, not to mention we already have 11, more than quadruple what anyone else has)
It doesn't make a damn bit of difference what "anyone else has". Nobody else has taken on the same role as the US. You mention we're "currently in THREE wars", so it sounds like we've got exactly the right number of aircraft carriers after all, doesn't it?
if we got rid of the 700+ overseas bases (uneeded, we can get to anywhere on the planet and drop bombs with our long range bombers and aircraft carriers)
That sounds rather short-sighted, actually. Eliminate the bases we've been maintaining for decades, because money is a bit tight right now, and depending entirely on more expensive aircraft carriers, doesn't sounds like a good idea. Not to mention the increased number of soldier deaths due to reduced medical capacity, since we've got to fly the wounded all the way back to the US, instead of taking them to first-rate facilities in our bases in Germany.
since if they get taxed if they kep it they are more likely to INVEST it into business rather than hoard, which takes it out of the economy and is "dead money".
Umm, what? Have you given this any thought at all?
First off, the rich DO invest their money. They invest their money extensively in the stock market because they can get better returns on it that way.
Second, they invest by keeping their money in banks, and the banks in question then invest the money where they can get good returns with low risk.
The idea that saving money took it out of the economy is an extremely old idea, and hasn't been true since long before any of us were born.
Re:My mom was a computer operator in the 70s
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Girls Go Geek Again
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Okay, pick some task that needs solving. Now try implementing it on a modern computer in a high-level language. Then try implementing it on a machine from the early '80s, say a 1MHz 6502 with 16KB of RAM. Now tell me that programming back then was easy.
Okay, off the top of my head I'd say general hardware IO and user input/output.
The former because external devices would just be hard-wired to a memory-address, instead of requiring you to link to a half dozen libraries to connect with a USB device or somesuch. And furthermore because programs were non-portable so you could just depend on consistent CPU timings and such.
The later chosen because stdin/stdout is surely easier to code than a whole GUI front-end using whichever libraries are required, and coding all the basic objects and events just to allow the user to input a couple digits.
Re:My mom was a computer operator in the 70s
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It'sA) The "average person" isn't employed as a computer operator. If you want to say it's gotten easier to do basic task on a computer, I don't think anyone will argue, but that's a long, long way from saying that the JOB of "computer operator" has gotten easier. Certainly it COULD be more complex now, with so many more layers these days requiring flexible responses.
B) That an older generation of "computer operator" did MORE WORK to get computers operating, doesn't mean it's necessarily harder. If there's less work for a task, yet there's more and longer commands to enter, and requires more understanding of the system to make decisions on what to enter, it could easily be a harder job even if the commands have nice friendly names, and you never need to leave your chair...
The idea that basically everyone here looked at the geek culture, and decided based on that to go into IT is an utterly ridiculous proposition. I know I had no clue about geek culture when I started with computers. None of the computer course teachers I saw before getting internet access myself at all resembled geeks, nor were they a model I would have at all wanted to emulate. There just was next to no mainstream representation of computer geeks until, say, the late 90s. The extent of what I knew about IT was that it paid well, and from my earliest expeiences with computers I found myself immediately proficient, and saw there was substantial challenge there to keep me interested, long-term.
The aptitude-test claim has the same issues... Maybe hiring was skewed towards men, but the same was true across the board, and yet today IT is one of the only white collar industries that hasn't shifted back to equilibrium? I certainly wasn't influenced by the existing genetic makeup of the IT industry when I was a teenager just fooling around with computers, so why have women been so heavily influenced by it? The premise fails the laugh test.
I'll further counter all sexism claims in IT with the blanket statement that lots of blue-collar jobs are heavily male-dominated as well, yet nobody claims the lack of female mechanics and truck drivers is a symptom of institutional sexism. Sexism is largely just being assumed as an easy out, because looking at individual causes is HARD and may not be politically expedient...
You are supposed to choose which one is the encode and how poor it sounds compared to the reference. It's an objective test that has nothing to do with your hardware because you aren't choosing which one you like best, you are choosing which one is exactly the same as the reference.
1) Listening tests are, by definition, subjective.
2) Consider that I make an audio codec which reproduces the audio perfectly even at low bitrates, EXCEPT for a constant hum at 15kHz.
- Person A plays it back on his cheap sound card and PC headphones that completely attenuate frequencies above 12kHz. He can't EVER tell the difference between the original and the encoding.
- Person B plays it back on his expensive home-theatre system with 0.03% THD, and expensive full-range speakers. He can tell the difference between the original and the encoding 100% of the time.
In short, people who are not trained listeners, who do not have the best available audio equipment, and/or who simply aren't trying very hard, will very quickly make even the crappiest sounding codec appear to be completely transparent. Those people who can actually do a good job of a listening test are completely lost in the (huge) margin of error, as statistical noise.
Little to nothing of value can come from such studies. There's good reason we have professional listening tests of lossy codecs.
It doesn't matter if it is transparent to a machine.
No it doesn't. That's why we're talking about human perception. You obviously don't have a clue what "Perceptual Entropy" is, even though I suggested you look it up, and mentioned it multiple times now. I don't know what there is to debate when you don't even understand the words I'm typing.
You are simply going by something you read as opposed to actually testing how well it works in practice.
I'm going on 4 decades of the top scientific papers in the fields of perceptual encoding. Papers written by the guys who formed the basis for all the codecs, and several of the guys who wrote the codecs.
I refuse to get dragged into a worthless conversation about who can or can't hear X. That is subjective. That what you're suggesting breaks every single law of human perception is 100% objective fact.
Tell me something, have you tried-out every perpetual motion machine out there? Hey, maybe one of them works, right? That's the extent of what you're saying.
Your insistence that your cargo cult beats my (objective) science is just a complete waste of my time, so consider this my last response. Feel free to reply if it makes you feel better.
