I once had a cell phone where I would get at least four wrong numbers per day. I'd never had that much trouble before, and never again after I changed numbers. Everyone calling was asking for a different person, so it wasn't because I had a number similar to a popular business (though that happened to me once before too).
Eventually I figured out the reason for the many wrong numbers: my exchange matched a nearby area code, and the first three digits of the rest of my number were an exchange within that area code. So, for example, let's say my number was 555 1234, there were a thousand valid numbers in the format 1 (555) 123 4###. What that meant was that anytime someone in my area code forgot to dial 1 when dialing one of those 1000 numbers, it resulted in a wrong number to me.
Once I figured that out, I got my number changed and things got much better. Don't know if that's what's happening to you, but I thought I'd mention it. If you think it is something like this, be sure to change exchanges too, not just the last four digits. Make sure the exchange does not match a nearby area code.
I was just there last fall and 70% of the country's energy needs are provided by geothermal. Seems to be working pretty well to me. I realize it's harder than it looks, but geothermal is certainly viable. I even swam and bathed in the runoff from one of the powerplants. Quite enjoyable, actually:)
I think your missing something here: you may be able to get more energy out of livestock raised on a plot of land than the veggies raised in the same space. But what do the animals eat? Veggies, usually, from another area. So you're using the vegetable area anyways, and now the livestock area on top of it.
It's pretty well established that feeding veggies to animals and then eating their meat is a very inefficient use of energy. I'm quite certain that you can feed more people off an acre of beans and rice than the cows raised off an acre of beans and rice in the same time frame. Just think about that for a moment. Thus your last paragraph doesn't really line up either, as our overall vegetable farming needs would go down, not up, if we all ate vegetables instead of meat.
Despite that, our food shortage problems have nothing to do with meat eating. Hunger is a political problem. So I say go ahead and eat meat if you like it. And choose organic if you're concerned about the environmental impact. I'm a meat eater and that's what I've chosen, anyways.
Man, it's crazy reading these health stories. The reports flip-flop back and forth and nobody seems to agree. You can find a study or expert to support completely conflicting theories. What are we to think? I certainly wouldn't dismiss Omega 3 based on this latest study... we've got data going both ways now. Which is wrong? Which is right?
The pattern I usually see in these studies is that after controlling for and isolating a particular dietary component, they find it has no benefit, and that the originally percieved benefits must have resulted from the people who eat that dietary component having an otherwise "healthy lifestyle".
But what is this "healthy lifestlye" then, if not a combination of things that may or may not have a positive effect in isolation? Diet has to be a part of that combination, but it may be that no single dietary component is "the key", rather it's the sum of them that does good. Perhaps then isolating components may not be the right approach.
Health and nutrition are extrodinarily complex. For myself I took a step back from all the analysis and confusion, to a relatively simple system of eating things that I think we must have evolved to eat. I skip just about anything that includes digestable technology. So it's grilled organic meats, salads and raw veggies, and water for the most part. I also try to include something "spoiled' each day, as I figure we evolved eating "spoiled" foods... cheese, yogurt, wine. I eat modest portions. And a few times a week I eat whatever the heck i feel like.
Anyways, since I started doing this I've lost weight and my cholesterol has been greatly improved. Though the latest studies I've seen claim that's not a great indicator anyways, so who knows what that means:)
In your 20s, the average speed of auditory processing is 68 milliseconds. That number jumps to an average of 87 milliseconds in your 40s and 106 milliseconds in your 60s.
Ignoring for the moment whether the test is an accurate measurement... let's say it is. I wonder if this age discrepancy is because people slow down as they get older, or is it because people born and raised in a slower paced world are slower their whole lives? In other words, will the 20 year old of today degrade over the next 40 years? And would the 60 year old of today have scored as well as the 20 year old if he had taken the test 40 years ago? We'd need folks take the test in another decade to have a better idea of what this really means.
There should be no legal distinction between stealing chewing gum from a shop and performing an illegal download.
But they are different. Markedly so. Not saying one is right and one is wrong, but one is an actual measurable loss the other is a loss in theory. And yes, I have lived as a professional artist. I have as much interest in copyright as anyone.
And who puts people in prison for 2-5 years for stealing gum anyways?
