I want MORE options, not less because of wary industry execs who don't want to have their content cracked.
I hear you -- but I think it's kinda funny how we're scared of them. They're the ones that should be scared. Corporations exist to make money by providing people a product or service that they are willing to pay for. We humans don't need a justification to exist, they do. We are the ones in charge.
However it all got turned on it's head somewhere and the average American seems to think that the corporations are the citizens with rights, and we are just consumers. We better hope they're kind to us! We better not complain and upset them or they'll stop being so nice!
I wonder how and when that change in thinking took place... I wonder how it could be turned around?
It's amazing how many people let the fear of legal threats keep them from doing what they believe to be right. Not saying I'm much different... but it is sad how weak we all are.
I get lots of unsolicited non-commercial mail which I want, so I don't know if whitelists and challenge response would work for me. But thanks for the input.
Spam is no longer a problem for me. It was a pain to get into the habit of saving every message to a "ham" or "spam" folder at first, but it is so worth it. After I got a couple thousand of each, the system effectively saves me from ~250 spam per day, With 1 or 2 a day getting through. It feels like 1998 again.
I did change the default scoring though, to use the bayesian stuff much more strongly. From my.spamassassin/user_prefs:
I've not seen any false positives yet. But the key is being religious about feeding the filter with all your saved ham and spam (trapped and non-trapped). I have a script that does this every month using the folders I save to.
This doesn't solve the worlds problems, but it solves mine. Which is good enough for now.
I just want to thank you for your balanced view. I did not support the war, but have been called unpatriotic enough times to make me very sad. I think most people on both sides of the fence love this country and don't want it to get messed up or attacked, we just have different ideas about the beset way to go about it.
It is good to meet a level-headed someone from the other side of the fence:)
I used to be a caffine junkie back in my highschool days. But I'm clean now. Here's what happened:
One night after a school dance I was hanging out at a friend's house with a small group. We were having a good time and it became obvious we were going to stay up all night. Being a straigtedge crowd, there were no drugs or alcohol on premisis... except caffine. In the form of coffee grounds. I knew I had to work the next day, so I figured I should start fueling immediately.
A buddy and I took the Mr. Coffee machine and filled the filter cup all the way to the top -- probably two or three cups of grounds. Then we ran about a cup of water through it. The resulting liquid was jet black and as thick as blood. I proceeded to take down the entire thing.
Well, it tasted something like battery acid, but it certainly worked. I was wired in a few minutes and was still soaring hours later. Once the sun came up I went home and got ready for work.
That's when the vomiting started. At first it was the black liquid, then just dry heaves. A lot of them. I called in sick to work. I suddenly felt awfully tired. I tried to go to sleep and couldn't. I put my hand on my stomach and there were literally spasms going on somewhere inside. My belly was vibrating. I tried some Pepto Bismol, then some Emetrol, both of which were vomitted up in minutes. In fact, swallowing my own saliva caused me to vomit. Eventually, I had to lay on the side of the bed, drooling into a basin for about four more hours before my stomach started calming down. I ate nothing but chicken broth for the next day.
After that I couldn't drink coffee anymore. In fact to this day the taste of coffee makes my stomach upset. Just the taste -- even just coffee flavored ice cream. Obviously it's a mental thing that I could probably overcome if I wanted, but I'm actually glad. I think I'll stay more or less caffine free.
It seems that the tone of this article is misleading; X development will continue on in good health.
However, I always find myself thinking about Y as an X replacement. It's certainly not the most mature option out there, but reading throught the PDF is a pleasure, as the author seems to have struck a great balance of power and simplicity.
It's unclear from the original post whether this happened before or after he got married. My interpretation was that it happened while he was married. If so, I find it hard to imagine he doesn't owe her an apology for the lying, deception, and doubtlessly her confusion and hurt while it was going on.
As a victim of infidelity, I can assure you that even if one doesn't know exactly what happened, there is a strong sense of trouble and hurt. The loss of trust is the hardest thing to recover. Complete honesty is the only way out in the long term.
I think he should talk to a professional counselor. They could certainly guide him better than the slashdot populous. But this is not the kind of thing that can be neatly swept under the carpet.
I don't think the guy is a lost cause, but as long as he keeps this secret from his wife their relationship is a sham. Think of all the lies he had to tell her to keep this under wraps. If he thinks that lying didn't distance them then he's never had a lying partner himself before. This type of dishonesty is very destructive over the long term.
I speak from experience.
