All of those companies you listed are web sites. I was talking about high-end database servers used for corporate backends, not web sites, computer cluster projects, etc.
Solaris is the smallest percentage of UNIX platforms my company's clients run on. AIX is first, followed by HP-UX. However, though Linux is a popular operating system with universities, web sites, startups and small server solutions, Linux on x86 scales horribly (and I do mean horribly) on our application and other high-performance database solutions with thousands of users compared with the big UNIX operating systems. ext3 can't support the filesystem throughput required even with RAID 10.
We still configure Solaris systems on Solaris 10 UltraSparc, and I believe Sun just came out with a new, rather mean processor. Solaris, and certainly HP-UX and AIX, are not going anywhere soon. There are too many enterprise database systems (new, not just legacy) that require the far more powerful and scalable hardware and software that Sun, IBM and HP offer.
Have you ever benchmarked the 4.7 GHz POWER6 chips on AIX 6.1? It's the fastest processor and operating system combination I've ever seen.
I've heard good things about ZFS from Sun Microsystems, though I don't have much experience with it. Ext3 seems to have decent crash recovery though it requires fscks almost every time. JFS2 from IBM is the most solid filesystem I've ever seen, but I don't know if such a filesystem works with MythTV.
Ha! That's a good one. Almost every ISP in the United States has given user IP address and account information away to any subpoena by the RIAA and its lawyers. This of course is civil and not criminal, but the ISP response is exactly the same. I've only heard of ISPs giving up user data for criminal investigations in child porn or murder cases (i.e. search results for "kill wife" or whatever nonsense the bungling murderer tried to look up) but that doesn't mean it won't spread.
Furthermore, even if the ISPs don't give up the information as easily here, they do track it, and if they're not using it for generalized network throttling, infrastructure improvement or aggregate trends, they'll sell every bit of data internally or to advertisers when they smell money. Privacy on the Internet via your ISP is an illusion in the States, at least for as long as the ISP can afford to keep the logs.
In other news, Google has dropped its 20th century name for a more futuristic, forward-looking one: Union Aerospace Corporation. A previously unknown employee, Malcom Betruger, single-handedly invented the space warp using current Google technology.
Duke D'Honnefleur: I don't like your cuffs. I don't like your cuffs, I don't like your cuffs. A man's cuffs should only come down to the tip of his pee pee. Yours come all the way down to your balls. Count de Monet: At least I have them. Duke D'Honnefleur: You bitch.
Here's a good site that overviews your rights during a traffic stop very well. It explains probable cause and when you can say "No" to a police search of your car.
Wasn't Columbus looking for the East Indies though? He was looking to find the East Indies for a shorter trading route but ended up in the Carribean instead. He thought he had found it, so he named the natives "Indians."
A good troll is like a powerful car, he takes off so quickly that you can't really keep up and you might not have known he was there. A bad troll is like a rice burner, you laugh at him trying to be like a fast car and it's retarded-looking.
Oh yeah, and Microsoft is awesome, Linux will die in 2009, Bush was the best president ever, and Internet memes are cool.
That answers my question perfectly, and also explains why sometimes Windows won't boot when something changes the partition but Mac OS X boots just fine.
If I hadn't already blown my mod points today I'd mod you up for such a thoughtful, well-explained answer.
So is anyone going to actually discuss the tsunami, or are we going to bang our heads together on a mile-long board until the end of metric time?
I find it interesting that the wave was only 100 feet high in the eyewitness accounts, but that it washed 1700 feet of vegetation off. I wonder if the shape of the land surrounding the bay somehow compressed the wave much like a levee does a flood.
All your kernels are belong to us. im in ur kernelz open-sourcin ur code Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert the kernel. THIS IS LINUX!
To define God, we can give him basic attributes that make him God without giving any sort of moral or personality claims. Basic definitions of God would be:
1. Non-physical (i.e. spiritual, metaphysical, multi-dimensional, however you want to phrase it) 2. Omnipotent (or near so) 3. Omniscient 4. Omnipresent 5. Eternal
As close to deistic as we can get.
I'd retreat if science could come up with a way to determine first cause from a physical standpoint (at least, I'd recant my claim both are equally valid. I doubt I'd stop believing in God).
> given that all of science done so far has succeeded by being purely physical, it seems far more reasonable to me to continue that trend than to stop, introduce spirituality for the start of the universe, and then have to explain why this spirituality doesn't manifest itself anywhere else.