I didn't say that. It is generally accepted that burning Jews alive is bad. So jokes about it are not an issue. But in the SS in 1942 jokes about burning Jews were most certainly a symptom that the issue was not being taken seriously. And that is analogous to the prison rape jokes today: it is not generally accepted that prisoners getting raped is bad, so the jokes are a symptom that the issue is not taken seriously. This is why I make the point. When it's no longer a serious social problem (one that can be easily resolved) I'll laugh at the jokes myself if they're any good.
Strawman. I didn't claim that I, or anyone else, laughed during Schindler's List.
Straw man back atcha. I didn't claim that either. I was just calling attention to the distinction between awful things being funny and awful things not being funny. I assumed in my comment that you did not find Schindler's list funny, which is a pretty safe assumption. I agree that humor is often based on suffering. You didn't explicitly say it, but you implied that the reverse is also true: that suffering is often humor. I would think this is an absurd point of view, but you go on to paint mankind as a bunch of sadists, which again implies this.
conscience and sympathy intervene and make the thought of laughing at them seem shamefull.
And why is sadism considered the base in your worldview and conscience and sympathy the exceptions which intervene? Especially when conscience and sympathy obviously outweigh sadism by a landslide in any observation of average human behavior? Maybe compassion is the base and sadism is the exception? I don't believe that people who don't laugh at Schindler's List refrain out of shame; they don't laugh because they don't find it funny. There's no repression there.
Yes, in the same way that not overeating, not having sex with everyone you happen to be attracted to, and not telling your boss that he's an idiot is repression.
Maybe in your world. I don't do those things because they generally don't yield very good results. And this being the case I generally don't want them at all, at a gut level. The same way I generally don't want anything that I can see as being a net loss for me, even if indirectly.
Don't get so hung up on shades of gray that you forget that black exists.
Understood, I don't. But I also try to avoid seeing the distribution as a flat line or a saddle. Fact is it's a bell curve and the vast majority live in the middle. Extremes are interesting but I don't think it makes sense to focus too much attention on them, which was what I felt you were doing.
as soon as some group is considered sub-human or entirely nonhuman, people are free to act on their sadism with good conscience - which they did, in all the mentioned cases.
A good point. Though I would point out that not all the people involved acted on their sadism. Rather there was always a subset of people who acted on their sadism. These events are horrifying to be sure (the one that always sticks in my mind is Japanese Unit 731). But the huge impact does not outweigh the fact, in my mind, that these events did not receive mass approval, even by those who had no direct suffering. In fact, people on the whole have been gravitating for the past century toward a greater respect for human rights. It happens in fits and starts. And there are huge pockets of time and location where they backslide. But the fact that we are even having this conversation is a testament to the fact that not all people are sadistic at their core, and that compassion can be the foundation of someone's social philosopy.
Back to prison rape: I just feel compelled whenever someone makes a joke about it to pedantically point out that it's actually a real problem. Once awareness has been raised, and prison rape is considered a bad thing by the majority, and prison guards no longer look the other way, I'll shut up and folks can joke away. I may even laugh myself:)
In any case, agree or disagree, thanks for the well thought out discussion.
I totally get that humor can be based on suffering, depending on the context and intent. I laughed in Pulp Fiction when the kid gets his head blown off by accident. But I didn't laugh during Shindler's List. I have a hard time believing you did. There is a difference.
And to be clear: sympathy is not my motivation to dislike prison rape. There are at least three reasons why everyone should be against prison rape:
1. Nearly all criminals are released from prison eventually. If they have been raped they are more dangerous to society.
2. The rapist is experiencing power. Why is anyone in prison allowed the pleasure of feeding their abusive tendancies? See point #1.
3. A society that sanctions human rights violations is fundamentally a less healthy society. Violence anywhere begets violence everywhere. This has been shown over and over again throughout history.
On your tangent: people are not all sadists. How many consciously sadistic acts does the average person undertake per day? Assuming you're living in something that passes for a functioning society, I'd say virtually zero. And you believe this is all simply repression? Even the jerks I know don't seem to take pleasure in hurting, it's just a side effect of their being inconsiderate. In fact, nearly everyone I know takes efforts to avoid causing suffering of others.