We're talking about a field of science, here. I've never tried to send 100 amps down a phone line, but I know damn-well exactly what would happen.
"I can't hear it" isn't an argument. It's an extremely subjective individual observation which cannot be challenged or refuted.
"96K is far below the threshold of Perceptual Entropy", however, is a pretty well irrefutable argument, based on the relevant scientific theories.
My previous statement, that frequency-domain codecs can never produce transparent audio, is also a pretty-well irrefutable argument (again) based on the relevant theories in this field.
The state of the art is improving all the time.
"the idea that compression technology keeps on improving is a myth." -- Leonardo Chiariglione (co-founder of MPEG)
If I pay for something with a card, my creditor provides additional protections in case what I bought is not as advertised, or if there is some other dispute with the merchant. If I paid cash, I have no such protection.
This has NOTHING to do with "credit" and everything to do with "electronic transactions" plus a little legislation. In short, you can get ALL those benefits with a DEBIT card, without utilizing credit.
Building a positive credit history is also essential for other purposes, such as renting a property, or securing employment in some sectors.
I've been a renter for many years. I have never had my application rejected, or been asked to get a co-signer nor additional deposit, even when dealing with several large commercial rental companies. And yes, I have dually confirmed I have never had any credit history at all. The 3 reporting agencies sent me nice form-letters telling me I do not exist.
Lack of credit history becomes a small hassle when establishing service with a new utility company. They may want additional records to prove your identity, or a modest deposit.
The one and only place I'm concerned about my lack of credit is in home-loans. My solution to that works out well for me (live cheap for a few years, then find a great deal on a dirt-cheap home where the banks will only accept cash offers, anyhow), but I can understand the dilemma of others who aren't in such a situation.
In those cases alternative credit can be established from your history of routinely paying utility bills on-time, providing a larger down-payment, etc.
But back to the OP, it is certainly and undeniably true that the way to get an ideal credit score is to "love debt". Paying a couple credit cards on-time, and keeping no balance on them will NOT give you a very good credit score. Keeping a balance on a LARGE number of credit cards, for years, is the way to get the most-desirable score, which is undeniably a piss-poor system, designed to encourage people who "love debt" to take more and more of it.
If you can reliably tell the difference in proper blind testing, you are likely have better hearing/perception than 99.9999 % of the population.
This is not true.
Frequency-domain codecs have known artifacts that CANNOT be eliminated. Pre-echo is probably the best-known example. A sample with heavy percussion or other complex impulses (like audience applause) will stand out like a sore thumb... Audience applause is one of the standards dating back to the 70s when human audio perception / lossy audio compression research was first beginning. Now applause and percussion samples are often omitted entirely from codec testing, because those paying for the studies just want some amazing, if fake, numbers for their brochures... these are the amazing 3X compression improvements you hear advertised. (See DVB+ marketing nonsense).
Modern audio codecs don't even try to sound indistinguishable from the original. The very earliest codecs developed (by AT&T, Philips, etc.) fit that need so very well that there's very little room for improvement in that area. Instead they focus on sounding good (not perfect) in low-bitrate encoding, and the old codecs (like MPEG-1 Layer 2) simply continue to be used by broadcasters, and anyone in-the-know. Ever wonder why there's no "AC-4" codec in development?
To suit modern codecs that don't try to sound like the original, testing methodologies were changed entirely, and you'll rarely hear a mention of this fact, even when marketing folks go and foolishly compare results from recent and 30-year-old tests using the different methodologies. Look-up some terms like MUSHRA and Perceptual Entropy.
The difference between AAC/MP3 and FLAC (and CD player *) my hi-fi allows to hear quite clearly.
Both MP3 and AAC are frequency-domain codecs, which have known issues which will always prevent them from providing true transparency (so that you can't hear the difference).
The alternative to frequency-domain is time-domain. In that camp are MPEG-1 Layer 2 (MP2) and MusePack (MPC). With a stereo MP2 encoding (via TwoLame) at about 192kbps, you'll very rarely find a sample distinguishable from the original. MPC can make the same claim, except at even lower bitrates.
If you want something more mainstream, AC-3 is a hybrid frequency/time domain codec, so it at least holds the potential for transparency as well, though that is much more highly dependent on the particular encoder doing the right thing, all the time.
And as for hardware support, MP2 gets a free-ride thanks to the popularity of MP3. Many MP3 player handle MP2 audio files as well. MPC support is rare, but Rockbox includes it, so you can flash the firmware on your iPod and get MPC support.
But it's a new world... There are a couple music apps for Android phones/tablet that will allow you to play MPC, like AMPlayer, but sadly Winamp and DoubleTwist do not.
You guys have to move to Alaska. It's a nice, comfortable 55 degrees F.
You and I may be polar opposites... I've just been thinking that the Southern California coast-line is too damn cold. Sure, the beach is close by, but when the temperature is usually 70 degrees, who wants to get in the water? Sure, there are the occasional 90F degree days, but even that's just warm.
I think I need to move back out to the desert. Going for a hike in 120F degree temperatures is just more my speed. The fact that land and homes cost less than 1/10th as much, and that there's just plenty of wide open areas certainly motivates me as well.
But I digress. I'd bet even a large swap-cooler running most of the day to cool off a house and several servers, is still using vastly less energy than your supplemental winter heating, even with your nice hybrid heating solution.
Why do people call incandescent light bulbs "energy wasters", when then can (in the cooler months) defray the work needed to be done by a household heating unit?
Because resistive electric heating is the least-efficient method in common use. A natural gas, propane, or diesel furnace is much more efficient and economical. For fully-electric heating, a heat-pump is much more efficient, is just about a free add-on if you need an air conditioner anyhow, etc. And throwing geothermal in, along with a heat-pump, makes it vastly better still.
(Why no fins/blowers on these ducts to disperse heat into the pizza-joint?)
