It shows how much of specialists they are and how detached from the real world they are (no surprise it took them ages before accepting that something like CK's stuff would be helpful). Linux devs should find out how their operating systems are used some time. I suppose that's why most people use distros.
It should pretty much be standard practice to mount filesystems noatime (and nodiratime,barrier=1 on ext3). Most sane distros have the noatime option even in their install GUI/UIs, it's not like some "new fangled" stuff like barrier=1 (which tries to make sure that data is actually flushed to nonvolatile storage on syncs, and not just the drive's volatile buffers).
Heh, and to quote Ingo: "So for most file workloads we give Windows a 20%-30% performance edge, for almost nothing".
Ingo even thinks they give Windows a performance advantage because of atime when Windows actually does something like atime. The few people who know how to set up windows systems (call them oxymorons if you want;) ) disable atime on windows too:
That said, reltime sounds vaguely interesting from an academic POV but there are bigger fish to fry. Most people who care about performance should just disable atime.
Most apps including email should NOT use atime - at _worst_ they should use "modified time" (and even then use something else if possible). Atime is more for forensics not for apps (after all the app can't tell if it's some random user/app who tried to accessed the file, so what's the point?), and nowadays if someone's got unauthorized access to your system, whether you have atime on or not doesn't make a big difference at all.
Archaelogists find ancient texts useful for getting a better picture of the ancient past. Even if they don't believe 100% of what is written in those texts, or the picture is incomplete/biased (after all most ancient rulers preferred to record their victories and leave out their defeats).
While LoTR may help scientists studying Tolkien's time and work, it doesn't go back quite as far.
Yeah I find it really funny that they're all arguing about the (IMO) small problems with various systems while the elections get Diebolded.
Even randomly picking a system from Wikipedia would be better than picking a Diebold system.
Politicians already buy votes with the voters money (they even use money of voters who won't ever vote for them), so why's it such a big problem if people could sell their votes?
It's not a good thing, but there are bigger problems to fix first.
"how many of people who go hungry to bed every night are in modern capitalist societies"
I dunno, those fat people seem to be always hungry;). Maybe you should: s/bed/fridge/
As for life expectancy, it's not unusual for both mother and child to die in the old days, and that sure brings the average expectancy down a LOT.
If you exclude that, I'd say we've only improved expectancy by about a decade. After all the Bible states 70 years normal expectancy with a max of 120, and it was written ages ago.
The medical care nowadays is a lot better, the infrastructure stuff like sewage, piped water, electricity and roads/rail thing is great. And there are lots more toys. And it's hard to beat hot water on demand and easy "climate control".
1) Usually in practice you don't have to pick the fastest horse. You want fast ones, and you don't want lame ones. 2) If you can't tell which horses are faster even after a few months, you should be doing other stuff. 3) The trouble is many companies put people who don't know which horses are faster (even after _years_) in charge of horse picking, and Horse Racing.
"Now, how a company with 20.000 employees can expect its average employee to be anything but... average?"
You don't need to fill the company with good people. You put the good humans where a good human makes a big difference, and it is critical that you have those where they are.
The average humans can do other stuff. Just like in the military;).
"it must rely on good proceses and strategies, not on above average people"
While I know you're not saying good processes and strategies are sufficient, and I agree that they are important, whenever I see the process word I just have to say:
"Many scientists believe given a sufficiently good process you will get AI".
Corollary:
"Since we don't have AI yet, our processes aren't sufficiently good and we still need humans to do some work".
You add good people and you get the good processes for free. Whereas if you just get a good process from a consultant...:p
Actually, the main problem is most companies don't know how to find people who know how to pick the fastest horses:).
The founders of a good small company might know how to pick the fastest horses, but the company cannot grow AND remain good, if the founders can't find people who can pick good people.
Don't get me wrong, but you totally miss my point. Women (and men) might as well be in more lucrative fields today. All the people encouraging those women to go into IT are doing a disservice to them.
As I said: Carly Fiorina didn't have a single IT degree, didn't do any IT, all she did was "Slash & Burn CEOing", and it got her far.