Yet we can still laugh at a good Nazi joke. Get used to the complexity of people. Don't get hung up on one point and then paint everything black and white.
You're half right: Nazis aren't funny. Killing Jews isn't funny. Jokes about them can be funny IF (and this is a very big IF) the joke is a means to relieve tension in an absurd and/or awful situation. People need to joke about terrible things to make sense of the world. Gallows humor. Black comedy. I get that. I even like that.
However: jokes about killing Jews are not funny if the point is to take the actual killing of Jews less seriously. Or to turn killing Jews into entertainment.
Likewise, in this case, if the joke was intended to relieve tension on the agreed horor of prison rape, I'd laugh. That wasn't the point. It never is. People really think prison rape is funny. In and of itself. But it's not. Real torment never is. It's also bad for society. It's bad for you.
It's not pretty colors, it's total utility. That rarely correlates with raw speed or cleverness of the algorithm. My guess is that most slow bits in the system were conscious choices where the benefits outweighed the costs. I'm sure there's a thousand things they could improve, still, but overall it's the most productive system I've worked on.
Actually, with a barcode on a section of shelf, and a barcode on the book, you can leave things in random order and find them very quickly once everything is scanned into the database. I've used warehouse systems like this and they're pretty neat.
But isn't one of the coolest things about AJAX the fact that it's pretty much platform independent? Why would anyone want to tie it to a particular platform? Didn't Java already try that?
FYI we don't all of us have a problem. Many of us Americans are reasonable people with a respect for world history and culture. We just get drowned out by the louder idiots sometimes.
Yeah yeah, I understan it's just a joke. Ha ha. But I wonder how this misinformed joke got started considering the French's long history of being terrifically fierce warriors, including bailing out America more than once.
Anyone who has read All Quiet on the Western Front may have an idea why the French surrendered to Germany rather than stage a straight fight. The brutality of Fhe First World War would kill just about anyone's taste for war on their home soil.
It's entirely expected that advertisements will appear everywhere and anywhere they can. There is no reason for them not to. People are not dissuaded from using a product because of advertisements, even on paid media. They have appeared cable TV, movies (before and during), DVD's, video games... they'll hit XM soon enough.
What surprises me is the sizable percentage of people who saying "well, if it results in more money to develop better games, that's fine". What?!? Since when has advertising dollars been spent to increase the quality of any media attached to it? I feel like I'm living in a different world from these people. Or perhaps they're just folks who have been brainwashed that capitalism is the end-all-be-all and making a buck can never be wrong. Whatever the case, I am 100% sure that advertising will become a part of video games, and that the resulting revenue will have no positive effect on the quality. If anything, it will be detrimental since the motivation of the game company will become "get ads in front of as many impressionable eyeballs as possible" rather than "make a fun game that people will want to pay to play".
Blogs are an excellent example of this. Blogs are horrible.
This seems to be the common sentiment, but I don't get it. I don't look at many blogs, and even then only rarely. How is their existence a problem? I think there's a misunderstanding that just because something isn't useful to you that it isn't useful. Most blogs are there for people to communicate with their family and friends. Just because they are publicly accessible doesn't mean they need to be publicly valuable. Should we restrict public verbal conversation just because most of it is inane? Heck, then we should shut down slashdot because the vast majority of the world probably doesn't find it interesting.
I guess I'm hoping there's a conversion in the next few decades where people accept that they only have to concern themselves with the stuff that applies to them, and they just ignore the stuff that doesn't.
Just curious if you have any interest in having a news story type video made out of this. I'm a small-time amateur movie director and I'd love to put something together on this topic. A mini-documentary type thing. Is there any chance I could get copies of the footage you have, and schedule some interviews with people involved?
So even the old fallback argument for patents is suspect. I'll admit that in some very rare and specific cases, patents provide some benefit for society, but I am convinced at this point that they are a substantial net loss.
Yeah, that lines up pretty well with our experience. So it might work great for a shared disk at a video editing shop (few large files) but for our application it was a problem. The lockups were still a concern in any case, but perhaps this was something that only showed up at high transaction rates too.
