Wait a minute: "..."find / -name CA.sh" is more likely to work on deb-based systems, and less likely to force one to read the rpm manpage to remember what options do what." Find isn't less likely to work on non-deb-based Linux systems, as far as I know. On the other hand, at least on my distros, I agree that "find / -name CA.sh [-print]" has never "forced" anyone to read the rpm manpage, nor has find ever forced itself upon anyone. Perhaps the license agreement covers this case.
"However, the book tells us that CA.sh, and a moderately competent Linux user is likely to know that rpm -ql openssl will list all of the files in the openssl package..."
What else is CA.sh likely to know?
I cannot resist including my own literate program. The original was written in reply to a programming test, posed by a prospective employer. During the interview I was told that the company contained their costs by keeping salaries low. In keeping with the spirit of literate programming, this story is recounted within the body of the program.
Literate programming might be more popular if it had support for interactive debugging, with the standard features common in contemporary interactive development environments.
It's about time. There was a serious point to be made, though the parent was marked flamebait. Taxpayer funded research should be a public good--the public should benefit from it, since they paid for it. (In practice government revenue is spent on a mix of private goods to support the "winning coalition" and on public goods.) The libertarian impulse would be to privatize the research.
I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool slashdotified anti-Windowlogist, until I upgraded from Vista to XP. I still need an an E6600 Core Duo CPU on an Intel DG965RYCK motherboard (running any version of the BIOS before April 4, 2006 to get around the 2GB memory limitation--Intel still hasn't fixed the BIOS bug) with 4GB RAM and a 250GB SATA drive to open more than one IE7 tab without thrashing and to assure IBM XT performance levels (for backwards compatibility with the 8086); and it is true that I was placed on a secret list of evil malcontents because I needed to validate my copy of XP through the classified Windows Advantage Homeland Security program, after an attempted upgrade to XP from a DELL OEM disk (I couldn't wait for the CompUSA going-out-of-business discount); but now at last I enjoy the glorious Windows religious experience, as promised by the stupendous sound-track that accompanies the successful booting of the magnificent operating system Windows XP, the long-awaited successor to Vista.
One of the inevitable topics of discussion among hackers is how to modify their cellphones. The closed architecture of the iPhone and the inferior monopoly carrier Apple chose are disincentives for anyone whose interest in technology transcends that of a consumer.
But Apple shouldn't disable a modified phone unless they are willing to compensate the owner. It's not their property. If Apple wants iPhones to be regulated, then they need to lobby for legislation to regulate the iPhone, and leave the enforcement to law enforcers.
Finally, I'd sooner spend the money supporting a class action lawsuit against Apple, than purchase an iPhone, as long as they are disabling phones that no longer belong to them.
My coauthor Larry Orlowski and I wrote about outsourcing CEOs in The Corner Office in Bangalore. I hope that our NY Times Op-Ed was cited in the patent application.
Osame Kinouchi in Persistence solves Fermi Paradox but challenges SETI projects has proposed a model of colonization that does not assume that colonization follows a uniform diffusion process. A uniform diffusion process is often tacitly assumed in back-of-the-envelope, extra-terrestrial-free solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Instead of a uniform diffusion process, Kinouchi proposes a model for intergalactic colonization closer to the distribution of cities on the Earth. This is not a simple uniform diffusion process, as shown by the non-uniform distribution of cities, and by the presence of exotic "lost" tribes, whose provincial worldview might prompt them to conclude that there is no global civilization.
Kinouchi points out that for a wide class of diffusion processes, including simple processes other than uniform diffusion (in which colonization would occur uniformly in every direction), the number of non-visited sites need not decay exponentially with time. Instead, the probability that some site remains uncolonized might follow a power law.
(He gives the probability that a site might not be visited by time t as P(t) = P_\infty + Ct^{-\theta}.)
I'll jump to the conclusion: if the colonization of space follows something like a non-uniform, persistent diffusion process, then there will be large regions of space that won't be colonized, away from the colonized areas. Since we haven't heard from extraterrestrials, we can assume we are in one of the large, unvisited regions, and so the nearby candidates for SETI searches are also unlikely to have been visited. (Kinouchi asserts that the Fermi Paradox is "locally" true.) So SETI has to look further than the immediate stellar neighborhood for likely candidates.
And the idea that humans have to be killed and maimed in war so that a few females can be impressed enough to mate with the victors is utterly repulsive. No female who was so impressed would be worth the effort or the carnage. What sort of female would tally the numbers of dead, wounded, maimed and disfigured and then decide to say "yes", if the numbers were sufficient? What a disgusting species of hateful monsters, if humanity conducts itself this way!