There is no point encouraging women to go to IT or stay in IT, it's not the best thing out there. Women should get out of IT if they aren't really interested, there are plenty of other fields where you can be _mediocre_ and do well (or even be incompetent and do well).
A lot of men (and a few women) are in IT _despite_ all the minuses because they are interested.
Now if you (male or female) were in a 3rd world developing country (like me), then sure go into IT, because you can easily undercut the "rich people in the West" and it's more comfortable than farming and pays better than assembly line work. But even women here prefer other jobs, and even here there ARE other jobs.
Remember: a LOT of IT jobs can be done elsewhere (other than those that require local physical presence). So if you're in a rich country only go into IT if you're interested - because you need to be interested to be at least in the top 10%, where people will pay your rates because you ARE BETTER, magnitudes better than random crap in Elbonia (or here:) ).
I can confidently say that I'm a lot better in IT stuff than some half-interested person in the USA, and more than 50% cheaper. I bet I even spell better:).
Yes, but if the documents are in a decent safe that's bolted to the floor, why waste time? Best to just steal it from some website.
Unless you are someone extraordinary, your IDs are worth much more to you than to the thief. And typically if your IDs were stolen it could trouble you for a lot longer than if your cash was.
Whereas your money would be worth about the same to the thief (if not more - after all that's why he's going about stealing), and maybe even partly covered by insurance, less hassle to replace.
Uh, I've seen a recording where he doesn't sound so stupid and that's when he didn't know his microphone was on[1].
If you guys think he's stupid, go figure out how he got re-elected.
Maybe because most voters in the US prefer to vote for people who seem to be like them.
e.g. stupid?
Note: I didn't say most people in the US, I meant active voters. Then again maybe the election was Diebolded, but hey if it was, who got punished for that?
Why should women be encouraged to work in a field where jobs keep getting outsourced to Elbonia or whichever random country the bosses think of next?
Because women are more willing to settle for lower salaries? While that's a _fact_ (go google for it), lower salaries, strange hours, higher chances of being outsourced are not helpful to women (or men anyway).
So to the women out there, only go into IT if you are really interested (or you get a great offer) - it's not the worst career path but it's not that great a career path for people who aren't that interested.
Go into Law, Management or something else if you're not.
After all look how well Carly Fiorina did - she got a golden handshake for screwing up HP. No IT degree needed- BA in philosophy and medieval history, MBA in marketing, SM in management.
I think she did very well (for herself) for either being incompetent or not interested in the long term success of HP. Whatever it was I don't think she was really interested in IT.
I would be happy if more women were in IT, but is it really in their interests?
(like mailmerge but for webserver config files:) )
After all who wants to click on GUI screens for each of the 100 servers? Or hire a temporary team of 5 people to do 20 servers each?
But what if it's 1000 servers? No difference the CLI way. If it's 10000 or more servers, you'd probably split the servers.txt file to multiple pieces and run the deploy on more than one machine.
Heh but you'd probably still want to do it in phases otherwise you get to mess up > 10000 machines at a go;).
If you have extra time and resources (haha) you could have someone make a GUI that helps you make those config files.
But whatever it is, stay away from that "registry" stuff which even Microsoft appears to be moving away from nowadays.
Sure, GUI is better for some stuff, but the popular desktop GUIs out there are appear to be designed _only_ for naive or ignorant people, and hardly have any features for augmenting the abilities of trained/experienced skilled people (they are either slow and laggy, or lack features - you might as well use cli or the screen program).
For an idea of how GUIs could augment the abilities of skilled people you'd have to look at UIs of some games - with decent UIs skilled human players can perform and sustain very many actions per second. They're probably not even near optimum, but they're an _example_ of why I think desktop GUIs have a long way to go. Microsoft Windows actually does do some stuff that I like - user can _easily_ customize the _classic_ start menu so you can easily launch stuff with keystrokes (just name files and folders in the start menu appropriately and winkey followed by the appropriate letter/number will launch/open it), can also put apps/shortcuts in the "Send To" folder.