Probably because adding a heat-exchanger onto those ducts wouldn't exactly be cheap, and must be paid entirely by energy savings (which is probably small), and yet the pizza joint still needs a traditional heater installed, so they can't redirect that money.
all my lcd's show more ghosting and wear over 5 yrs than my old tv's used to.
Ghosting on an LCD is a TEMPORARY issue, which is trivially easy to completely reverse. The ghosting on your CRTs is permanent and irreversible.
As for "wear", I have no idea what you're talking about. If you mean physical, then yes, plastic can be scratched more easily than glass, but that's a problem that can be fixed, too.
tv's also didn't have stuck pixels and refresh problems.
Actually, TVs did get dead pixels. The phosphor may flake, the screen may shift, the gun may lose alignment. I've seen some TVs with bad (internal) screen damage, that people just keep using. On an LCD, stuck and dead pixels can often be worked-around with some simple software to exercise the screens. And if it doesn't fix it, well, that's one pixel in 2 million, instead of one in 300 thousand.
tv's pretty much 'just plain worked' for decades and decades.
TV's didn't "just plain work". TVs were EXPENSIVE, so people put up with the problems a hell of a lot longer, did all kinds of half-assed fixes to keep it going a bit longer (eg., glue a screwdriver permanently in the hole to keep the vhold adjustment in proper contact) or perhaps got professional repair, back when the economics of repairing TVs made sense. Or how about designed-in quick-fixes, like the ability to easily turn up the power on the flyback transformer, so the TV will keep looking tolerable for a couple more years as it starts fading and getting terribly blurry...
show me someone who still uses an lcd after even 5.
LCDs aren't century-old technologies like CRTs, so:
A) There just isn't such a long history of widespread LCD use, as there is for CRTs. You can't look back at the LCD TV your parents owned as you were growing up... Naturally, there will be far less long-term owners, because there are simply far, far less owners, period. B) The technology is improving rapidly, so people WANT to buy new ones.
Just because it's a hard drive, doesn't mean you have to put a filing system on it.
I'm very well-aware of that. I've used tar directly on floppies innumerable times, and plenty of other tricks like writing files directly onto block devices. In fact I just recently stopped recording ~820MBs of PAR2 data to CDs in Mode2/XA as my corrupt media recovery method (RAID-5 on CD-R, really).
However, when people talk about using hard drives for backup, they are talking about a file system, and for good reason. Hard drives don't have any advantage over tapes in cost/GB, speed, shelf-life, etc. What they do have is their quick and easy recovery, verification, reuse, and updating (eg. with something like rsync). Once you start using TAR rather than a file system, you lose just about all of the advantages of HDDs.
And besides that, you're not talking about TAR, anyhow. You're talking about proprietary GTAR features that aren't found just about anywhere else. So, instead of betting that EXT2 will be around in a couple decades, you're betting that GTAR will be around in a couple decades. That may be a somewhat safer bet, but not by much.
Less of an issue these days, especially with the open-source file systems. Ext2/Ext3 are probably the safest bets at this point, maybe FAT/FAT32 (because it's such a simple file system and easily reverse engineered well enough that you can read the data).
As I said, Ext2 SHOULD be compatible, but even today it is not. 3rd party implementations are horrible and flaky. Trying to use an ext2-formatted USB drive on both Linux and FreeBSD quickly turned into a nightmare. You obviously haven't tried it, and ignorance is bliss. The world doesn't work the way you think it should...
The fact that the reference is GPL'd means it's not spreading as much as something with a freer license would (eg. UFS/FFS). This has been seen time and time again. Sadly, I wouldn't bet on UFS today, either, as even Linux has a complete crap UFS implementation that I've never seen work.
Hell, if you think open source is going to guarantee comatibility, why aren't you recommending MINIX-FS? It's open source, and has been for years, so it should be readable everywhere by now.
Officer: Am I being recorded? Driver: Yes, it's posted on my car. I'm streaming this live to... Officer: Please stop recording. Driver: Why? I know my rights and it's not interfering with... Officer: Step out of the car sir, I'm placing you under arrest. Driver: What am I being arrested for? Officer: Watch your head sir...
You see, the legality doesn't matter, and the threat of live streaming and archiving doesn't accomplish a thing. Long-term, if everyone did it, maybe... The court has this miraculous ability to deem something inadmissible on technicalities, and completely pretend it doesn't exist.
but the moment you give random assholes the ability to ruin my career and get me locked up for trying to do my job to the best of my ability is the moment I find something less dangerous to do. I'm all for holding cops accountable for their actions, but the response has to be reasonable, it has to based on common sense, and it has to be carried out by the system. Punishing them in a trial-by-media based on some blurry footage, followed by a political decision to lock them up or dismiss them..... that's wrong. Period.
Being videotaped is NOT the cause of ANY of these problems you've listed. If it was, police sure as hell wouldn't have video cameras on their dashboards.
The video is just another piece of (objective) evidence. If "the system" will steam-roll you because of that, then it's the system that has the problem that needs fixing.
It wasn't long ago that a cop shot (and killed) an unarmed man, in the back, for resisting arrest, was videotaped doing so by multiple people, and the video was aired by the media, causing a huge public outcry, yet the officer was acquitted.
What else springs to mind? Rodney King beating? All acquitted.
So now YOU tell me, where are these cases of cops NOT being given every benefit of the doubt, and instead being railroaded for doing their job?
you can buy from anywhere a USB adapter that will plug into a 20+ year old drive and any OS will mount it. Wish I could say the same about all my removable media...
Maybe if you used FAT. Any other file-system at all, and you're struggling.
Ext2 is fine on Linux, but I haven't found any other OS with a halfway decent implementation, though. Sure, there are plenty of half-working implementations, but fsck on ext2 outside of linux? Forget it. UFS/FFS might have worked, but interoperability between implementations is pretty damn poor.