The Psychology Today article violates WP:NPOV, WP:V and WP:NOR. And now I'm going to violate them.
From the article:
Women often say no to men. Men have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them. Men have built (and destroyed) civilization in order to impress women, so that they might say yes.
That a single scientific discovery owes its origin to sex is a disgrace to the entire scientific enterprise. Who cares if women say no to men? Certainly not a single worthy scientist or programmer. In the words of the poet
Science must be pursued for its own sake
And never to impress potential mates!
Likewise for military conflict. What reproductive advantage is gained by an elite of aging politicians somewhat past their reproductive prime if they send the youth to war? The notion of honor is a tawdry embarrassment, if it has anything whatsoever to do with reproductive fitness. No self respecting warrior would have anything to do with it.
The correlation, for humanity, between reproductive fitness and economic effectiveness is a bug, not a feature. This observation goes back to Nietzsche, whose criticism of English psychologists in the Genealogy of Morals is pertinent to the obtuse Psychology Today article.
These English psychologists--what do they really want? We find them, willingly or unwillingly, always at the same work, that is, hauling the partie honteuse [shameful part] of our inner world into the foreground, in order to look right there for the truly effective and operative force which has determined our development, the very place where man's intellectual pride least wishes to find it (for example, in the vis inertiae [force of inertia] of habit or in forgetfulness or in a blind, contingent, mechanical joining of ideas or in something else purely passive, automatic, reflex, molecular, and completely stupid)--what is it that really drives these psychologists always in this particular direction?
It is not merely politically incorrect to attribute scientific and technological advance, and the productions of art and literature to the correlation between economic effectiveness and reproductive fitness. It leads to the intellectually abhorrent notion that the measure of scientific theory is reproductive success. If reproductive success is the measure of a scientific theory, how reproductively successful were the creators of the theory referred to in the Psychology Today article? How successful could they have been, given the highly non-normal distribution of wealth?
Worse, it leads to a self-defeating, fatuous complacency, for example, over the highly non-normal distribution of wealth, itself viewed as a wonderful consequence of the correlation between reproductive fitness and economic effectiveness. To explain why this putative correlation is sinister and insidious and not wonderful, I will need to cite a source that won't be written until some time in the future, after the vaunted technological singularity of the Transhumanists will have occurred. By then, the readership Popular Psychology and Slashdot will be Transhuman. The naive excerpt from the Popular Psychology article I included above will have been updated, as follows.
Reproductive behavior is expensive, inefficient and irrational, if rationality is
epitomized by otherwise isolated agents who maximize their expected
utility in their only interaction, the exchange of commodity vectors,
ab
I have to check, but I have heard that in NY, if you don't have a permit to carry a weapon, it is illegal to wear a bullet proof vest. The intention is to deter criminals. Armed security guards would presumably have carry permits and could wear them. So the term "civilian" was inaccurate, but not by much, at least in the metropolitan area (I'm not referring to the south), as it is relatively unusual for civilians to have carry permits (they are supposed to be difficult to obtain).
The business about the second amendment is another topic altogether. The United States is a more dangerous place than other countries on account of its more permissive attitude towards guns--an attitude which tends toward a self-righteous sense of God-given, constitutional entitlement. That's a sociological fact.
I don't think a citizen's arrest is a crime, even if you're wearing a bunch of expensive body armor.
Not so: it's illegal in New York for a civilian to wear a bullet-proof vest.
Lets say you have 100 servers and they are in 10 RACKS. You consolidate these 100 Servers in 10 racks through virtualization. You now have 10 servers in 1 rack, carrying the load of what was 100 servers in 10 racks. The total power for that 1 rack will go up! The total power overall will go down, EVERY SINGLE TIME.
Not necessarily. The total power could go up. It depends; you can't tell from your example. If by "the singe rack carries the load of the 100 servers in 10 racks" means that the power consumption is the same, then it does not go down: it remains the same. What you're saying might be true, but it doesn't follow logically. You have to be more specific and provide some numbers.
If the 100 servers are running at 15% utilization at 20W, the 100 servers consume a total of 2000W. Now you consolidate them and each server running 10 virtualized servers consumes 280W at 80-90% utilization (let's assume they are the same 300W servers). Now the single rack is drawing 10*280W = 2800W after consolidation.
Maybe these are faster servers that consume 400W each. Now you have a single rack of 10 servers consuming 4kW, as opposed to 100 underutilized servers that were consuming 2KW.
