I used to feel the same exact way -- I thought watching golf was about as exciting as watching the grass its played on grow.
I don't know what happened, but I've gotten kind of hooked on the major tournaments. There's enough camera coverage that they actually spend most of the time with a decent golfer hitting the ball, so its not just a bunch of guys walking around, and they're almost exclusively in high definition.
Rural areas have, in the recent past, had serious problems with meth cookers. Either stealing anhydrous ammonia or using abandoned or unused houses and buildings to cook meth. Since meth cookers are usually tweakers and tweakers are usually paranoid and borderline psychotic, they have a tendency to be dangerous. And then there's just thieves stealing cattle or farm equipment, who are also generally armed and dangerous.
I've heard this from BLM rangers in Arizona and landowners in North Dakota.
Even if geohashers aren't doing anything "wrong" and are trespassing in error, at a minimum ranchers/farmers know that a sheriff may be 30 minutes or more away and that confronting an unknown quantity in a rural location and unarmed is inherently dangerous. So you grab your rifle from the truck.
While this might get you in hot water in the city when the police show up, in the country it means when your wife's cousin's husband (ie, the sheriff or deputy) shows up he usually will ask the landowner what time the barbecue on Saturday is and does he want those people arrested or just escorted out of the county.
And getting arrested in a rural area sucks. They'll treat you nice, but the "punishment" means spending 2-3 days in jail until bail is set and someone can drive down to bail you out (they won't let you out to go to the bank to get money wired to you) and if you choose to fight it or have to go to trial, making several trips at inconvenient times, hiring a local attorney (whose rates tend to go up for outsiders) and then paying some fine.
There was a bit in the NY Times within the last week (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/opinion/06tyson.html), written by an astrophysicist, who used a new statistical technique (published in a real journal) that combines poll numbers. The point of the article was largely to chide the Dems for favoring Obama over Clinton, as based on this poll analysis technique, Clinton could beat McCain but Obama couldn't.
I'm neither a mathematician or much of a fan of any of the candidates, but it certainly sounds like they might be onto something.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
on
Running Xen
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· Score: 1
In ESX class, we were told (and this is a gross paraphrasing from something the instructor mentioned off the cuff 6 months ago) that multiple virtual CPUs helps most with VMs that run a lot of monolithic processes, as the ESX CPU scheduler is biased towards running on whatever CPU is available, which apparently can hammer cache coherency for SMP-aware multithreading. I think he said that setting processor affinities helps, but can hurt in other ways as well as being incompatible with VMotion.
I think that at the end of the day, though, stuff like VirtualCenter/VMotion/HA kind of matters more than simple CPU performance. Usually its SAN I/O that starts suck giant donkey dorks under VMWare, long before anyone complains about CPU.
Yes it sucks that people only serve 6 months in jail for rape (in Denmark), but at what point have they suffered enough?
Why don't I rape your wife/sister/girlfriend and then drop in on her six months and one day after to see how she feels about whether I've suffered enough?
Lax punishment works in small, homogenous commuinities where crime is generally non-existent and petty (small-time property crime, fighting-type assault, etc), since it generally assumes that the community is functional enough to produce community members with a respect for others and that the people involved really aren't "bad".
In larger communities it ends up serving no deterrence effect, particularly when you are dealing with violent crimes. There's also a justice angle to consider; where punishment is too lax (6 months for rape? You have to be kidding me!) you often end up with cycles of revenge where people feel that they need to dish out their own punishment.
So they haven't fixed the IMAP bug with Windows Mobile yet?
I was more or less set to give up my dated FreeBSD home email server in favor of a Google Apps hosted email setup, but the IMAP incompatibilities killed it for me and I went through the time-consuming exercise of rebuilding a new FreeBSD system, this time using postfix, SASL and IMAPS.
I was fairly staggered by the Windows Mobile incompatibility, it was like WTF, why aren't they fixing this and why didn't they test it?
He was my friend in high school and roommate in college for a year. Smartest guy I've ever met in my life, easily smarter than any other PhDs I've known, including people I know with Harvard post-med school doctorates.
