That said, if you were a black kid living in a ghetto who would your parents tell you to be more wary of? Black guys most probably.
They don't even have to tell them. When they go in an elevator and they see the black ladies clutch their handbags tightly whenever a young black guy enters. Then when it's a white guy instead and the ladies don't seem to do the same thing, what do the kids learn?
I'm racist, but I'm also biased against lions. If I see a lion on the street, I'm going to perceive it as a threat. So what if the lion is actually not dangerous, I'm not going to bother finding out.
If I see an elderly black lady on the street, I'm not going to run away from her, I might even give her a hand if she needs help carrying her groceries.
But when I play an MMORPG and decide to help people, I don't actually take looks into consideration - I consider their level (I tend to help low levels), and how potentially annoying they might be - I tend to avoid helping people who whine a lot e.g. "Will someone please help me, this game sucks nobody helps". I don't even consider gender - a large proportion of the "females" are guys anyway. In fact I usually don't even see how they look before I decide to add them to my team - with Guild Wars, you just past their name in and click add, or accept their invite.
In my experience random humans looking for help with the game are usually less competent than the computer/game controlled NPC henchmen (that's why they're looking for help - most missions are quite easy).
Lastly, I find chinese/japanese/korean/taiwanese women more attractive (I don't know what race you'd call that look - oriental?). So yeah I'm racist:).
Usually there are logs, so you can read them after the reboot. If there are no logs, being able to ssh in isn't such a big help - not many people can look at what's left in the RAM, figure out what happen and then fix stuff.
The best thing about being able to ssh in is you can do a clean shutdown. But now some distros do a clean shutdown if you press the power button, so that's even more convenient.
Say the video driver is buggy - how would a normal user fix things? If the system is fully updated, and the video driver is still buggy, what are the odds they wouuld be able to fix the video driver?
In practice they'll have to either change the video card or the O/S.
For example: "Darn thing doesn't work, ok switch to XP, hmm seems to work now" - this could be the solution whether it was Vista or Ubuntu.
For me being able to ssh in was useful, because I run vmware server, so I'd run a script to suspend all the virtual machines, and then shutdown. After the reboot I can resume the virtual machines and most of the sessions in the VMs will be OK - most of the apps will be restored - some network stuff might break if you don't restart in time and they timeout.
I suspect the Windows XP virtual machine I had might have had better uptimes than the opensuse box they were hosted on;).
BTW Firefox on that opensuse box often used more memory than an entire XP virtual machine (which was running a fair number of IE instances, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Skype windows amongst other things). Yeah firefox 1.x and 2.x were crap.
That's what the Unix people like to say all the time, but it's not very helpful.
AFAIK for Desktop users there's very little difference between rebooting and restarting X.
They lose all their unsaved work - since most of it is still in apps in X. And the last I checked if you restart X, the apps die. I'd love to be proven wrong on this.
Sure it's not a big problem for people who just use X as an interface to ssh and screen, and for some browsing. But I heard there's this push for "Desktop".
In the old days Windows 95 ran on MSDOS, if it hung, even if you could get it to exit to dos and then you type win to start it back up, it's still not very helpful to most people.
Sure, but the CEO makes money by cutting costs and doing things just like other companies.
And when stuff goes poof, the CEO gets a golden parachute, and writes a nice goodbye letter to the company staff.
Of course people then say, "See that's why a good CEO is worth $$$$$$$$", yes that's true, the funny thing is companies keep paying bad CEOs a lot too rather than have stuff like a "probation period" or having the $$$$ linked to what happens to the company 3 years later.
Anyway, they have to try to bail it out to prevent other stuff from blowing up. It is actually not such a bad idea (of course it'll be good for me if they didn't - since I'm waiting for a "Big Sale" on the entire stockmarket).
However you should see the hypocrisy - in the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, people like the IMF[1] (and other "Experts") were saying that Governments shouldn't be doing bail outs and instead they should allow the insolvent banks and financial institutions to fail. So were they incompetent or evil?
"It's got a master process that's watching over everything else. The processes are also running at multiple different privilege levels. This may not be something that's absolutely new, but it does show innovation"
Operating Systems do that all the time. Why do you think Microsoft sees Google as a threat? They don't see chrome as "just a browser", they see it as competition for Windows.
