Actually, I can imagine that no-name cylons would be cheaper -- no need to pay a recurring actor/actress since anyone can don a costume and continue... Plus I seem to recall that the identity of the Cylon infiltrators was already known... Unless the lookaline happens to have been the human from which they cloned the appearance...
For my predictions: A cylon becomes a 7-of-9; that is, it integrates into human culture. There will be some episodes where it reverts back to its roots, but somehow, through sheer human (ha) will, overcomes its mechanical nature. A human crewmember falls in love with the Cylon.
A Cylon and a human get trapped on a planet. They need to overcome their differences in order to survive. Someone insults Mickey Mouse. One says, "Picard in big chair, turning."
A human infiltrates Cylon HQ by mimicking Capt. Kirk's robotic delivery: Jones....Jones.....Cannot....keep....straight....f ace..
A crew member dies in an early episode but reappears in a later one as the son/daughter/doppelganger. Time travel may be involved. Or cloning. Or, egads, Cylons replicating. They'll call him Duncan. Duncan Idaho. Or Tasha if it's a she.
A gay space pirate named Sonny Crockett appears. He seems to know the captain from way back... Rumors float and some light-hearted banter.
They may have used spoofed DNS packets just to bypass a firewall, but information can also be tunneled in real DNS packets, so even if you only allow DNS to/from certain servers, you're still not safe from this leak.
Yup, and that's not the half of it. With the extensions being duct-taped onto the existing spec it makes it easier and easier to do this. I've seen some hacks to allow all sorts of arbitrary information to live on the servers, some relayed automatically because of the extensions, some used to modify how mail servers respond, some even for routing. It's nothing new (remember transferring data via ICMP ECHO?) but it's on a new level now.
When I first started with computers back in the early 80's there was a lot of energy in the community. People ran BBSs, built circuit boards to attach to print heads to scan images, built weather facsimile machines, tinkered and hacked and built stuff. Those days were very enjoyable. But the only downside was that all the little hacks were for the computer. I.e., the gadgets celebrated the technology and the coolness of doing new things, but they were all about the technology itself.
Things have changed somewhat since then. There's still Linux and new experimental OSes (and BSDs too) to tinker with. Hardware is commoditized so there's not a lot of need or desire to build memory expansion boards, but people still do interesting things. However, the biggest change is that computers are now really cool tools for doing non-computer things.
I can only speak to my interests, but without computers I could not have easily played with video or recording, ray tracing, music production, math (some problems *require* computers to understand, at least in my case), etc.. The computer today is akin to what the printing press was several centuries ago. I.e., it gives some very powerful tools to individuals of modest means. So things that were only the demesne of researchers and big companies ten years ago is now available in a relatively low powered desktop system.
Not really an accident since no computers were harmed...
I had an old AMD K6-2 that was having some stability issues. During troubleshooting I had removed the CPU fan for a few seconds as I was swapping in a known good CPU. At some point I had the fan off but had the machine powered on for about a minute because I got distracted. When I realized my error I immediately pulled the plug. A few minutes passed as I did something else. Then I needed to put back in the original CPU. So I shifted the lever, popped the CPU then put it face down into my palm. It took about 1/2 second before I realized how hot the thing still was but it was too late. A square patch of skin was burned away right at the base of my thumb.
And here's one that didn't happen to me...
One of the employees I'd trained had gone solo, covering three medium sized buildings. Everything went well for close to a year. Then he gave me a call: "Help, the fileservers are down and I've never had to rebuild from scratch." You have backups? "Of course." Whew, no problem then. I make the 100 mile drive and meet him in the server room. Disk is hosed so we rebuild. It takes a while but everything is going smoothly. The OS is in place so I ask him for the data backups. He hands me the tapes. Pop them in but can't retrieve any data. Eh? Don't panic. Check the logs. Backups went successful for the better part of a year. We decide it's probably the tape drive since he mentioned that he'd seen some errors "once or twice". We drive 30 miles to another facility to retrieve a drive and maybe shoot the data across the net. But the same problem at the other facility. OK, keep calm. Backups are showing successful for close to a year. It warns if the tape is bad. It warns if for some reason it can't complete a backup. Crap. Check what's being backed up... Three log files. That's it. For a year he's been backing up three log files, maybe 20K worth in each of them. Data? Nope, not listed in the things that get backed up. But the backup was successful because it was never instructed to do anything else but those three log files...
Many people believe that a good manager need not know the nuts and bolts of what the subordinates do. After all, a manager is hired to manage, not code or administer systems. Plus a manager that is very technical will have that urge to jump in himself (or herself). On the other hand, we are all familiar with the clueless manager that sets impossible deadlines or purchases technology based upon some salesman's pitch. So a technically clueless manager can be as bad. Ask the candidate what they think of this. How much should a technical manager know about the technology?
Hard-core geeky types are often introverted and not what most managers are accustomed to see. Some are arrogant prima-donnas, some self-effacing, some look and smell like long-haul truckers. Many are violently independent. How will the candidate deal with this motley group and get them to work together?
Two competing vendors are trying to sell you a product. How do you choose between them? This question can help answer who the candidate trusts. Does he/she speak to his group first, soliciting their opinions or does he exclude his team from the process.
Whose job is more important, the manager's or the employee's? If he says the employees he's very likely pandering for acceptance. If he says the manager's then he may quickly drop useful members of the team.
What is a TPS report? The bigger question is how pedantic is the manager? Can he bend the rules or break them in order to get something accomplished. Does he understand the reasons for a paperwork process but is willing to forego them based on his judgment.