He should go to a professional counselor and talk with them about coming clean with his wife. I wish him luck as it could mean the end of their relationship. Either way, that is.
For family and boss, whatever, they don't need to know everything. But for a spouse it is critical.
Nobody is going to prove one way or the other in our lifetime. Any trend can be explained as an unrelated anomaly. And for all we know it was going to happen anyways, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
However, anyone who thinks that a relatively small, closed system like ours won't sustain some type of damage from our activities is just plain crazy. You can only piss in the pool so many times before it starts turning yellow.
Determining the threshold and what to do about it is left as an exercise for the reader.
Sure -- if the RIAA stopped screwing the consumer, the artists, and abusing the legal process, I'll stop hating them. But just because they're finally offering songs for download doesn't undo the damage of the DMCA, DRM, un/underpaid artists, etc.
There's a lot more to this than just downloads -- or price, and frankly I doubt it'll change.
So I'm still boycotting the RIAA.
Oh, and there's quite often better music, too, on the independent side. For those of you who have no moral motivations on the topic.
Clock for clock it does outperform. We went from a dual Xeon 2.4Ghz to a dual Opteron 1.6Ghz (fastest at the time). The performance was roughly the same: some operations were faster, some slower.
But we were never CPU bound, so even if it was faster it wouldn't be much help.
In the end, I think we'll stick with the second generation Opteron setup for the coming year (as opposed to moving to IBM or Sun) but the memory issues were quite a let down nonetheless.
Let me be the first one to say that I laughed my ass off when I first interviewed at Zappos.com. They made me a good offer and I took the job thinking the company might last six months.
That was in the summer of 2000.
Since then they've doubled their business every 8 months. We've been profitable since Q4 2002.
Our DB handles > 200 queries per second, and that's after substantial webserver caching.
Right -- the real problem was that our MySQL process couldn't be configured to stay under 3GB and perform adequately in our setup. If it goes over 3GB the OS takes it down.
We eventually found workarounds, but in any case the first round of Opteron offerings were very green. "Duh" says me after months of trouble. I'm usually not the type to take the plunge on untested hardware/software/whatever for anything critical. Now I remember why:)
Oh, and actually, to correct myself: even if you can get past the 4GB thing with virtual memory, 32 bit Linux at least won't let a single process to exceed 2 GB (or with some patches 3GB). Get too large and the kernel shuts you down. Bang. This happens pretty easily with MySQL.
But you can easily do 64 bit math on a 32 bit CPU. I do this all the time. It won't be quite as fast, but unless you're doing a whole hell of a lot of calculations it's just a mild bottleneck.
The memory issue is a real dead end, though. You can't (in my knowledge at least) get past the 4GB limit on a 32 bit CPU (or more specifically a CPU with 32 bit memory addresses).
Well, I guess if you count virtual memory you can. But the penalty there is much larger than for doing 64 bit math on a 32 bit processor.
Doesn't seem the article tests the system with >4GB. That seems odd since that is one of the most compelling reasons to go 64bit (other than pure bragging rights).
My company upgraded to SuSE on Opteron a few months back, and had some random memory corruption with our 8GB setup. Turned out it was some bad interaction between the Tyan motherboard, the BIOS, and the stepping 1 of the Opteron. What a pain.
We're stable now with 4GB, but the memory was the only reason we upgraded in the first place. I'd like to see more tests with lots of memory.
Sure, I'm happy that this screwy dictator was caught. Saddam is a bad man, and I don't think anyone here thinks otherwise.
Now here's why I'm unhappy: many Americans will see this as a "victory" and be more likely to support war in the future. Unfortunately the world is not a safer place (according to our own intelligence), and we just invaded a nation under false pretenses.
Now, if the US had made the case that Saddam needed to be removed it would be a different story. But as it is, we were lied to by our leaders about why this war was being started. That is not good no matter how it is whitewashed now.
It is a series of small steps like this lead to the downfall of great nations. Just look at history to see what happened to all of the countries that started becoming outwardly aggressive for their own "security".
All Saddam had to do was comply with inspectors and he'd still be living in palaces
Funny, that's what I thought was happening. And in fact, every country in the world who was observing the situation (except for America and Britain) believed he was complying. He may not have been particularly polite about it, but the inspectors were there going through his country for months.
Then Bush said "prove you have no weapons", which is logically impossible, and that was our justification for war.