Why is that though? Has the rail system (with regards to people moving) simply died due to neglect? Noise/speed requirements as trains can't travel so fast in urban areas? Are there too many stops along the way to make it worth it?
The rail system has collapsed due to its own lack of economic viability, mismanagement and the time factor, which can't be discounted.
When I was a kid, we'd take a 3 week vacation in the winter and at least two weeks over the summer, and my dad had a crap job as a semi-trailer salesman. I have a "good" job as an IT consultant and my wife is a marketing executive, and I can barely get away for 2 weeks a year and she the same. We *have* to take fast vacations, and we almost always fly out early in the morning or ASAP after work to maximize our vacations.
But I think most famously Amtrak was run as a unionized government entity that nobody really cared about. Their rolling stock rotted, they lost money, service was awful, and Congress kept underfunding or threatening to cut funding. Every said "too bad" when lines got cut (eg, Minneapolis to Duluth -- an easy 2-3 hour drive, but scenic and relaxing on the train) but people who did try to take it often spent hours stopped due to mechanical problems -- a cow-orker of mine took it to Whitefish, Montana and spent 12 *hours* at a dead stop due to some problem. She rented a sleeper car for big bucks, but those that didn't suffered.
I think for rail to see a significant revival it will take a big investment in service (rolling stock, administration, in-train service, scheduling, express routes), a doubling or tripling of airfares and possible some innovations (eg, bringing your car with you on a car-carrier) and social/business acceptance of the 3 week vacation.
Air travel has become quite commonplace, I wonder if the rising fuel costs will make it economically non-viable to fly the number of routes and schedules that the airlines fly now if they end up having to raise the price to accommodate the ever-rising costs of fuel, turning air travel into one of those exclusive things it used to be 50 years ago.
I also wonder if we'll see a renaissance in train travel in the US as air travel gets more expensive.
I guess that's my question -- what if Dell decided tomorrow that "rugged" was the new norm for their laptops, and they planned to produce 85% of their machines as ruggedized. When you start talking that kind of volume, how much does it add, really?
Furthermore, what's the investment-to-value curve like for the extra engineering and materials associated with ruggedness? Is it a question of the first 50% of investment in engineering or materials providing 85% of the durability, or is it the other way around?
What I'm getting at is, could *all* laptops be almost as rugged as a Toughbook for only a nominal increase in materials and engineering?
I'm sure it adds something to the cost of laptop to make it "tough", but is the real reason they're not all "tough" for a $5 upcharge is that makers want them to break (even after we buy their overpriced cases) so we come back and buy another one after trivial Newtonian physics has been experienced?
Why can't they make them all tough, or at least make "toughness" such a trivial feature that it doesn't require spending an extra $1500?
The broadcast networks (eg, the "big 4" -- NBC, ABC, CBS & PBS) no longer define television anymore. Cable, DVDs, the internet (as both non-video-media competitor for time and media source) and timeshifting all have undermined the core business model (eyeballs available at specific timeslots) but the networks seem unable to come up with an alternative that makes them money.
They're probably doing this to see if it has an impact on real-time ratings without causing too much fuss and negative publicity. They'd really like to get back to guaranteeing specific, measurable audiences to advertisers instead of just telling them that many people are watching the show.
Population control isn't a disaster; famine and ecological collapse are disasters that are seldom correctable, outside of long-term time horizons where widespread death and possible collapse of a civilization are considered acceptable corrections.
Think of it this way -- the NY Times recently quoted a Canadian agricultural professor as saying that 40% of the world won't get enough to eat without the continued global use of nitrogen fertilizer. So we've already outstripped the ability of the land to provide food for the world's population; we're relying on juking it chemically to provide for us. A widespread reduction in fertilizer production is enough to induce famine.
"Too small" populations are primarily economic model estimates based around GDP and government payments; many of the details are simply policy matters or even lifestyle choices (ie, the expectation that retirement means a condo in Florida, daily golf and expensive medicines to prolong terminal illnesses.)
...all the physics in the universe won't help them.
