If that were true, I'd expect Sydney, Australia to be a much larger tech hub that it currently is. We're basically the gay capital of the southern hemisphere, but all you're find here are some crappy branch offices of foreign corporations and boring local systems integrators.
So I think you're wrong about that, but one thing you said was spot on - what attracts both gays or geeks is *other* gays or geeks.
The fact that they both congregate in San Fran is pretty much a coincidence, I think.
And that will undo everything, will it? All those kids will be A-OK again?
Capital punishment solves nothing, and just feeds the basest desire of humans for revenge.
This is a terrible crime against society, I agree, and the punishment should be banishment. The system we have for that is called prison, and they should be going there for a very long time.
While they're there, society should find a way to make sure that such a thing never happens again.
This is the proper way to do things. Merely calling for the guilty parties' deaths is a simplistic, brutal way to conduct proceedings that should be nothing but a memory of the dark ages.
You know, I like Star Wars, but I don't DEEPLY DEEPLY LOVE IT like many here. Yeah I know, turn in my geek card, etc, except I DEEPLY DEEPLY LOVE a lot of anime, so I think I should get to keep it.
Anyway, bearing that in mind, I didn't really mind the "new" Star Wars. Actually, I liked it (except Jar Jar, obviously), and thought all those people complaining about how Lucas was basically ass-raping their childhood innocence, etc, were kind of overreacting.
But holy shit, now I know what they meant. I fucking love Cowboy Bebop, I fucking LOVE it, and now Hollywood is going to fuck it up the ass.
There is NO WAY this movie is going to be a worthy continuation or even a semi-accurate movie version of one of my favourite anime series of all time. NO FUCKING WAY. They just cannot do it, Hollywood just cannot make that kind of movie. Cowboy Bebop is deeply nihilistic in a way Hollywood just does not understand. I have nothing against Keanu Reeves but there is no way he can possibly even comprehend the character of Spike. No-one like him can. I am sorry but happy dumb Americans living in sun-drenched California just cannot understand this kind of emotion. They don't even know what to shoot for.
Faye Valentine? Dear god it'll probably be Lucy Liu. Why not eh? It's an "asian" series so we should get someone from "asia"! Argh!
God, I'm sorry Star Wars fans. I should have fought for you. "Next they came for the Star Wars fans, but I did not speak up, for I was not a Star Wars fan"... well now they've come for me...
My company started writing a big app in Rails. We hit limitations (for us) fairly quickly so just started replacing the bits we wanted to work differently. The great thing about Ruby is you can just switch stuff in and out. The great thing about Rails is that it's well-designed enough that you can do that fairly easily.
Sessions, for example. We wanted to share sessions between sites, so just stopped using the Rails one and started using ours. We just put a new session class system in a gem, require it, and talk to that instead of the built-in. Works brilliantly and with a little finesse you can make it totally transparent.
I think the key is to think of Rails as a framework - as in, a literal scaffolding that you place things in. The basic structure is sound enough and very useful. It's filled with some useful default code, but if that doesn't meet your needs, feel free to start replacing it wih things that do.
That's less than 500 a day! Christ, my personal blog gets more than that. Double that, in fact. And it's not like I put any effort into it whatsoever. It's roughly half talking about bands I like and half ranting about Ruby. No professional ambitions or concessions whatsoever. Not even updated regularly.
So isn't that pathetically low by any modern standard? Who could possibly make any money at all on 14k uniques a month?
I was under the impression that numbers like this were really low and basically meant nothing. "Enough traffic to call yourself popular" starts at about a quarter million uniques a month in my mind, and that would be the absolute minimum.
Don't mean to add insult to injury here, but if you've been soldiering on for more than 6 years and have less traffic than some random guy's zero-effort personal blog, then maybe you should just give up.
I don't oppose the Chinese doing registrations in their TLD in their own language. Rather, I want to point out that their ability to do so is an opportunity that spammers can and will exploit to conceal their own identities.
Huh? That's how their names are written. And you wouldn't be able to communicate anyway. Go find a Chinese speaker, it's not exactly hard.
And in case you haven't noticed, spammers just use fake names - when they register domains at all, that is. So what's the difference?
You better get used to seeing Chinese characters around, by the way, with no effort being made to transcribe to english-equivalent. There's a lot more of them than there are us. Why should they bother?
BBC on the far left, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN on the left
Only an American would ever claim, with a straight face, that the BBC is "far left" and the likes of CNN, MSNBC, etc are on the "left".
You have no perspective at all. Your entire frame of reference is wrong. I wonder if you even know what these words "left" and "right" are supposed to mean.
I don't know much about "DU" and "Daily KOS" but unless they insistently call for the immediate transformation of the USA into a soviet-style planned economy then they are not "far, far left". I can't really imagine such sites being all that popular in the US, or anywhere really.
The BBC is mildly left, what you would expect from a government-run service in a fairly centrist country like Britain.
The mainstream US news services you list are all varying degrees of right wing. Do you seriously think that someone in an actual left-leaning country like Norway or France would look at CNN and think, wow, this is quite lefty? Do you think the Chinese government looks at MSNBC and thinks it shares a common political outlook?
Fox is kind of quasi right-wing with a strong dose of ignorance, religion and rabble-rousing. I don't know much about Rush Limbaugh but if even you describe him as "right" then I assume he is some far-out fringe wacko, along with Coulter who is so mixed up I can't even tell - nothing but a grab-bag of populist "hot button" issues, mostly self-contradictory, appealing to disenfranchised types with low self-esteem and looking for someone to blame.
You call for a news organisation that hits "right down the centre". Ironically, the BBC is probably the most neutral and reliably "centre" news service in English. The fact that you describe them as "far left" indicates to me that the problem is actually your radically off-centre frame of reference.
You seem to define "left" as "anything I disagree with", and the more you disagree with them, the further left they are. This is a definition the rest of the world, and possibly even the rest of the US, does not share. In other words, you're wrong - very, very wrong.
One more point. Al Jazeera is becoming a fairly respected news service these days. It's free speech, free market, mildly right wing but they do their best to be impartial. On the occasions I have watched their coverage I have been pretty impressed by their fairness.
My question is, is Al Jazeera mildly right wing like everyone else thinks, or are they "wrong" and therefore "left" according to your twisted, self-serving worldview?