The building is on fire! What do you do? Start timing him immediately and look at a stopwatch as you ask. This can show how well he performs under the slight pressure of a fake emergency. Does he wilt? Does he get the employees to safety first or is his first reaction to grab the backup tapes? Which one is more important to you?
If it's actually a Linux based SMC (Solaris Management Console) it would be a very good thing. Clients for SMC exist for Solaris and Windows, but nothing for Linux. Whatever else may be said about Sun's bizarre marketing strategies and corporate (mis)-directions, they do have some good tools for systems management. Though I'm now a die-hard Linux user, there are still many areas where Solaris (maybe just by virtue of being developed longer) outshines Linux. This is of course changing minute by minute...
Re:I'm switching, although SuSE has problems, too
on
Fedora Core 2 Dud or Dodo?
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· Score: 3, Informative
So far, my test installs have gone OK, except for one major problem: it doesn't work under VMWare!
It works fine if you pass vdso=0 to the installer and add it to grub.conf.
The judges, IIRC headed by Tarentino, did add that the film won on the basis of its artistic merits...
And maybe Jimmy Carter won the Nobel on the basis of his Habitat for Humanity and election work throughout the world.
Problem is that I'm not sure if you're kidding or not. I think you're being facetious...:D Art is about politics. From Guernica to the Medici tributes to the famous bust of Apollo it has been about politics. Film, as an art form (no snickers, please) consumes and regurgitates the politics of the era. "F9/11" does so. It was the "Injuns" first. Then the aliens. Then Nazis. Then Russians. Recently it's been Arabs. I wonder why "Enemy of the State" gets played so infrequently while movies with Arab bad guys have been on broadcast television over twenty times in the past three months. Conspiracy? Probably not, but the fact alone does speak volumes.
I'm a big fan of science fiction; detractors of SF always say that the ideological elements are too raw, too much on the surface. But it is precisely because of this that I enjoy it so. When China was perceived as a threat there was a huge upsurge in the number of "hive mind" bad guys in SF. "Enemy Mind" looked at the same issues as a recent winner that talked of two enemy combatants in the Middle East that were thrown together. The rawness is, in an odd sort of way, reminiscent of Kafka's "Metamorphosis".
But on to documentaries... The party line is that Moore is full of falsehoods and is creative with the truth. Hmm. So are the administration's recent Medicare ads (the ones which the GAO decided were illegal). I want to see this movie. I want to see "Passion of the Christ". I want more coffee. It's probably time for some. I'm just rambling anyway. I think my foot is asleep.
Cool... I'm at this moment ripping "BladeRunner TDC". Transcoding with the xvid library is almost done. Quality is really very good versus some of the commercial applications out there for Windows. For example, the deep blue scenes in "Finding Nemo" tend to look blocky and sort of like a mosaic with a commercial Win2K program. Using DVDRip with xvid (on a Fedora Core 1 machine) the same scene is a lot smoother and the color gradients are not nearly as noticeable.
On a related note, I'll soon be trying out some of the pre/post filters for DVDRip. They do take a LONG time however. I've noticed that the Linux versions, when ripping at high quality, takes at least 20% longer than the Windows program at a similar bitrate. But the quality is better so I'm happy.
Uh, what's so hard about unrolling a tar-ball and setting the JAVA_HOME environment variable?
Do that. Then try launching a jar file from the GUI or CLI. Bzzt. Nope, you need to add a few more lines to.bash_profile including PATH and a heap size so simple things can work properly. Okay, at least you can now launch stuff by putting in
Wonderful you think. Then you browse over to a website with some pretty Java utilities. Your local applications work but bzzt again, not in the browser. So you copy over some files to your local.plugins directory then relaunch Firefox. A management interface that works fine under Windows and MacOSX fails on Linux. Do some more digging. Repeat.
Now I'm not saying it doesn't run fine once installed. With the new NPTL on Fedora it really flies. Any complaints about speed are usually from folks who haven't used a recent version. But man, I've been using Unix and Linux for over a decade and it still gave me some trouble. Now I like to think I'm somewhat competent with Linux (may or may not be the case), but I don't see any newbies or curious Windows users converting if this is their first experience.
My first real computing experiences were on Sun hardware. I've logged lots of time in front of Sparcstations up to E6500s and dozens of E450s. At one point, I thought Linux was a fad because it was so amateurish and unpolished compared to SunOS/Solaris. I still know more about SunOS/Solaris than I do about Linux. What a difference a few years makes...
I think Sun started dying when they started to push remote framebuffer devices as a viable business solution. Besides costing more than a PC, it required extensive reworking of the network in many cases. They killed off (then brought back) Solaris on Intel when sticking with it might have slowed down Linux adoption in the data center (people looking for cheap hardware -- PC servers -- are generally not looking for Sun boxes). Sun was riding high on the dot.com and Y2K booms but they were too slow, too entrenched to react when the landscape changed. Their hardware can no longer keep up with equivalent priced Intel machines with equivalent availability features. Hell, even the Apple machines are eating into traditional Sun markets in research and academia. Why? Their low-end, slowest machines are still $1,200 more than Apple or Intel.