Good point, but I can also make the claim that if the being is indeed beyond the universe, multi-dimensional, or otherwise, no explanation is really required, since humans would be incapable of registering such a being in their experience or with any kind of sensors, until we can learn to detect more than four dimensions of existence. That would be sufficient to explain why it never manifests itself--we're incapable of detecting it.
I hope I don't get marked as a spam account for replying so much, but here goes.
Your point about space seems valid. If space is indeed a hypersphere, then it would be like traveling around the globe, except in what appears to be an infinite straight line to us. I recall scientists have modeled this mathematically with pretty sound evidence.
I disagree with your point about time. We don't have any evidence that time is cyclical, but we have evidence of a large amount of time passing (billions of years) without a single cycle or interrupt.
> But if they do exist, I would image they would be just as indifferent to us humans as we are to the bacteria on our arms. To suggest that an all powerful being would take such a focused interest in puny humans seems arrogant on our part.
I'm going to get a little more philosophical here, but I have to bring up religion to disagree with your point. If God (or as you call it, powerful multi-dimensional being) exists, then there's a good chance most world religions have a basis in reality. Most of these religions teach that God is personal. The difference between bacteria and humans is enormous. Bacteria are not sentient, and they are the same dimensionality as ourselves. Humans are sentient, aware and intelligent. God would take an interest in humans because they are able to communicate with him, and are his creation. It's not arrogant to believe that, if that is what God desires--and that's what most religions believe.
I think we're going to hit a circle soon in logic, but I'll bite.
> entropy increasing applies to a closed system and thus is not directly applicable to an oscillation/multi-verse model.
How do you know? Why isn't the infinite/oscillation universe a larger closed system? This point doesn't make any sense to me since you have no way of knowing what's beyond the closed system of the universe or the laws that apply to it.
> anyway, you don't seem to get the idea that when scientists suggest a model it's just a step in a continuous journey - if there's no evidence right now, then science will aim to fill that gap - improve the theories until they can be differentiated by particular observations and then look for those observations. science is more about the method than the particular knowledge.
I never said anything of the sort. I believe science is excellent at gathering knowledge and postulating theories. The difference I'm drawing is between purely physical vs. physical and spiritual, not science and religion.
> I don't like your position in that it seems to be 'if there's no definitively known explanation, all are equally valid'. saying that the start of the universe is just as likely as by 'God' as by 'nature' is like saying an unseen murder was as likely done by the devil as by another human being. you don't know for sure! prove it wasn't the devil!
The difference here is that we would have forensic evidence of what happened. We have a body, or blood, or a weapon. We have potential footsteps and DNA. It may not have been a human. It could have been a wild animal, suicide, or natural disaster. However, we have cause and effect evidence for the ending of life. We don't have any direct evidence of first cause--so this analogy fails there.
> also, can you address the fact that God is infinitely complex whereas the universe isn't and so is a rubbish explanation in the sense that the explanation is far more complicated than needed?
I'm not sure what you're asking here. How do you know God is infinitely complex? You say we have no evidence for God, so how can you declare He's infinitely complex? Perhaps God is infinitely simple, or has no definition of complexity at all. If this is the case, why would this explanation be any more complicated than the "we have an infinite selection of multiverses that have always been and exist eternally without explanation"?
My ultimate point is that a simple, monotheistic God (let's not even bring religion into the picture) is no less absurd, complex, or provable than either a) assuming that we'll never know where the first oscillating universe/multiverse came from or b) trying to contrive a physical explanation such as an infinite multiverse to explain one universe that we can see.
I can see by the quickness you are getting modded up who is going to win this debate, but that goes back to the idea that being atheist is somehow more intellectual than accepting a God could exist.
The problem with your rebuttal is that we have no proof anything physical can exist infinitely. We have the law of conservation of mass-energy, but we also have entropy, which states that things will tend to greater disorder. A universe that had existed too long will have become a dark mass of seething elementary particles. And we have evidence the universe exists, but no evidence it can exist infinitely. In fact, according to science, we have specific proof that this particular universe has *not* always been. In fact, we have a pretty specific age of 13.7 billion years assigned to this one.
So unless the oscillating universe can somehow "reset" entropy with its collapse and be able to do this an infinite number of times, it will eventually cease to oscillate and become perfectly disorderly. Same with a steady-state universe, or a multi-verse. Any universe with our particular set of physical laws will exhibit this behavior.
