I hate getting into internet arguments, and I'm only replying to this comment because Atlantis seems like a thoughtful person who has presented a reasoned, but off-mark perspective here.
Open Source has really never been terribly important for your average person; all of its important freedoms relate to developers.
The freedoms that Open Source brings to developers directly impacts users. Support for hardware and software provided by corporations can only last as long as there is a commercial interest in people using a given product. Old peripherals don't get drivers coded by their vendor for new OS releases and new peripherals don't get drivers bundled for old OS installations. Open source has thankfully picked up the slack for these users. Microsoft intentionally is withholding additional development on fixes, updates, etc. on this end-of-lifed OS, pressuring users to purchase an upgrade to its replacement OS. As new protocols, file formats, and other technical evolutions come along, XP will not be updated to support them.
With the OLPC program, WinXP laptop recipients are being shackled to limited future use of their gifted laptop. The Sugar laptop recipients have a multitude of developers committed to continuing the relevance of their platform for many years to come.
Please don't take this as a Microsoft-bashing rant. Substitute the name 'Microsoft' with any closed-source vendor. Microsoft is just the convenient example in this discussion. Take Internet Explorer. Once Netscape collapsed, there was no commercial incentive for Microsoft to improve its browser. (Yes, I know this is heading into the economics of competition-- I'll return to the original point of Open Source benefiting the user.) Since MS dominated the product category, they could withdraw those development resources to focus on other areas of generating profit. Internet Explorer withered for years because there was no pressure to add features or increase it's performance. The cost of developing a new, competing browser from scratch eliminated any possible threats from other commercial software vendors, too. That is, if they weren't given a community-developed code base for free. Eventually, Internet Explorer became embarrassingly antiquated, lacking modern features such as tabbed browsing because open source projects brought innovations to this product category which motivated Microsoft to restart IE development.
I could go on with many more examples of open source benefiting consumers, but I pity this dead horse I'm beating.
Hardware acceleration by purchasing more and/or faster CPU's is a longer-term performance improvement strategy. You can't just take a web server offline, put 8 new quad-core CPU's in the box and reboot. A major web publisher is going to have to build that system in parallel, test it, then migrate it into production. This is a several months-long process.
Meanwhile, the tips listed here will give a poorly-implemented website a boost that will seem like 8 quad-cores were installed.
I used to travel the world solving performance issues for web sites. As an example, I was contracted to support voter.com on the eve of the 2000 elections.
Want to see huge performance gains with minimal work? Here are the easy fixes:
1. Check the error logs. Layout monkeys will frequently forget to bundle up a spacer gif or some other graphic when deploying to production. Each one of these requires a seperate HTTP request to be sent, handled, file system hit, and 404 response returned. Four tasks can be removed for the server if you remove those html references from the site layout.
2. Either turn off logging in production, or put the logs on a separate (physical) file system.
3. Memory is cheap. If you can, mount your document root to virtual memory.
4. Cache, cache, cache. If you are deploying new content, spider your site in testing, manually copy the cache to the doc root of production. Keep the load off the production DB.
5. If you can, log all DB transactions over the course of a day. Check for repetitious SQL. Convert those commands to stored procedures, then update the dynamic page generation code to use the stored procs.
I know these are obvious recommendations. You wouldn't believe how many high-traffic sites don't implement these basic techniques.
Seth
Let's apply it to the Tasmanian Tiger!
on
Frozen Mice Cloned
·
· Score: 1
There's a lot of reasons this might not work for a species we've never seen develop.
While I share people's enthusiasm for bringing back the Mammoths, I agree that there are some significant hurdles for applying this technique to that species. Perhaps it would be a good fit for bringing back the Tasmanian Tiger?
Positioning it as an extension of office is much more appealing to me than google's broadband-dependent offering.
I suppose it looks appealing to someone who was planning on buying another update to the MS Office suite. As someone who wasn't going to buy it, the Google Apps are serving me and my small business very well.
What age is the cut-off for when you stop feeling pleasure thinking about people going to prison? 83? 82? Just wondering. Does the brutality of the crime have any bearing on your enjoyment of people going to prison?