Don't get me wrong. I liked Sun and still do. I want them to survive not only because it makes my skills more valuable, not only because they were largely friendly to open source, but because they have developed some cool technologies. But they have to change. Maybe these moves are a good thing (they can't be worse than the previous path). But they have to do more: quit being so wishy-washy with Linux (either embrace it fully or compete against it); make Java easier to install on Linux (I don't care if it's opened up or not); make Solaris9/Intel as functional as the Sparc version (where's SMC? At least make a Linux SMC client); lower the hardware prices to be more in line with the industry (even if this means putting together an IA32 or IA64 machine).
Shoot, I remember seeing shape based searches in high school over a decade ago:
Body type (check one): () Kate Moss () Barbie Doll () Olive Oyl () Petite () Athletic Slim () Athletic Trim () Average () Athletic Muscular () Zaftig () Body Builder . . . () Jabba the Hut () Portraits, courtesy US Space Agency
Feynman spoke on the Challenger inquiry. He knew the NASA director at the time. The director is one step away from Kalpana Chawla, an astronaut on Columbia. Chawla is of Indian descent, and knew Dr. Piyush Agrawal, former head of mathematics in Miami-Dade Schools (IIRC) in Florida. My parents have a picture of Dr. Agrawal and Chawla in Washington. My father is good friends with Dr. Agrawal.
On the same thread, the best man at my wedding works at a NASA subcontractor. There are likely at least two dozen direct links to Feynman through him.
A good friend of mine did some work at CERN, though in different eras than Feynman. He's studying physics at likely can follow a few links.
You probably won't ever see this because of how late I'm posting... However:
Building from source is great if you want to tweak a system and get it running exactly how you imagine. Be prepared for configuration and all the various issues associated with source builds. I'm assuming that even if you build from source that you are using some sort of package/file management system to alert you of dependencies and file modifications. This is easy to do with binary packages, not so easy managing sources. I regularly rebuild *on my test machines* all manner of software from source, including the kernel, KDE, glibc and a bunch of other libraries.
Now for the problems with source builds: 1) You need a development machine. I.e., you need the compiler tools and libraries. For a regular workstation this is no problem, but you DO NOT want these tools accessible on a server even if they're 'chmod 700' or otherwise locked away. This means you'll build on another machine and create a binary package and... well, you're back where you started except you lost some time.
2) There's no easy way to create snapshots of packages. Differences in libraries and config files can make or break software. The best errors are those that prevent the software from compiling. The worst are those that compile, but errors or weirdness doesn't show up until a month later. Now RPM is much maligned, but it does allow you to keep the build instructions, dependency information, etc.. inside the package. You get lots of control, once you've learned RPM, on where things get installed.
3) Backouts are not as easy. You can often do a 'make uninstall' but this requires the sources be kept around in some cases. Tools like checkinstall can ease the burden, however.
4) Duplication of effort. Source builds are good for customizing, as I mentioned. It's a myth, however, that rebuilding from source will dramatically improve performance except in a few, somewhat rare cases. E.g., rebuilding a 2.4 kernel with a pre-emptible patch can make your desktop faster. Rebuilding a stock 2.4 from kernel.org or your distro's sources will likely not be noticeable.
I've been carrying out an experiment over the past few months to get in touch with a famous author/mathematician. He's written on the subject and it just absolutely fascinates me. The idea is to send a few letters to friends and see how quickly it can reach the destination through the hops. Theoretically you could get to the author with just six or seven hops. I sent a few letters to some associates but these got only to the third or fourth level before dying out. I'm going to increase the initial broadcast with a different, more academic oriented group this time. Software like the link shows (well, what I got before the./ing) is almost perfect to track the results.
On a related note, a book called "Nexus" by M. Buchanan discusses social and other networks. Decent treatment, but unfortunately no equations or numbers.
I've found that provided the system have a good amount of memory, a pentium 2 is good enough to run most applications.
I've been tweaking an older PII laptop (400MhZ, 192M) over the past few months. The idea was not to lose any functionality or "new" features (i.e., dropping a 2.2 based distro, the PII's contemporary OS, would be cheating). So far I'm extremely pleased. The machine is very functional, even faster in some respects than a newer Thinkpad T22 (800MhZ, 256M) because the video support is better.
The main changes: * 2.6 kernel -- huge difference * Fluxbox instead of KDE/Gnome * NPTL * Rebuilt some apps with i686 optimizations * Config tweaks (default services, buffer sizes, etc) * Application substitutions (Firefox vs Mozilla, etc)
I've been testing other things including: * Default fs (reiserfs vs ext3) * sshd default configs (blowfish vs des, etc) * MP3 vs OGG (about the same CPU, but I hear MP3 is nicer) * Adjusting timer resolution in kernel * Replacement syslog that batches writes
Really. Let's all admit it finally. Those pictures from mars are as boring as hell!
Interesting attitude.
I, for one, find the pictures fascinating and awe-inspiring on many levels.
At first it was just an appreciation for the mere fact that NASA was able to get the rovers onto the Martian surface. When I think of how f***ing far away Mars is, and how they were able to hit the target, I'm pretty much in awe. Yeah, the physics are well understood and software exists to determine everything about the mission (I can download such software for my home PC), but actually doing it is still pretty amazing.
Then there's the whole rover itself. It's a semi-autonomous machine, thousands of miles from home base, and it can send back some pretty detailed images of the surface, drill rocks, sample the environment. Hell, sometimes getting cams in the other room to work properly can be a task. That they could do this, troubleshoot and re-program the machine from that distance, and do it *twice* gives me a tremendous feeling of well-being.