I'm not even saying that ousting Saddam was a bad thing. But the fact remains we went to war under false pretenses, and that is a very very very dangerous precedent. If the ends justify the means in this case we are taking a step closer to being a rogue nation -- the likes of which we have so often criticized and fought in the past.
Your point is valid, and one that I am aware of. The theft is not of the car, but of Toyota's hitherto unquestioned right to profit from their car ideas.
But imagine in this hypothetical world of plenty: what is the goal of enforcing false scarcity? In an extreme case, would it be important to keep hungry people from generating all their own food for the sake of the farmers?
I don't have the answers -- my point is that there are a lot of subtle issues here that are going to come front and center over the next 100 years. And appealing to the current law or current sensibilities is probably not going to be enough.
I'm not going to claim I have a hold on what is right or wrong, but I think most people can see a distinction between taking and duplicating. Imagine some future where I can make a Lexus for myself by taking a picture of yours and feeding into my starfleet issue matter replicator. Am I stealing?
Maybe I am... but there's something much different about that and taking your car so you can't use it any more.
We can now duplicate and transport information trivially. The times they are a changing and we're all going to have to update our thinking one way or the other.
I really hope someone who knows the difference gets involved in this before it's integrated into our lives. How would you change your fingerprint if it were copied?
I'm thinking a pervasive system where you:
1. scan your fingerprints for identification 2. enter a PIN for authentication 3. enter an alert PIN if you're being forced to authenticate
This would prevent people from chopping off fingers for authentication since they'd need the PIN, and even if they forced you to give them the PIN you could give them the alert PIN. Things would function normally (money dispensed, etc.) but the system would know something was wrong and would take some type of action.
Slashdot Mirror
I want MORE options, not less because of wary industry execs who don't want to have their content cracked.
I hear you -- but I think it's kinda funny how we're scared of them. They're the ones that should be scared. Corporations exist to make money by providing people a product or service that they are willing to pay for. We humans don't need a justification to exist, they do. We are the ones in charge.
However it all got turned on it's head somewhere and the average American seems to think that the corporations are the citizens with rights, and we are just consumers. We better hope they're kind to us! We better not complain and upset them or they'll stop being so nice!
I wonder how and when that change in thinking took place... I wonder how it could be turned around?
Cheers.
It's amazing how many people let the fear of legal threats keep them from doing what they believe to be right. Not saying I'm much different... but it is sad how weak we all are.
I get lots of unsolicited non-commercial mail which I want, so I don't know if whitelists and challenge response would work for me. But thanks for the input.
Spam is no longer a problem for me. It was a pain to get into the habit of saving every message to a "ham" or "spam" folder at first, but it is so worth it. After I got a couple thousand of each, the system effectively saves me from ~250 spam per day, With 1 or 2 a day getting through. It feels like 1998 again.
.spamassassin/user_prefs:
I did change the default scoring though, to use the bayesian stuff much more strongly. From my
score BAYES_00 -1.0
score BAYES_01 -1.0
score BAYES_10 -1.0
score BAYES_20 -1.0
score BAYES_30 -1.0
score BAYES_40 -1.0
score BAYES_44 -1.0
score BAYES_50 1.0
score BAYES_56 1.0
score BAYES_60 5.0
score BAYES_70 5.0
score BAYES_80 5.0
score BAYES_90 5.0
score BAYES_99 5.0
I've not seen any false positives yet. But the key is being religious about feeding the filter with all your saved ham and spam (trapped and non-trapped). I have a script that does this every month using the folders I save to.
This doesn't solve the worlds problems, but it solves mine. Which is good enough for now.
Cheers.
I just want to thank you for your balanced view. I did not support the war, but have been called unpatriotic enough times to make me very sad. I think most people on both sides of the fence love this country and don't want it to get messed up or attacked, we just have different ideas about the beset way to go about it.
:)
It is good to meet a level-headed someone from the other side of the fence
Cheers.
I used to be a caffine junkie back in my highschool days. But I'm clean now. Here's what happened:
One night after a school dance I was hanging out at a friend's house with a small group. We were having a good time and it became obvious we were going to stay up all night. Being a straigtedge crowd, there were no drugs or alcohol on premisis... except caffine. In the form of coffee grounds. I knew I had to work the next day, so I figured I should start fueling immediately.
A buddy and I took the Mr. Coffee machine and filled the filter cup all the way to the top -- probably two or three cups of grounds. Then we ran about a cup of water through it. The resulting liquid was jet black and as thick as blood. I proceeded to take down the entire thing.
