" (this is turning into a Sysinternals commercial!)"
yeah, that'll happen on exactly the day that Sysinternals starts shipping products for platforms other than Windows./bitter (and no, the Linux version of Filemon does not work with any recent version of Linux).
I worked in the tape backup software business for 11 years, the first 5 of it, intimitely involved with 4mm (DAT), 8mm, DLT, and QIC technologies. I never, ever, not once, ever, heard of a customer fixing a bad tape with a stanley knife and sellotape. Not once. On a few occasions, we had customers get tapes recovered via OnTrack's service - which just recovered the data - then they had to pay US consulting fees to restructure it into files. Not pretty.
And 8mm/4mm was ASS for reliability. Compared to DLT.
And then there's the whole Sequential vs Random access thing. Having to seek to the end of a 40 gig DLT tape for a single file can pretty much take all day, with most commercial backup solutions.
Then there's the hideous disparity between storage capacities of tape and disk. Tape drives that are capable of backing up even an average-size disk these days are in the $2000 range.
And spend that much on a tape drive, and MAYBE the tape lasts 5 years - but does your drive? And if it doesn't, can you find a new drive that supports the old tape format? And with the consolidation that happened in the 1990s in the tape backup software industry, there's a buttload of depricated backup software - so your old software may read your old tape format, but I doubt it will support a new tape drive that can.
In short - tape backup is an ugly, ugly, can of worms. The worst IT nightmare there is. And I'm very glad that I haven't migrated to an IT position where I'd be responsible for backups. If I had, I would probably slash my wrists as the best solution to the PC backup problem.
I could rant for years on the "car troubleshooting" issue. I know several people who would take it on much longer than even that.
Of course, I'm an antique VW nut. My main complaint with the "new" cars is the "check engine" light. The fact that, in order to diagnose a fault, you need to buy a separate instrument just blows my mind. Although, the price for these tools has come WAY down (I understand that for domestic cars, you can get them for under $50 at Pep Boys, they used to be giant console machines costing upwards of $10,000), it's kind of ridiculous to figure out how to troubleshoot a bad O2 sensor, or leaky vacuum hose. Granted, much of the complexity of "new" cars came from EPA regs and CAFE standards of the early 1970's - when you look at the difficulty in troubleshooting, plus the abyssmal reliability we were getting with these cars, especially back in the 1980's, one wonders why we went there. However, this situation has improved greatly. Especially in your Hondas and Toyotas. Or your Luxury-type cars - the Cadillac, for instance, that requires a Tune-Up after 100,000 miles. Worth the journey. Overall, look at the reduced labor costs over that time period.
If anything, there's been a de-evolution of automotive technology in the past 10 years with the SUV craze. There's certainly very little thought to design. Most of these trucks have crappy suspensions, as far as onroad driving goes, and there's no thought to fuel efficiency at all. One cannot pursue fuel efficiency and penis length enhancement at the same time - it seems. And with this de-evolution, one would expect some simplicity, or a return to the old design values. Alas, that has not happened.
Here's why.
When you go to buy a car, the car dealer isn't selling a car. They're selling financing. They're not after a sale. They're after a revenue stream. That's why the market pressure to innovate and improved has not acted on the automotive industry.
"It's well known that Sun's "professional" compiler suite produces some of the best code around for assorted sparc-architecture processors,"
I've heard this said over and over - but I once worked on a project where we hit a memory leak in our code - our developers traced it down to the memory management code in the Sun compiler. Set our development team back two years. Sure this is an isolated case, and I don't know if you can take that to mean that Sun's compiler isn't top knotch. But I'm certainly bitter about it, and I know my former team and our customers certainly are.
" It may be believable in animals that rely solely on instincts, but extending it to intelligent species,. . . "
define "intelligent"
"As for height being genetically correlated with leadership: that's just plain wrong."
I didn't say leadership. I said dominance. A person does not need to be dominant to be a good leader - but it helps. (because people will tend not to follow a submissive leader). Nor does dominant traits or behavior lead to good leadership skills. In fact, some of the WORST leaders are people who get off on their own dominance.