This is such a DUH discussion. I wonder if the guy asking this question even has the know-how to execute on this plan if he's asking this question in the first place. Web-based beats all for this one-off scenario.
In support of the parent, I'd like to point out that another challenge to adoption of each 'revolutionary' solar breakthrough is that everyone considering a massive solar project is aware that shit-piles of research funds have been rapidly re-directed towards this field. Every time some advancement is made, purchasers have to be wary that their investment won't be ridiculously obsoleted by the next advancement in a few months time. This while their investment may take years to pay itself off.
There are plenty of areas that are obfuscated in Google Earth for reasons that are fairly clear.
What are the clear reasons? By blurring these overhead images, does it make the job of terrorists more difficult? Instead of hitting these targets with orbiting kinetic weapons, they have to resort to truck bombs? The deal is, any entity that is going to mount an offensive on these installations is going to do it in such an unsophisticated manner, that aerial photographs are unneccessary. Information about these installations can be captured via field reconnassaince anyway.
This is voluntary, not 'forced' and it's in the hardware, not the software. If it were in the software, it could easily be bypassed with a custom driver, or just a krack.
Considering that the number photographers using Macs is incredibly disproportionate to normal Mac/PC ratios (probably 50%+ among serious photographers, vs under 10% for normal users), they almost certainly doomed the project to failure before it started by not having a standard, cross-platform implementation.
Hey, I'm typing this under Mac OS X86 running on a quad intel box I built. But I have to jump in and say that this product looks like it's not really intended for the hardcore photographers out there. It looks like it's for the mainstream techno-klutzes who want to just load content into something and have it automajically converted to something fancy. The largest portion of that demograph is probably suffering Windoes...
Not one social program benefits me, yet I pay close to half my paycheck for them.
Here's the trick. Although you live in your own house / apartment, you live in a community which forms the society at large. You live happily and seemingly 'independent' of the social programs and the people they support. If those programs didn't exist, however, imagine how long you would enjoy your comfort while others starve outside your neighborhood. It would be short order before your door would be knocked down and your cabinets would be raided. I shudder to think about what might happen to your family if you put up some resistance to this redistribution of food stuffs.
Oh, but your guns, the police, etc. would protect you. Hey, go visit Columbia and see how well that's working for the wealthy victims of kidnappers there.
Warrantless wiretaps on 3rd parties is completely illegal.
You got a reference for what law specifically forbids warrantless wiretaps? My understanding is that the fourth amendment forbids unreasonable search and seizure, which court precedence has held that wiretaps are unreasonable unless a judge grants a warrant. The bill of rights does not use the word 'wiretap' as they didn't have phones at the time of publication.
In this case, a librarian allowed the FBI to perform a search without a warrant, thereby ignoring library users' rights to privacy. This is the same as what AT&T did when they allowed the NSA to install wiretapping equipment on their switches to listen to all phone calls routed through their network.
I 100% agree with NerveGas on the rsync suggestion. I use it in reverse to backup my laptop to my hosting provider.
Here's the one thing to remember in terms of rsync. It's going to be the CURRENT snapshot of your data. Not a big deal, except if you're doing development and find out a week later that changes you made to your DB have had unintended consequences. If you've rsynced, you're going to want to have made additional local backups on a regular basis so you can roll back to one of those snapshots prior to when you hosed your DB. Apologies if that was obvious, but rsync is the transfer mechanism. You'll still want to manage archives locally.
Well I don't know what they can get from this other than evidence of a possible crime, but not who was on the computer.
It could have been that the FBI had traced a message back to this computer's NIC. They probably have a good idea who the sender of the message was, but they want to corroborate it with physical evidence. By grabbing the computer, they can check the keyboard for fingerprints (unlikely, but possible) and DNA. If they find a match, then it's strong evidence supporting their claim that a particular individual is responsible for a given communication.
This wasn't social engineering and seizure, this was government enforcement making a request for a reason, likely to prevent a crime.
That's the same as the warrantless wiretaps performed by the NSA with cooperation from AT&T & other telcos. "Oh, they're probably trying to do something good. Go ahead. Abuse all these people's right to privacy. I'm willing to make that judgment call." It doesn't sound like the Library Science curriculum includes any sections covering constitutional law....