And besides, how would you have known, 20 years ago, that FAT and UFS would still be in-force? Maybe you thought some other OS was going to survive in the long-haul. Okay, well it didn't, nothing else knows the filesystem, and even if it ran on x86, your ancient OS doesn't have USB support, and is quirky enough it probably won't run on a modern PC... Hell, even tried to load Windows 95 on an K7 or better? Sure, there are patches, but only because Windows 95 survived.
Personally, my concerns are more fundamental. I don't want my important data to be ONLY online. If I need it in 20 years, I want several off-line hard copies. How about subtle bit-errors in your primary system being slowly replicated to your online backup? Maybe it's defective hardware, or maybe viruses and the like... Sure, it's a great model for simple home usage, where the data isn't all that valuable, and not important for too many years. And it's great for short to medium-term archiving for businesses, greatly reducing the number of hard-copies you have to make and store, but it's not something to be entirely trusted, without those hard-copies available in the worst-case scenarios.
Traditionally the way to do this is with tape. As you replace the drive (and you will), your tape capacity increases, but it will be read-compatible with your old tapes. The investment is huge, but it makes it very easy to replicate, take off-site, archive, etc.
The problem is making sure you bet on the right technology... The right technology being the ones big companies are using, so there will be demand for the drives in a few decades. Use some cheap junk "personal" tape drive, and you won't find drives that can read it in a few years. Show me a SaS or SATA Iomega Ditto tape drive... Sure, fortunately the old IDE and SCSI-1 interfaces are still around, for the moment, but they won't be, for too much longer.
He's saying BSD isn't really relevant on the _desktop_ (and sorry but no, OS X is not a counter-example to this
Actually, no. He's saying EVERY OTHER POSIX OS isn't relevant, which means OS X is most definitely a couter-example. Not just BSD, he's strictly Linux-only, an atitiude which is so wrong
Also, he's talking about SOUND systems, something which is certainly NOT desktop-only. Desktop tasks just happens to be the predominant use for audio on a Unix system. I know I routinely use ESounD to output audio from multiple Unix (Linux, BSD, Solaris, AIX, SCO, etc) and Windows systems over the network to a headless server with a soundcard...
Yeah, but: why do these cables have active parts on both ends? Oh yeah, part of the "screw the customer" spec.
Maybe because DisplayPort is a completely different standard than DVI/HDMI, and conversion to (dual-link) DVI/HDMI output from DisplayPort strictly requires active conversion?
1) RHEL5.6 was released at the same time, and effort was simply dedicated to that release, at the expense of RHEL6.
2) RHEL made extensive changes to their build system / infrastructure, which required far more effort to reproduce and verify than just another 5.x release would have.
Certainly possible there were other reason as well...
Considering 6.1 has been out for some time this is a bit of a non event, most people using CentOs have moved on.
Quite the opposite. I was expecting it to be a non-event, too. Instead, reading the announcement, I found much to be excited about.
First, while this is technically 6.0, the announcement specifically says the 6.1 updates will be going in to the rolling release branch right away, so when you do a "yum update" you'll get all the 6.1 goodness, in short order.
Secondly, their plans for LiveCD images and minimal-install CD images in the next few days, which serve important niches and which Redhat didn't even provide with their release, are very exciting too, and fills a huge need.
Besides that, companies are incredibly slow to upgrade their infrastructure anyhow. RHEL6 is a pretty major change, so people weren't rolling it out to their servers the day it was released. I know we're a fully paid-up RedHat shop and we haven't upgraded ANYTHING to RHEL6 yet.
The CentOS folks stated their inability to commit enough resource to support both 6.0 and 5.6 releases simultaneously, and got an overwhelming number of requests to go for 5.6 rather than 6.0, so we already know what most people's needs really are.
CentOS is basically a dead project to the majority of people who have moved on to more responsive distributions.
Honestly, if anyone was so desperate for the new features in RHEL6, they would have jumped ship long before even the RHEL6 beta came out. RHEL5 was getting very long in the tooth, so if you had a real need for what's available now, why didn't you switch to Fedora 13, more than a year ago? Where are these people that desperately needed these updates 6 months ago, but didn't need them 18 months ago and were happy with RHEL5 until just recently?
Really, a few (and I do mean a few, certainly not "the majority") impatient folks that didn't feel like waiting for a CentOS6 desktop to play with, aren't representative of anything. And if you did switch to SL6, RHEL6, or Fedora 13, it's just a repo change and a yum upgrade to go back to the CentOS packages.
Well, if it is actually compiled for i686, then calling it "i386" is just plain wrong.
i386 has, forever, been the name used to denote the 32-bit, Intel-compatible, CPU architecture.
x86 is far, far too easy to confuse with x86-64.
IA-32 is a relatively new term, and reeks too much of Intel marketing. I'd be happy with denoting 32-bit platforms as "IA-32" and 64-bit platforms as "AMD64", but I think Intel would profusely object to the later, though it's quite accurate...
Redhat derived distros are nice for servers, like CentOS. Ubuntu derived distros are nice for clients.
I fail to see how CentOS is un-nice for clients. And I say that as someone who has rolled-out several hundred CentOS client workstations.
If your assertion is that Ubuntu is better for clients, simply because it's newer and shinier, then you're thinking of very different "clients" than I am. If you want to fiddle with the latest unstable versions of everything, be my guest. I'd rather have a stable platform of everything, and only bring in a few cutting-edge bits and pieces, where they are strictly needed, and not have to worry that brokenness in the rest of the system may be making my life more difficult than it needs to be.
I wanted to respond in detail to the points made about limitations, which aren't correct.
Yes, I'm extremely sloppy when posting details to/. particularly when I believe a simple explanation is good enough to get the point across, and not confuse too many people...