Anyway, forking is a good thing and sandboxing even better- using "classic" threads is insane when you're talking about running random 3rd party stuff. There are only a few people in the world who can do threads without bugs.
If your browser design assumes that the coders making apps for the "Browser O/S" are going to get it right, it's not going to last very long.
It's not so good if you need someone else to look at your screen. But I suppose you could just "virtual-telepathically" send them a screenshot or url to a live stream from your "personal server" to their personal server.
The difference between software engineering and other engineering.
With software, management sells the plastic models to the customer as version 1.0.
This is partly because the plastic models cost as much to make as the "real thing".
Most people do not understand that "make all" in a software project is the equivalent of the "build phase" in a civil engineering project. And that's why most people don't know how to manage software projects.
Maybe you're a really good coder and can handle all the issues related to threading.
However the browser you write won't just be running your own code. It will be running code written by Adobe, Facebook 3rd party apps, and so on.
Given that, it's wiser to design your browser to use processes, so if you or somebody else screws up, the offending tab can be killed without affecting the other tabs, and also the memory used gets freed up (this is quite important given the large amounts of memory a tab can use nowadays).
You could in theory have your browser threaded, but use processes for the plugins, javascript and future junk^H^H^H^Hfeatures the W3C comes up with, but at that point how much do you really gain?
Why do you think Microsoft sees Google as the enemy? They are right. Google have just launched a new "operating system".
It's wise for Google's "operating system" aka browser to have process isolation, so that it is harder for one misbehaving instance to take down the rest.
The last time I used Firefox it regularly used more than 1GB of RAM and leaked memory.
And because Firefox used one process, you could not get rid of the "offending" browser instance and still keep the other tabs and windows around. In order to free up the leaked memory you had to close ALL browser windows.
Ironically unlike IE, you cannot easily launch separate instances of firefox - it insists on running in a single process (you'll have to create multiple accounts etc).
With IE, if your facebook instance is sucking up huge amounts of memory, just close it, and you get the memory back. The other IE instances do not have to be closed.
The firefox devs should have been humble enough to admit they can't manage memory, and so design their browser to allow separate processes to run.
IIRC there have already been fatalities from salvage people cutting into the wrong stuff.
Most salvage people know better than to cut into a fuel tank without taking precautions. But word might not have gone out about salvaging hybrid or electric cars safely.
Batteries can similarly store a lot more energy than you want going through your body parts in less than a second. And the thing about electricity is it can be transported to potentially surprising places.
"especially if their favorite Party gets another four years in office."
Assuming you're in the USA - I thought you had some sort of democracy?
Or is it that badly diebolded?
Assuming a nondiebolded election, the parties are in because the voters voted for them. Whether you like the results or not, it sure seems like democracy at work here.
I bet that if more than 5% of the voters voted for some other party, the "Two Favourite Parties" would start to notice, and if that figure kept increasing with each election, they'd start changing their ways.
As it is, there is no reason for the two parties to change much - between them they represent 99% of the voting population - just look at this:
If I made a fighter spacecraft or aircraft, I would also use audio to convey information.
If a fake sound helped identify the type of craft, I'd use it.
If a fake doppler sound effect rapidly helped convey that something is approaching (whenever fake sound is played it ascends in pitch) or leaving (descends in pitch), then I'd use that too.
I'd make a fighter spacecraft be able to shoot in almost any direction - in a vacuum you can shoot stuff sideways or backwards without the atmosphere causing "inconvenience".
BTW, I've always thought it might be interesting to have network equipment make sounds that are correlated to what they are doing - via say network monitoring software. Then a sysadmin could get used to a "normal baseline sound", and one day maybe the sysadmin might just detect that something is not quite right, way before things go belly up, and before the conventional warnings come in.
That child labour thing always comes up. But where's the evidence there's that much child labour?
I hear that minimum wage in the USA is not far below 8 USD per hour.
That's what many mid ("have used source control") programmers and engineers get in cheap countries - and they're not children (even if they behave like them sometimes;) ).