Maybe the best way for me to let you know how much you are projecting your own ideas onto that paragraph you excerpted from the story is by telling you I have no idea, without further information, who or what this "cheap shot" you complain about is supposed to be at.
Is the "cheap shot" at people who write pro/anti-Bush rants? Is it at the people who rank the content according only to their preexisting biases? Is it the popularly held opinions themselves? Is it Mr Bush?
All of them? None of them? I have no idea. There is no clue to be found either in the excerpt or your comment.
That is just the 23 wards at the centre. The population of Greater Tokyo, which is what most people refer to when they say "Tokyo", is more like 35 million.
And yet we have a government paid institution for athletes. Truly our country is fucked up.
While I would agree that having the AIS but no Space Agency does indeed make our priorities look somewhat backwards, I have no ill will whatsoever towards the AIS - in fact I think it should be expanded. Obesity and diabetes are becoming major health problems in our society and we need to get them down.
I would argue that the AIS does a wonderful job promoting sport and exercise in the community, and also provides a regular crop of "heroes" to inspire the kids. If anything it should be bigger, more swimming pools, more ovals, more participation. It probably pays for itself many times over in future health care cost reduction.
It's not an either/or proposition. A Space Agency would be great, but the AIS is also good. We need both.
I could not agree more that AU should establish and fund (well!) a proper space agency. I would fucking LOVE that. Perhaps we could start by redirecting all allocated funding for that ridiculous internet filtering scheme.
But let's keep it in perspective. Australia has 21 million people. We're two thirds the population of California. The other city I spend a lot of time in, Tokyo, has more people than my whole god damn country. I think visitors and foreigners often get a mistaken impression about this country - sure, the cities are fairly large, but there's only fucking FIVE of them. It's a big country - I was born in South Australia, we have a military base there that is BIGGER THAN ENGLAND - but there's no people and kangaroos don't pay tax. Yet.
We're rich enough per capita, sure, but the volume just isn't there. For fuck's sake, we're closing down the entire Navy for 2 months for Christmas. We can't get enough people to staff our fricking marine defences (the most important, since we're an island) - but we're going to build a space industry now? With who?
What I would really like to see is some kind of cooperative effort. Why all this competition between nations, duplicated effort, and misplaced nationalism? We'd get so much more done if we pooled our resources and really worked together. And I don't mean in the manner of sclerotic, ineffective jaw-fests like the UN, I mean cooperate like allies in a war, which we're all pretty good at.
We need a war, then. A War on Not Being In Space! Come on, you apes! Do you want to live forever?
You're a Brit, so maybe you don't know about tipping.
In many countries in the world, a tip of around 20% for service is considered normal, even obligatory. In theory, if service is indeed not "up to your standards", you can leave nothing at all. In practise, almost everyone tips at or near the generally accepted level.
People could use your "pathetic excuse" to never tip, but they almost always do. Hell, I'm not even a yank, so I've got another excuse not to tip - "that's not my culture!". But in America, I always tip, 20% on the dot. Social pressure wins every time. So I bet that even if paying for restaurant meals was "optional", you'd still pay, unless you're some kind of sociopath who isn't capable of noticing or caring that people hate them.
I have had access to pretty much any music I want for free since 1998. I still seem to have a lot of CDs. Basically any band that makes it into my "A-list", I go buy all their CDs. Why? I don't know. There's no economic advantage. A pride thing, a social pressure thing, a status thing? You tell me.
I've had a DVD burner since the early 2000s. There has been nothing stopping me burning my own copies of DVDs, for a marginal or zero cost, since then. I have actually never done this even once. Why? Same as above, I guess? And I don't want to look like a cheap-ass loser to my friends. Or myself.
Why am I mentioning these things? Well, I just think your worldview is too black and white. There is not a sharp line between good paying customers and illegal thieving pirates. It's more like a gradient. Plenty of artists where I only have their "good" CD. I've got the rest of the albums on mp3, they're just not worth spending the $30 on (or, these days, storing the damn things forevermore - almost more of a factor!).
Similarly, I own a number of, say, iD software games. There were some shitty ones, and I never bought them. They just didn't deserve that vote. But I'll pay money for games I like, no problem at all. I'll pay a LOT of money for games I actually want. In fact I've previously said on this site that I'd pay pretty much any reasonable amount for remakes of some of my favourite games, say Marathon 2 or Final Fantasy 7. If there was a PS3 with FF7v2 in ROM and useless for anything else that costs $1000 and that was the only way to get it... I would buy that in a heartbeat, lol.
So it's complex. Your worldview seems to be about a binary world of "filthy thieving callous dishonest pirates" vs "angels who can do no wrong". In reality, everyone I know is a mixture of the two.
Which am I, angel or thief? I own many more CDs than average. But I've "stolen" many more times than that again. I probably own 10 times as many games as the average consumer. But I've pirated 100 times more. But I've given the industry thousands of dollars! But I've stolen many times more! Which is it?
Grey. It's a word, it's an area, it's a colour, it's a point on a sliding scale between black and white. Turn up the bit depth on your display of the world, maybe you'll start to see an awful lot of it.
The probability for anything that differs drastically from that 10e-9 is probably diminishingly small and can be ignored for practical purposes.
Wow, I see you've solved the cosmological constant problem, then? Just like that!
Ok, Quantum field theorists all over the world.. pens down! Job's done, problem solved. I know you've all been wondering why the hell the universe is expanding exponentially when it shouldn't be, and it sure looked like the energy of vacuum had a lot to do with it.. but, nope, sorry! You can just ignore it, straight from the horses's mouth, you heard it here first.
Hey, could I ask a teensy small favour? I know I didn't do any of the key work on your breakthrough, other than perhaps inspire the wheels of genius to spin into action.. but I sure would appreciate a litte "thanks for the assist" in your Nobel Prize acceptance speech next year for casually solving - in a slashdot comment no less! - one of the greatest outstanding problems in physics today.
Well, I agree with everything you say, and am not really qualified to add anything to your analysis. However, bear in mind that yesterday's magic is today's research project and tomorrow's $100 gadget.