I bought my last phone in 2005. I spent $279 on it even with the discount Sprint offered for renewing my contract. It was the best digital camera phone they offered at the time.
As I explored features like text messaging, I realized Samsung had no idea what UI meant. To delete a message, you had to scroll down a list of options to the second page of options before 'delete' was available. They prioritized 'file' and 'reply' higher in the list than delete, which is what you'll want to do with more messages than any other option. Text messages were such an annoyance to deal with, I would tell people my phone doesn't support it and ask them not to send them to me.
It had a calendar and address book, but offered no connectivity with my computer. Completely standalone repository.
If I wanted to email the photos off the camera to someone, I had to upgrade my plan to include wireless internet, which was another $20 a month.
The point of all these criticisms is that I had already run through the gauntlet of buying a premium phone to find that its usability was horrible. As a consumer, I never considered dropping that kind of cash on a Nokia or other phone promising fancy features after my disappointment with that Samsung phone. When I checked out the iPhone at the Apple Store, I immediately recognized that they 'got' what was missing on my Samsung-- usability. I had no qualms switching carriers and buying the iPhone. The service plan ends up costing me what it would have with Sprint if I would have gotten the internet option. The phone cost me essentially the same as my 2005 phone did, and it works a million times better.
No problem. Get a few hundred female comatose victims and send them in a huge spacecraft. Near the point of their anticipated demise, have a machine artificially inseminate them and also deliver the resulting child. Have robots care for the children and educate them aboard the spacecraft. If the distance is too great for their lifetimes, have the children reproduce as late as they can, then eject them into space to conserve life support resources. All along the way, the ship will need to increase acceleration so that the final generation will be used to 5G. This will evolve their hearts to pump blood against 5x earth gravity.
When the ship finally arrives, it will need to orbit and plan a landing in the ocean. Their best chance for survival will be as swimming mammals while they develop the constitution to walk upright on this new planet.
I downloaded an earlier version of the iPhone 2.0 software and installed it on my iPhone yesterday. Works great and I've spent a lot of time in the app store. Here are my observations:
1. AolRadio is an amazing offering. Within wifi zones, it offers a ton of digital radio stations that blow my Sirius satellite subscription out of the water- better music offerings and for free. It supposedly works to some extent over 3g, while not offering ALL stations. So it makes the iPhone a cool portable internet radio player.
2. eReader is an ebook reader that's free, but it only allows you to install books purchased from their website. For $9.99 you can purchase an app called 'bookshelf' that lets you install your own ebooks, and supports multiple formats. It doesn't currently support PDF, but I assume it will.
3. Most of the good games are not free or cheap. Super Monkey Ball is $9.99.
4. Weatherbug is an app similar to the original weather APP, but it offers radar views and current condition photos. The radar would be excellent, but it doesn't automatically zoom in to the city you are interested in. At least one other feature on it seems incomplete.
In your premise, the Dems ran things for 50 years, but because of economic woes during the last ten years of that period (the seventies), you're going to poo-poo their leadership. The dems took back control of the White House through the nineties and created a budget surplus. Then this guy, Bush, takes the helm for two terms and look where we are. The track record here isn't very convincing that the Democrats are economic numbskulls. Especially when you consider that those fifty years of Democrat control consisted of more economic growth than the country had experienced previously or since.
i didnt vote for him, but rather against the morons who i despised running against him.
Ok. In your world, Al Gore and John Kerry are morons compared to George W. Bush. I read about bizarro world in a Superman comic book, and I find it interesting that DC comics is promoting those old issues by having characters from those stories post on Slashdot.
I don't know if anyone has checked, but natural gas ain't exactly cheap either.
It might currently be expensive, but that's based on current demand & supply. Domestic oil companies recognize the possible vast availability of natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico. While other energy sources remained cheap, there was no incentive to develop infrastructure to harvest domestic natural gas on a large scale. Now that petroleum is expensive, natural gas is likely to draw a lot more attention both in demand which will spur development of supply.
Slashdot Mirror
That helicopter video clip was incredible. Thanks for posting the link.