The minimum wage in Australia is about 14 AUD per hour, and that's a LOT in a cheap country. A typical cost of a decent lunch (meat, vege, carbs) in a cheap country can be less than AUD2.00 or USD1.50 (and that's _eating_out_). In some places even cheaper if you go without the meat: http://www.gonomad.com/traveltalesfromindia/2006/01/how-far-100-rupee-note-will-go.html
You can use google to convert the figures to USD. e.g.
130000000 rupiah in usd 70000 myr in usd
Go look for countries where your stuff is made then google for salary guide, and do some comparisons. You can also google for lunch followed by the currency of the country and you can get more comparison info.
BTW CEOs in Japan don't really make that much, and the popular stereotype is they're expected to commit suicide if they make a really serious mistake, rather than get USD20 million and a job in another company;).
Look beyond the media hype about child labour. Do some searching and get a better picture of the world.
The thing about running a public company - if most shareholders think short term, they will kick you out if you start thinking long term and you don't hold most of the shares.
If you hold enough shares, they'll still try to kick you out - minority interests etc.
The big problem is the long term is not clear either - how can you build computers in the USA and still be competitive in the long term? Where is the country heading?
So if you're the CEO the easiest thing to do is "slash and burn" and take the golden parachute if you're caught holding the parcel when the music stops.
Just recently I opened up slashdot with a browser instance that had javascript enabled, and it took ages to load the frontpage for the first time.
And I was really surprised. So surprised that I tried loading it with my normal browser, and it loaded up quickly.
When I did a tcpdump, there were pages and pages of javascript flowing by. Finally after a long wait the page loaded. After that, it loaded up quickly again - caching?
But now when I just tried again it's still taking ages - more than 20 seconds.
A page like slashdot should load up reasonably fast (and does when I have javascript disabled).
If/var/log fills up a 143GB drive before you notice it, the server can't be that important - since nothing and nobody is monitoring it.
Nowadays for most systems (server or desktops) I just have 80MB/boot, 256MB of swap and the rest is for /
I prefer a small 256MB swap because I'd rather run out of memory fast than waste time trying to ssh in and kill stuff while the machine runs from the hard drive page by page. Adjust the vm overcommit accordingly.
Ah cool, so what happens if the libertarians get their wish and you have a small (and still corrupt) government but huge companies running the USA, and the huge companies then decide that there is no free speech in the areas they control, which is "everywhere".
Then the bad stuff happening won't be against the Constitution anymore, since it won't ever be the Government doing it.
You might be sensitive to some of the chemicals your body breaks aspartame down to.
From wikipedia: "Upon ingestion, aspartame breaks down into several residual chemicals, including aspartic acid, phenylalanine, methanol".
You could do a test for yourself to see whether it's psychological. Cover up all the cans with some paper so you can't tell them apart. Mix them up, then number/label them. Drink them as normal but keep the empty cans intact, record the symptoms or effects and the label. Once you're done with all of them (and only then, not before), remove the paper from all the cans and see if there is a correlation. If you're really sensitive to it and you're not doing this as a scientific study, you may not need to drink that many cans to prove stuff to yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_2919.shtml
http://www.newsnet14.com/2007/01/black-doll-white-doll-same-study-different-generation-same-results/
That said, if you were a black kid living in a ghetto who would your parents tell you to be more wary of? Black guys most probably.
They don't even have to tell them. When they go in an elevator and they see the black ladies clutch their handbags tightly whenever a young black guy enters. Then when it's a white guy instead and the ladies don't seem to do the same thing, what do the kids learn?
I'm racist, but I'm also biased against lions. If I see a lion on the street, I'm going to perceive it as a threat. So what if the lion is actually not dangerous, I'm not going to bother finding out.
If I see an elderly black lady on the street, I'm not going to run away from her, I might even give her a hand if she needs help carrying her groceries.
But when I play an MMORPG and decide to help people, I don't actually take looks into consideration - I consider their level (I tend to help low levels), and how potentially annoying they might be - I tend to avoid helping people who whine a lot e.g. "Will someone please help me, this game sucks nobody helps". I don't even consider gender - a large proportion of the "females" are guys anyway. In fact I usually don't even see how they look before I decide to add them to my team - with Guild Wars, you just past their name in and click add, or accept their invite.
In my experience random humans looking for help with the game are usually less competent than the computer/game controlled NPC henchmen (that's why they're looking for help - most missions are quite easy).