I am an utter layman, and do not pretend otherwise - everyone has to specialise in something, and no-one can know everything. But I learn what I can in the time that I have, and one of the things I am most interested in is Quantum Field Theory. I suggest looking into it if you want some (very early) guidance into what might be actually possible in terms of matter/energy even in this dimension. The implications are as staggering as the science is baffling - very. And QFT is hardly alone, also check out M-theory, Quantum Foam, and String theory. None of these are crackpot niche theories, by the way.
Just to give you a taste, here's a question for you: What's the energy density of vacuum?
General relativity tells you it's, uh, not very much. About 10 to the -9 joules per cubic meter, to be exact.
According to QFT, the answer can vary between 0 and infinity, depending what you feed in, and still be "right" (since QFT presently ignores gravity) - the correct answer is probably "undetermined at this time".
What's the point of this? Well, that two major branches of physics disagree on the energy of a vacuum is a pretty big deal to me. What if it's huge, a (seemingly) very real possibility? What could we do with that?
Allow me to radically and destructively oversimplify. Some theories suggest that matter as we know it is basically standing waves of energy, which manifests itself in "our" dimensions, like a standing wave in a one-dimensional string turns it, for all intents and purposes, into a two-dimensional object. Any space without that which we understand as physical substance (no matter, ie. a vacuum) has merely not been excited into the correct wave to appear in our dimensions. But what could the right kind of manipulation, applied correctly, do in this kind of "sea of latent matter" environment? Could it be possible to temporarily create those standing waves of matter-like behaviour? Or find something to push against, to move yourself through the vacuum like oars on the sea? There's your Culture fields, and there's your hyperspace grid. Or not : )
Well, like I said, I'm nothing but a layman, and any actual quantum physicists reading this will no doubt find themselves involuntarily clenching their fists in rage at my ignorance. But I'm pretty sure that nothing I said is actually ruled out even by current theory.
All I can say is, I look forward to the next century very much, as I'm sure some big surprises are in store as we begin to figure it all out for real... and maybe after another 100 years of study, I will actually know the first thing I am talking about.. : )
If you're being shot in the face with a 15KW laser, I think blindness is the least of your worries. A direct shot from something like this will lead to blindness in the same way a bullet in your eye leads to blindness. The unit is a weapon and will be treated like one, I doubt they'll be waving it around as a joke any more than they shoot people with real bullets for a joke.
More interesting is the question of backscatter - lasers can be reflected. In fact, it would see the primary means of protection against laser fire would be a mirrored surface. On any kind of complex surface that will indeed produce a lot of scattered rays of lesser, but still blinding, power.
I would assume that the primary envisaged use case of this thing, right now at least, is anti-missile, especially at sea. Anti-ship missiles typically have a curved, if not spherical, tip, which in future will presumably be covered by a mirrored coating as a counter to the existence of laser defense systems. At least some of the laser light, then, will likely reflect back at the ship, with unpredictable intensity.
The advent of this kind of thing may indeed precipitate an interesting change in how military personnel dress and expose themselves in combat situations. Mirrored helmets for everyone who could possibly be in range would seem a likely first step...
Disclaimer: I know nothing about laser warfare that I didn't learn from Culture novels!
Local redundancy = some protection built into a single system to protect against failing drives. Like RAID 5 or 6, or GFS storing copies of data on various servers in the cluster.
Seperate system redundancy = having a full failover redundant machine/cluster in case the first one falls over.
Not exactly standard terms I know but I suspected our difference was hinging on the definition of "redundancy" so wanted to be more specific.
The Google File System paper says "By default, we store three replicas". Each replica is on a different server, although they are probably all in the same datacenter.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought? I thought you were claiming they had three DCs mirroring each other or something crazy.
This is a higher level of redundancy than RAID 10.
I see the problem. We are talking about different things.
RAID10 is only locally redundant, ie, inside the server/cluster. If the RAID controller screws up or the server blows up, you lose. That is not what I mean by redundancy. I would call that "fault tolerant", not redundant.
What I mean by redundancy is having a hot replica next to the first server to failover to. Or, even better, in a different location, on different power.
Google's system is not directly comparable because although it's local redundancy they mean when they say "three replicas", it's still divided up between different hardware, and it's hardware failures of varying kinds that we are trying to guard against here. So they do have hardware redundancy, which is excellent and way better than RAID10. However, if the cluster fails - not that I can imagine that happening, knowing Google - there is no higher level redundancy to switch to. Not that they need it; works well for them.
Anyway hope I straightened that out and am making sense...
That's a pretty extraordinary claim. I think a citation is needed.
I find it very difficult to believe that Google immediately and permanently makes a triple-redundant (not just local redundancy, separate-system redundancy) copy of every single byte ever uploaded to Youtube.
Their filesystem is highly locally redundant in itself, superficially comparable to RAID-6 or better. But you're asking me to believe that they then have another, and then another, full copy of that entire installation?
I don't think so, but I'd be interested to be proven wrong.
Ah, yes, I was mainly thinking about non-mission-critical data, for example vast amounts of user-uploaded data for web sites.
You would have to be utterly crazy not to guarantee full redundancy on, say, a user database or business documents. However, it's quite a different matter to guarantee full 100% redundancy for, say, a few hundred TBs of user photos and videos. When you are offering a free service, it's difficult to make a business case for an incredibly expensive full-redundancy setup just to rule out an unlikely event which would maybe annoy a tiny subset of your non-paying users.
For example, I am not privy to Google's internal workings, but I very much doubt they have guaranteed full redundancy for every single video that has ever been uploaded to YouTube. Admittedly, they don't use RAID, they use a custom FS, but the principle is the same. The cost of absolutely guaranteeing so much (mostly low-value) data would be incredible, and I can't believe they would do it.
I've studied the systems of high-load social networks like Mixi and LiveJournal, and unless something has changed, they do not do it. I can't imagine Wikipedia has full redundancy on its images, or RapidShare on its user files, or Flickr, etc etc. Hell, there was an "incident" earlier this year when darling-of-the-blogosphere VC-funded Joyent, ironically using ZFS, were forced to admit they did not have redundant storage for data uploaded into not one but two of their *paid* online storage products. Something went wrong, the service was down for a week while they sorted it out, and they then decided to pull the product from the market rather than move to full redundancy since it would be too expensive. And that's when the customers were paying them!