Then there are the pictures themselves. We're peering at a f***ing other planet, man! Never before in human history have we seen the Martian surface with this much detail and this much information. I know it doesn't mean much to many people, but this is the spirit of exploration, the pure f***ing joy of discovery that pushed our forefathers to new worlds, new medicines, new art. Pushing the bounds, ripping apart the g*ddamned envelope, reaching beyond our grasp, is what makes us human and differentiates us from some cockroach or mindless automaton.
Mod me as a dork, but I am happy to be alive at this time.
Yah, good point. I'm not saying that fairy tales aren't deep, but they are not in the strictest sense "literary". I've had my Joseph Campbell and Hamilton classes and appreciate the ideas that suffuse fairy tales (Disney's bowdlerized and castrated versions excepted). These ideas (Puck, the Devil, quest, etc.) appear in "The Hobbit" (TH) as either direct reference or heavy allusions. So, yes, _TH_ is a fairy tale or at least a string of fairy tales.
Yeah, my sentiments exactly. I think that the complexities of the trilogy showed Jackson as a master administrator -- it's amazing that a project of such scope didn't fall apart as the Matrix sequels did -- but I agree that portions seemed too overblown.
In some movies you get the idea that the characters are secondary to the plot and the visual. FOTR showed many sides to the characters but these tend to be missing in the latter films. Not that they weren't there, only that the battle was bigger. It felt as if I was watching "Starship Troopers" with a change of scenery. Now don't me wrong -- I enjoyed "Starship Troopers" -- but it was definitely built on the idea that the individuals were almost irrelevant compared to the campaign.
To give credit where it's due, Jackson does handle most of the lecture scenes very well. I enjoyed Aragorn's ("..but not this day") and Gandalf's speeches. They could have easily become sappy but they remained poignant and powerful. He's also captured the grandeur of the book.
But to end, I do think that LOTR deserved at least four Oscars (director, though maybe not best picture).
Though I thoroughly enjoyed the LOTR movies, I did feel that there was just too much steel and horses; it seemed to "epic" for my taste. The characterization seemed a little lost in all the fighting.
_The Hobbit_ is different. There are plenty of internal conflicts and chances to develop characters. Though the dwarves are a little (har har) cookie cutter, Bilbo and Gandalf can certainly be fleshed out. I personally think that _The Hobbit_ would be *easier* to make because it has a decent plot (questish, but still decent), enough battle scenes and is sufficiently dark to not alienate LOTR fans. With only a couple central characters, it would be more of an actor's movie.
Dark? The riddle scenes were, when I first read them, pretty engrossing. With a treatment like that given to Shelob, it would as threatening. There's maybe not as much psychological darkness, but there's lots to be said for physical terror (dragon, trolls, Gollum).
I don't mean to elevate TH above what Tolkien intended, but I have seen more than a couple papers contrasting/comparing TH with Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and even Dante's "Inferno". Some of these are stretches, true, but I think that to discount the literary aspect of TH and call it strictly a fairy tale would be a disservice to Tolkien.
I'm in the middle of reading _Nexus_ by Mark Buchanan. One of the topics he covers is the work by Mark Granovetter that discusses links in a social network. One thing I found interesting was that weak links, those from friends-of-friends or casual associates, do more to tie together a network than the local, strong links. The reasoning is that local links tend to be more isolated: your friends will have similar interests and know many of the same people. Links to distant nodes will thus tend to be more "ordered" and require more steps to reach that node. Weak links will act as a shortcut between disparate groups.
Immortality
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Space Burial
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· Score: 3, Interesting
In a few billion years this little wet dustball of ours is going to disappear in a poof of smoke when good old Sol gets middle-aged (insert old fat guy joke here). I want my DNA sent in the other direction. I want my genes to land on some planet (or planets) throughout the galaxy and start new lifecycles. Damn right.
The funny thing is that you are poking fun at people for doing things that you don't understand for reasons that you don't understand.
No, I'm poking fun at people who modify their weapons because they think it's cool or they think that doing so will magically improve their shooting. It's like a carpenter who gets a larger compressor for his nail gun because he doesn't know how to put up a door. Or maybe it's closer to those folks who color their CD edges with green marker because they believe it makes it sound better. Contrary to what many believe, environmental factors is one of the largest variables. "Know your weapon" still is the best advice.
I've been shooting for close to twenty years and have modified, or helped to modify many pistols and rifles. In that time I've seen lots of novice shooters destroy perfectly good firearms or make them unsafe by using substandard parts. Funny thing is that you sound like one of those folks who read something on the Internet somewhere and try to impress your friends with your newfound "knowledge".
Just like the ricers see that real race cars are loud, low to the ground and have wings.
And this is exactly my point. Modifying your weapon because the pros do so will not make you a better shooter. For example, do you have any real idea what a spoiler or wing does at (compartively) low speeds (under 120MPH)? Huge difference or none? How much of it is marketing? Sure, there are constant advances in firearms, but on the range it will make more difference if you drank a cup of coffee that morning (near imperceptible shakiness) or if it's your first shot or your fiftieth (barrel walk) or if it's cooler (air density) than if you use a specialized powder mix. I won't even mention the marginal quality control in some reloads. Now I'm not saying that proper reloads or weapon modifications don't contribute, only that their significance is completely overwhelmed by other factors and is essentially lost in the error margin of these variables.
And I'm also willing to discuss ballistics if you'd like. I'll even put up a lot of pretty equations too.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I can imagine that no-name cylons would be cheaper -- no need to pay a recurring actor/actress since anyone can don a costume and continue... Plus I seem to recall that the identity of the Cylon infiltrators was already known... Unless the lookaline happens to have been the human from which they cloned the appearance...
f ace..