My point is that trying to explain a "first cause" with purely physical mechanisms is as provable as saying "God did it." We don't have direct evidence of either one. It's just most people believe that the more "scientific" or "intellectual" thing to do is dismiss God and contrive a purely physical explanation, while the more "religious" thing to do is say "God did it." Both of them seem equally unfounded in evidence to me. The logical thing to do, then, is to say "We don't know, but it's possible that something physical we don't understand, or God, exists and was capable of being the first cause." However, dismissing God simply because of the lack of evidence is as flawed as using the same lack of evidence to contrive a purely imaginary physical explanation.
I've heard this theory, and the other one that we have an infinite stretch of "space-time" and this section happened to be the stable, orderly section of the whole blanket and able to support life. I've also heard a "multi-verse" theory, where there's an infinite number of universes and this one got the physical laws and constants right for life and existence.
The problem with all of these theories is they don't explain the origin. Your oscillating universe has a logical problem. Where did it start oscillating? You can claim it's infinite, but to me, that's just as ridiculous as the idea of an infinite God creating it. The same problem applies to the blanket universe and the multi-verse theory. Who created the blanket, or if it wasn't created, where did it come from? If it's "always been" or infinite, that smacks of a cop-out that's as bad as saying "God did it." I believe in God personally, but from a neutral point of view, I don't see the advantage of the "always been" or infinity arguments over the ones of an all-powerful, infinite God.
The other problem is that haven't scientists shown this universe isn't going to contract, but rather suffer heat death due to its spacetime shape and lack of sufficient mass to decelerate the expansion?
If you stretch any further for a geeky, funny pop culture reference, you're going to look like Mr. Fantastic after a battle with the Silver Surfer at the rubber band factory.
Slashdot Mirror
All of those companies you listed are web sites. I was talking about high-end database servers used for corporate backends, not web sites, computer cluster projects, etc.
Solaris is the smallest percentage of UNIX platforms my company's clients run on. AIX is first, followed by HP-UX. However, though Linux is a popular operating system with universities, web sites, startups and small server solutions, Linux on x86 scales horribly (and I do mean horribly) on our application and other high-performance database solutions with thousands of users compared with the big UNIX operating systems. ext3 can't support the filesystem throughput required even with RAID 10.
We still configure Solaris systems on Solaris 10 UltraSparc, and I believe Sun just came out with a new, rather mean processor. Solaris, and certainly HP-UX and AIX, are not going anywhere soon. There are too many enterprise database systems (new, not just legacy) that require the far more powerful and scalable hardware and software that Sun, IBM and HP offer.
Have you ever benchmarked the 4.7 GHz POWER6 chips on AIX 6.1? It's the fastest processor and operating system combination I've ever seen.
In other news, Jack Thompson will be appearing in R. Kelly's next video, "We Be Pissin' on the Justizzile System."
I thought JFS2 supported dynamic filesystem sizing. http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/pseries/v5r3/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.cmds/doc/aixcmds1/chfs.htm
Of course, this may be dependent on AIX and IBM hardware and may not be available in Linux. I agree JFS doesn't support it.
I've heard good things about ZFS from Sun Microsystems, though I don't have much experience with it. Ext3 seems to have decent crash recovery though it requires fscks almost every time. JFS2 from IBM is the most solid filesystem I've ever seen, but I don't know if such a filesystem works with MythTV.
Ha! That's a good one. Almost every ISP in the United States has given user IP address and account information away to any subpoena by the RIAA and its lawyers. This of course is civil and not criminal, but the ISP response is exactly the same. I've only heard of ISPs giving up user data for criminal investigations in child porn or murder cases (i.e. search results for "kill wife" or whatever nonsense the bungling murderer tried to look up) but that doesn't mean it won't spread.
Furthermore, even if the ISPs don't give up the information as easily here, they do track it, and if they're not using it for generalized network throttling, infrastructure improvement or aggregate trends, they'll sell every bit of data internally or to advertisers when they smell money. Privacy on the Internet via your ISP is an illusion in the States, at least for as long as the ISP can afford to keep the logs.
In Soviet Russia, the ice crushes you!
Yakov Smirnov said it.
No he didn't.
In other news, Google has dropped its 20th century name for a more futuristic, forward-looking one: Union Aerospace Corporation. A previously unknown employee, Malcom Betruger, single-handedly invented the space warp using current Google technology.