And, I'm not trying to correllate height with dominance. I'm corellating submissiveness with shortness. A good example is in more primative cultures, royalty always sits on a chair that is elevated physically compared to others, and often, it's a requirement that the non royalty never sit higher than the royalty. That's to take advantage of the fact that, a higher physical position, encourages submissive behavior in others. When you're looking UP at someone, there's a natural tendency to submit to them. "Intelligent" humans can, of course, easily coutner this urge, IF they're aware of it, and IF they put their mind to it. Most people blunder through life - trying to deny these traits, and so nature has it's way with them.
This has everything to do with how the human animal is hardwired for dominance/submission. Very similar to many animals. More dominant males tend to succeed better. Being taller is a dominance trait. It's not rocket science. It's biology. It drives a lot more human behavior than most people are aware of, or would be comfortable admitting.
The big problem I see with space debris is, we don't have the slightest idea how to get rid of it. Once space becomes littered with a bunch of debris to the point where space travel becomes too hazardous to be worthwhile - it will be that way for a very long time, and there's no way to correct that.
Bill Gates has obviously been watching our current US Presidential Administration closely.
The bigger, and more outrageous the lie - the less people will question it's veracity. As long as proving that it's a lie takes more than 5 minutes, or involves logic that a typical American High School graduate can't grasp, you can say anything - and it's as good as truth.
Regardless of the amount of innovation Linux provides, one must remember: It's a free OS written by hobbyists in their spare time. It's mere existence is of CRUCIAL importance, because it provides a vital alternative to the industry-provided monopoly OS. Could you imagine a world without Linux?
I think Linux is just fine as it is - it adequately fills it's niche, and does not need "marketing wizards" to add flash and pizzaz.
"Socialism is a nice idea, but greed breeds innovation better."
As long as you keep the greed in check, and don't reward unchecked greed, fraud, and abuse (as our present system in the US does). Greed is a handy whip to use as a motivator. But if you let it get out of hand, it's dog eat dog, and then. . . why did we start walking on our hind legs again? That's not civilization. It's living like brutal animals.
"Perhaps this will kick the US space program back into gear?"
There's only one thing that would kick the US space program back into gear - a dedicated public, and dedicated leaders. Right now, the public seems more dedicated towards gasing up their SUV's, learning who's going to be voted off the island next, or who's the next WWF Wrestling champion. First man on the moon is exiting. Good TV. Next exiting thing is first man on Mars, and that's beyond the attention span of the average American. Sad to say.
So you're saying that if two cars, leaving Denver at the same time in opposite directions, both travelling at 50 miles an hour, after 3 hours, they're more than 300 miles apart?
This asteroid is too small to be of concern. On the Media Astronomical Size scale, "size of a house" is much smaller than the far-more-threatening "Size of Cincinnati" or "Size of Manhattan". But I'm especially worried about the "Size of Texas" ones. Especially if their leaders have any designs on the US Presidency.
Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about the Meteor Crater(TM) in Arizona, is that about 50 miles to the North, on Hopi land, there's a site that was the muddy bank of a river, where dinosaurs had walked and left footprints. The heat from the meteor impact baked the mud, and preserved these dinosaur footprints, some eggs, and other items of interest. It's an absolutely fascinating site, and not one that's generally well-known, because the native Americans who live there have not marketed it as a tourist site.
Visit Meteor Crater, and you'll understand how truly fucked we are if we continue to gamble with the survival of our species as we do. Sooner or later, we're going to lose. And when we lose, we shall lose BIG.
On OS X MPlayer is about the only media player that will balls-out play just anything. Bottom line, this is what it's all about. That's the killer-app of video as far as I'm concerned. The program that does not make it the user's concern what format, what encoding method, or who copyrighted what. Don't hassle me with technical crap. When I want that, I'll open a term window. But when I'm going throug video clips, I certainly don't need that kind of hassle. (often, my right hand is covered with lotion at this point:)
However, there are a couple of clips I've tried playing that'll hang MPlayer in a very ugly way, often taking Finder with it, occasionally taking the whole system along for the ride. (especially if that clip was on a CD). Granted, these files are almost certainly corrupted in some way. And every one of them that hangs MPlayer won't even open for other media players (quicktime, WiMP, VideoLan).
Well, with Windows NT running on the US Navy's Aegis cruisers, we might wake up one day to find out that some Al Queda hacker vaporized New York with a cruise missile.
If it's a soccer mom who's gotta truck around 5 neighborhood kids, that's okay.