So, it's not uncommon at all. I would actually be pretty surprised if any large percentage of the huge amount of bulk data uploaded to free services around the web was stored with the "enterprise grade" 100% redundancy you're talking about.
Databases and business documents, though, hell yes : )
Guh. Sorry. I'm tired, and re-reading my comment the english is well-formed but the concepts are jumbled nonsense. Let me try again, by your leave...
Yes, it's unavoidable to rebuild when you lose a disk, and there will be a performance hit unless you go for full on 100% redundancy, and not many companies can afford to do that with a lot of data.
ZFS offers a number of benefits, though, in the event of drive failure-triggered rebuild, in that it basically knows where the data is and only bothers with that. A hardware controller has no idea what's data and what is blank space and so just redoes everything. In theory, assuming the MB/s of rebuild is the same, a ZFS rebuild of a half-full array should take half the time of a traditional controller.
It is also much more intelligent about *what* it rebuilds, starting at the top and then descending down the FS tree, marking it as known good along the way. This means that if a second drive fails halfway through the resync, instead of a catastrophic failure you still have the data up to the point of failure.
But I didn't even want to talk about drive-failure rebuilding, what I actually wanted to say that ZFS is, in theory, less likely to get itself into an inconsistent state in the case of power fluctuations, controller RAM failures, drive failures w/ pending writes, that kind of thing. That's the kind of rebuild I meant - after some kind of catastrophic failure. I should probably have said "integrity checking" though.
By design, ZFS never holds critical data in memory only and so at least in theory should always be consistent on-disk. Basically it shouldn't need to fsck. That is a giant advantage to me, if it turns out to be as good in reality as it sounds on paper. Of course, that also has a lot to do with the capabilities of the FS proper, but removing the evil, evil HW controllers from the picture can only be a plus.
I don't know why, but RAID controllers are the most unreliable pieces of hardware I have ever known, besides the drives themselves (but at least they are consistent and expected to fail). Get a few of them together and something WILL go wrong, more often than not in a horrible and unexpected way. When some RAM goes bad in a HW RAID controller you are in for a whole lot of subtle, silent-error-prone fun. Anything that gets the HW controllers out of the picture is a win for me.
And don't even mention the batteries in HW raid controllers. They are the wrong solution to the power failure problem, especially since it's always after a failure that a disk will decide it's had enough of spinning and would just like to sit still for a while, thank you very much. Drive failure with pending writes! Exactly the words every administrator wants to hear. Almost as good as power failure with pending writes. Combine the two (highly likely!) for maximum LULZ. Ok, this is turning into a rant, I better stop.
Anyway, thanks for the corrections. My original comment (and probably this one) came across as a confused mess upon re-reading.. sorry.. will sleep now : )
Or maybe he's still on his 1st or 2nd home-built RAID. In my experience techs tend to build maybe 3 or 4, and be around a while to see the problems, before they say "fuck this" and buy from a vendor.
Home built RAID is great for home use and as a learning experience. Personally, I'd go with a Enhance UltraStor RS16-JS SAS and an Areca ARC-1680ix, but that's just me and because I use macs at home. And I don't really mind it taking 16 hours to rebuild. Oh no, I can't stream my movies at full speed today. Try telling your boss that your ecommerce site will be 10x slower and timing out all over the place for the next day or two at christmastime but that's cool because you saved a few grand last year building the storage array yourself and see the delighted look on his face.
You would have to be nuts to try and pull the "save money by building it myself!" trick in a heavy production environment. You might get away with it for a while, maybe with one or two units. What happens when you have 12? 24? 48? Practically a full time job just babysitting the damn things. And what is your strategy for when, not if, but when the power fails?
I'm actually pretty interested in these Suns. The price isn't *that* bad when you consider that ZFS, in theory, doesn't have to rebuild and should get itself into an inconsistent state less. Those two features alone are pretty much worth the markup IMO. And furthermore, everyone knows Sun RRPs are just there to make the discounts they then offer you look better. No-one pays more than 50-80% of that if you buy more than a couple of things at a time and you have a decent VAR.
Gee, I wonder why? Perhaps because the admins had configured the comment ID field to be 24 bits, then forgot about it?
They bumped it up and the problem went away. Of course.
I don't even like MySQL (prefer PostgreSQL myself) but geeze, please try to make your criticisms a little more "sober reflection on objective merits" and a little less "clear evidence i have no fucking idea what I am talking about".
ok, next person blame something else and how these 2 things weren't built wrong.
OK. Twitter's problems have very little to do with ruby and mysql. Anyone who thinks otherwise does not understand what scaling is.
Yeah, Ruby is a bit slow. I love it but it's a bit slow, I can't deny it. But so what? You scale out, not up. Twitter can't seem to learn that lesson.
And your criticism of MySQL is laughable, seeing as how it's made on an extremely high-traffic site that runs.. MySQL. Also see Facebook, Mixi, et al.
If Ruby and MySQL were the problems, Twitter's job would be simple! A straight port to a faster language, a (reasonably) simple DB change. They have had *ample* time to do this, but have not. This is pretty good evidence that the problems are elsewhere.
The site remains unstable. Personally, I have begun to believe the problems are corporate. I know any number of talented developers who could have rebuilt twitter from scratch about 10 times over by now. I have to assume they have some other kind of problem.
You will be delighted to discover that all British people do, in fact, die.
For the men, you need only wait 76.9 years before death is statistically likely; for the females it's a slightly longer period of eager anticipation: 81.2 years on average before your wish is fulfilled.
Cloud is pants, and idle is definitely pants, but Epaper? That's not pants. Well, there is the possibility of actual pants being made from it, so it could be pants, literally.. uh, did I just "whoosh" myself? Sigh.
Anyway, highly amusing to see this extremely British slang creeping into the everyday slashdot vernacular.
Slashdot Mirror
If that were true, I'd expect Sydney, Australia to be a much larger tech hub that it currently is. We're basically the gay capital of the southern hemisphere, but all you're find here are some crappy branch offices of foreign corporations and boring local systems integrators.
So I think you're wrong about that, but one thing you said was spot on - what attracts both gays or geeks is *other* gays or geeks.
The fact that they both congregate in San Fran is pretty much a coincidence, I think.
And that will undo everything, will it? All those kids will be A-OK again?