You would need to include some figures to reassure people like the facilities staff who maintain the electricals, and the person who writes the check for the work.
The second article has an obvious implication: total power consumption can go up.
Many data centers are not equipped to deal with the new power requirements that are necessary to support virtual servers. For example, you might need four 20-amp power circuits for each 42U data cabinet that is fully loaded with standard 2U servers, in order to satisfy power needs and to provide power redundancy (the ability to withstand a single circuit failure). This power scheme is actually double the standard power layout, which provisions only two 20-amp power circuits per cabinet.
And doubling the power per cabinet poses new problems of its own, especially if it means the data center needs to upgrade its whole power infrastructure.
There you go. It's easy to see that there can be a net gain in power consumption before and after virtualization. If typical datacenters don't have four 20A circuits per 42U rack to handle the higher power densities, then are you going to argue that their electrical costs would go down when they upgrade to handle the higher densities? What about A/C costs going up? Suppose you just manage to hit the A/C threshold in the new configuration,
and now you need another A/C unit; are you still going to maintain that there is no total increase in power consumption?
The marketing slogan that total power consumption always goes down even though power/footprint goes up is simply no substitute for analysis. It depends. In many situations the total power consumption can go up. The earlier statement that the servers are irrelevant is incompetent. Typically older servers are replaced with more powerful servers with significantly greater power consumption.
You're right about not continuing: why would anyone bother using the services of a person who has no comprehension of the difference between total power consumption before and after virtualization?
There is no place in that article where the author tells you there will be an overall increase in power used. Period, end of discussion. Do you know why there is no place in that article where it says that? Because it would not happen.
But in contradiction to this, the article states that virtualization may result in an overall increase in power consumption:
Virtualisation is the silent enemy
Virtualisation has been touted as a technology that can be used to reduce power consumption because it allows computing tasks to be consolidated to fewer servers. Unfortunately, reducing the number of physical servers by increasing the workload on the remaining servers can result in increased power consumption.
"Type of servers used before and after = irrelevant."
Absolutely false. Power consumption goes up with the square of CPU speed. That has to be taken into consideration. Also, with virtualized servers running at 80% utilization, instead of 15%, which is a typical number, the standard two 20 Amp circuits per 42 U rack won't be enough: you need twice that, which is another cost you haven't mentioned.
It's obvious that you don't understand the article or what the author meant by footprint. You mentioned virtualizing 5 servers on one. If these were the servers of the example, they'd be running at 20 W at 15-20% utilization each. Now they're running on a single server at 80% utilization at 280 watts. The total power consumption before virtualization was 100W. The power consumption after virtualization is 280, so the net increase is 180 W. That's overhead for you and it's point of the article. Somehow you count this kind of an increase as a decrease. Now if by "overhead" you mean something other than power consumption, you've changed the subject. If you mean power consumption, you're mistaken.
To clarify what he is saying for you, not only does the power consumption/footprint rise after virtualization, but so can the total power consumption. In his example with a 300 watt server running at 20 watts and 15-20% CPU utilization before virtualization, which runs at 280 watts and 80% after virtualization, the total footprint would have to go down by a factor of 14 for the total power consumption to be conserved. (At this point it would be appropriate to interject, "all other things being equal"--meaning that there is no difference in application performance--a big assumption, and that the identical servers are used before and after). Ignoring CPU utilization, the 14 to 1 footprint reduction with the identical total power consumption before and after virtualization isn't likely. Including CPU utilization, it's less likely.
His point wasn't merely that the power/footprint goes up. That's not the issue. The issue is that the total power consumption can go up in a non-linear fashion.
Your statement would be true in an ideal world where CPU utilization and power consumption were linearly related; unfortunately they aren't, so your statement, and your position that I don't know what footprint means is fatuous.
I re-read the article I linked to and it flatly contradicts your statement, weasel words such as "all other things being equal" notwithstanding. You need to re-read the last paragraph.
Slashdot Mirror
A three-to-one ratio of false positives is lower than most paranoids will accept.
Yes, but that's not what the parent wrote.
Wait a minute: "..."find / -name CA.sh" is more likely to work on deb-based systems, and less likely to force one to read the rpm manpage to remember what options do what." Find isn't less likely to work on non-deb-based Linux systems, as far as I know. On the other hand, at least on my distros, I agree that "find / -name CA.sh [-print]" has never "forced" anyone to read the rpm manpage, nor has find ever forced itself upon anyone. Perhaps the license agreement covers this case.
Neither did the the moderately competent Linux networking book reviewer.