If it's a single man, driving to the liquor store alone, and has bought into the Bush administration's logic that "increasing demand will fix the supply problem" - or, "God blesses us with oil because we're Christians, and believe in posting the ten commandments in public buildings, and shooting fags" then I define them as a redneck. Whether they live in the suburbs, or not.
If this were true, I'm sure these cells would sell retail for $14,999.99. Or whatever one-penny cheaper than it would cost to buy electicity from the power company is. Price is what the market will bear. Not what would make life better for everyone.
This is why DSL costs $50/mo, instead of $10/mo. The service doesn't cost that much to provide. It's what the market will bear.
. ..and I'm still not convinced it is - I think I speak for just about every person on the planet; FUCK OPEC, Fuck the oil companies, and FUCK the execs they placed in public office, and FUCK the SUV-driving rednecks who feel it's their patriotic duty to consume as much of a limited nonrenewable resource in THIS generation as humanly possible, if for no other reason than to prevent others from having it.
Of course, if it's not true, then I continue to stick my tongue up the above people's asses, like everybody else.
Slashdot Mirror
" (this is turning into a Sysinternals commercial!)"
/bitter (and no, the Linux version of Filemon does not work with any recent version of Linux).
yeah, that'll happen on exactly the day that Sysinternals starts shipping products for platforms other than Windows.
I'm reading the Foundation series by Issac Asimov.
I want my personal force shield generator, with an atomic power source the size of a walnut. And some lead lined underwear, please.
I worked in the tape backup software business for 11 years, the first 5 of it, intimitely involved with 4mm (DAT), 8mm, DLT, and QIC technologies. I never, ever, not once, ever, heard of a customer fixing a bad tape with a stanley knife and sellotape. Not once. On a few occasions, we had customers get tapes recovered via OnTrack's service - which just recovered the data - then they had to pay US consulting fees to restructure it into files. Not pretty.
And 8mm/4mm was ASS for reliability. Compared to DLT.
And then there's the whole Sequential vs Random access thing. Having to seek to the end of a 40 gig DLT tape for a single file can pretty much take all day, with most commercial backup solutions.
Then there's the hideous disparity between storage capacities of tape and disk. Tape drives that are capable of backing up even an average-size disk these days are in the $2000 range.
And spend that much on a tape drive, and MAYBE the tape lasts 5 years - but does your drive? And if it doesn't, can you find a new drive that supports the old tape format? And with the consolidation that happened in the 1990s in the tape backup software industry, there's a buttload of depricated backup software - so your old software may read your old tape format, but I doubt it will support a new tape drive that can.
In short - tape backup is an ugly, ugly, can of worms. The worst IT nightmare there is. And I'm very glad that I haven't migrated to an IT position where I'd be responsible for backups. If I had, I would probably slash my wrists as the best solution to the PC backup problem.
I was on vacation in Orlando when a Shuttle flew in. very clear, window-rattling sonic booms. Last I checked, Orlando was populated.
I could rant for years on the "car troubleshooting" issue. I know several people who would take it on much longer than even that.
Of course, I'm an antique VW nut. My main complaint with the "new" cars is the "check engine" light. The fact that, in order to diagnose a fault, you need to buy a separate instrument just blows my mind. Although, the price for these tools has come WAY down (I understand that for domestic cars, you can get them for under $50 at Pep Boys, they used to be giant console machines costing upwards of $10,000), it's kind of ridiculous to figure out how to troubleshoot a bad O2 sensor, or leaky vacuum hose.
Granted, much of the complexity of "new" cars came from EPA regs and CAFE standards of the early 1970's - when you look at the difficulty in troubleshooting, plus the abyssmal reliability we were getting with these cars, especially back in the 1980's, one wonders why we went there. However, this situation has improved greatly. Especially in your Hondas and Toyotas. Or your Luxury-type cars - the Cadillac, for instance, that requires a Tune-Up after 100,000 miles. Worth the journey. Overall, look at the reduced labor costs over that time period.
If anything, there's been a de-evolution of automotive technology in the past 10 years with the SUV craze. There's certainly very little thought to design. Most of these trucks have crappy suspensions, as far as onroad driving goes, and there's no thought to fuel efficiency at all. One cannot pursue fuel efficiency and penis length enhancement at the same time - it seems. And with this de-evolution, one would expect some simplicity, or a return to the old design values. Alas, that has not happened.
Here's why.