Capital punishment solves nothing, and just feeds the basest desire of humans for revenge.
This is a terrible crime against society, I agree, and the punishment should be banishment. The system we have for that is called prison, and they should be going there for a very long time.
While they're there, society should find a way to make sure that such a thing never happens again.
This is the proper way to do things. Merely calling for the guilty parties' deaths is a simplistic, brutal way to conduct proceedings that should be nothing but a memory of the dark ages.
You know, I like Star Wars, but I don't DEEPLY DEEPLY LOVE IT like many here. Yeah I know, turn in my geek card, etc, except I DEEPLY DEEPLY LOVE a lot of anime, so I think I should get to keep it.
Anyway, bearing that in mind, I didn't really mind the "new" Star Wars. Actually, I liked it (except Jar Jar, obviously), and thought all those people complaining about how Lucas was basically ass-raping their childhood innocence, etc, were kind of overreacting.
But holy shit, now I know what they meant. I fucking love Cowboy Bebop, I fucking LOVE it, and now Hollywood is going to fuck it up the ass.
There is NO WAY this movie is going to be a worthy continuation or even a semi-accurate movie version of one of my favourite anime series of all time. NO FUCKING WAY. They just cannot do it, Hollywood just cannot make that kind of movie. Cowboy Bebop is deeply nihilistic in a way Hollywood just does not understand. I have nothing against Keanu Reeves but there is no way he can possibly even comprehend the character of Spike. No-one like him can. I am sorry but happy dumb Americans living in sun-drenched California just cannot understand this kind of emotion. They don't even know what to shoot for.
Faye Valentine? Dear god it'll probably be Lucy Liu. Why not eh? It's an "asian" series so we should get someone from "asia"! Argh!
God, I'm sorry Star Wars fans. I should have fought for you. "Next they came for the Star Wars fans, but I did not speak up, for I was not a Star Wars fan" ... well now they've come for me ...
My company started writing a big app in Rails. We hit limitations (for us) fairly quickly so just started replacing the bits we wanted to work differently. The great thing about Ruby is you can just switch stuff in and out. The great thing about Rails is that it's well-designed enough that you can do that fairly easily.
Sessions, for example. We wanted to share sessions between sites, so just stopped using the Rails one and started using ours. We just put a new session class system in a gem, require it, and talk to that instead of the built-in. Works brilliantly and with a little finesse you can make it totally transparent.
I think the key is to think of Rails as a framework - as in, a literal scaffolding that you place things in. The basic structure is sound enough and very useful. It's filled with some useful default code, but if that doesn't meet your needs, feel free to start replacing it wih things that do.
That's less than 500 a day! Christ, my personal blog gets more than that. Double that, in fact. And it's not like I put any effort into it whatsoever. It's roughly half talking about bands I like and half ranting about Ruby. No professional ambitions or concessions whatsoever. Not even updated regularly.
So isn't that pathetically low by any modern standard? Who could possibly make any money at all on 14k uniques a month?
I was under the impression that numbers like this were really low and basically meant nothing. "Enough traffic to call yourself popular" starts at about a quarter million uniques a month in my mind, and that would be the absolute minimum.
Don't mean to add insult to injury here, but if you've been soldiering on for more than 6 years and have less traffic than some random guy's zero-effort personal blog, then maybe you should just give up.
I don't oppose the Chinese doing registrations in their TLD in their own language. Rather, I want to point out that their ability to do so is an opportunity that spammers can and will exploit to conceal their own identities.
Huh? That's how their names are written. And you wouldn't be able to communicate anyway. Go find a Chinese speaker, it's not exactly hard.
And in case you haven't noticed, spammers just use fake names - when they register domains at all, that is. So what's the difference?
You better get used to seeing Chinese characters around, by the way, with no effort being made to transcribe to english-equivalent. There's a lot more of them than there are us. Why should they bother?
BBC on the far left, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN on the left
Only an American would ever claim, with a straight face, that the BBC is "far left" and the likes of CNN, MSNBC, etc are on the "left".
You have no perspective at all. Your entire frame of reference is wrong. I wonder if you even know what these words "left" and "right" are supposed to mean.
I don't know much about "DU" and "Daily KOS" but unless they insistently call for the immediate transformation of the USA into a soviet-style planned economy then they are not "far, far left". I can't really imagine such sites being all that popular in the US, or anywhere really.
The BBC is mildly left, what you would expect from a government-run service in a fairly centrist country like Britain.
The mainstream US news services you list are all varying degrees of right wing. Do you seriously think that someone in an actual left-leaning country like Norway or France would look at CNN and think, wow, this is quite lefty? Do you think the Chinese government looks at MSNBC and thinks it shares a common political outlook?
Fox is kind of quasi right-wing with a strong dose of ignorance, religion and rabble-rousing. I don't know much about Rush Limbaugh but if even you describe him as "right" then I assume he is some far-out fringe wacko, along with Coulter who is so mixed up I can't even tell - nothing but a grab-bag of populist "hot button" issues, mostly self-contradictory, appealing to disenfranchised types with low self-esteem and looking for someone to blame.
You call for a news organisation that hits "right down the centre". Ironically, the BBC is probably the most neutral and reliably "centre" news service in English. The fact that you describe them as "far left" indicates to me that the problem is actually your radically off-centre frame of reference.
You seem to define "left" as "anything I disagree with", and the more you disagree with them, the further left they are. This is a definition the rest of the world, and possibly even the rest of the US, does not share. In other words, you're wrong - very, very wrong.
One more point. Al Jazeera is becoming a fairly respected news service these days. It's free speech, free market, mildly right wing but they do their best to be impartial. On the occasions I have watched their coverage I have been pretty impressed by their fairness.
My question is, is Al Jazeera mildly right wing like everyone else thinks, or are they "wrong" and therefore "left" according to your twisted, self-serving worldview?
Maybe the best way for me to let you know how much you are projecting your own ideas onto that paragraph you excerpted from the story is by telling you I have no idea, without further information, who or what this "cheap shot" you complain about is supposed to be at.
Is the "cheap shot" at people who write pro/anti-Bush rants? Is it at the people who rank the content according only to their preexisting biases? Is it the popularly held opinions themselves? Is it Mr Bush?