Well, it tasted something like battery acid, but it certainly worked. I was wired in a few minutes and was still soaring hours later. Once the sun came up I went home and got ready for work.
That's when the vomiting started. At first it was the black liquid, then just dry heaves. A lot of them. I called in sick to work. I suddenly felt awfully tired. I tried to go to sleep and couldn't. I put my hand on my stomach and there were literally spasms going on somewhere inside. My belly was vibrating. I tried some Pepto Bismol, then some Emetrol, both of which were vomitted up in minutes. In fact, swallowing my own saliva caused me to vomit. Eventually, I had to lay on the side of the bed, drooling into a basin for about four more hours before my stomach started calming down. I ate nothing but chicken broth for the next day.
After that I couldn't drink coffee anymore. In fact to this day the taste of coffee makes my stomach upset. Just the taste -- even just coffee flavored ice cream. Obviously it's a mental thing that I could probably overcome if I wanted, but I'm actually glad. I think I'll stay more or less caffine free.
I got fired from the job.
I still eat chocolate from time to time.
Cheers.
It seems that the tone of this article is misleading; X development will continue on in good health.
However, I always find myself thinking about Y as an X replacement. It's certainly not the most mature option out there, but reading throught the PDF is a pleasure, as the author seems to have struck a great balance of power and simplicity.
Cheers.
Perhaps this is will cast a clearer light on my view of the situation:
Doesn't his wife have the right to decide whether she wants to be married to and raise children with an ex-porn star and liar?
Cheers.
It's unclear from the original post whether this happened before or after he got married. My interpretation was that it happened while he was married. If so, I find it hard to imagine he doesn't owe her an apology for the lying, deception, and doubtlessly her confusion and hurt while it was going on.
As a victim of infidelity, I can assure you that even if one doesn't know exactly what happened, there is a strong sense of trouble and hurt. The loss of trust is the hardest thing to recover. Complete honesty is the only way out in the long term.
Some of the more successful marriage counselors seem to agree with this.
I think he should talk to a professional counselor. They could certainly guide him better than the slashdot populous. But this is not the kind of thing that can be neatly swept under the carpet.
Cheers.
I don't think the guy is a lost cause, but as long as he keeps this secret from his wife their relationship is a sham. Think of all the lies he had to tell her to keep this under wraps. If he thinks that lying didn't distance them then he's never had a lying partner himself before. This type of dishonesty is very destructive over the long term.
I speak from experience.
He should go to a professional counselor and talk with them about coming clean with his wife. I wish him luck as it could mean the end of their relationship. Either way, that is.
For family and boss, whatever, they don't need to know everything. But for a spouse it is critical.
Cheers.
Nobody is going to prove one way or the other in our lifetime. Any trend can be explained as an unrelated anomaly. And for all we know it was going to happen anyways, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
However, anyone who thinks that a relatively small, closed system like ours won't sustain some type of damage from our activities is just plain crazy. You can only piss in the pool so many times before it starts turning yellow.
Determining the threshold and what to do about it is left as an exercise for the reader.
Cheers.
Sure -- if the RIAA stopped screwing the consumer, the artists, and abusing the legal process, I'll stop hating them. But just because they're finally offering songs for download doesn't undo the damage of the DMCA, DRM, un/underpaid artists, etc.
There's a lot more to this than just downloads -- or price, and frankly I doubt it'll change.
So I'm still boycotting the RIAA.
Oh, and there's quite often better music, too, on the independent side. For those of you who have no moral motivations on the topic.
Cheers.
Clock for clock it does outperform. We went from a dual Xeon 2.4Ghz to a dual Opteron 1.6Ghz (fastest at the time). The performance was roughly the same: some operations were faster, some slower.
But we were never CPU bound, so even if it was faster it wouldn't be much help.
In the end, I think we'll stick with the second generation Opteron setup for the coming year (as opposed to moving to IBM or Sun) but the memory issues were quite a let down nonetheless.
Cheers.
Let me be the first one to say that I laughed my ass off when I first interviewed at Zappos.com. They made me a good offer and I took the job thinking the company might last six months.
:)
That was in the summer of 2000.
Since then they've doubled their business every 8 months. We've been profitable since Q4 2002.
Our DB handles > 200 queries per second, and that's after substantial webserver caching.
Crazy but true
Cheers.
Right -- the real problem was that our MySQL process couldn't be configured to stay under 3GB and perform adequately in our setup. If it goes over 3GB the OS takes it down.