A major dose of population control is necessary as well, as a lot of Africa's civil unrest and political instability can be traced to overpopulation. Tribal lands get subdivided until they can't be subdivided anymore, and landless youth head to the cities where they are unemployed and easily pressed into whatever militia the local revolutionary, tribal rival or kleptocratic government is organizing today.
Building infrastructure, handing out OLPCs, curing malaria, etc. isn't going to help.
Hasn't Windows source code leaked? I seem to recall a leak of either 2000 or XP a couple of years ago, although it wasn't complete and not readily buildable, IIRC.
Most houses have the meter outside the house. The meter (at least here in Minnesota) belongs to the electric utility and the external mounting allows them to service the meter without customer involvement.
I had mine swapped out without warning, which of course cut my power. I filed a grievance with the public utility commission which got me a call from the utility apologizing and asking me if it was OK to rescind my complaint; I told them no, it wasn't OK, and what-if-I-had-a-respirator, etc. They gave me a song and dance about "acts of god" and weather, to which I said "sure, but God nor mother nature pulled my meter."
I then checked with the PUC and found it was legal to enclose my meter in a steel cage, which I did. Since I have all underground serviced utilities, it does a nice job keeping the cable guy, phone guy, power guy, etc out of my hair without an appointment. The power company actually got pissed once when they saw it servicing the neighbor. I told them why I did it and the guy said it wasn't allowed and he could disconnect my service, but a demand for ID and his supervisor's name and telephone number shut him up.
Ironically, my natural gas meter IS inside, which is different than most if not all of my neighbors. Don't know why its inside, but its the one thing I wish WAS outside.
I'm waiting to see how bad the service gets when spring finally arrives to our godforsaken artic plain. I've heard that the leaves coming out on the trees kill signal strength.
I also had a really random conversation with a client employee who said he has and likes it, but it crawls performance wise during evening "peak" hours and that you have to do browser-based authentication, which kills it for any kind of home LAN connectivity with a Wifi->ethernet bridge (which I'm sure is totally intentional, although I'm sure someone could come up with a bridge that featured an embedded browser for these kinds of things..).
Caribou and Dunn Brothers combined outnumber Starbucks in Minneapolis. You can't turn around without finding a Caribou, they seem to have better or more visible locations.
Here in Minneapolis we have two other chains competing with Starbucks, Dunn Bros. and Caribou, both starting out locally. Both of the competitors offer free Wifi. Caribou's is limited to an hour, but you can circumvent that pretty easily. I don't frequent Dunn Bros. often enough to know what kind of limit they might have.
Many other indie coffee shops, restaurants and other places offer free wifi.
I'm always amazed when I see people sitting in Starbucks using laptops (maybe they're not online) when they could go down the block or across the street and get free Wifi and probably better coffee.
Mod parent up. The Mac fanboys are in something of a logical bind; if Apple hardware is so superior, a clone wouldn't be a threat. If MacOS is so superior to Windows, then clones would be a benefit, and OS sales would easily balance hardware losses (which of course there wouldn't be any, since the hardware is so superior).
I'd pay a premium for some kind of dongle that would let me run MacOS on intel hardware, but probably as a VM instance and then I might switch it around to run Windows in a VM under MacOS.
IIRC all three of those companies are hurting finacially, so they probably just looked the other way because they need the money.
This is why we NEED a RICO investigation and prosecution of spammers.
Spam at the level it occurs at cannot exist without the cooperation of above-board entities like banks, ISPs and other "legitimate" businesses.
A RICO prosecution allows EVERYONE profiting in the larger enterprise to be targeted by $100,000 fines and 10 year minimum prison sentences. When ISP, bank and other execs are going to jail along with spammers for participating in a racketeering conspiracy, the air supply for spammers among legitimate businesses will simply go away.
This WILL hurt spamming as a business prospect. Will it knock out botnets and every east bloc thug sending spam? Of course not. But it will pinch the bigger operators and make it much, much harder for whoever wants to keep it up to do so.
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I used to feel the same exact way -- I thought watching golf was about as exciting as watching the grass its played on grow.
I don't know what happened, but I've gotten kind of hooked on the major tournaments. There's enough camera coverage that they actually spend most of the time with a decent golfer hitting the ball, so its not just a bunch of guys walking around, and they're almost exclusively in high definition.