Pity we haven't progressed very much since Douglas Engelbart's demo in 1968. And hardly anyone seems to notice the lack of actual progress. They just go wow over stupid and useless stuff like wobbly windows, "transparency" and that stupid show windows/apps sideways so you can select from them (sure doesn't work well if you have 100 windows running, how about we actually work on augmenting human ability again?).
How about diamond plated pans? Diamond has very good thermal conductivity and if done right the surface will have a low coefficient of friction.
And how about an oven that can behave like a "thermos flask" instead of heating your kitchen[1]. Set the temperature you want, it should get there quick and stays there.
I'm sure we can use heat pipe and phase change technology somewhere.:)
[1] More efficient to use a heat pump for heating your kitchen. Dump the heat from the thermos oven slowly after you are done with the cooking, or save it for the next meal.
Nobody wondered about the eggs? I don't think he was the first to discover it.
After all even Jules Verne mentioned it a long time ago: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/v/verne/jules /v52oc/chapter7.html
quote: Instead of 100 degrees, the instrument registered only 66 degrees. "Take my advice, Ben Zoof," he said; "leave your eggs in the saucepan a good quarter of an hour."
"Boil them hard! That will never do," objected the orderly.
"You will not find them hard, my good fellow. Trust me, we shall be able to dip our sippets into the yolks easily enough." End quote.
As for liquid nitrogen ice cream I think that's been known for a while too.
Lastly liquid nitrogen is dangerous, a few reasons I can think of: 1) It can freeze bits of your body solid (and those bits can break off) 2) Though it is not poisonous, when the liquid nitrogen turns to gas, if you are in an enclosed area, it can fill the area you are in - you won't stay alive long just breathing nitrogen, or the percentage of oxygen in the air could be too low (or the partial pressure anyway). 3) It can make other stuff brittle and shatter them unexpectedly, or cause stuff to blow up (water expands when frozen, so go think of the possibilities).
I'm a slashdotter you insensitive clod. Of course I'd be in the house. In the basement too, stuffing my face with pizza, emailing old korean people "In Soviet Russia" jokes while watching Natalie Portman movies.
It's not like I'd have other things to do;).
Actually, might be better to get comprehensive insurance, and put nonreplaceable valuables in a good safe (backups, passports, certs etc) - mark it "No cash in here - documents only".
Yeah, I'd rather be mugged and lose my wallet etc to some guy with a knife who knows I'm likely to unarmed, than to be shot from behind. I'd partly consider the mugging a tax for having crap cops and no socialist style safety net where I live.
The reason why you don't always get shootings is because the cops still have a chance of getting the culprit and they may put the culprit on the top of their "Todo" list.
With lots of guns around things are a lot worse if the law enforcement breaks down, so you better be sure it doesn't ever break down.
In South Africa I think the crooks actually do what you say - just shoot you. Apparently in Johannesberg it's recommended that you don't stop your car for long at traffic lights/junctions at night - just move ASAP and keep moving.
You do lose a lot if you end up in a society where everyone just shoots strangers first, but the gun nuts don't seem to understand it. But anyway it's too late for the USA - they have guns everywhere already and large bunch of people willing to shoot each other for stupid reasons. No easy solution to that.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course. No Original Research ;).
It shows how much of specialists they are and how detached from the real world they are (no surprise it took them ages before accepting that something like CK's stuff would be helpful). Linux devs should find out how their operating systems are used some time. I suppose that's why most people use distros.
;) ) disable atime on windows too:
o ws2000serv/reskit/regentry/46656.mspx?mfr=true
It should pretty much be standard practice to mount filesystems noatime (and nodiratime,barrier=1 on ext3). Most sane distros have the noatime option even in their install GUI/UIs, it's not like some "new fangled" stuff like barrier=1 (which tries to make sure that data is actually flushed to nonvolatile storage on syncs, and not just the drive's volatile buffers).
Heh, and to quote Ingo: "So for most file workloads we give Windows a 20%-30% performance edge, for almost nothing".
Ingo even thinks they give Windows a performance advantage because of atime when Windows actually does something like atime. The few people who know how to set up windows systems (call them oxymorons if you want
See: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/wind
Search for NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate for more.