For my predictions:
A cylon becomes a 7-of-9; that is, it integrates into human culture. There will be some episodes where it reverts back to its roots, but somehow, through sheer human (ha) will, overcomes its mechanical nature. A human crewmember falls in love with the Cylon.
A Cylon and a human get trapped on a planet. They need to overcome their differences in order to survive. Someone insults Mickey Mouse. One says, "Picard in big chair, turning."
A human infiltrates Cylon HQ by mimicking Capt. Kirk's robotic delivery: Jones....Jones.....Cannot....keep....straight....
A crew member dies in an early episode but reappears in a later one as the son/daughter/doppelganger. Time travel may be involved. Or cloning. Or, egads, Cylons replicating. They'll call him Duncan. Duncan Idaho. Or Tasha if it's a she.
A gay space pirate named Sonny Crockett appears. He seems to know the captain from way back... Rumors float and some light-hearted banter.
They may have used spoofed DNS packets just to bypass a firewall, but information can also be tunneled in real DNS packets, so even if you only allow DNS to/from certain servers, you're still not safe from this leak.
Yup, and that's not the half of it. With the extensions being duct-taped onto the existing spec it makes it easier and easier to do this. I've seen some hacks to allow all sorts of arbitrary information to live on the servers, some relayed automatically because of the extensions, some used to modify how mail servers respond, some even for routing. It's nothing new (remember transferring data via ICMP ECHO?) but it's on a new level now.
KL
I'll do many things, but engendering myself with the RIAA is not one of them.
When I first started with computers back in the early 80's there was a lot of energy in the community. People ran BBSs, built circuit boards to attach to print heads to scan images, built weather facsimile machines, tinkered and hacked and built stuff. Those days were very enjoyable. But the only downside was that all the little hacks were for the computer. I.e., the gadgets celebrated the technology and the coolness of doing new things, but they were all about the technology itself.
Things have changed somewhat since then. There's still Linux and new experimental OSes (and BSDs too) to tinker with. Hardware is commoditized so there's not a lot of need or desire to build memory expansion boards, but people still do interesting things. However, the biggest change is that computers are now really cool tools for doing non-computer things.
I can only speak to my interests, but without computers I could not have easily played with video or recording, ray tracing, music production, math (some problems *require* computers to understand, at least in my case), etc.. The computer today is akin to what the printing press was several centuries ago. I.e., it gives some very powerful tools to individuals of modest means. So things that were only the demesne of researchers and big companies ten years ago is now available in a relatively low powered desktop system.
Not really an accident since no computers were harmed...
I had an old AMD K6-2 that was having some stability issues. During troubleshooting I had removed the CPU fan for a few seconds as I was swapping in a known good CPU. At some point I had the fan off but had the machine powered on for about a minute because I got distracted. When I realized my error I immediately pulled the plug. A few minutes passed as I did something else. Then I needed to put back in the original CPU. So I shifted the lever, popped the CPU then put it face down into my palm. It took about 1/2 second before I realized how hot the thing still was but it was too late. A square patch of skin was burned away right at the base of my thumb.
And here's one that didn't happen to me...
One of the employees I'd trained had gone solo, covering three medium sized buildings. Everything went well for close to a year. Then he gave me a call: "Help, the fileservers are down and I've never had to rebuild from scratch." You have backups? "Of course." Whew, no problem then. I make the 100 mile drive and meet him in the server room. Disk is hosed so we rebuild. It takes a while but everything is going smoothly. The OS is in place so I ask him for the data backups. He hands me the tapes. Pop them in but can't retrieve any data. Eh? Don't panic. Check the logs. Backups went successful for the better part of a year. We decide it's probably the tape drive since he mentioned that he'd seen some errors "once or twice". We drive 30 miles to another facility to retrieve a drive and maybe shoot the data across the net. But the same problem at the other facility. OK, keep calm. Backups are showing successful for close to a year. It warns if the tape is bad. It warns if for some reason it can't complete a backup. Crap. Check what's being backed up... Three log files. That's it. For a year he's been backing up three log files, maybe 20K worth in each of them. Data? Nope, not listed in the things that get backed up. But the backup was successful because it was never instructed to do anything else but those three log files...
Many people believe that a good manager need not know the nuts and bolts of what the subordinates do. After all, a manager is hired to manage, not code or administer systems. Plus a manager that is very technical will have that urge to jump in himself (or herself). On the other hand, we are all familiar with the clueless manager that sets impossible deadlines or purchases technology based upon some salesman's pitch. So a technically clueless manager can be as bad. Ask the candidate what they think of this. How much should a technical manager know about the technology?
Hard-core geeky types are often introverted and not what most managers are accustomed to see. Some are arrogant prima-donnas, some self-effacing, some look and smell like long-haul truckers. Many are violently independent. How will the candidate deal with this motley group and get them to work together?
Two competing vendors are trying to sell you a product. How do you choose between them? This question can help answer who the candidate trusts. Does he/she speak to his group first, soliciting their opinions or does he exclude his team from the process.
Whose job is more important, the manager's or the employee's? If he says the employees he's very likely pandering for acceptance. If he says the manager's then he may quickly drop useful members of the team.
What is a TPS report? The bigger question is how pedantic is the manager? Can he bend the rules or break them in order to get something accomplished. Does he understand the reasons for a paperwork process but is willing to forego them based on his judgment.