There are some great variations on the "My Kid is a..."
"My kid sells drugs to your honor student."
"My kid knocked up your honor student."
I've seen the former on a car, the latter only in a catalog...
Rural areas have, in the recent past, had serious problems with meth cookers. Either stealing anhydrous ammonia or using abandoned or unused houses and buildings to cook meth. Since meth cookers are usually tweakers and tweakers are usually paranoid and borderline psychotic, they have a tendency to be dangerous. And then there's just thieves stealing cattle or farm equipment, who are also generally armed and dangerous.
I've heard this from BLM rangers in Arizona and landowners in North Dakota.
Even if geohashers aren't doing anything "wrong" and are trespassing in error, at a minimum ranchers/farmers know that a sheriff may be 30 minutes or more away and that confronting an unknown quantity in a rural location and unarmed is inherently dangerous. So you grab your rifle from the truck.
While this might get you in hot water in the city when the police show up, in the country it means when your wife's cousin's husband (ie, the sheriff or deputy) shows up he usually will ask the landowner what time the barbecue on Saturday is and does he want those people arrested or just escorted out of the county.
And getting arrested in a rural area sucks. They'll treat you nice, but the "punishment" means spending 2-3 days in jail until bail is set and someone can drive down to bail you out (they won't let you out to go to the bank to get money wired to you) and if you choose to fight it or have to go to trial, making several trips at inconvenient times, hiring a local attorney (whose rates tend to go up for outsiders) and then paying some fine.
There was a bit in the NY Times within the last week (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/opinion/06tyson.html), written by an astrophysicist, who used a new statistical technique (published in a real journal) that combines poll numbers. The point of the article was largely to chide the Dems for favoring Obama over Clinton, as based on this poll analysis technique, Clinton could beat McCain but Obama couldn't.
I'm neither a mathematician or much of a fan of any of the candidates, but it certainly sounds like they might be onto something.
In ESX class, we were told (and this is a gross paraphrasing from something the instructor mentioned off the cuff 6 months ago) that multiple virtual CPUs helps most with VMs that run a lot of monolithic processes, as the ESX CPU scheduler is biased towards running on whatever CPU is available, which apparently can hammer cache coherency for SMP-aware multithreading. I think he said that setting processor affinities helps, but can hurt in other ways as well as being incompatible with VMotion.
I think that at the end of the day, though, stuff like VirtualCenter/VMotion/HA kind of matters more than simple CPU performance. Usually its SAN I/O that starts suck giant donkey dorks under VMWare, long before anyone complains about CPU.
Yes it sucks that people only serve 6 months in jail for rape (in Denmark), but at what point have they suffered enough?
Why don't I rape your wife/sister/girlfriend and then drop in on her six months and one day after to see how she feels about whether I've suffered enough?
Lax punishment works in small, homogenous commuinities where crime is generally non-existent and petty (small-time property crime, fighting-type assault, etc), since it generally assumes that the community is functional enough to produce community members with a respect for others and that the people involved really aren't "bad".
In larger communities it ends up serving no deterrence effect, particularly when you are dealing with violent crimes. There's also a justice angle to consider; where punishment is too lax (6 months for rape? You have to be kidding me!) you often end up with cycles of revenge where people feel that they need to dish out their own punishment.
So they haven't fixed the IMAP bug with Windows Mobile yet?
I was more or less set to give up my dated FreeBSD home email server in favor of a Google Apps hosted email setup, but the IMAP incompatibilities killed it for me and I went through the time-consuming exercise of rebuilding a new FreeBSD system, this time using postfix, SASL and IMAPS.
I was fairly staggered by the Windows Mobile incompatibility, it was like WTF, why aren't they fixing this and why didn't they test it?
He was my friend in high school and roommate in college for a year. Smartest guy I've ever met in my life, easily smarter than any other PhDs I've known, including people I know with Harvard post-med school doctorates.
I'm more worried about the Yul Brenner character. Jurassic was fun, but Westworld is scary.
...that the sharp pencils at Dell probably figured out that the savings they made on sleazy behavior are profitable in spite of the fines.