You mention that kills performance. PostgreSQL allows you to run this as a low priority background job, which continues to allow reads and writes, yet runs at a deliberately slower pace to avoid impact on system resources. All of that is automatic, with the VACUUM task even cancelling itself if it really does get in the way of any user request.
That's certainly a good tip. The company I work for is, sadly, one where there is never time to do any in-depth research, tuning, debugging, etc., unless/until a major component is completely falling apart. Try as I might to change that, it's slow going...
Our fix to this point has been partitioning and truncating old data, and vacuuming the empty tables to reclaim XIDs, and hoping all goes well and we never need a full auto-vacuum...
I must ask, though, if adjusting the priority is so safe, why are the defaults so aggressive that they are guaranteed to have a major performance impact? I don't see where anyone would want an aggressive autovacuum, which is, by definition, not happening during a maintenance window nor scheduled during off-peak hours, dramatically affecting DB performance.
The number of XIDs has no effect whatsoever on the number of rows in a database.
Well, only in that (at least when left to defaults) a full autovacuum is so long-running and such a painful performance hit that avoiding it has undeniably limited us to a 1B limit.
Many PostgreSQL users have installations above a Terabyte in size.
Replication has been one of the areas that has received significant and consistent developer attention across many years. Starting in 9.0 we have native binary replication,
I have been following these recent developments with anticipation. But I must say it has honestly come a decade late. At least I've been personally (either directly or indirectly) having to work around the lack of postgres multi-master replication for that long, and having a harder and harder time justifying the lack thereof in something that is supposedly enterprise-class open source software.
with options that make it the full equivalent of the best options in Oracle Enterprise Edition, including pay for options of Active Data Guard. Synchronous replication will be available in PostgreSQL 9.1, out real soon now. PostgreSQL 9.2 will have cascaded replication, multiple performance options and other features, many of which are in advance of what is available in pay-for commercial systems.
That, I had not heard. Simple 2-node multi-master clustering has been so long in coming that I was happy to just finally see that available, and didn't expect to see much more coming down in the near future. I certainly look-forward to having the option of a 16-node Postgres cluster. And maybe I can justify investing more time in profiling and tuning our postgres DBs, rather than only ever our Oracle (RAC) installations.
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It doesn't make a damn bit of difference what "anyone else has". Nobody else has taken on the same role as the US. You mention we're "currently in THREE wars", so it sounds like we've got exactly the right number of aircraft carriers after all, doesn't it?
That sounds rather short-sighted, actually. Eliminate the bases we've been maintaining for decades, because money is a bit tight right now, and depending entirely on more expensive aircraft carriers, doesn't sounds like a good idea. Not to mention the increased number of soldier deaths due to reduced medical capacity, since we've got to fly the wounded all the way back to the US, instead of taking them to first-rate facilities in our bases in Germany.
Umm, what? Have you given this any thought at all?
First off, the rich DO invest their money. They invest their money extensively in the stock market because they can get better returns on it that way.
Second, they invest by keeping their money in banks, and the banks in question then invest the money where they can get good returns with low risk.
The idea that saving money took it out of the economy is an extremely old idea, and hasn't been true since long before any of us were born.
Okay, off the top of my head I'd say general hardware IO and user input/output.
The former because external devices would just be hard-wired to a memory-address, instead of requiring you to link to a half dozen libraries to connect with a USB device or somesuch. And furthermore because programs were non-portable so you could just depend on consistent CPU timings and such.
The later chosen because stdin/stdout is surely easier to code than a whole GUI front-end using whichever libraries are required, and coding all the basic objects and events just to allow the user to input a couple digits.
It'sA) The "average person" isn't employed as a computer operator. If you want to say it's gotten easier to do basic task on a computer, I don't think anyone will argue, but that's a long, long way from saying that the JOB of "computer operator" has gotten easier. Certainly it COULD be more complex now, with so many more layers these days requiring flexible responses.
B) That an older generation of "computer operator" did MORE WORK to get computers operating, doesn't mean it's necessarily harder. If there's less work for a task, yet there's more and longer commands to enter, and requires more understanding of the system to make decisions on what to enter, it could easily be a harder job even if the commands have nice friendly names, and you never need to leave your chair...
The idea that basically everyone here looked at the geek culture, and decided based on that to go into IT is an utterly ridiculous proposition. I know I had no clue about geek culture when I started with computers. None of the computer course teachers I saw before getting internet access myself at all resembled geeks, nor were they a model I would have at all wanted to emulate. There just was next to no mainstream representation of computer geeks until, say, the late 90s. The extent of what I knew about IT was that it paid well, and from my earliest expeiences with computers I found myself immediately proficient, and saw there was substantial challenge there to keep me interested, long-term.
The aptitude-test claim has the same issues... Maybe hiring was skewed towards men, but the same was true across the board, and yet today IT is one of the only white collar industries that hasn't shifted back to equilibrium? I certainly wasn't influenced by the existing genetic makeup of the IT industry when I was a teenager just fooling around with computers, so why have women been so heavily influenced by it? The premise fails the laugh test.
I'll further counter all sexism claims in IT with the blanket statement that lots of blue-collar jobs are heavily male-dominated as well, yet nobody claims the lack of female mechanics and truck drivers is a symptom of institutional sexism. Sexism is largely just being assumed as an easy out, because looking at individual causes is HARD and may not be politically expedient...
1) Listening tests are, by definition, subjective.
2) Consider that I make an audio codec which reproduces the audio perfectly even at low bitrates, EXCEPT for a constant hum at 15kHz.
- Person A plays it back on his cheap sound card and PC headphones that completely attenuate frequencies above 12kHz. He can't EVER tell the difference between the original and the encoding.
- Person B plays it back on his expensive home-theatre system with 0.03% THD, and expensive full-range speakers. He can tell the difference between the original and the encoding 100% of the time.