The building is on fire! What do you do? Start timing him immediately and look at a stopwatch as you ask. This can show how well he performs under the slight pressure of a fake emergency. Does he wilt? Does he get the employees to safety first or is his first reaction to grab the backup tapes? Which one is more important to you?
Gorgo? As in Gorgo the Lugubrious? Oh shit. You'd better run.
If it's actually a Linux based SMC (Solaris Management Console) it would be a very good thing. Clients for SMC exist for Solaris and Windows, but nothing for Linux. Whatever else may be said about Sun's bizarre marketing strategies and corporate (mis)-directions, they do have some good tools for systems management. Though I'm now a die-hard Linux user, there are still many areas where Solaris (maybe just by virtue of being developed longer) outshines Linux. This is of course changing minute by minute...
So far, my test installs have gone OK, except for one major problem: it doesn't work under VMWare!
It works fine if you pass vdso=0 to the installer and add it to grub.conf.
The judges, IIRC headed by Tarentino, did add that the film won on the basis of its artistic merits...
:D Art is about politics. From Guernica to the Medici tributes to the famous bust of Apollo it has been about politics. Film, as an art form (no snickers, please) consumes and regurgitates the politics of the era. "F9/11" does so. It was the "Injuns" first. Then the aliens. Then Nazis. Then Russians. Recently it's been Arabs. I wonder why "Enemy of the State" gets played so infrequently while movies with Arab bad guys have been on broadcast television over twenty times in the past three months. Conspiracy? Probably not, but the fact alone does speak volumes.
And maybe Jimmy Carter won the Nobel on the basis of his Habitat for Humanity and election work throughout the world.
Problem is that I'm not sure if you're kidding or not. I think you're being facetious...
I'm a big fan of science fiction; detractors of SF always say that the ideological elements are too raw, too much on the surface. But it is precisely because of this that I enjoy it so. When China was perceived as a threat there was a huge upsurge in the number of "hive mind" bad guys in SF. "Enemy Mind" looked at the same issues as a recent winner that talked of two enemy combatants in the Middle East that were thrown together. The rawness is, in an odd sort of way, reminiscent of Kafka's "Metamorphosis".
But on to documentaries... The party line is that Moore is full of falsehoods and is creative with the truth. Hmm. So are the administration's recent Medicare ads (the ones which the GAO decided were illegal). I want to see this movie. I want to see "Passion of the Christ". I want more coffee. It's probably time for some. I'm just rambling anyway. I think my foot is asleep.
Cool... I'm at this moment ripping "BladeRunner TDC". Transcoding with the xvid library is almost done. Quality is really very good versus some of the commercial applications out there for Windows. For example, the deep blue scenes in "Finding Nemo" tend to look blocky and sort of like a mosaic with a commercial Win2K program. Using DVDRip with xvid (on a Fedora Core 1 machine) the same scene is a lot smoother and the color gradients are not nearly as noticeable.
On a related note, I'll soon be trying out some of the pre/post filters for DVDRip. They do take a LONG time however. I've noticed that the Linux versions, when ripping at high quality, takes at least 20% longer than the Windows program at a similar bitrate. But the quality is better so I'm happy.
Uh, what's so hard about unrolling a tar-ball and setting the JAVA_HOME environment variable?
.bash_profile including PATH and a heap size so simple things can work properly. Okay, at least you can now launch stuff by putting in
/opt/j2sdk_nb/j2sdk1.4.2/jre/bin/java -mx${JAVA_HEAP_SIZE}m ${JEDIT} -jar "/home/johndoe/bin/java/jedit/4.1/jedit.jar"
.plugins directory then relaunch Firefox. A management interface that works fine under Windows and MacOSX fails on Linux. Do some more digging. Repeat.
Do that. Then try launching a jar file from the GUI or CLI. Bzzt. Nope, you need to add a few more lines to
"exec
Wonderful you think. Then you browse over to a website with some pretty Java utilities. Your local applications work but bzzt again, not in the browser. So you copy over some files to your local
Now I'm not saying it doesn't run fine once installed. With the new NPTL on Fedora it really flies. Any complaints about speed are usually from folks who haven't used a recent version. But man, I've been using Unix and Linux for over a decade and it still gave me some trouble. Now I like to think I'm somewhat competent with Linux (may or may not be the case), but I don't see any newbies or curious Windows users converting if this is their first experience.
My first real computing experiences were on Sun hardware. I've logged lots of time in front of Sparcstations up to E6500s and dozens of E450s. At one point, I thought Linux was a fad because it was so amateurish and unpolished compared to SunOS/Solaris. I still know more about SunOS/Solaris than I do about Linux. What a difference a few years makes...
I think Sun started dying when they started to push remote framebuffer devices as a viable business solution. Besides costing more than a PC, it required extensive reworking of the network in many cases. They killed off (then brought back) Solaris on Intel when sticking with it might have slowed down Linux adoption in the data center (people looking for cheap hardware -- PC servers -- are generally not looking for Sun boxes). Sun was riding high on the dot.com and Y2K booms but they were too slow, too entrenched to react when the landscape changed. Their hardware can no longer keep up with equivalent priced Intel machines with equivalent availability features. Hell, even the Apple machines are eating into traditional Sun markets in research and academia. Why? Their low-end, slowest machines are still $1,200 more than Apple or Intel.