Lastly, I find chinese/japanese/korean/taiwanese women more attractive (I don't know what race you'd call that look - oriental?). So yeah I'm racist :).
Usually there are logs, so you can read them after the reboot. If there are no logs, being able to ssh in isn't such a big help - not many people can look at what's left in the RAM, figure out what happen and then fix stuff.
;).
The best thing about being able to ssh in is you can do a clean shutdown. But now some distros do a clean shutdown if you press the power button, so that's even more convenient.
Say the video driver is buggy - how would a normal user fix things? If the system is fully updated, and the video driver is still buggy, what are the odds they wouuld be able to fix the video driver?
In practice they'll have to either change the video card or the O/S.
For example: "Darn thing doesn't work, ok switch to XP, hmm seems to work now" - this could be the solution whether it was Vista or Ubuntu.
For me being able to ssh in was useful, because I run vmware server, so I'd run a script to suspend all the virtual machines, and then shutdown. After the reboot I can resume the virtual machines and most of the sessions in the VMs will be OK - most of the apps will be restored - some network stuff might break if you don't restart in time and they timeout.
I suspect the Windows XP virtual machine I had might have had better uptimes than the opensuse box they were hosted on
BTW Firefox on that opensuse box often used more memory than an entire XP virtual machine (which was running a fair number of IE instances, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Skype windows amongst other things). Yeah firefox 1.x and 2.x were crap.
That's what the Unix people like to say all the time, but it's not very helpful.
AFAIK for Desktop users there's very little difference between rebooting and restarting X.
They lose all their unsaved work - since most of it is still in apps in X. And the last I checked if you restart X, the apps die. I'd love to be proven wrong on this.
Sure it's not a big problem for people who just use X as an interface to ssh and screen, and for some browsing. But I heard there's this push for "Desktop".
In the old days Windows 95 ran on MSDOS, if it hung, even if you could get it to exit to dos and then you type win to start it back up, it's still not very helpful to most people.
Sure, but the CEO makes money by cutting costs and doing things just like other companies.
And when stuff goes poof, the CEO gets a golden parachute, and writes a nice goodbye letter to the company staff.
Of course people then say, "See that's why a good CEO is worth $$$$$$$$", yes that's true, the funny thing is companies keep paying bad CEOs a lot too rather than have stuff like a "probation period" or having the $$$$ linked to what happens to the company 3 years later.
Whose money they are using to bail it out?
Who voted Bush in twice?
Stupid people losing money ;).
Anyway, they have to try to bail it out to prevent other stuff from blowing up. It is actually not such a bad idea (of course it'll be good for me if they didn't - since I'm waiting for a "Big Sale" on the entire stockmarket).
However you should see the hypocrisy - in the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, people like the IMF[1] (and other "Experts") were saying that Governments shouldn't be doing bail outs and instead they should allow the insolvent banks and financial institutions to fail. So were they incompetent or evil?
Go figure.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_financial_crisis#IMF_role
"It's got a master process that's watching over everything else. The processes are also running at multiple different privilege levels. This may not be something that's absolutely new, but it does show innovation"
Operating Systems do that all the time. Why do you think Microsoft sees Google as a threat? They don't see chrome as "just a browser", they see it as competition for Windows.
Anyway, forking is a good thing and sandboxing even better- using "classic" threads is insane when you're talking about running random 3rd party stuff. There are only a few people in the world who can do threads without bugs.
If your browser design assumes that the coders making apps for the "Browser O/S" are going to get it right, it's not going to last very long.
Mainstream cooperative multitasking is so 1980s.
Just have the display in your brain. Sensory prosthetics.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp_pr.html
It's not so good if you need someone else to look at your screen. But I suppose you could just "virtual-telepathically" send them a screenshot or url to a live stream from your "personal server" to their personal server.
The difference between software engineering and other engineering.
With software, management sells the plastic models to the customer as version 1.0.
This is partly because the plastic models cost as much to make as the "real thing".
Most people do not understand that "make all" in a software project is the equivalent of the "build phase" in a civil engineering project. And that's why most people don't know how to manage software projects.
"You say that you have enjoyed my stories for years. Why did you wait until you disliked one story before writing to me?'"