That said, reltime sounds vaguely interesting from an academic POV but there are bigger fish to fry. Most people who care about performance should just disable atime.
Most apps including email should NOT use atime - at _worst_ they should use "modified time" (and even then use something else if possible). Atime is more for forensics not for apps (after all the app can't tell if it's some random user/app who tried to accessed the file, so what's the point?), and nowadays if someone's got unauthorized access to your system, whether you have atime on or not doesn't make a big difference at all.
Archaelogists find ancient texts useful for getting a better picture of the ancient past. Even if they don't believe 100% of what is written in those texts, or the picture is incomplete/biased (after all most ancient rulers preferred to record their victories and leave out their defeats).
While LoTR may help scientists studying Tolkien's time and work, it doesn't go back quite as far.
p.s. Your bias is showing.
Yeah I find it really funny that they're all arguing about the (IMO) small problems with various systems while the elections get Diebolded.
Even randomly picking a system from Wikipedia would be better than picking a Diebold system.
Politicians already buy votes with the voters money (they even use money of voters who won't ever vote for them), so why's it such a big problem if people could sell their votes?
It's not a good thing, but there are bigger problems to fix first.
If buying a vote is illegal in USA but selling isn't, people from other countries could buy the votes.
"how many of people who go hungry to bed every night are in modern capitalist societies"
;). Maybe you should: s/bed/fridge/
I dunno, those fat people seem to be always hungry
As for life expectancy, it's not unusual for both mother and child to die in the old days, and that sure brings the average expectancy down a LOT.
If you exclude that, I'd say we've only improved expectancy by about a decade. After all the Bible states 70 years normal expectancy with a max of 120, and it was written ages ago.
The medical care nowadays is a lot better, the infrastructure stuff like sewage, piped water, electricity and roads/rail thing is great. And there are lots more toys. And it's hard to beat hot water on demand and easy "climate control".
The reason why that doesn't happen is because of STDs, and there's a limit to how many children most people can sustainably bring to adulthood.
1) Usually in practice you don't have to pick the fastest horse. You want fast ones, and you don't want lame ones.
;).
:p
2) If you can't tell which horses are faster even after a few months, you should be doing other stuff.
3) The trouble is many companies put people who don't know which horses are faster (even after _years_) in charge of horse picking, and Horse Racing.
"Now, how a company with 20.000 employees can expect its average employee to be anything but... average?"
You don't need to fill the company with good people. You put the good humans where a good human makes a big difference, and it is critical that you have those where they are.
The average humans can do other stuff. Just like in the military
"it must rely on good proceses and strategies, not on above average people"
While I know you're not saying good processes and strategies are sufficient, and I agree that they are important, whenever I see the process word I just have to say:
"Many scientists believe given a sufficiently good process you will get AI".
Corollary:
"Since we don't have AI yet, our processes aren't sufficiently good and we still need humans to do some work".
You add good people and you get the good processes for free. Whereas if you just get a good process from a consultant...
Actually, the main problem is most companies don't know how to find people who know how to pick the fastest horses :).
The founders of a good small company might know how to pick the fastest horses, but the company cannot grow AND remain good, if the founders can't find people who can pick good people.
Don't get me wrong, but you totally miss my point. Women (and men) might as well be in more lucrative fields today. All the people encouraging those women to go into IT are doing a disservice to them.
:) ).
:).
As I said: Carly Fiorina didn't have a single IT degree, didn't do any IT, all she did was "Slash & Burn CEOing", and it got her far.
There is no point encouraging women to go to IT or stay in IT, it's not the best thing out there. Women should get out of IT if they aren't really interested, there are plenty of other fields where you can be _mediocre_ and do well (or even be incompetent and do well).
A lot of men (and a few women) are in IT _despite_ all the minuses because they are interested.
Now if you (male or female) were in a 3rd world developing country (like me), then sure go into IT, because you can easily undercut the "rich people in the West" and it's more comfortable than farming and pays better than assembly line work. But even women here prefer other jobs, and even here there ARE other jobs.