IMHO, the fines levied should be something like 3x profits from bad behavior so that we get around this "fines as a cost of doing business" mentality.
Why is that though? Has the rail system (with regards to people moving) simply died due to neglect? Noise/speed requirements as trains can't travel so fast in urban areas? Are there too many stops along the way to make it worth it?
The rail system has collapsed due to its own lack of economic viability, mismanagement and the time factor, which can't be discounted.
When I was a kid, we'd take a 3 week vacation in the winter and at least two weeks over the summer, and my dad had a crap job as a semi-trailer salesman. I have a "good" job as an IT consultant and my wife is a marketing executive, and I can barely get away for 2 weeks a year and she the same. We *have* to take fast vacations, and we almost always fly out early in the morning or ASAP after work to maximize our vacations.
But I think most famously Amtrak was run as a unionized government entity that nobody really cared about. Their rolling stock rotted, they lost money, service was awful, and Congress kept underfunding or threatening to cut funding. Every said "too bad" when lines got cut (eg, Minneapolis to Duluth -- an easy 2-3 hour drive, but scenic and relaxing on the train) but people who did try to take it often spent hours stopped due to mechanical problems -- a cow-orker of mine took it to Whitefish, Montana and spent 12 *hours* at a dead stop due to some problem. She rented a sleeper car for big bucks, but those that didn't suffered.
I think for rail to see a significant revival it will take a big investment in service (rolling stock, administration, in-train service, scheduling, express routes), a doubling or tripling of airfares and possible some innovations (eg, bringing your car with you on a car-carrier) and social/business acceptance of the 3 week vacation.
Air travel has become quite commonplace, I wonder if the rising fuel costs will make it economically non-viable to fly the number of routes and schedules that the airlines fly now if they end up having to raise the price to accommodate the ever-rising costs of fuel, turning air travel into one of those exclusive things it used to be 50 years ago.
I also wonder if we'll see a renaissance in train travel in the US as air travel gets more expensive.
I guess that's my question -- what if Dell decided tomorrow that "rugged" was the new norm for their laptops, and they planned to produce 85% of their machines as ruggedized. When you start talking that kind of volume, how much does it add, really?
Furthermore, what's the investment-to-value curve like for the extra engineering and materials associated with ruggedness? Is it a question of the first 50% of investment in engineering or materials providing 85% of the durability, or is it the other way around?
What I'm getting at is, could *all* laptops be almost as rugged as a Toughbook for only a nominal increase in materials and engineering?
I'm sure it adds something to the cost of laptop to make it "tough", but is the real reason they're not all "tough" for a $5 upcharge is that makers want them to break (even after we buy their overpriced cases) so we come back and buy another one after trivial Newtonian physics has been experienced?
Why can't they make them all tough, or at least make "toughness" such a trivial feature that it doesn't require spending an extra $1500?
The broadcast networks (eg, the "big 4" -- NBC, ABC, CBS & PBS) no longer define television anymore. Cable, DVDs, the internet (as both non-video-media competitor for time and media source) and timeshifting all have undermined the core business model (eyeballs available at specific timeslots) but the networks seem unable to come up with an alternative that makes them money.
They're probably doing this to see if it has an impact on real-time ratings without causing too much fuss and negative publicity. They'd really like to get back to guaranteeing specific, measurable audiences to advertisers instead of just telling them that many people are watching the show.
Population control isn't a disaster; famine and ecological collapse are disasters that are seldom correctable, outside of long-term time horizons where widespread death and possible collapse of a civilization are considered acceptable corrections.
Think of it this way -- the NY Times recently quoted a Canadian agricultural professor as saying that 40% of the world won't get enough to eat without the continued global use of nitrogen fertilizer. So we've already outstripped the ability of the land to provide food for the world's population; we're relying on juking it chemically to provide for us. A widespread reduction in fertilizer production is enough to induce famine.
"Too small" populations are primarily economic model estimates based around GDP and government payments; many of the details are simply policy matters or even lifestyle choices (ie, the expectation that retirement means a condo in Florida, daily golf and expensive medicines to prolong terminal illnesses.)