We used GPFS in our production environment for about 9 months in 2004/2005. We chose it specifically because it allowed several machines to share the file system (like NFS) but with file locking. It was also supposed to be very fault tolerant with no single point of failure. We set it up using a fiberchannel SAN.
Unfortunately we had a lot of problems with it. For one, performance was quite bad in ceratin cases... doing an ls in a large directory would take a very long time. Doing finds would take a very long time. Once you had a specific file you wanted, opening and reading it was reasonable (though all disk ops were still on the slow side), but multi file operations lagged on the level of 10s of seconds or more. I think it was having to issue network checks to every machine in the set for each file or something.
Also, the CPU usage was very high across all our machines, primarly from lock manager communications. It really taxed the system. And perhaps worst of all, it would caused crashes sometimes. A single machine in the set would die (usually a GPFS assert), and though that didn't break the set permanently, a multi-minute freeze on all disk reads would take place until the set determined the machine was unavailable. We spoke with IBM about all this stuff... provided debugging output and everything, we used the latest patches. But we never got the issues resolved. It was a very rough few months indeed. I probably averaged 4 hours sleep per night.
When I say "slow" what am I comparing it to? In the end we switched to NFS and we came up with a somewhat clever way to avoid the need for file locking. NFS used the same SAN hardware, but had a single point of failure: the head server. We doubled up there with warm failover. The load on all servers dropped dramatically (I'm talking from ~40 load to ~.1 load). Disk operations were orders of magnitude faster. And we've not had a single NFS related lockup or failure in the past year and a half *knocks on wood*.
Anyways -- GPFS probably has some good uses. But I would not recommend it for a very high-volume (lots of files, lots of traffic) mission critical situation. Unless they've made some major improvements.
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I once had a cell phone where I would get at least four wrong numbers per day. I'd never had that much trouble before, and never again after I changed numbers. Everyone calling was asking for a different person, so it wasn't because I had a number similar to a popular business (though that happened to me once before too).
Eventually I figured out the reason for the many wrong numbers: my exchange matched a nearby area code, and the first three digits of the rest of my number were an exchange within that area code. So, for example, let's say my number was 555 1234, there were a thousand valid numbers in the format 1 (555) 123 4###. What that meant was that anytime someone in my area code forgot to dial 1 when dialing one of those 1000 numbers, it resulted in a wrong number to me.
Once I figured that out, I got my number changed and things got much better. Don't know if that's what's happening to you, but I thought I'd mention it. If you think it is something like this, be sure to change exchanges too, not just the last four digits. Make sure the exchange does not match a nearby area code.
Cheers.
I was just there last fall and 70% of the country's energy needs are provided by geothermal. Seems to be working pretty well to me. I realize it's harder than it looks, but geothermal is certainly viable. I even swam and bathed in the runoff from one of the powerplants. Quite enjoyable, actually :)
Cheers.
I think your missing something here: you may be able to get more energy out of livestock raised on a plot of land than the veggies raised in the same space. But what do the animals eat? Veggies, usually, from another area. So you're using the vegetable area anyways, and now the livestock area on top of it.
It's pretty well established that feeding veggies to animals and then eating their meat is a very inefficient use of energy. I'm quite certain that you can feed more people off an acre of beans and rice than the cows raised off an acre of beans and rice in the same time frame. Just think about that for a moment. Thus your last paragraph doesn't really line up either, as our overall vegetable farming needs would go down, not up, if we all ate vegetables instead of meat.
Despite that, our food shortage problems have nothing to do with meat eating. Hunger is a political problem. So I say go ahead and eat meat if you like it. And choose organic if you're concerned about the environmental impact. I'm a meat eater and that's what I've chosen, anyways.
Cheers.
Man, it's crazy reading these health stories. The reports flip-flop back and forth and nobody seems to agree. You can find a study or expert to support completely conflicting theories. What are we to think? I certainly wouldn't dismiss Omega 3 based on this latest study... we've got data going both ways now. Which is wrong? Which is right?
:)
The pattern I usually see in these studies is that after controlling for and isolating a particular dietary component, they find it has no benefit, and that the originally percieved benefits must have resulted from the people who eat that dietary component having an otherwise "healthy lifestyle".