In short, people who are not trained listeners, who do not have the best available audio equipment, and/or who simply aren't trying very hard, will very quickly make even the crappiest sounding codec appear to be completely transparent. Those people who can actually do a good job of a listening test are completely lost in the (huge) margin of error, as statistical noise.
Little to nothing of value can come from such studies. There's good reason we have professional listening tests of lossy codecs.
No it doesn't. That's why we're talking about human perception. You obviously don't have a clue what "Perceptual Entropy" is, even though I suggested you look it up, and mentioned it multiple times now. I don't know what there is to debate when you don't even understand the words I'm typing.
I'm going on 4 decades of the top scientific papers in the fields of perceptual encoding. Papers written by the guys who formed the basis for all the codecs, and several of the guys who wrote the codecs.
I refuse to get dragged into a worthless conversation about who can or can't hear X. That is subjective. That what you're suggesting breaks every single law of human perception is 100% objective fact.
Tell me something, have you tried-out every perpetual motion machine out there? Hey, maybe one of them works, right? That's the extent of what you're saying.
Your insistence that your cargo cult beats my (objective) science is just a complete waste of my time, so consider this my last response. Feel free to reply if it makes you feel better.
We're talking about a field of science, here. I've never tried to send 100 amps down a phone line, but I know damn-well exactly what would happen.
"I can't hear it" isn't an argument. It's an extremely subjective individual observation which cannot be challenged or refuted.
"96K is far below the threshold of Perceptual Entropy", however, is a pretty well irrefutable argument, based on the relevant scientific theories.
My previous statement, that frequency-domain codecs can never produce transparent audio, is also a pretty-well irrefutable argument (again) based on the relevant theories in this field.
"the idea that compression technology keeps on improving is a myth." -- Leonardo Chiariglione (co-founder of MPEG)
This has NOTHING to do with "credit" and everything to do with "electronic transactions" plus a little legislation. In short, you can get ALL those benefits with a DEBIT card, without utilizing credit.
I've been a renter for many years. I have never had my application rejected, or been asked to get a co-signer nor additional deposit, even when dealing with several large commercial rental companies. And yes, I have dually confirmed I have never had any credit history at all. The 3 reporting agencies sent me nice form-letters telling me I do not exist.
Lack of credit history becomes a small hassle when establishing service with a new utility company. They may want additional records to prove your identity, or a modest deposit.
The one and only place I'm concerned about my lack of credit is in home-loans. My solution to that works out well for me (live cheap for a few years, then find a great deal on a dirt-cheap home where the banks will only accept cash offers, anyhow), but I can understand the dilemma of others who aren't in such a situation.
In those cases alternative credit can be established from your history of routinely paying utility bills on-time, providing a larger down-payment, etc.
But back to the OP, it is certainly and undeniably true that the way to get an ideal credit score is to "love debt". Paying a couple credit cards on-time, and keeping no balance on them will NOT give you a very good credit score. Keeping a balance on a LARGE number of credit cards, for years, is the way to get the most-desirable score, which is undeniably a piss-poor system, designed to encourage people who "love debt" to take more and more of it.
This is not true.
Frequency-domain codecs have known artifacts that CANNOT be eliminated. Pre-echo is probably the best-known example. A sample with heavy percussion or other complex impulses (like audience applause) will stand out like a sore thumb... Audience applause is one of the standards dating back to the 70s when human audio perception / lossy audio compression research was first beginning. Now applause and percussion samples are often omitted entirely from codec testing, because those paying for the studies just want some amazing, if fake, numbers for their brochures... these are the amazing 3X compression improvements you hear advertised. (See DVB+ marketing nonsense).
Modern audio codecs don't even try to sound indistinguishable from the original. The very earliest codecs developed (by AT&T, Philips, etc.) fit that need so very well that there's very little room for improvement in that area. Instead they focus on sounding good (not perfect) in low-bitrate encoding, and the old codecs (like MPEG-1 Layer 2) simply continue to be used by broadcasters, and anyone in-the-know. Ever wonder why there's no "AC-4" codec in development?
To suit modern codecs that don't try to sound like the original, testing methodologies were changed entirely, and you'll rarely hear a mention of this fact, even when marketing folks go and foolishly compare results from recent and 30-year-old tests using the different methodologies. Look-up some terms like MUSHRA and Perceptual Entropy.
Both MP3 and AAC are frequency-domain codecs, which have known issues which will always prevent them from providing true transparency (so that you can't hear the difference).
The alternative to frequency-domain is time-domain. In that camp are MPEG-1 Layer 2 (MP2) and MusePack (MPC). With a stereo MP2 encoding (via TwoLame) at about 192kbps, you'll very rarely find a sample distinguishable from the original. MPC can make the same claim, except at even lower bitrates.
If you want something more mainstream, AC-3 is a hybrid frequency/time domain codec, so it at least holds the potential for transparency as well, though that is much more highly dependent on the particular encoder doing the right thing, all the time.
And as for hardware support, MP2 gets a free-ride thanks to the popularity of MP3. Many MP3 player handle MP2 audio files as well. MPC support is rare, but Rockbox includes it, so you can flash the firmware on your iPod and get MPC support.
But it's a new world... There are a couple music apps for Android phones/tablet that will allow you to play MPC, like AMPlayer, but sadly Winamp and DoubleTwist do not.
You and I may be polar opposites... I've just been thinking that the Southern California coast-line is too damn cold. Sure, the beach is close by, but when the temperature is usually 70 degrees, who wants to get in the water? Sure, there are the occasional 90F degree days, but even that's just warm.
I think I need to move back out to the desert. Going for a hike in 120F degree temperatures is just more my speed. The fact that land and homes cost less than 1/10th as much, and that there's just plenty of wide open areas certainly motivates me as well.