Because if you're a good writer, you might have pleased millions.
And if millions of people write to you, it could make the postman unhappy (and other people too).
There's already a good way to show appreciation - via the writer's bank account.
That said, do write an appreciation letter if it's for something exceptional (or your letter is going to be something worth reading).
But millions of letters just saying "I liked your latest book" might get a bit tiresome (or worse think star trek fan vs Shatner ala SNL ).
Maybe you're a really good coder and can handle all the issues related to threading.
However the browser you write won't just be running your own code. It will be running code written by Adobe, Facebook 3rd party apps, and so on.
Given that, it's wiser to design your browser to use processes, so if you or somebody else screws up, the offending tab can be killed without affecting the other tabs, and also the memory used gets freed up (this is quite important given the large amounts of memory a tab can use nowadays).
You could in theory have your browser threaded, but use processes for the plugins, javascript and future junk^H^H^H^Hfeatures the W3C comes up with, but at that point how much do you really gain?
Why do you think Microsoft sees Google as the enemy? They are right. Google have just launched a new "operating system".
It's wise for Google's "operating system" aka browser to have process isolation, so that it is harder for one misbehaving instance to take down the rest.
Cooperative multitasking is so 1980s.
"Until then Firefox should hang around"
In my experience too much of it hangs around.
The last time I used Firefox it regularly used more than 1GB of RAM and leaked memory.
And because Firefox used one process, you could not get rid of the "offending" browser instance and still keep the other tabs and windows around. In order to free up the leaked memory you had to close ALL browser windows.
Ironically unlike IE, you cannot easily launch separate instances of firefox - it insists on running in a single process (you'll have to create multiple accounts etc).
With IE, if your facebook instance is sucking up huge amounts of memory, just close it, and you get the memory back. The other IE instances do not have to be closed.
The firefox devs should have been humble enough to admit they can't manage memory, and so design their browser to allow separate processes to run.
IIRC there have already been fatalities from salvage people cutting into the wrong stuff.
Most salvage people know better than to cut into a fuel tank without taking precautions. But word might not have gone out about salvaging hybrid or electric cars safely.
Batteries can similarly store a lot more energy than you want going through your body parts in less than a second. And the thing about electricity is it can be transported to potentially surprising places.
No time to investigate 4000 take down notices from one organization?
No time to "not be evil".
They didn't just take videos down, they suspended accounts based on complaints from a fictitious organization.
They've allegedly got many geniuses working for them.
Go figure.
Maybe they do reboot it once a day.
It's only a stock exchange after all, not a 24/7 online casino system.
You use more energy if you're learning something.
I got it from google :)
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=381608
Too lazy to use more energy looking for better answers ;).
"especially if their favorite Party gets another four years in office."
Assuming you're in the USA - I thought you had some sort of democracy?
Or is it that badly diebolded?
Assuming a nondiebolded election, the parties are in because the voters voted for them. Whether you like the results or not, it sure seems like democracy at work here.
I bet that if more than 5% of the voters voted for some other party, the "Two Favourite Parties" would start to notice, and if that figure kept increasing with each election, they'd start changing their ways.
As it is, there is no reason for the two parties to change much - between them they represent 99% of the voting population - just look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2004
The people have got what they voted for. If they don't like it, then they should stop voting that way.
If I made a fighter spacecraft or aircraft, I would also use audio to convey information.
If a fake sound helped identify the type of craft, I'd use it.
If a fake doppler sound effect rapidly helped convey that something is approaching (whenever fake sound is played it ascends in pitch) or leaving (descends in pitch), then I'd use that too.
I'd make a fighter spacecraft be able to shoot in almost any direction - in a vacuum you can shoot stuff sideways or backwards without the atmosphere causing "inconvenience".
BTW, I've always thought it might be interesting to have network equipment make sounds that are correlated to what they are doing - via say network monitoring software. Then a sysadmin could get used to a "normal baseline sound", and one day maybe the sysadmin might just detect that something is not quite right, way before things go belly up, and before the conventional warnings come in.
That child labour thing always comes up. But where's the evidence there's that much child labour?
I hear that minimum wage in the USA is not far below 8 USD per hour.