Seth
Atlantis,
I'm noticing that you haven't commented on my description of how the consumer benefits from Open Source. I assume you agree with my summation.
Seth
I hate getting into internet arguments, and I'm only replying to this comment because Atlantis seems like a thoughtful person who has presented a reasoned, but off-mark perspective here.
The freedoms that Open Source brings to developers directly impacts users. Support for hardware and software provided by corporations can only last as long as there is a commercial interest in people using a given product. Old peripherals don't get drivers coded by their vendor for new OS releases and new peripherals don't get drivers bundled for old OS installations. Open source has thankfully picked up the slack for these users. Microsoft intentionally is withholding additional development on fixes, updates, etc. on this end-of-lifed OS, pressuring users to purchase an upgrade to its replacement OS. As new protocols, file formats, and other technical evolutions come along, XP will not be updated to support them.
With the OLPC program, WinXP laptop recipients are being shackled to limited future use of their gifted laptop. The Sugar laptop recipients have a multitude of developers committed to continuing the relevance of their platform for many years to come.
Please don't take this as a Microsoft-bashing rant. Substitute the name 'Microsoft' with any closed-source vendor. Microsoft is just the convenient example in this discussion. Take Internet Explorer. Once Netscape collapsed, there was no commercial incentive for Microsoft to improve its browser. (Yes, I know this is heading into the economics of competition-- I'll return to the original point of Open Source benefiting the user.) Since MS dominated the product category, they could withdraw those development resources to focus on other areas of generating profit. Internet Explorer withered for years because there was no pressure to add features or increase it's performance. The cost of developing a new, competing browser from scratch eliminated any possible threats from other commercial software vendors, too. That is, if they weren't given a community-developed code base for free. Eventually, Internet Explorer became embarrassingly antiquated, lacking modern features such as tabbed browsing because open source projects brought innovations to this product category which motivated Microsoft to restart IE development.
I could go on with many more examples of open source benefiting consumers, but I pity this dead horse I'm beating.
Seth
Hardware acceleration by purchasing more and/or faster CPU's is a longer-term performance improvement strategy. You can't just take a web server offline, put 8 new quad-core CPU's in the box and reboot. A major web publisher is going to have to build that system in parallel, test it, then migrate it into production. This is a several months-long process.
Meanwhile, the tips listed here will give a poorly-implemented website a boost that will seem like 8 quad-cores were installed.
Seth
I used to travel the world solving performance issues for web sites. As an example, I was contracted to support voter.com on the eve of the 2000 elections.
Want to see huge performance gains with minimal work? Here are the easy fixes:
1. Check the error logs. Layout monkeys will frequently forget to bundle up a spacer gif or some other graphic when deploying to production. Each one of these requires a seperate HTTP request to be sent, handled, file system hit, and 404 response returned. Four tasks can be removed for the server if you remove those html references from the site layout.
2. Either turn off logging in production, or put the logs on a separate (physical) file system.
3. Memory is cheap. If you can, mount your document root to virtual memory.
4. Cache, cache, cache. If you are deploying new content, spider your site in testing, manually copy the cache to the doc root of production. Keep the load off the production DB.
5. If you can, log all DB transactions over the course of a day. Check for repetitious SQL. Convert those commands to stored procedures, then update the dynamic page generation code to use the stored procs.
I know these are obvious recommendations. You wouldn't believe how many high-traffic sites don't implement these basic techniques.
Seth
There's a lot of reasons this might not work for a species we've never seen develop.
While I share people's enthusiasm for bringing back the Mammoths, I agree that there are some significant hurdles for applying this technique to that species. Perhaps it would be a good fit for bringing back the Tasmanian Tiger?
Seth
Hence, the problem of 'mob rule.'
Seth
Positioning it as an extension of office is much more appealing to me than google's broadband-dependent offering.
I suppose it looks appealing to someone who was planning on buying another update to the MS Office suite. As someone who wasn't going to buy it, the Google Apps are serving me and my small business very well.
Seth
What age is the cut-off for when you stop feeling pleasure thinking about people going to prison? 83? 82? Just wondering. Does the brutality of the crime have any bearing on your enjoyment of people going to prison?