But what is this "healthy lifestlye" then, if not a combination of things that may or may not have a positive effect in isolation? Diet has to be a part of that combination, but it may be that no single dietary component is "the key", rather it's the sum of them that does good. Perhaps then isolating components may not be the right approach.
Health and nutrition are extrodinarily complex. For myself I took a step back from all the analysis and confusion, to a relatively simple system of eating things that I think we must have evolved to eat. I skip just about anything that includes digestable technology. So it's grilled organic meats, salads and raw veggies, and water for the most part. I also try to include something "spoiled' each day, as I figure we evolved eating "spoiled" foods... cheese, yogurt, wine. I eat modest portions. And a few times a week I eat whatever the heck i feel like.
Anyways, since I started doing this I've lost weight and my cholesterol has been greatly improved. Though the latest studies I've seen claim that's not a great indicator anyways, so who knows what that means
Cheers.
Yeah... and how's that been working out for us?
In your 20s, the average speed of auditory processing is 68 milliseconds. That number jumps to an average of 87 milliseconds in your 40s and 106 milliseconds in your 60s.
Ignoring for the moment whether the test is an accurate measurement... let's say it is. I wonder if this age discrepancy is because people slow down as they get older, or is it because people born and raised in a slower paced world are slower their whole lives? In other words, will the 20 year old of today degrade over the next 40 years? And would the 60 year old of today have scored as well as the 20 year old if he had taken the test 40 years ago? We'd need folks take the test in another decade to have a better idea of what this really means.
Cheers.
There should be no legal distinction between stealing chewing gum from a shop and performing an illegal download.
But they are different. Markedly so. Not saying one is right and one is wrong, but one is an actual measurable loss the other is a loss in theory. And yes, I have lived as a professional artist. I have as much interest in copyright as anyone.
And who puts people in prison for 2-5 years for stealing gum anyways?
Cheers.
I didn't say that. It is generally accepted that burning Jews alive is bad. So jokes about it are not an issue. But in the SS in 1942 jokes about burning Jews were most certainly a symptom that the issue was not being taken seriously. And that is analogous to the prison rape jokes today: it is not generally accepted that prisoners getting raped is bad, so the jokes are a symptom that the issue is not taken seriously. This is why I make the point. When it's no longer a serious social problem (one that can be easily resolved) I'll laugh at the jokes myself if they're any good.
Cheers.
Strawman. I didn't claim that I, or anyone else, laughed during Schindler's List.
:)
Straw man back atcha. I didn't claim that either. I was just calling attention to the distinction between awful things being funny and awful things not being funny. I assumed in my comment that you did not find Schindler's list funny, which is a pretty safe assumption. I agree that humor is often based on suffering. You didn't explicitly say it, but you implied that the reverse is also true: that suffering is often humor. I would think this is an absurd point of view, but you go on to paint mankind as a bunch of sadists, which again implies this.
conscience and sympathy intervene and make the thought of laughing at them seem shamefull.
And why is sadism considered the base in your worldview and conscience and sympathy the exceptions which intervene? Especially when conscience and sympathy obviously outweigh sadism by a landslide in any observation of average human behavior? Maybe compassion is the base and sadism is the exception? I don't believe that people who don't laugh at Schindler's List refrain out of shame; they don't laugh because they don't find it funny. There's no repression there.
Yes, in the same way that not overeating, not having sex with everyone you happen to be attracted to, and not telling your boss that he's an idiot is repression.
Maybe in your world. I don't do those things because they generally don't yield very good results. And this being the case I generally don't want them at all, at a gut level. The same way I generally don't want anything that I can see as being a net loss for me, even if indirectly.
Don't get so hung up on shades of gray that you forget that black exists.
Understood, I don't. But I also try to avoid seeing the distribution as a flat line or a saddle. Fact is it's a bell curve and the vast majority live in the middle. Extremes are interesting but I don't think it makes sense to focus too much attention on them, which was what I felt you were doing.
as soon as some group is considered sub-human or entirely nonhuman, people are free to act on their sadism with good conscience - which they did, in all the mentioned cases.