:)
We eventually found workarounds, but in any case the first round of Opteron offerings were very green. "Duh" says me after months of trouble. I'm usually not the type to take the plunge on untested hardware/software/whatever for anything critical. Now I remember why
Cheers.
Yup. I'm the Al Bundy of the internet :)
:)
Oh, and I'm employed and the company is doing great
Oh, and actually, to correct myself: even if you can get past the 4GB thing with virtual memory, 32 bit Linux at least won't let a single process to exceed 2 GB (or with some patches 3GB). Get too large and the kernel shuts you down. Bang. This happens pretty easily with MySQL.
Cheers.
But you can easily do 64 bit math on a 32 bit CPU. I do this all the time. It won't be quite as fast, but unless you're doing a whole hell of a lot of calculations it's just a mild bottleneck.
The memory issue is a real dead end, though. You can't (in my knowledge at least) get past the 4GB limit on a 32 bit CPU (or more specifically a CPU with 32 bit memory addresses).
Well, I guess if you count virtual memory you can. But the penalty there is much larger than for doing 64 bit math on a 32 bit processor.
Cheers.
Doesn't seem the article tests the system with >4GB. That seems odd since that is one of the most compelling reasons to go 64bit (other than pure bragging rights).
My company upgraded to SuSE on Opteron a few months back, and had some random memory corruption with our 8GB setup. Turned out it was some bad interaction between the Tyan motherboard, the BIOS, and the stepping 1 of the Opteron. What a pain.
We're stable now with 4GB, but the memory was the only reason we upgraded in the first place. I'd like to see more tests with lots of memory.
Cheers
Fair enough. I guess I just wonder when, and in what form, our final comeuppance will come.
Cheers.
Sure, I'm happy that this screwy dictator was caught. Saddam is a bad man, and I don't think anyone here thinks otherwise.
Now here's why I'm unhappy: many Americans will see this as a "victory" and be more likely to support war in the future. Unfortunately the world is not a safer place (according to our own intelligence), and we just invaded a nation under false pretenses.
Now, if the US had made the case that Saddam needed to be removed it would be a different story. But as it is, we were lied to by our leaders about why this war was being started. That is not good no matter how it is whitewashed now.
It is a series of small steps like this lead to the downfall of great nations. Just look at history to see what happened to all of the countries that started becoming outwardly aggressive for their own "security".
Now, tell my what you're so happy about.
Cheers.
All Saddam had to do was comply with inspectors and he'd still be living in palaces
Funny, that's what I thought was happening. And in fact, every country in the world who was observing the situation (except for America and Britain) believed he was complying. He may not have been particularly polite about it, but the inspectors were there going through his country for months.
Then Bush said "prove you have no weapons", which is logically impossible, and that was our justification for war.
I'm not even saying that ousting Saddam was a bad thing. But the fact remains we went to war under false pretenses, and that is a very very very dangerous precedent. If the ends justify the means in this case we are taking a step closer to being a rogue nation -- the likes of which we have so often criticized and fought in the past.
Cheers.
Your point is valid, and one that I am aware of. The theft is not of the car, but of Toyota's hitherto unquestioned right to profit from their car ideas.
But imagine in this hypothetical world of plenty: what is the goal of enforcing false scarcity? In an extreme case, would it be important to keep hungry people from generating all their own food for the sake of the farmers?
I don't have the answers -- my point is that there are a lot of subtle issues here that are going to come front and center over the next 100 years. And appealing to the current law or current sensibilities is probably not going to be enough.
Cheers.
I'm not going to claim I have a hold on what is right or wrong, but I think most people can see a distinction between taking and duplicating. Imagine some future where I can make a Lexus for myself by taking a picture of yours and feeding into my starfleet issue matter replicator. Am I stealing?
Maybe I am... but there's something much different about that and taking your car so you can't use it any more.
We can now duplicate and transport information trivially. The times they are a changing and we're all going to have to update our thinking one way or the other.
Cheers.
I really hope someone who knows the difference gets involved in this before it's integrated into our lives. How would you change your fingerprint if it were copied?
I'm thinking a pervasive system where you:
1. scan your fingerprints for identification
2. enter a PIN for authentication
3. enter an alert PIN if you're being forced to authenticate
This would prevent people from chopping off fingers for authentication since they'd need the PIN, and even if they forced you to give them the PIN you could give them the alert PIN. Things would function normally (money dispensed, etc.) but the system would know something was wrong and would take some type of action.
Just thinking off the top of my head.
Cheers.