But I digress. I'd bet even a large swap-cooler running most of the day to cool off a house and several servers, is still using vastly less energy than your supplemental winter heating, even with your nice hybrid heating solution.
Because resistive electric heating is the least-efficient method in common use. A natural gas, propane, or diesel furnace is much more efficient and economical. For fully-electric heating, a heat-pump is much more efficient, is just about a free add-on if you need an air conditioner anyhow, etc. And throwing geothermal in, along with a heat-pump, makes it vastly better still.
Probably because adding a heat-exchanger onto those ducts wouldn't exactly be cheap, and must be paid entirely by energy savings (which is probably small), and yet the pizza joint still needs a traditional heater installed, so they can't redirect that money.
Ghosting on an LCD is a TEMPORARY issue, which is trivially easy to completely reverse. The ghosting on your CRTs is permanent and irreversible.
As for "wear", I have no idea what you're talking about. If you mean physical, then yes, plastic can be scratched more easily than glass, but that's a problem that can be fixed, too.
Actually, TVs did get dead pixels. The phosphor may flake, the screen may shift, the gun may lose alignment. I've seen some TVs with bad (internal) screen damage, that people just keep using.
On an LCD, stuck and dead pixels can often be worked-around with some simple software to exercise the screens. And if it doesn't fix it, well, that's one pixel in 2 million, instead of one in 300 thousand.
TV's didn't "just plain work". TVs were EXPENSIVE, so people put up with the problems a hell of a lot longer, did all kinds of half-assed fixes to keep it going a bit longer (eg., glue a screwdriver permanently in the hole to keep the vhold adjustment in proper contact) or perhaps got professional repair, back when the economics of repairing TVs made sense. Or how about designed-in quick-fixes, like the ability to easily turn up the power on the flyback transformer, so the TV will keep looking tolerable for a couple more years as it starts fading and getting terribly blurry...
LCDs aren't century-old technologies like CRTs, so:
A) There just isn't such a long history of widespread LCD use, as there is for CRTs. You can't look back at the LCD TV your parents owned as you were growing up... Naturally, there will be far less long-term owners, because there are simply far, far less owners, period.
B) The technology is improving rapidly, so people WANT to buy new ones.
I'm very well-aware of that. I've used tar directly on floppies innumerable times, and plenty of other tricks like writing files directly onto block devices. In fact I just recently stopped recording ~820MBs of PAR2 data to CDs in Mode2/XA as my corrupt media recovery method (RAID-5 on CD-R, really).
However, when people talk about using hard drives for backup, they are talking about a file system, and for good reason. Hard drives don't have any advantage over tapes in cost/GB, speed, shelf-life, etc. What they do have is their quick and easy recovery, verification, reuse, and updating (eg. with something like rsync). Once you start using TAR rather than a file system, you lose just about all of the advantages of HDDs.
And besides that, you're not talking about TAR, anyhow. You're talking about proprietary GTAR features that aren't found just about anywhere else. So, instead of betting that EXT2 will be around in a couple decades, you're betting that GTAR will be around in a couple decades. That may be a somewhat safer bet, but not by much.
As I said, Ext2 SHOULD be compatible, but even today it is not. 3rd party implementations are horrible and flaky. Trying to use an ext2-formatted USB drive on both Linux and FreeBSD quickly turned into a nightmare. You obviously haven't tried it, and ignorance is bliss. The world doesn't work the way you think it should...
The fact that the reference is GPL'd means it's not spreading as much as something with a freer license would (eg. UFS/FFS). This has been seen time and time again. Sadly, I wouldn't bet on UFS today, either, as even Linux has a complete crap UFS implementation that I've never seen work.
Hell, if you think open source is going to guarantee comatibility, why aren't you recommending MINIX-FS? It's open source, and has been for years, so it should be readable everywhere by now.
In the real world, it goes more like this:
Officer: Am I being recorded?
Driver: Yes, it's posted on my car. I'm streaming this live to...
Officer: Please stop recording.
Driver: Why? I know my rights and it's not interfering with...
Officer: Step out of the car sir, I'm placing you under arrest.
Driver: What am I being arrested for?
Officer: Watch your head sir...
You see, the legality doesn't matter, and the threat of live streaming and archiving doesn't accomplish a thing. Long-term, if everyone did it, maybe... The court has this miraculous ability to deem something inadmissible on technicalities, and completely pretend it doesn't exist.
Being videotaped is NOT the cause of ANY of these problems you've listed. If it was, police sure as hell wouldn't have video cameras on their dashboards.
The video is just another piece of (objective) evidence. If "the system" will steam-roll you because of that, then it's the system that has the problem that needs fixing.
It wasn't long ago that a cop shot (and killed) an unarmed man, in the back, for resisting arrest, was videotaped doing so by multiple people, and the video was aired by the media, causing a huge public outcry, yet the officer was acquitted.
What else springs to mind? Rodney King beating? All acquitted.
So now YOU tell me, where are these cases of cops NOT being given every benefit of the doubt, and instead being railroaded for doing their job?
Maybe if you used FAT. Any other file-system at all, and you're struggling.
Ext2 is fine on Linux, but I haven't found any other OS with a halfway decent implementation, though. Sure, there are plenty of half-working implementations, but fsck on ext2 outside of linux? Forget it. UFS/FFS might have worked, but interoperability between implementations is pretty damn poor.
And besides, how would you have known, 20 years ago, that FAT and UFS would still be in-force? Maybe you thought some other OS was going to survive in the long-haul. Okay, well it didn't, nothing else knows the filesystem, and even if it ran on x86, your ancient OS doesn't have USB support, and is quirky enough it probably won't run on a modern PC... Hell, even tried to load Windows 95 on an K7 or better? Sure, there are patches, but only because Windows 95 survived.