...all the physics in the universe won't help them.
A major dose of population control is necessary as well, as a lot of Africa's civil unrest and political instability can be traced to overpopulation. Tribal lands get subdivided until they can't be subdivided anymore, and landless youth head to the cities where they are unemployed and easily pressed into whatever militia the local revolutionary, tribal rival or kleptocratic government is organizing today.
Building infrastructure, handing out OLPCs, curing malaria, etc. isn't going to help.
Hasn't Windows source code leaked? I seem to recall a leak of either 2000 or XP a couple of years ago, although it wasn't complete and not readily buildable, IIRC.
Most houses have the meter outside the house. The meter (at least here in Minnesota) belongs to the electric utility and the external mounting allows them to service the meter without customer involvement.
I had mine swapped out without warning, which of course cut my power. I filed a grievance with the public utility commission which got me a call from the utility apologizing and asking me if it was OK to rescind my complaint; I told them no, it wasn't OK, and what-if-I-had-a-respirator, etc. They gave me a song and dance about "acts of god" and weather, to which I said "sure, but God nor mother nature pulled my meter."
I then checked with the PUC and found it was legal to enclose my meter in a steel cage, which I did. Since I have all underground serviced utilities, it does a nice job keeping the cable guy, phone guy, power guy, etc out of my hair without an appointment. The power company actually got pissed once when they saw it servicing the neighbor. I told them why I did it and the guy said it wasn't allowed and he could disconnect my service, but a demand for ID and his supervisor's name and telephone number shut him up.
Ironically, my natural gas meter IS inside, which is different than most if not all of my neighbors. Don't know why its inside, but its the one thing I wish WAS outside.
When you typed "communist" you misspelled "dictatorial, totalitarian and unelected government."
I'm waiting to see how bad the service gets when spring finally arrives to our godforsaken artic plain. I've heard that the leaves coming out on the trees kill signal strength.
I also had a really random conversation with a client employee who said he has and likes it, but it crawls performance wise during evening "peak" hours and that you have to do browser-based authentication, which kills it for any kind of home LAN connectivity with a Wifi->ethernet bridge (which I'm sure is totally intentional, although I'm sure someone could come up with a bridge that featured an embedded browser for these kinds of things..).
Caribou and Dunn Brothers combined outnumber Starbucks in Minneapolis. You can't turn around without finding a Caribou, they seem to have better or more visible locations.
Here in Minneapolis we have two other chains competing with Starbucks, Dunn Bros. and Caribou, both starting out locally. Both of the competitors offer free Wifi. Caribou's is limited to an hour, but you can circumvent that pretty easily. I don't frequent Dunn Bros. often enough to know what kind of limit they might have.
Many other indie coffee shops, restaurants and other places offer free wifi.
I'm always amazed when I see people sitting in Starbucks using laptops (maybe they're not online) when they could go down the block or across the street and get free Wifi and probably better coffee.
Mod parent up. The Mac fanboys are in something of a logical bind; if Apple hardware is so superior, a clone wouldn't be a threat. If MacOS is so superior to Windows, then clones would be a benefit, and OS sales would easily balance hardware losses (which of course there wouldn't be any, since the hardware is so superior).
I'd pay a premium for some kind of dongle that would let me run MacOS on intel hardware, but probably as a VM instance and then I might switch it around to run Windows in a VM under MacOS.
IIRC all three of those companies are hurting finacially, so they probably just looked the other way because they need the money.
This is why we NEED a RICO investigation and prosecution of spammers.
Spam at the level it occurs at cannot exist without the cooperation of above-board entities like banks, ISPs and other "legitimate" businesses.
A RICO prosecution allows EVERYONE profiting in the larger enterprise to be targeted by $100,000 fines and 10 year minimum prison sentences. When ISP, bank and other execs are going to jail along with spammers for participating in a racketeering conspiracy, the air supply for spammers among legitimate businesses will simply go away.
This WILL hurt spamming as a business prospect. Will it knock out botnets and every east bloc thug sending spam? Of course not. But it will pinch the bigger operators and make it much, much harder for whoever wants to keep it up to do so.