That's what many mid ("have used source control") programmers and engineers get in cheap countries - and they're not children (even if they behave like them sometimes ;) ).
The minimum wage in Australia is about 14 AUD per hour, and that's a LOT in a cheap country. A typical cost of a decent lunch (meat, vege, carbs) in a cheap country can be less than AUD2.00 or USD1.50 (and that's _eating_out_). In some places even cheaper if you go without the meat: http://www.gonomad.com/traveltalesfromindia/2006/01/how-far-100-rupee-note-will-go.html
Other costs like rent may not be high either.
Go look at this (from some googling):
http://www.bticonsultants.com/res/previous/sg/bti/en/document_center/btiasiasalaryguide.pdf?ObjectID=97810&ViewMode=0&PreviewState=0
You can use google to convert the figures to USD. e.g.
130000000 rupiah in usd
70000 myr in usd
Go look for countries where your stuff is made then google for salary guide, and do some comparisons. You can also google for lunch followed by the currency of the country and you can get more comparison info.
BTW CEOs in Japan don't really make that much, and the popular stereotype is they're expected to commit suicide if they make a really serious mistake, rather than get USD20 million and a job in another company ;).
Look beyond the media hype about child labour. Do some searching and get a better picture of the world.
The thing about running a public company - if most shareholders think short term, they will kick you out if you start thinking long term and you don't hold most of the shares.
;) )
If you hold enough shares, they'll still try to kick you out - minority interests etc.
The big problem is the long term is not clear either - how can you build computers in the USA and still be competitive in the long term? Where is the country heading?
So if you're the CEO the easiest thing to do is "slash and burn" and take the golden parachute if you're caught holding the parcel when the music stops.
Seems the rats are leaving the ship.
(Have I got enough metaphors in there yet?
Just recently I opened up slashdot with a browser instance that had javascript enabled, and it took ages to load the frontpage for the first time.
And I was really surprised. So surprised that I tried loading it with my normal browser, and it loaded up quickly.
When I did a tcpdump, there were pages and pages of javascript flowing by. Finally after a long wait the page loaded. After that, it loaded up quickly again - caching?
But now when I just tried again it's still taking ages - more than 20 seconds.
A page like slashdot should load up reasonably fast (and does when I have javascript disabled).
If /var/log fills up a 143GB drive before you notice it, the server can't be that important - since nothing and nobody is monitoring it.
/boot, 256MB of swap and the rest is for /
Nowadays for most systems (server or desktops) I just have 80MB
I prefer a small 256MB swap because I'd rather run out of memory fast than waste time trying to ssh in and kill stuff while the machine runs from the hard drive page by page. Adjust the vm overcommit accordingly.
So let me get this right, Natalie Portman would be petrified in your parents' basement?
Ah cool, so what happens if the libertarians get their wish and you have a small (and still corrupt) government but huge companies running the USA, and the huge companies then decide that there is no free speech in the areas they control, which is "everywhere".
Then the bad stuff happening won't be against the Constitution anymore, since it won't ever be the Government doing it.
That's news to me that they didn't mandate English, why would they be _backing_off_ plans to _suspend_ players who cannot speak English well enough:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hUbJhKCLRQv6DieBfbsOW7E6Q4NgD930RPNO1
Regarding sponsors, some have already made some negative noises about the LPGA's recent idiocy (almost seems like bigotry).
It'll be funny if a mute pro golf player sues the LPGA.
What next? You have to speak Japanese in order to play in Japan, and Korean to play in Korea?
With bright ideas like that, one wonders about the real reasons why the LPGA isn't doing as well as the PGA.
You might be sensitive to some of the chemicals your body breaks aspartame down to.
From wikipedia: "Upon ingestion, aspartame breaks down into several residual chemicals, including aspartic acid, phenylalanine, methanol".
You could do a test for yourself to see whether it's psychological. Cover up all the cans with some paper so you can't tell them apart. Mix them up, then number/label them. Drink them as normal but keep the empty cans intact, record the symptoms or effects and the label. Once you're done with all of them (and only then, not before), remove the paper from all the cans and see if there is a correlation. If you're really sensitive to it and you're not doing this as a scientific study, you may not need to drink that many cans to prove stuff to yourself.