Personally, my concerns are more fundamental. I don't want my important data to be ONLY online. If I need it in 20 years, I want several off-line hard copies. How about subtle bit-errors in your primary system being slowly replicated to your online backup? Maybe it's defective hardware, or maybe viruses and the like... Sure, it's a great model for simple home usage, where the data isn't all that valuable, and not important for too many years. And it's great for short to medium-term archiving for businesses, greatly reducing the number of hard-copies you have to make and store, but it's not something to be entirely trusted, without those hard-copies available in the worst-case scenarios.
The problem is making sure you bet on the right technology... The right technology being the ones big companies are using, so there will be demand for the drives in a few decades. Use some cheap junk "personal" tape drive, and you won't find drives that can read it in a few years. Show me a SaS or SATA Iomega Ditto tape drive... Sure, fortunately the old IDE and SCSI-1 interfaces are still around, for the moment, but they won't be, for too much longer.
Actually, no. He's saying EVERY OTHER POSIX OS isn't relevant, which means OS X is most definitely a couter-example. Not just BSD, he's strictly Linux-only, an atitiude which is so wrong
Also, he's talking about SOUND systems, something which is certainly NOT desktop-only. Desktop tasks just happens to be the predominant use for audio on a Unix system. I know I routinely use ESounD to output audio from multiple Unix (Linux, BSD, Solaris, AIX, SCO, etc) and Windows systems over the network to a headless server with a soundcard...
Maybe because DisplayPort is a completely different standard than DVI/HDMI, and conversion to (dual-link) DVI/HDMI output from DisplayPort strictly requires active conversion?
Well, I know of two reasons:
1) RHEL5.6 was released at the same time, and effort was simply dedicated to that release, at the expense of RHEL6.
2) RHEL made extensive changes to their build system / infrastructure, which required far more effort to reproduce and verify than just another 5.x release would have.
Certainly possible there were other reason as well...
Quite the opposite. I was expecting it to be a non-event, too. Instead, reading the announcement, I found much to be excited about.
First, while this is technically 6.0, the announcement specifically says the 6.1 updates will be going in to the rolling release branch right away, so when you do a "yum update" you'll get all the 6.1 goodness, in short order.
Secondly, their plans for LiveCD images and minimal-install CD images in the next few days, which serve important niches and which Redhat didn't even provide with their release, are very exciting too, and fills a huge need.
Besides that, companies are incredibly slow to upgrade their infrastructure anyhow. RHEL6 is a pretty major change, so people weren't rolling it out to their servers the day it was released. I know we're a fully paid-up RedHat shop and we haven't upgraded ANYTHING to RHEL6 yet.
The CentOS folks stated their inability to commit enough resource to support both 6.0 and 5.6 releases simultaneously, and got an overwhelming number of requests to go for 5.6 rather than 6.0, so we already know what most people's needs really are.
Honestly, if anyone was so desperate for the new features in RHEL6, they would have jumped ship long before even the RHEL6 beta came out. RHEL5 was getting very long in the tooth, so if you had a real need for what's available now, why didn't you switch to Fedora 13, more than a year ago? Where are these people that desperately needed these updates 6 months ago, but didn't need them 18 months ago and were happy with RHEL5 until just recently?
Really, a few (and I do mean a few, certainly not "the majority") impatient folks that didn't feel like waiting for a CentOS6 desktop to play with, aren't representative of anything. And if you did switch to SL6, RHEL6, or Fedora 13, it's just a repo change and a yum upgrade to go back to the CentOS packages.
i386 has, forever, been the name used to denote the 32-bit, Intel-compatible, CPU architecture.
x86 is far, far too easy to confuse with x86-64.
IA-32 is a relatively new term, and reeks too much of Intel marketing. I'd be happy with denoting 32-bit platforms as "IA-32" and 64-bit platforms as "AMD64", but I think Intel would profusely object to the later, though it's quite accurate...
I fail to see how CentOS is un-nice for clients. And I say that as someone who has rolled-out several hundred CentOS client workstations.
If your assertion is that Ubuntu is better for clients, simply because it's newer and shinier, then you're thinking of very different "clients" than I am. If you want to fiddle with the latest unstable versions of everything, be my guest. I'd rather have a stable platform of everything, and only bring in a few cutting-edge bits and pieces, where they are strictly needed, and not have to worry that brokenness in the rest of the system may be making my life more difficult than it needs to be.
Yes, I'm extremely sloppy when posting details to /. particularly when I believe a simple explanation is good enough to get the point across, and not confuse too many people...
That's certainly a good tip. The company I work for is, sadly, one where there is never time to do any in-depth research, tuning, debugging, etc., unless/until a major component is completely falling apart. Try as I might to change that, it's slow going...
Our fix to this point has been partitioning and truncating old data, and vacuuming the empty tables to reclaim XIDs, and hoping all goes well and we never need a full auto-vacuum...
I must ask, though, if adjusting the priority is so safe, why are the defaults so aggressive that they are guaranteed to have a major performance impact? I don't see where anyone would want an aggressive autovacuum, which is, by definition, not happening during a maintenance window nor scheduled during off-peak hours, dramatically affecting DB performance.
Well, only in that (at least when left to defaults) a full autovacuum is so long-running and such a painful performance hit that avoiding it has undeniably limited us to a 1B limit.
I have been following these recent developments with anticipation. But I must say it has honestly come a decade late. At least I've been personally (either directly or indirectly) having to work around the lack of postgres multi-master replication for that long, and having a harder and harder time justifying the lack thereof in something that is supposedly enterprise-class open source software.
That, I had not heard. Simple 2-node multi-master clustering has been so long in coming that I was happy to just finally see that available, and didn't expect to see much more coming down in the near future. I certainly look-forward to having the option of a 16-node Postgres cluster. And maybe I can justify investing more time in profiling and tuning our postgres DBs, rather than only ever our Oracle (RAC) installations.