Remember: a LOT of IT jobs can be done elsewhere (other than those that require local physical presence). So if you're in a rich country only go into IT if you're interested - because you need to be interested to be at least in the top 10%, where people will pay your rates because you ARE BETTER, magnitudes better than random crap in Elbonia (or here
I can confidently say that I'm a lot better in IT stuff than some half-interested person in the USA, and more than 50% cheaper. I bet I even spell better
Yes, but if the documents are in a decent safe that's bolted to the floor, why waste time? Best to just steal it from some website.
Unless you are someone extraordinary, your IDs are worth much more to you than to the thief. And typically if your IDs were stolen it could trouble you for a lot longer than if your cash was.
Whereas your money would be worth about the same to the thief (if not more - after all that's why he's going about stealing), and maybe even partly covered by insurance, less hassle to replace.
Uh, I've seen a recording where he doesn't sound so stupid and that's when he didn't know his microphone was on[1].
a pe.reaction/index.html
If you guys think he's stupid, go figure out how he got re-elected.
Maybe because most voters in the US prefer to vote for people who seem to be like them.
e.g. stupid?
Note: I didn't say most people in the US, I meant active voters. Then again maybe the election was Diebolded, but hey if it was, who got punished for that?
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/07/18/bush.t
IMO, while he may not be The Evil Super Genius, he's not as stupid as he pretends to be.
Why should women be encouraged to work in a field where jobs keep getting outsourced to Elbonia or whichever random country the bosses think of next?
Because women are more willing to settle for lower salaries? While that's a _fact_ (go google for it), lower salaries, strange hours, higher chances of being outsourced are not helpful to women (or men anyway).
So to the women out there, only go into IT if you are really interested (or you get a great offer) - it's not the worst career path but it's not that great a career path for people who aren't that interested.
Go into Law, Management or something else if you're not.
After all look how well Carly Fiorina did - she got a golden handshake for screwing up HP. No IT degree needed- BA in philosophy and medieval history,
MBA in marketing, SM in management.
I think she did very well (for herself) for either being incompetent or not interested in the long term success of HP. Whatever it was I don't think she was really interested in IT.
I would be happy if more women were in IT, but is it really in their interests?
Text file configs are magnitudes easier when you have lots of servers (say hundreds) to configure and set up.
./deploy.pl servers.txt
:) )
;).
e.g. edit template.conf
cat base.conf template.conf |
(like mailmerge but for webserver config files
After all who wants to click on GUI screens for each of the 100 servers? Or hire a temporary team of 5 people to do 20 servers each?
But what if it's 1000 servers? No difference the CLI way. If it's 10000 or more servers, you'd probably split the servers.txt file to multiple pieces and run the deploy on more than one machine.
Heh but you'd probably still want to do it in phases otherwise you get to mess up > 10000 machines at a go
If you have extra time and resources (haha) you could have someone make a GUI that helps you make those config files.
But whatever it is, stay away from that "registry" stuff which even Microsoft appears to be moving away from nowadays.
Sure, GUI is better for some stuff, but the popular desktop GUIs out there are appear to be designed _only_ for naive or ignorant people, and hardly have any features for augmenting the abilities of trained/experienced skilled people (they are either slow and laggy, or lack features - you might as well use cli or the screen program).
For an idea of how GUIs could augment the abilities of skilled people you'd have to look at UIs of some games - with decent UIs skilled human players can perform and sustain very many actions per second. They're probably not even near optimum, but they're an _example_ of why I think desktop GUIs have a long way to go. Microsoft Windows actually does do some stuff that I like - user can _easily_ customize the _classic_ start menu so you can easily launch stuff with keystrokes (just name files and folders in the start menu appropriately and winkey followed by the appropriate letter/number will launch/open it), can also put apps/shortcuts in the "Send To" folder.
Pity we haven't progressed very much since Douglas Engelbart's demo in 1968. And hardly anyone seems to notice the lack of actual progress. They just go wow over stupid and useless stuff like wobbly windows, "transparency" and that stupid show windows/apps sideways so you can select from them (sure doesn't work well if you have 100 windows running, how about we actually work on augmenting human ability again?).