Seth
This is such a DUH discussion. I wonder if the guy asking this question even has the know-how to execute on this plan if he's asking this question in the first place. Web-based beats all for this one-off scenario.
Seth
In support of the parent, I'd like to point out that another challenge to adoption of each 'revolutionary' solar breakthrough is that everyone considering a massive solar project is aware that shit-piles of research funds have been rapidly re-directed towards this field. Every time some advancement is made, purchasers have to be wary that their investment won't be ridiculously obsoleted by the next advancement in a few months time. This while their investment may take years to pay itself off.
Seth
What are the clear reasons? By blurring these overhead images, does it make the job of terrorists more difficult? Instead of hitting these targets with orbiting kinetic weapons, they have to resort to truck bombs? The deal is, any entity that is going to mount an offensive on these installations is going to do it in such an unsophisticated manner, that aerial photographs are unneccessary. Information about these installations can be captured via field reconnassaince anyway.
Seth
This is voluntary, not 'forced' and it's in the hardware, not the software. If it were in the software, it could easily be bypassed with a custom driver, or just a krack.
Seth
Considering that the number photographers using Macs is incredibly disproportionate to normal Mac/PC ratios (probably 50%+ among serious photographers, vs under 10% for normal users), they almost certainly doomed the project to failure before it started by not having a standard, cross-platform implementation.
Hey, I'm typing this under Mac OS X86 running on a quad intel box I built. But I have to jump in and say that this product looks like it's not really intended for the hardcore photographers out there. It looks like it's for the mainstream techno-klutzes who want to just load content into something and have it automajically converted to something fancy. The largest portion of that demograph is probably suffering Windoes...
Seth
Not one social program benefits me, yet I pay close to half my paycheck for them.
Here's the trick. Although you live in your own house / apartment, you live in a community which forms the society at large. You live happily and seemingly 'independent' of the social programs and the people they support. If those programs didn't exist, however, imagine how long you would enjoy your comfort while others starve outside your neighborhood. It would be short order before your door would be knocked down and your cabinets would be raided. I shudder to think about what might happen to your family if you put up some resistance to this redistribution of food stuffs.
Oh, but your guns, the police, etc. would protect you. Hey, go visit Columbia and see how well that's working for the wealthy victims of kidnappers there.
Seth
Warrantless wiretaps on 3rd parties is completely illegal.
You got a reference for what law specifically forbids warrantless wiretaps? My understanding is that the fourth amendment forbids unreasonable search and seizure, which court precedence has held that wiretaps are unreasonable unless a judge grants a warrant. The bill of rights does not use the word 'wiretap' as they didn't have phones at the time of publication.
In this case, a librarian allowed the FBI to perform a search without a warrant, thereby ignoring library users' rights to privacy. This is the same as what AT&T did when they allowed the NSA to install wiretapping equipment on their switches to listen to all phone calls routed through their network.
Seth
I 100% agree with NerveGas on the rsync suggestion. I use it in reverse to backup my laptop to my hosting provider.
Here's the one thing to remember in terms of rsync. It's going to be the CURRENT snapshot of your data. Not a big deal, except if you're doing development and find out a week later that changes you made to your DB have had unintended consequences. If you've rsynced, you're going to want to have made additional local backups on a regular basis so you can roll back to one of those snapshots prior to when you hosed your DB. Apologies if that was obvious, but rsync is the transfer mechanism. You'll still want to manage archives locally.
Seth
Well I don't know what they can get from this other than evidence of a possible crime, but not who was on the computer.
It could have been that the FBI had traced a message back to this computer's NIC. They probably have a good idea who the sender of the message was, but they want to corroborate it with physical evidence. By grabbing the computer, they can check the keyboard for fingerprints (unlikely, but possible) and DNA. If they find a match, then it's strong evidence supporting their claim that a particular individual is responsible for a given communication.
Seth
This wasn't social engineering and seizure, this was government enforcement making a request for a reason, likely to prevent a crime.
That's the same as the warrantless wiretaps performed by the NSA with cooperation from AT&T & other telcos. "Oh, they're probably trying to do something good. Go ahead. Abuse all these people's right to privacy. I'm willing to make that judgment call." It doesn't sound like the Library Science curriculum includes any sections covering constitutional law....