All of them? None of them? I have no idea. There is no clue to be found either in the excerpt or your comment.
You are seeing things which are not there.
That is just the 23 wards at the centre. The population of Greater Tokyo, which is what most people refer to when they say "Tokyo", is more like 35 million.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area
/Users/level4/projects/slashdot-reply/language/lib/parse_local_slang.rb:34: syntax error, unexpected 'eh', expecting 'mate' /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require' ./slashdot-reply.rb:46:in `discern_nationality_from_linguistic_traits' ./slashdot-reply.rb:46:in `each' ./slashdot-reply.rb:54:in `process_speech' /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require' /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require' /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:253:in `load_modules' /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:251:in `each' /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:251:in `load_modules' /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:21:in `setup' /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:54:in `start' /usr/bin/irb:13
Crikey, a project like the Canadarm would be cool, eh?
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And yet we have a government paid institution for athletes. Truly our country is fucked up.
While I would agree that having the AIS but no Space Agency does indeed make our priorities look somewhat backwards, I have no ill will whatsoever towards the AIS - in fact I think it should be expanded. Obesity and diabetes are becoming major health problems in our society and we need to get them down.
I would argue that the AIS does a wonderful job promoting sport and exercise in the community, and also provides a regular crop of "heroes" to inspire the kids. If anything it should be bigger, more swimming pools, more ovals, more participation. It probably pays for itself many times over in future health care cost reduction.
It's not an either/or proposition. A Space Agency would be great, but the AIS is also good. We need both.
I could not agree more that AU should establish and fund (well!) a proper space agency. I would fucking LOVE that. Perhaps we could start by redirecting all allocated funding for that ridiculous internet filtering scheme.
But let's keep it in perspective. Australia has 21 million people. We're two thirds the population of California. The other city I spend a lot of time in, Tokyo, has more people than my whole god damn country. I think visitors and foreigners often get a mistaken impression about this country - sure, the cities are fairly large, but there's only fucking FIVE of them. It's a big country - I was born in South Australia, we have a military base there that is BIGGER THAN ENGLAND - but there's no people and kangaroos don't pay tax. Yet.
We're rich enough per capita, sure, but the volume just isn't there. For fuck's sake, we're closing down the entire Navy for 2 months for Christmas. We can't get enough people to staff our fricking marine defences (the most important, since we're an island) - but we're going to build a space industry now? With who?
What I would really like to see is some kind of cooperative effort. Why all this competition between nations, duplicated effort, and misplaced nationalism? We'd get so much more done if we pooled our resources and really worked together. And I don't mean in the manner of sclerotic, ineffective jaw-fests like the UN, I mean cooperate like allies in a war, which we're all pretty good at.
We need a war, then. A War on Not Being In Space! Come on, you apes! Do you want to live forever?
You're a Brit, so maybe you don't know about tipping.
In many countries in the world, a tip of around 20% for service is considered normal, even obligatory. In theory, if service is indeed not "up to your standards", you can leave nothing at all. In practise, almost everyone tips at or near the generally accepted level.
People could use your "pathetic excuse" to never tip, but they almost always do. Hell, I'm not even a yank, so I've got another excuse not to tip - "that's not my culture!". But in America, I always tip, 20% on the dot. Social pressure wins every time. So I bet that even if paying for restaurant meals was "optional", you'd still pay, unless you're some kind of sociopath who isn't capable of noticing or caring that people hate them.
I have had access to pretty much any music I want for free since 1998. I still seem to have a lot of CDs. Basically any band that makes it into my "A-list", I go buy all their CDs. Why? I don't know. There's no economic advantage. A pride thing, a social pressure thing, a status thing? You tell me.
I've had a DVD burner since the early 2000s. There has been nothing stopping me burning my own copies of DVDs, for a marginal or zero cost, since then. I have actually never done this even once. Why? Same as above, I guess? And I don't want to look like a cheap-ass loser to my friends. Or myself.
Why am I mentioning these things? Well, I just think your worldview is too black and white. There is not a sharp line between good paying customers and illegal thieving pirates. It's more like a gradient. Plenty of artists where I only have their "good" CD. I've got the rest of the albums on mp3, they're just not worth spending the $30 on (or, these days, storing the damn things forevermore - almost more of a factor!).
Similarly, I own a number of, say, iD software games. There were some shitty ones, and I never bought them. They just didn't deserve that vote. But I'll pay money for games I like, no problem at all. I'll pay a LOT of money for games I actually want. In fact I've previously said on this site that I'd pay pretty much any reasonable amount for remakes of some of my favourite games, say Marathon 2 or Final Fantasy 7. If there was a PS3 with FF7v2 in ROM and useless for anything else that costs $1000 and that was the only way to get it ... I would buy that in a heartbeat, lol.
So it's complex. Your worldview seems to be about a binary world of "filthy thieving callous dishonest pirates" vs "angels who can do no wrong". In reality, everyone I know is a mixture of the two.
Which am I, angel or thief? I own many more CDs than average. But I've "stolen" many more times than that again. I probably own 10 times as many games as the average consumer. But I've pirated 100 times more. But I've given the industry thousands of dollars! But I've stolen many times more! Which is it?
Grey. It's a word, it's an area, it's a colour, it's a point on a sliding scale between black and white. Turn up the bit depth on your display of the world, maybe you'll start to see an awful lot of it.
The probability for anything that differs drastically from that 10e-9 is probably diminishingly small and can be ignored for practical purposes.
Wow, I see you've solved the cosmological constant problem, then? Just like that!
Ok, Quantum field theorists all over the world .. pens down! Job's done, problem solved. I know you've all been wondering why the hell the universe is expanding exponentially when it shouldn't be, and it sure looked like the energy of vacuum had a lot to do with it .. but, nope, sorry! You can just ignore it, straight from the horses's mouth, you heard it here first.
Hey, could I ask a teensy small favour? I know I didn't do any of the key work on your breakthrough, other than perhaps inspire the wheels of genius to spin into action .. but I sure would appreciate a litte "thanks for the assist" in your Nobel Prize acceptance speech next year for casually solving - in a slashdot comment no less! - one of the greatest outstanding problems in physics today.