How about diamond plated pans? Diamond has very good thermal conductivity and if done right the surface will have a low coefficient of friction.
:)
And how about an oven that can behave like a "thermos flask" instead of heating your kitchen[1]. Set the temperature you want, it should get there quick and stays there.
I'm sure we can use heat pipe and phase change technology somewhere.
[1] More efficient to use a heat pump for heating your kitchen. Dump the heat from the thermos oven slowly after you are done with the cooking, or save it for the next meal.
Nobody wondered about the eggs? I don't think he was the first to discover it.
s /v52oc/chapter7.html
:).
After all even Jules Verne mentioned it a long time ago: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/v/verne/jule
quote: Instead of 100 degrees, the instrument registered only 66 degrees. "Take my advice, Ben Zoof," he said; "leave your eggs in the saucepan a good quarter of an hour."
"Boil them hard! That will never do," objected the orderly.
"You will not find them hard, my good fellow. Trust me, we shall be able to dip our sippets into the yolks easily enough."
End quote.
As for liquid nitrogen ice cream I think that's been known for a while too.
Lastly liquid nitrogen is dangerous, a few reasons I can think of:
1) It can freeze bits of your body solid (and those bits can break off)
2) Though it is not poisonous, when the liquid nitrogen turns to gas, if you are in an enclosed area, it can fill the area you are in - you won't stay alive long just breathing nitrogen, or the percentage of oxygen in the air could be too low (or the partial pressure anyway).
3) It can make other stuff brittle and shatter them unexpectedly, or cause stuff to blow up (water expands when frozen, so go think of the possibilities).
You can go think of the other reasons
Just take the energy from another universe then.
Depends on your dog. Many dogs won't eat food from strangers.
Anyway, in some cases they just steal your dog. Happened to someone I know - they took his siberian husky.
If the intruder is prepared the dog is in trouble unless you arm the dog or stack the odds other ways.
Well if he's insured, and you steal his replaceable stuff, he might just get a PC upgrade.
That is if the insurance company honours the bet.
I'm a slashdotter you insensitive clod. Of course I'd be in the house. In the basement too, stuffing my face with pizza, emailing old korean people "In Soviet Russia" jokes while watching Natalie Portman movies.
;).
It's not like I'd have other things to do
Actually, might be better to get comprehensive insurance, and put nonreplaceable valuables in a good safe (backups, passports, certs etc) - mark it "No cash in here - documents only".
Yeah, I'd rather be mugged and lose my wallet etc to some guy with a knife who knows I'm likely to unarmed, than to be shot from behind. I'd partly consider the mugging a tax for having crap cops and no socialist style safety net where I live.
The reason why you don't always get shootings is because the cops still have a chance of getting the culprit and they may put the culprit on the top of their "Todo" list.
With lots of guns around things are a lot worse if the law enforcement breaks down, so you better be sure it doesn't ever break down.
In South Africa I think the crooks actually do what you say - just shoot you. Apparently in Johannesberg it's recommended that you don't stop your car for long at traffic lights/junctions at night - just move ASAP and keep moving.
You do lose a lot if you end up in a society where everyone just shoots strangers first, but the gun nuts don't seem to understand it. But anyway it's too late for the USA - they have guns everywhere already and large bunch of people willing to shoot each other for stupid reasons. No easy solution to that.
Unarmed people? Chuck Norris unarms you without arms.
If you're lucky Chuck Norris just roundhouse kicks you once and you only lose both arms.
Wrong? He did say quake 2 first then unreal.
;).
Heavily modified or not it's not really that big a deal since it's heavily not here yet
Well, if the likes of Apollo Diamond won't make cheap diamonds soon enough for nontechnical reasons, I bet eventually China will start making them ;).
There must be zillions of uses for inexpensive large pieces of diamond.
What I find annoying is getting lm-sensors to work with server hardware.
I can monitor the temperature and voltages of my home beige box but can't on any of the servers I tried at work- Dell, IBM, HP.