Duke D'Honnefleur: I don't like your cuffs. I don't like your cuffs, I don't like your cuffs. A man's cuffs should only come down to the tip of his pee pee. Yours come all the way down to your balls.
Count de Monet: At least I have them.
Duke D'Honnefleur: You bitch.
Here's a good site that overviews your rights during a traffic stop very well. It explains probable cause and when you can say "No" to a police search of your car.
http://www.flexyourrights.org/traffic_stop_scenario
Wasn't Columbus looking for the East Indies though? He was looking to find the East Indies for a shorter trading route but ended up in the Carribean instead. He thought he had found it, so he named the natives "Indians."
A good troll is like a powerful car, he takes off so quickly that you can't really keep up and you might not have known he was there. A bad troll is like a rice burner, you laugh at him trying to be like a fast car and it's retarded-looking.
Oh yeah, and Microsoft is awesome, Linux will die in 2009, Bush was the best president ever, and Internet memes are cool.
That answers my question perfectly, and also explains why sometimes Windows won't boot when something changes the partition but Mac OS X boots just fine.
If I hadn't already blown my mod points today I'd mod you up for such a thoughtful, well-explained answer.
Has anyone tried this with Boot Camp? I had no problems with Mac OS X and FileVault dual-booting with either XP SP2 or Vista base.
So is anyone going to actually discuss the tsunami, or are we going to bang our heads together on a mile-long board until the end of metric time?
I find it interesting that the wave was only 100 feet high in the eyewitness accounts, but that it washed 1700 feet of vegetation off. I wonder if the shape of the land surrounding the bay somehow compressed the wave much like a levee does a flood.
All your kernels are belong to us.
im in ur kernelz open-sourcin ur code
Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert the kernel.
THIS IS LINUX!
Mementos, the Fresh Maker?
To define God, we can give him basic attributes that make him God without giving any sort of moral or personality claims. Basic definitions of God would be:
1. Non-physical (i.e. spiritual, metaphysical, multi-dimensional, however you want to phrase it)
2. Omnipotent (or near so)
3. Omniscient
4. Omnipresent
5. Eternal
As close to deistic as we can get.
I'd retreat if science could come up with a way to determine first cause from a physical standpoint (at least, I'd recant my claim both are equally valid. I doubt I'd stop believing in God).
> given that all of science done so far has succeeded by being purely physical, it seems far more reasonable to me to continue that trend than to stop, introduce spirituality for the start of the universe, and then have to explain why this spirituality doesn't manifest itself anywhere else.
Good point, but I can also make the claim that if the being is indeed beyond the universe, multi-dimensional, or otherwise, no explanation is really required, since humans would be incapable of registering such a being in their experience or with any kind of sensors, until we can learn to detect more than four dimensions of existence. That would be sufficient to explain why it never manifests itself--we're incapable of detecting it.
I hope I don't get marked as a spam account for replying so much, but here goes.
Your point about space seems valid. If space is indeed a hypersphere, then it would be like traveling around the globe, except in what appears to be an infinite straight line to us. I recall scientists have modeled this mathematically with pretty sound evidence.
I disagree with your point about time. We don't have any evidence that time is cyclical, but we have evidence of a large amount of time passing (billions of years) without a single cycle or interrupt.
> But if they do exist, I would image they would be just as indifferent to us humans as we are to the bacteria on our arms. To suggest that an all powerful being would take such a focused interest in puny humans seems arrogant on our part.
I'm going to get a little more philosophical here, but I have to bring up religion to disagree with your point. If God (or as you call it, powerful multi-dimensional being) exists, then there's a good chance most world religions have a basis in reality. Most of these religions teach that God is personal. The difference between bacteria and humans is enormous. Bacteria are not sentient, and they are the same dimensionality as ourselves. Humans are sentient, aware and intelligent. God would take an interest in humans because they are able to communicate with him, and are his creation. It's not arrogant to believe that, if that is what God desires--and that's what most religions believe.
I think we're going to hit a circle soon in logic, but I'll bite.
> entropy increasing applies to a closed system and thus is not directly applicable to an oscillation/multi-verse model.
How do you know? Why isn't the infinite/oscillation universe a larger closed system? This point doesn't make any sense to me since you have no way of knowing what's beyond the closed system of the universe or the laws that apply to it.
> anyway, you don't seem to get the idea that when scientists suggest a model it's just a step in a continuous journey - if there's no evidence right now, then science will aim to fill that gap - improve the theories until they can be differentiated by particular observations and then look for those observations. science is more about the method than the particular knowledge.