Don't get me wrong. I liked Sun and still do. I want them to survive not only because it makes my skills more valuable, not only because they were largely friendly to open source, but because they have developed some cool technologies. But they have to change. Maybe these moves are a good thing (they can't be worse than the previous path). But they have to do more: quit being so wishy-washy with Linux (either embrace it fully or compete against it); make Java easier to install on Linux (I don't care if it's opened up or not); make Solaris9/Intel as functional as the Sparc version (where's SMC? At least make a Linux SMC client); lower the hardware prices to be more in line with the industry (even if this means putting together an IA32 or IA64 machine).
Shoot, I remember seeing shape based searches in high school over a decade ago:
Body type (check one):
() Kate Moss
() Barbie Doll
() Olive Oyl
() Petite
() Athletic Slim
() Athletic Trim
() Average
() Athletic Muscular
() Zaftig
() Body Builder
.
.
.
() Jabba the Hut
() Portraits, courtesy US Space Agency
(sorry)
Feynman? Here's one:
Feynman spoke on the Challenger inquiry. He knew the NASA director at the time. The director is one step away from Kalpana Chawla, an astronaut on Columbia. Chawla is of Indian descent, and knew Dr. Piyush Agrawal, former head of mathematics in Miami-Dade Schools (IIRC) in Florida. My parents have a picture of Dr. Agrawal and Chawla in Washington. My father is good friends with Dr. Agrawal.
On the same thread, the best man at my wedding works at a NASA subcontractor. There are likely at least two dozen direct links to Feynman through him.
A good friend of mine did some work at CERN, though in different eras than Feynman. He's studying physics at likely can follow a few links.
You probably won't ever see this because of how late I'm posting... However:
Building from source is great if you want to tweak a system and get it running exactly how you imagine. Be prepared for configuration and all the various issues associated with source builds. I'm assuming that even if you build from source that you are using some sort of package/file management system to alert you of dependencies and file modifications. This is easy to do with binary packages, not so easy managing sources. I regularly rebuild *on my test machines* all manner of software from source, including the kernel, KDE, glibc and a bunch of other libraries.
Now for the problems with source builds:
1) You need a development machine. I.e., you need the compiler tools and libraries. For a regular workstation this is no problem, but you DO NOT want these tools accessible on a server even if they're 'chmod 700' or otherwise locked away. This means you'll build on another machine and create a binary package and... well, you're back where you started except you lost some time.
2) There's no easy way to create snapshots of packages. Differences in libraries and config files can make or break software. The best errors are those that prevent the software from compiling. The worst are those that compile, but errors or weirdness doesn't show up until a month later. Now RPM is much maligned, but it does allow you to keep the build instructions, dependency information, etc.. inside the package. You get lots of control, once you've learned RPM, on where things get installed.
3) Backouts are not as easy. You can often do a 'make uninstall' but this requires the sources be kept around in some cases. Tools like checkinstall can ease the burden, however.
4) Duplication of effort. Source builds are good for customizing, as I mentioned. It's a myth, however, that rebuilding from source will dramatically improve performance except in a few, somewhat rare cases. E.g., rebuilding a 2.4 kernel with a pre-emptible patch can make your desktop faster. Rebuilding a stock 2.4 from kernel.org or your distro's sources will likely not be noticeable.
I've been carrying out an experiment over the past few months to get in touch with a famous author/mathematician. He's written on the subject and it just absolutely fascinates me. The idea is to send a few letters to friends and see how quickly it can reach the destination through the hops. Theoretically you could get to the author with just six or seven hops. I sent a few letters to some associates but these got only to the third or fourth level before dying out. I'm going to increase the initial broadcast with a different, more academic oriented group this time. Software like the link shows (well, what I got before the ./ing) is almost perfect to track the results.
On a related note, a book called "Nexus" by M. Buchanan discusses social and other networks. Decent treatment, but unfortunately no equations or numbers.
I've found that provided the system have a good amount of memory, a pentium 2 is good enough to run most applications.
I've been tweaking an older PII laptop (400MhZ, 192M) over the past few months. The idea was not to lose any functionality or "new" features (i.e., dropping a 2.2 based distro, the PII's contemporary OS, would be cheating). So far I'm extremely pleased. The machine is very functional, even faster in some respects than a newer Thinkpad T22 (800MhZ, 256M) because the video support is better.
The main changes:
* 2.6 kernel -- huge difference
* Fluxbox instead of KDE/Gnome
* NPTL
* Rebuilt some apps with i686 optimizations
* Config tweaks (default services, buffer sizes, etc)
* Application substitutions (Firefox vs Mozilla, etc)
I've been testing other things including:
* Default fs (reiserfs vs ext3)
* sshd default configs (blowfish vs des, etc)
* MP3 vs OGG (about the same CPU, but I hear MP3 is nicer)
* Adjusting timer resolution in kernel
* Replacement syslog that batches writes
Really. Let's all admit it finally. Those pictures from mars are as boring as hell!
Interesting attitude.
I, for one, find the pictures fascinating and awe-inspiring on many levels.
At first it was just an appreciation for the mere fact that NASA was able to get the rovers onto the Martian surface. When I think of how f***ing far away Mars is, and how they were able to hit the target, I'm pretty much in awe. Yeah, the physics are well understood and software exists to determine everything about the mission (I can download such software for my home PC), but actually doing it is still pretty amazing.
Then there's the whole rover itself. It's a semi-autonomous machine, thousands of miles from home base, and it can send back some pretty detailed images of the surface, drill rocks, sample the environment. Hell, sometimes getting cams in the other room to work properly can be a task. That they could do this, troubleshoot and re-program the machine from that distance, and do it *twice* gives me a tremendous feeling of well-being.