Ah, another fan : )
Well, I agree with everything you say, and am not really qualified to add anything to your analysis. However, bear in mind that yesterday's magic is today's research project and tomorrow's $100 gadget.
I am an utter layman, and do not pretend otherwise - everyone has to specialise in something, and no-one can know everything. But I learn what I can in the time that I have, and one of the things I am most interested in is Quantum Field Theory. I suggest looking into it if you want some (very early) guidance into what might be actually possible in terms of matter/energy even in this dimension. The implications are as staggering as the science is baffling - very. And QFT is hardly alone, also check out M-theory, Quantum Foam, and String theory. None of these are crackpot niche theories, by the way.
Just to give you a taste, here's a question for you: What's the energy density of vacuum?
General relativity tells you it's, uh, not very much. About 10 to the -9 joules per cubic meter, to be exact.
According to QFT, the answer can vary between 0 and infinity, depending what you feed in, and still be "right" (since QFT presently ignores gravity) - the correct answer is probably "undetermined at this time".
What's the point of this? Well, that two major branches of physics disagree on the energy of a vacuum is a pretty big deal to me. What if it's huge, a (seemingly) very real possibility? What could we do with that?
Allow me to radically and destructively oversimplify. Some theories suggest that matter as we know it is basically standing waves of energy, which manifests itself in "our" dimensions, like a standing wave in a one-dimensional string turns it, for all intents and purposes, into a two-dimensional object. Any space without that which we understand as physical substance (no matter, ie. a vacuum) has merely not been excited into the correct wave to appear in our dimensions. But what could the right kind of manipulation, applied correctly, do in this kind of "sea of latent matter" environment? Could it be possible to temporarily create those standing waves of matter-like behaviour? Or find something to push against, to move yourself through the vacuum like oars on the sea? There's your Culture fields, and there's your hyperspace grid. Or not : )
Well, like I said, I'm nothing but a layman, and any actual quantum physicists reading this will no doubt find themselves involuntarily clenching their fists in rage at my ignorance. But I'm pretty sure that nothing I said is actually ruled out even by current theory.
All I can say is, I look forward to the next century very much, as I'm sure some big surprises are in store as we begin to figure it all out for real... and maybe after another 100 years of study, I will actually know the first thing I am talking about .. : )
If you're being shot in the face with a 15KW laser, I think blindness is the least of your worries. A direct shot from something like this will lead to blindness in the same way a bullet in your eye leads to blindness. The unit is a weapon and will be treated like one, I doubt they'll be waving it around as a joke any more than they shoot people with real bullets for a joke.
More interesting is the question of backscatter - lasers can be reflected. In fact, it would see the primary means of protection against laser fire would be a mirrored surface. On any kind of complex surface that will indeed produce a lot of scattered rays of lesser, but still blinding, power.
I would assume that the primary envisaged use case of this thing, right now at least, is anti-missile, especially at sea. Anti-ship missiles typically have a curved, if not spherical, tip, which in future will presumably be covered by a mirrored coating as a counter to the existence of laser defense systems. At least some of the laser light, then, will likely reflect back at the ship, with unpredictable intensity.
The advent of this kind of thing may indeed precipitate an interesting change in how military personnel dress and expose themselves in combat situations. Mirrored helmets for everyone who could possibly be in range would seem a likely first step ...
Disclaimer: I know nothing about laser warfare that I didn't learn from Culture novels!
Local redundancy = some protection built into a single system to protect against failing drives. Like RAID 5 or 6, or GFS storing copies of data on various servers in the cluster.
Seperate system redundancy = having a full failover redundant machine/cluster in case the first one falls over.
Not exactly standard terms I know but I suspected our difference was hinging on the definition of "redundancy" so wanted to be more specific.
The Google File System paper says "By default, we store three replicas". Each replica is on a different server, although they are probably all in the same datacenter.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought? I thought you were claiming they had three DCs mirroring each other or something crazy.
This is a higher level of redundancy than RAID 10.
I see the problem. We are talking about different things.
RAID10 is only locally redundant, ie, inside the server/cluster. If the RAID controller screws up or the server blows up, you lose. That is not what I mean by redundancy. I would call that "fault tolerant", not redundant.
What I mean by redundancy is having a hot replica next to the first server to failover to. Or, even better, in a different location, on different power.
Google's system is not directly comparable because although it's local redundancy they mean when they say "three replicas", it's still divided up between different hardware, and it's hardware failures of varying kinds that we are trying to guard against here. So they do have hardware redundancy, which is excellent and way better than RAID10. However, if the cluster fails - not that I can imagine that happening, knowing Google - there is no higher level redundancy to switch to. Not that they need it; works well for them.
Anyway hope I straightened that out and am making sense ...
That's a pretty extraordinary claim. I think a citation is needed.
I find it very difficult to believe that Google immediately and permanently makes a triple-redundant (not just local redundancy, separate-system redundancy) copy of every single byte ever uploaded to Youtube.
Their filesystem is highly locally redundant in itself, superficially comparable to RAID-6 or better. But you're asking me to believe that they then have another, and then another, full copy of that entire installation?
I don't think so, but I'd be interested to be proven wrong.
Ah, yes, I was mainly thinking about non-mission-critical data, for example vast amounts of user-uploaded data for web sites.
You would have to be utterly crazy not to guarantee full redundancy on, say, a user database or business documents. However, it's quite a different matter to guarantee full 100% redundancy for, say, a few hundred TBs of user photos and videos. When you are offering a free service, it's difficult to make a business case for an incredibly expensive full-redundancy setup just to rule out an unlikely event which would maybe annoy a tiny subset of your non-paying users.
For example, I am not privy to Google's internal workings, but I very much doubt they have guaranteed full redundancy for every single video that has ever been uploaded to YouTube. Admittedly, they don't use RAID, they use a custom FS, but the principle is the same. The cost of absolutely guaranteeing so much (mostly low-value) data would be incredible, and I can't believe they would do it.