"However, the book tells us that CA.sh, and a moderately competent Linux user is likely to know that rpm -ql openssl will list all of the files in the openssl package..." What else is CA.sh likely to know?
Literate programming might be more popular if it had support for interactive debugging, with the standard features common in contemporary interactive development environments.
It's about time. There was a serious point to be made, though the parent was marked flamebait. Taxpayer funded research should be a public good--the public should benefit from it, since they paid for it. (In practice government revenue is spent on a mix of private goods to support the "winning coalition" and on public goods.) The libertarian impulse would be to privatize the research.
The government did something right. So much for the Ron Palsies.
I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool slashdotified anti-Windowlogist,
until I upgraded from Vista to XP. I still need an an E6600 Core Duo
CPU on an Intel DG965RYCK motherboard (running any version of the BIOS
before April 4, 2006 to get around the 2GB memory limitation--Intel
still hasn't fixed the BIOS bug) with 4GB RAM and a 250GB SATA
drive to open more than one IE7 tab without thrashing and to assure
IBM XT performance levels (for backwards compatibility with the 8086);
and it is true that I was placed on a secret list of evil malcontents
because I needed to validate my copy of XP through the classified
Windows Advantage Homeland Security program, after an attempted
upgrade to XP from a DELL OEM disk (I couldn't wait for the CompUSA
going-out-of-business discount); but now at last I enjoy the glorious
Windows religious experience, as promised by the stupendous sound-track
that accompanies the successful booting of the magnificent operating
system Windows XP, the long-awaited successor to Vista.
One of the inevitable topics of discussion among hackers is how to modify their cellphones. The closed architecture of the iPhone and the inferior monopoly carrier Apple chose are disincentives for anyone whose interest in technology transcends that of a consumer.
But Apple shouldn't disable a modified phone unless they are willing to compensate the owner. It's not their property. If Apple wants iPhones to be regulated, then they need to lobby for legislation to regulate the iPhone, and leave the enforcement to law enforcers.
Finally, I'd sooner spend the money supporting a class action lawsuit against Apple, than purchase an iPhone, as long as they are disabling phones that no longer belong to them.
My coauthor Larry Orlowski and I wrote about outsourcing CEOs in The Corner Office in Bangalore. I hope that our NY Times Op-Ed was cited in the patent application.
Osame Kinouchi in Persistence solves Fermi Paradox but challenges SETI projects has proposed a model of colonization that does not assume that colonization follows a uniform diffusion process. A uniform diffusion process is often tacitly assumed in back-of-the-envelope, extra-terrestrial-free solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Instead of a uniform diffusion process, Kinouchi proposes a model for intergalactic colonization closer to the distribution of cities on the Earth. This is not a simple uniform diffusion process, as shown by the non-uniform distribution of cities, and by the presence of exotic "lost" tribes, whose provincial worldview might prompt them to conclude that there is no global civilization.
Kinouchi points out that for a wide class of diffusion processes, including simple processes other than uniform diffusion (in which colonization would occur uniformly in every direction), the number of non-visited sites need not decay exponentially with time. Instead, the probability that some site remains uncolonized might follow a power law.
(He gives the probability that a site might not be visited by time t as P(t) = P_\infty + Ct^{-\theta}.)
I'll jump to the conclusion: if the colonization of space follows something like a non-uniform, persistent diffusion process, then there will be large regions of space that won't be colonized, away from the colonized areas. Since we haven't heard from extraterrestrials, we can assume we are in one of the large, unvisited regions, and so the nearby candidates for SETI searches are also unlikely to have been visited. (Kinouchi asserts that the Fermi Paradox is "locally" true.) So SETI has to look further than the immediate stellar neighborhood for likely candidates.
And the idea that humans have to be killed and maimed in war so that a few females can be impressed enough to mate with the victors is utterly repulsive. No female who was so impressed would be worth the effort or the carnage. What sort of female would tally the numbers of dead, wounded, maimed and disfigured and then decide to say "yes", if the numbers were sufficient? What a disgusting species of hateful monsters, if humanity conducts itself this way!
That a single scientific discovery owes its origin to sex is a disgrace to the entire scientific enterprise. Who cares if women say no to men? Certainly not a single worthy scientist or programmer. In the words of the poet
Science must be pursued for its own sake
And never to impress potential mates!
Likewise for military conflict. What reproductive advantage is gained by an elite of aging politicians somewhat past their reproductive prime if they send the youth to war? The notion of honor is a tawdry embarrassment, if it has anything whatsoever to do with reproductive fitness. No self respecting warrior would have anything to do with it.