I never said anything of the sort. I believe science is excellent at gathering knowledge and postulating theories. The difference I'm drawing is between purely physical vs. physical and spiritual, not science and religion.
> I don't like your position in that it seems to be 'if there's no definitively known explanation, all are equally valid'. saying that the start of the universe is just as likely as by 'God' as by 'nature' is like saying an unseen murder was as likely done by the devil as by another human being. you don't know for sure! prove it wasn't the devil!
The difference here is that we would have forensic evidence of what happened. We have a body, or blood, or a weapon. We have potential footsteps and DNA. It may not have been a human. It could have been a wild animal, suicide, or natural disaster. However, we have cause and effect evidence for the ending of life. We don't have any direct evidence of first cause--so this analogy fails there.
> also, can you address the fact that God is infinitely complex whereas the universe isn't and so is a rubbish explanation in the sense that the explanation is far more complicated than needed?
I'm not sure what you're asking here. How do you know God is infinitely complex? You say we have no evidence for God, so how can you declare He's infinitely complex? Perhaps God is infinitely simple, or has no definition of complexity at all. If this is the case, why would this explanation be any more complicated than the "we have an infinite selection of multiverses that have always been and exist eternally without explanation"?
My ultimate point is that a simple, monotheistic God (let's not even bring religion into the picture) is no less absurd, complex, or provable than either a) assuming that we'll never know where the first oscillating universe/multiverse came from or b) trying to contrive a physical explanation such as an infinite multiverse to explain one universe that we can see.
I can see by the quickness you are getting modded up who is going to win this debate, but that goes back to the idea that being atheist is somehow more intellectual than accepting a God could exist.
The problem with your rebuttal is that we have no proof anything physical can exist infinitely. We have the law of conservation of mass-energy, but we also have entropy, which states that things will tend to greater disorder. A universe that had existed too long will have become a dark mass of seething elementary particles. And we have evidence the universe exists, but no evidence it can exist infinitely. In fact, according to science, we have specific proof that this particular universe has *not* always been. In fact, we have a pretty specific age of 13.7 billion years assigned to this one.
So unless the oscillating universe can somehow "reset" entropy with its collapse and be able to do this an infinite number of times, it will eventually cease to oscillate and become perfectly disorderly. Same with a steady-state universe, or a multi-verse. Any universe with our particular set of physical laws will exhibit this behavior.
My point is that trying to explain a "first cause" with purely physical mechanisms is as provable as saying "God did it." We don't have direct evidence of either one. It's just most people believe that the more "scientific" or "intellectual" thing to do is dismiss God and contrive a purely physical explanation, while the more "religious" thing to do is say "God did it." Both of them seem equally unfounded in evidence to me. The logical thing to do, then, is to say "We don't know, but it's possible that something physical we don't understand, or God, exists and was capable of being the first cause." However, dismissing God simply because of the lack of evidence is as flawed as using the same lack of evidence to contrive a purely imaginary physical explanation.
I've heard this theory, and the other one that we have an infinite stretch of "space-time" and this section happened to be the stable, orderly section of the whole blanket and able to support life. I've also heard a "multi-verse" theory, where there's an infinite number of universes and this one got the physical laws and constants right for life and existence.
The problem with all of these theories is they don't explain the origin. Your oscillating universe has a logical problem. Where did it start oscillating? You can claim it's infinite, but to me, that's just as ridiculous as the idea of an infinite God creating it. The same problem applies to the blanket universe and the multi-verse theory. Who created the blanket, or if it wasn't created, where did it come from? If it's "always been" or infinite, that smacks of a cop-out that's as bad as saying "God did it." I believe in God personally, but from a neutral point of view, I don't see the advantage of the "always been" or infinity arguments over the ones of an all-powerful, infinite God.
The other problem is that haven't scientists shown this universe isn't going to contract, but rather suffer heat death due to its spacetime shape and lack of sufficient mass to decelerate the expansion?
Isn't there a ???? step in there somewhere?
If you stretch any further for a geeky, funny pop culture reference, you're going to look like Mr. Fantastic after a battle with the Silver Surfer at the rubber band factory.
I find it egregious that it took until 2007 to add "w00t" to the dictionary. I was using w00t back in the Warcraft II and Command & Conquer days.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some juvenile delinquents that I need to evict from my grass.