I've studied the systems of high-load social networks like Mixi and LiveJournal, and unless something has changed, they do not do it. I can't imagine Wikipedia has full redundancy on its images, or RapidShare on its user files, or Flickr, etc etc. Hell, there was an "incident" earlier this year when darling-of-the-blogosphere VC-funded Joyent, ironically using ZFS, were forced to admit they did not have redundant storage for data uploaded into not one but two of their *paid* online storage products. Something went wrong, the service was down for a week while they sorted it out, and they then decided to pull the product from the market rather than move to full redundancy since it would be too expensive. And that's when the customers were paying them!
http://www.joyeur.com/2008/01/22/bingodisk-and-strongspace-what-happened
So, it's not uncommon at all. I would actually be pretty surprised if any large percentage of the huge amount of bulk data uploaded to free services around the web was stored with the "enterprise grade" 100% redundancy you're talking about.
Databases and business documents, though, hell yes : )
Guh. Sorry. I'm tired, and re-reading my comment the english is well-formed but the concepts are jumbled nonsense. Let me try again, by your leave...
Yes, it's unavoidable to rebuild when you lose a disk, and there will be a performance hit unless you go for full on 100% redundancy, and not many companies can afford to do that with a lot of data.
ZFS offers a number of benefits, though, in the event of drive failure-triggered rebuild, in that it basically knows where the data is and only bothers with that. A hardware controller has no idea what's data and what is blank space and so just redoes everything. In theory, assuming the MB/s of rebuild is the same, a ZFS rebuild of a half-full array should take half the time of a traditional controller.
It is also much more intelligent about *what* it rebuilds, starting at the top and then descending down the FS tree, marking it as known good along the way. This means that if a second drive fails halfway through the resync, instead of a catastrophic failure you still have the data up to the point of failure.
I can't remember where I read that; maybe here: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/smokin_mirrors
But I didn't even want to talk about drive-failure rebuilding, what I actually wanted to say that ZFS is, in theory, less likely to get itself into an inconsistent state in the case of power fluctuations, controller RAM failures, drive failures w/ pending writes, that kind of thing. That's the kind of rebuild I meant - after some kind of catastrophic failure. I should probably have said "integrity checking" though.
By design, ZFS never holds critical data in memory only and so at least in theory should always be consistent on-disk. Basically it shouldn't need to fsck. That is a giant advantage to me, if it turns out to be as good in reality as it sounds on paper. Of course, that also has a lot to do with the capabilities of the FS proper, but removing the evil, evil HW controllers from the picture can only be a plus.
I don't know why, but RAID controllers are the most unreliable pieces of hardware I have ever known, besides the drives themselves (but at least they are consistent and expected to fail). Get a few of them together and something WILL go wrong, more often than not in a horrible and unexpected way. When some RAM goes bad in a HW RAID controller you are in for a whole lot of subtle, silent-error-prone fun. Anything that gets the HW controllers out of the picture is a win for me.
And don't even mention the batteries in HW raid controllers. They are the wrong solution to the power failure problem, especially since it's always after a failure that a disk will decide it's had enough of spinning and would just like to sit still for a while, thank you very much. Drive failure with pending writes! Exactly the words every administrator wants to hear. Almost as good as power failure with pending writes. Combine the two (highly likely!) for maximum LULZ. Ok, this is turning into a rant, I better stop.
Anyway, thanks for the corrections. My original comment (and probably this one) came across as a confused mess upon re-reading .. sorry .. will sleep now : )
You have certainly never done this yourself.
Or maybe he's still on his 1st or 2nd home-built RAID. In my experience techs tend to build maybe 3 or 4, and be around a while to see the problems, before they say "fuck this" and buy from a vendor.
Home built RAID is great for home use and as a learning experience. Personally, I'd go with a Enhance UltraStor RS16-JS SAS and an Areca ARC-1680ix, but that's just me and because I use macs at home. And I don't really mind it taking 16 hours to rebuild. Oh no, I can't stream my movies at full speed today. Try telling your boss that your ecommerce site will be 10x slower and timing out all over the place for the next day or two at christmastime but that's cool because you saved a few grand last year building the storage array yourself and see the delighted look on his face.
You would have to be nuts to try and pull the "save money by building it myself!" trick in a heavy production environment. You might get away with it for a while, maybe with one or two units. What happens when you have 12? 24? 48? Practically a full time job just babysitting the damn things. And what is your strategy for when, not if, but when the power fails?
I'm actually pretty interested in these Suns. The price isn't *that* bad when you consider that ZFS, in theory, doesn't have to rebuild and should get itself into an inconsistent state less. Those two features alone are pretty much worth the markup IMO. And furthermore, everyone knows Sun RRPs are just there to make the discounts they then offer you look better. No-one pays more than 50-80% of that if you buy more than a couple of things at a time and you have a decent VAR.
Gee, I wonder why? Perhaps because the admins had configured the comment ID field to be 24 bits, then forgot about it?
They bumped it up and the problem went away. Of course.
I don't even like MySQL (prefer PostgreSQL myself) but geeze, please try to make your criticisms a little more "sober reflection on objective merits" and a little less "clear evidence i have no fucking idea what I am talking about".
ok, next person blame something else and how these 2 things weren't built wrong.
OK. Twitter's problems have very little to do with ruby and mysql. Anyone who thinks otherwise does not understand what scaling is.
Yeah, Ruby is a bit slow. I love it but it's a bit slow, I can't deny it. But so what? You scale out, not up. Twitter can't seem to learn that lesson.
And your criticism of MySQL is laughable, seeing as how it's made on an extremely high-traffic site that runs .. MySQL. Also see Facebook, Mixi, et al.
If Ruby and MySQL were the problems, Twitter's job would be simple! A straight port to a faster language, a (reasonably) simple DB change. They have had *ample* time to do this, but have not. This is pretty good evidence that the problems are elsewhere.
The site remains unstable. Personally, I have begun to believe the problems are corporate. I know any number of talented developers who could have rebuilt twitter from scratch about 10 times over by now. I have to assume they have some other kind of problem.
i hope all british people die.
You will be delighted to discover that all British people do, in fact, die.
For the men, you need only wait 76.9 years before death is statistically likely; for the females it's a slightly longer period of eager anticipation: 81.2 years on average before your wish is fulfilled.
Jolly good show, eh, old boy?
Cloud is pants, and idle is definitely pants, but Epaper? That's not pants. Well, there is the possibility of actual pants being made from it, so it could be pants, literally .. uh, did I just "whoosh" myself? Sigh.
Anyway, highly amusing to see this extremely British slang creeping into the everyday slashdot vernacular.