The correlation, for humanity, between reproductive fitness and economic effectiveness is a bug, not a feature. This observation goes back to Nietzsche, whose criticism of English psychologists in the Genealogy of Morals is pertinent to the obtuse Psychology Today article.
It is not merely politically incorrect to attribute scientific and technological advance, and the productions of art and literature to the correlation between economic effectiveness and reproductive fitness. It leads to the intellectually abhorrent notion that the measure of scientific theory is reproductive success. If reproductive success is the measure of a scientific theory, how reproductively successful were the creators of the theory referred to in the Psychology Today article? How successful could they have been, given the highly non-normal distribution of wealth?
Worse, it leads to a self-defeating, fatuous complacency, for example, over the highly non-normal distribution of wealth, itself viewed as a wonderful consequence of the correlation between reproductive fitness and economic effectiveness. To explain why this putative correlation is sinister and insidious and not wonderful, I will need to cite a source that won't be written until some time in the future, after the vaunted technological singularity of the Transhumanists will have occurred. By then, the readership Popular Psychology and Slashdot will be Transhuman. The naive excerpt from the Popular Psychology article I included above will have been updated, as follows.
It's a free police state.
I have to check, but I have heard that in NY, if you don't have a permit to carry a weapon, it is illegal to wear a bullet proof vest. The intention is to deter criminals. Armed security guards would presumably have carry permits and could wear them. So the term "civilian" was inaccurate, but not by much, at least in the metropolitan area (I'm not referring to the south), as it is relatively unusual for civilians to have carry permits (they are supposed to be difficult to obtain).
The business about the second amendment is another topic altogether. The United States is a more dangerous place than other countries on account of its more permissive attitude towards guns--an attitude which tends toward a self-righteous sense of God-given, constitutional entitlement. That's a sociological fact.
I don't think a citizen's arrest is a crime, even if you're wearing a bunch of expensive body armor. Not so: it's illegal in New York for a civilian to wear a bullet-proof vest.
Not necessarily. The total power could go up. It depends; you can't tell from your example. If by "the singe rack carries the load of the 100 servers in 10 racks" means that the power consumption is the same, then it does not go down: it remains the same. What you're saying might be true, but it doesn't follow logically. You have to be more specific and provide some numbers.
If the 100 servers are running at 15% utilization at 20W, the 100 servers consume a total of 2000W. Now you consolidate them and each server running 10 virtualized servers consumes 280W at 80-90% utilization (let's assume they are the same 300W servers). Now the single rack is drawing 10*280W = 2800W after consolidation.
Maybe these are faster servers that consume 400W each. Now you have a single rack of 10 servers consuming 4kW, as opposed to 100 underutilized servers that were consuming 2KW.
You would need to include some figures to reassure people like the facilities staff who maintain the electricals, and the person who writes the check for the work.
The marketing slogan that total power consumption always goes down even though power/footprint goes up is simply no substitute for analysis. It depends. In many situations the total power consumption can go up. The earlier statement that the servers are irrelevant is incompetent. Typically older servers are replaced with more powerful servers with significantly greater power consumption.
You're right about not continuing: why would anyone bother using the services of a person who has no comprehension of the difference between total power consumption before and after virtualization?
Other sources caution that virtualization can increase power consumption.
The statement that virtualization ALWAYS reduces total power consumption is false.
"Type of servers used before and after = irrelevant." Absolutely false. Power consumption goes up with the square of CPU speed. That has to be taken into consideration. Also, with virtualized servers running at 80% utilization, instead of 15%, which is a typical number, the standard two 20 Amp circuits per 42 U rack won't be enough: you need twice that, which is another cost you haven't mentioned.
It's obvious that you don't understand the article or what the author meant by footprint. You mentioned virtualizing 5 servers on one. If these were the servers of the example, they'd be running at 20 W at 15-20% utilization each. Now they're running on a single server at 80% utilization at 280 watts. The total power consumption before virtualization was 100W. The power consumption after virtualization is 280, so the net increase is 180 W. That's overhead for you and it's point of the article. Somehow you count this kind of an increase as a decrease. Now if by "overhead" you mean something other than power consumption, you've changed the subject. If you mean power consumption, you're mistaken.
Your statement would be true in an ideal world where CPU utilization and power consumption were linearly related; unfortunately they aren't, so your statement, and your position that I don't know what footprint means is fatuous.
I re-read the article I linked to and it flatly contradicts your statement, weasel words such as "all other things being equal" notwithstanding. You need to re-read the last paragraph.