A good point. Though I would point out that not all the people involved acted on their sadism. Rather there was always a subset of people who acted on their sadism. These events are horrifying to be sure (the one that always sticks in my mind is Japanese Unit 731). But the huge impact does not outweigh the fact, in my mind, that these events did not receive mass approval, even by those who had no direct suffering. In fact, people on the whole have been gravitating for the past century toward a greater respect for human rights. It happens in fits and starts. And there are huge pockets of time and location where they backslide. But the fact that we are even having this conversation is a testament to the fact that not all people are sadistic at their core, and that compassion can be the foundation of someone's social philosopy.
Back to prison rape: I just feel compelled whenever someone makes a joke about it to pedantically point out that it's actually a real problem. Once awareness has been raised, and prison rape is considered a bad thing by the majority, and prison guards no longer look the other way, I'll shut up and folks can joke away. I may even laugh myself
In any case, agree or disagree, thanks for the well thought out discussion.
Cheers.
I totally get that humor can be based on suffering, depending on the context and intent. I laughed in Pulp Fiction when the kid gets his head blown off by accident. But I didn't laugh during Shindler's List. I have a hard time believing you did. There is a difference.
And to be clear: sympathy is not my motivation to dislike prison rape. There are at least three reasons why everyone should be against prison rape:
1. Nearly all criminals are released from prison eventually. If they have been raped they are more dangerous to society.
2. The rapist is experiencing power. Why is anyone in prison allowed the pleasure of feeding their abusive tendancies? See point #1.
3. A society that sanctions human rights violations is fundamentally a less healthy society. Violence anywhere begets violence everywhere. This has been shown over and over again throughout history.
On your tangent: people are not all sadists. How many consciously sadistic acts does the average person undertake per day? Assuming you're living in something that passes for a functioning society, I'd say virtually zero. And you believe this is all simply repression? Even the jerks I know don't seem to take pleasure in hurting, it's just a side effect of their being inconsiderate. In fact, nearly everyone I know takes efforts to avoid causing suffering of others.
Yet we can still laugh at a good Nazi joke. Get used to the complexity of people. Don't get hung up on one point and then paint everything black and white.
Cheers.
You're half right: Nazis aren't funny. Killing Jews isn't funny. Jokes about them can be funny IF (and this is a very big IF) the joke is a means to relieve tension in an absurd and/or awful situation. People need to joke about terrible things to make sense of the world. Gallows humor. Black comedy. I get that. I even like that.
However: jokes about killing Jews are not funny if the point is to take the actual killing of Jews less seriously. Or to turn killing Jews into entertainment.
Likewise, in this case, if the joke was intended to relieve tension on the agreed horor of prison rape, I'd laugh. That wasn't the point. It never is. People really think prison rape is funny. In and of itself. But it's not. Real torment never is. It's also bad for society. It's bad for you.
Clueless people my ass.
Cheers.
Ethical/professional journalism?!? Ha ha ha. i should mod you "funny".
Cheers.
Someone should send them a copy of the Mythical Man Month. I'm no MS hater... I wish them luck... but this does not bode well for Vista.
Cheers.
It's not pretty colors, it's total utility. That rarely correlates with raw speed or cleverness of the algorithm. My guess is that most slow bits in the system were conscious choices where the benefits outweighed the costs. I'm sure there's a thousand things they could improve, still, but overall it's the most productive system I've worked on.
:)
And don't hate it just because it's beautiful
Cheers.
Actually, with a barcode on a section of shelf, and a barcode on the book, you can leave things in random order and find them very quickly once everything is scanned into the database. I've used warehouse systems like this and they're pretty neat.
Cheers.
But isn't one of the coolest things about AJAX the fact that it's pretty much platform independent? Why would anyone want to tie it to a particular platform? Didn't Java already try that?
Cheers.
FYI we don't all of us have a problem. Many of us Americans are reasonable people with a respect for world history and culture. We just get drowned out by the louder idiots sometimes.
Cheers.
Yeah yeah, I understan it's just a joke. Ha ha. But I wonder how this misinformed joke got started considering the French's long history of being terrifically fierce warriors, including bailing out America more than once.
Anyone who has read All Quiet on the Western Front may have an idea why the French surrendered to Germany rather than stage a straight fight. The brutality of Fhe First World War would kill just about anyone's taste for war on their home soil.
Cheers.