Seth
I bought my last phone in 2005. I spent $279 on it even with the discount Sprint offered for renewing my contract. It was the best digital camera phone they offered at the time.
As I explored features like text messaging, I realized Samsung had no idea what UI meant. To delete a message, you had to scroll down a list of options to the second page of options before 'delete' was available. They prioritized 'file' and 'reply' higher in the list than delete, which is what you'll want to do with more messages than any other option. Text messages were such an annoyance to deal with, I would tell people my phone doesn't support it and ask them not to send them to me.
It had a calendar and address book, but offered no connectivity with my computer. Completely standalone repository.
If I wanted to email the photos off the camera to someone, I had to upgrade my plan to include wireless internet, which was another $20 a month.
The point of all these criticisms is that I had already run through the gauntlet of buying a premium phone to find that its usability was horrible. As a consumer, I never considered dropping that kind of cash on a Nokia or other phone promising fancy features after my disappointment with that Samsung phone. When I checked out the iPhone at the Apple Store, I immediately recognized that they 'got' what was missing on my Samsung-- usability. I had no qualms switching carriers and buying the iPhone. The service plan ends up costing me what it would have with Sprint if I would have gotten the internet option. The phone cost me essentially the same as my 2005 phone did, and it works a million times better.
Seth
No problem. Get a few hundred female comatose victims and send them in a huge spacecraft. Near the point of their anticipated demise, have a machine artificially inseminate them and also deliver the resulting child. Have robots care for the children and educate them aboard the spacecraft. If the distance is too great for their lifetimes, have the children reproduce as late as they can, then eject them into space to conserve life support resources. All along the way, the ship will need to increase acceleration so that the final generation will be used to 5G. This will evolve their hearts to pump blood against 5x earth gravity.
When the ship finally arrives, it will need to orbit and plan a landing in the ocean. Their best chance for survival will be as swimming mammals while they develop the constitution to walk upright on this new planet.
Seth
I downloaded an earlier version of the iPhone 2.0 software and installed it on my iPhone yesterday. Works great and I've spent a lot of time in the app store. Here are my observations:
1. AolRadio is an amazing offering. Within wifi zones, it offers a ton of digital radio stations that blow my Sirius satellite subscription out of the water- better music offerings and for free. It supposedly works to some extent over 3g, while not offering ALL stations. So it makes the iPhone a cool portable internet radio player.
2. eReader is an ebook reader that's free, but it only allows you to install books purchased from their website. For $9.99 you can purchase an app called 'bookshelf' that lets you install your own ebooks, and supports multiple formats. It doesn't currently support PDF, but I assume it will.
3. Most of the good games are not free or cheap. Super Monkey Ball is $9.99.
4. Weatherbug is an app similar to the original weather APP, but it offers radar views and current condition photos. The radar would be excellent, but it doesn't automatically zoom in to the city you are interested in. At least one other feature on it seems incomplete.
Seth
In your premise, the Dems ran things for 50 years, but because of economic woes during the last ten years of that period (the seventies), you're going to poo-poo their leadership. The dems took back control of the White House through the nineties and created a budget surplus. Then this guy, Bush, takes the helm for two terms and look where we are. The track record here isn't very convincing that the Democrats are economic numbskulls. Especially when you consider that those fifty years of Democrat control consisted of more economic growth than the country had experienced previously or since.
Seth
i didnt vote for him, but rather against the morons who i despised running against him.
Ok. In your world, Al Gore and John Kerry are morons compared to George W. Bush. I read about bizarro world in a Superman comic book, and I find it interesting that DC comics is promoting those old issues by having characters from those stories post on Slashdot.
Seth
I don't know if anyone has checked, but natural gas ain't exactly cheap either.
It might currently be expensive, but that's based on current demand & supply. Domestic oil companies recognize the possible vast availability of natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico. While other energy sources remained cheap, there was no incentive to develop infrastructure to harvest domestic natural gas on a large scale. Now that petroleum is expensive, natural gas is likely to draw a lot more attention both in demand which will spur development of supply.
Seth