Then there are the pictures themselves. We're peering at a f***ing other planet, man! Never before in human history have we seen the Martian surface with this much detail and this much information. I know it doesn't mean much to many people, but this is the spirit of exploration, the pure f***ing joy of discovery that pushed our forefathers to new worlds, new medicines, new art. Pushing the bounds, ripping apart the g*ddamned envelope, reaching beyond our grasp, is what makes us human and differentiates us from some cockroach or mindless automaton.
Mod me as a dork, but I am happy to be alive at this time.
Yah, good point. I'm not saying that fairy tales aren't deep, but they are not in the strictest sense "literary". I've had my Joseph Campbell and Hamilton classes and appreciate the ideas that suffuse fairy tales (Disney's bowdlerized and castrated versions excepted). These ideas (Puck, the Devil, quest, etc.) appear in "The Hobbit" (TH) as either direct reference or heavy allusions. So, yes, _TH_ is a fairy tale or at least a string of fairy tales.
Yeah, my sentiments exactly. I think that the complexities of the trilogy showed Jackson as a master administrator -- it's amazing that a project of such scope didn't fall apart as the Matrix sequels did -- but I agree that portions seemed too overblown.
In some movies you get the idea that the characters are secondary to the plot and the visual. FOTR showed many sides to the characters but these tend to be missing in the latter films. Not that they weren't there, only that the battle was bigger. It felt as if I was watching "Starship Troopers" with a change of scenery. Now don't me wrong -- I enjoyed "Starship Troopers" -- but it was definitely built on the idea that the individuals were almost irrelevant compared to the campaign.
To give credit where it's due, Jackson does handle most of the lecture scenes very well. I enjoyed Aragorn's ("..but not this day") and Gandalf's speeches. They could have easily become sappy but they remained poignant and powerful. He's also captured the grandeur of the book.
But to end, I do think that LOTR deserved at least four Oscars (director, though maybe not best picture).
Though I thoroughly enjoyed the LOTR movies, I did feel that there was just too much steel and horses; it seemed to "epic" for my taste. The characterization seemed a little lost in all the fighting.
_The Hobbit_ is different. There are plenty of internal conflicts and chances to develop characters. Though the dwarves are a little (har har) cookie cutter, Bilbo and Gandalf can certainly be fleshed out. I personally think that _The Hobbit_ would be *easier* to make because it has a decent plot (questish, but still decent), enough battle scenes and is sufficiently dark to not alienate LOTR fans. With only a couple central characters, it would be more of an actor's movie.
Dark? The riddle scenes were, when I first read them, pretty engrossing. With a treatment like that given to Shelob, it would as threatening. There's maybe not as much psychological darkness, but there's lots to be said for physical terror (dragon, trolls, Gollum).
I don't mean to elevate TH above what Tolkien intended, but I have seen more than a couple papers contrasting/comparing TH with Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and even Dante's "Inferno". Some of these are stretches, true, but I think that to discount the literary aspect of TH and call it strictly a fairy tale would be a disservice to Tolkien.
I'm in the middle of reading _Nexus_ by Mark Buchanan. One of the topics he covers is the work by Mark Granovetter that discusses links in a social network. One thing I found interesting was that weak links, those from friends-of-friends or casual associates, do more to tie together a network than the local, strong links. The reasoning is that local links tend to be more isolated: your friends will have similar interests and know many of the same people. Links to distant nodes will thus tend to be more "ordered" and require more steps to reach that node. Weak links will act as a shortcut between disparate groups.
In a few billion years this little wet dustball of ours is going to disappear in a poof of smoke when good old Sol gets middle-aged (insert old fat guy joke here). I want my DNA sent in the other direction. I want my genes to land on some planet (or planets) throughout the galaxy and start new lifecycles. Damn right.
The funny thing is that you are poking fun at people for doing things that you don't understand for reasons that you don't understand.
No, I'm poking fun at people who modify their weapons because they think it's cool or they think that doing so will magically improve their shooting. It's like a carpenter who gets a larger compressor for his nail gun because he doesn't know how to put up a door. Or maybe it's closer to those folks who color their CD edges with green marker because they believe it makes it sound better. Contrary to what many believe, environmental factors is one of the largest variables. "Know your weapon" still is the best advice.
I've been shooting for close to twenty years and have modified, or helped to modify many pistols and rifles. In that time I've seen lots of novice shooters destroy perfectly good firearms or make them unsafe by using substandard parts. Funny thing is that you sound like one of those folks who read something on the Internet somewhere and try to impress your friends with your newfound "knowledge".
Just like the ricers see that real race cars are loud, low to the ground and have wings.
And this is exactly my point. Modifying your weapon because the pros do so will not make you a better shooter. For example, do you have any real idea what a spoiler or wing does at (compartively) low speeds (under 120MPH)? Huge difference or none? How much of it is marketing? Sure, there are constant advances in firearms, but on the range it will make more difference if you drank a cup of coffee that morning (near imperceptible shakiness) or if it's your first shot or your fiftieth (barrel walk) or if it's cooler (air density) than if you use a specialized powder mix. I won't even mention the marginal quality control in some reloads. Now I'm not saying that proper reloads or weapon modifications don't contribute, only that their significance is completely overwhelmed by other factors and is essentially lost in the error margin of these variables.
And I'm also willing to discuss ballistics if you'd like. I'll even put up a lot of pretty equations too.