It's entirely expected that advertisements will appear everywhere and anywhere they can. There is no reason for them not to. People are not dissuaded from using a product because of advertisements, even on paid media. They have appeared cable TV, movies (before and during), DVD's, video games... they'll hit XM soon enough.
What surprises me is the sizable percentage of people who saying "well, if it results in more money to develop better games, that's fine". What?!? Since when has advertising dollars been spent to increase the quality of any media attached to it? I feel like I'm living in a different world from these people. Or perhaps they're just folks who have been brainwashed that capitalism is the end-all-be-all and making a buck can never be wrong. Whatever the case, I am 100% sure that advertising will become a part of video games, and that the resulting revenue will have no positive effect on the quality. If anything, it will be detrimental since the motivation of the game company will become "get ads in front of as many impressionable eyeballs as possible" rather than "make a fun game that people will want to pay to play".
Cheers.
I think he was being sarcastic :)
Blogs are an excellent example of this. Blogs are horrible.
This seems to be the common sentiment, but I don't get it. I don't look at many blogs, and even then only rarely. How is their existence a problem? I think there's a misunderstanding that just because something isn't useful to you that it isn't useful. Most blogs are there for people to communicate with their family and friends. Just because they are publicly accessible doesn't mean they need to be publicly valuable. Should we restrict public verbal conversation just because most of it is inane? Heck, then we should shut down slashdot because the vast majority of the world probably doesn't find it interesting.
I guess I'm hoping there's a conversion in the next few decades where people accept that they only have to concern themselves with the stuff that applies to them, and they just ignore the stuff that doesn't.
Cheers.
Just curious if you have any interest in having a news story type video made out of this. I'm a small-time amateur movie director and I'd love to put something together on this topic. A mini-documentary type thing. Is there any chance I could get copies of the footage you have, and schedule some interviews with people involved?
Thanks for your consideration.
The pharmaceutical argument for patents seems to be a fallacy. Read Why Drug Companies Don't Need Patents and On the Necessity of Drug Patents. I think they make some pretty compelling arguments.
So even the old fallback argument for patents is suspect. I'll admit that in some very rare and specific cases, patents provide some benefit for society, but I am convinced at this point that they are a substantial net loss.
Cheers.
Yeah, that lines up pretty well with our experience. So it might work great for a shared disk at a video editing shop (few large files) but for our application it was a problem. The lockups were still a concern in any case, but perhaps this was something that only showed up at high transaction rates too.
Cheers.
We used GPFS in our production environment for about 9 months in 2004/2005. We chose it specifically because it allowed several machines to share the file system (like NFS) but with file locking. It was also supposed to be very fault tolerant with no single point of failure. We set it up using a fiberchannel SAN.
Unfortunately we had a lot of problems with it. For one, performance was quite bad in ceratin cases... doing an ls in a large directory would take a very long time. Doing finds would take a very long time. Once you had a specific file you wanted, opening and reading it was reasonable (though all disk ops were still on the slow side), but multi file operations lagged on the level of 10s of seconds or more. I think it was having to issue network checks to every machine in the set for each file or something.
Also, the CPU usage was very high across all our machines, primarly from lock manager communications. It really taxed the system. And perhaps worst of all, it would caused crashes sometimes. A single machine in the set would die (usually a GPFS assert), and though that didn't break the set permanently, a multi-minute freeze on all disk reads would take place until the set determined the machine was unavailable. We spoke with IBM about all this stuff... provided debugging output and everything, we used the latest patches. But we never got the issues resolved. It was a very rough few months indeed. I probably averaged 4 hours sleep per night.
When I say "slow" what am I comparing it to? In the end we switched to NFS and we came up with a somewhat clever way to avoid the need for file locking. NFS used the same SAN hardware, but had a single point of failure: the head server. We doubled up there with warm failover. The load on all servers dropped dramatically (I'm talking from ~40 load to ~.1 load). Disk operations were orders of magnitude faster. And we've not had a single NFS related lockup or failure in the past year and a half *knocks on wood*.
Anyways -- GPFS probably has some good uses. But I would not recommend it for a very high-volume (lots of files, lots of traffic) mission critical situation. Unless they've made some major improvements.
Cheers.