When you go to buy a car, the car dealer isn't selling a car. They're selling financing. They're not after a sale. They're after a revenue stream. That's why the market pressure to innovate and improved has not acted on the automotive industry.
"It's well known that Sun's "professional" compiler suite produces some of the best code around for assorted sparc-architecture processors,"
I've heard this said over and over - but I once worked on a project where we hit a memory leak in our code - our developers traced it down to the memory management code in the Sun compiler. Set our development team back two years. Sure this is an isolated case, and I don't know if you can take that to mean that Sun's compiler isn't top knotch. But I'm certainly bitter about it, and I know my former team and our customers certainly are.
" It may be believable in animals that rely solely on instincts, but extending it to intelligent species,. . . "
define "intelligent"
"As for height being genetically correlated with leadership: that's just plain wrong."
I didn't say leadership. I said dominance. A person does not need to be dominant to be a good leader - but it helps. (because people will tend not to follow a submissive leader). Nor does dominant traits or behavior lead to good leadership skills. In fact, some of the WORST leaders are people who get off on their own dominance.
And, I'm not trying to correllate height with dominance. I'm corellating submissiveness with shortness. A good example is in more primative cultures, royalty always sits on a chair that is elevated physically compared to others, and often, it's a requirement that the non royalty never sit higher than the royalty. That's to take advantage of the fact that, a higher physical position, encourages submissive behavior in others. When you're looking UP at someone, there's a natural tendency to submit to them. "Intelligent" humans can, of course, easily coutner this urge, IF they're aware of it, and IF they put their mind to it. Most people blunder through life - trying to deny these traits, and so nature has it's way with them.
NYT won't be contributing to this large body of text, because registration is STILL required.
ME -- not suprised
This has everything to do with how the human animal is hardwired for dominance/submission. Very similar to many animals. More dominant males tend to succeed better. Being taller is a dominance trait. It's not rocket science. It's biology. It drives a lot more human behavior than most people are aware of, or would be comfortable admitting.
The big problem I see with space debris is, we don't have the slightest idea how to get rid of it. Once space becomes littered with a bunch of debris to the point where space travel becomes too hazardous to be worthwhile - it will be that way for a very long time, and there's no way to correct that.
Bill Gates has obviously been watching our current US Presidential Administration closely.
The bigger, and more outrageous the lie - the less people will question it's veracity. As long as proving that it's a lie takes more than 5 minutes, or involves logic that a typical American High School graduate can't grasp, you can say anything - and it's as good as truth.
It's all about the panty-shots.
Kiki's Delivery service too. It's like a wierd Japanese Hentai Pr0n site.
Regardless of the amount of innovation Linux provides, one must remember: It's a free OS written by hobbyists in their spare time. It's mere existence is of CRUCIAL importance, because it provides a vital alternative to the industry-provided monopoly OS. Could you imagine a world without Linux?
I think Linux is just fine as it is - it adequately fills it's niche, and does not need "marketing wizards" to add flash and pizzaz.
"Socialism is a nice idea, but greed breeds innovation better."
As long as you keep the greed in check, and don't reward unchecked greed, fraud, and abuse (as our present system in the US does). Greed is a handy whip to use as a motivator. But if you let it get out of hand, it's dog eat dog, and then. . . why did we start walking on our hind legs again? That's not civilization. It's living like brutal animals.
"Perhaps this will kick the US space program back into gear?"
There's only one thing that would kick the US space program back into gear - a dedicated public, and dedicated leaders. Right now, the public seems more dedicated towards gasing up their SUV's, learning who's going to be voted off the island next, or who's the next WWF Wrestling champion. First man on the moon is exiting. Good TV. Next exiting thing is first man on Mars, and that's beyond the attention span of the average American. Sad to say.
So you're saying that if two cars, leaving Denver at the same time in opposite directions, both travelling at 50 miles an hour, after 3 hours, they're more than 300 miles apart?
This asteroid is too small to be of concern. On the Media Astronomical Size scale, "size of a house" is much smaller than the far-more-threatening "Size of Cincinnati" or "Size of Manhattan". But I'm especially worried about the "Size of Texas" ones. Especially if their leaders have any designs on the US Presidency.
Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about the Meteor Crater(TM) in Arizona, is that about 50 miles to the North, on Hopi land, there's a site that was the muddy bank of a river, where dinosaurs had walked and left footprints. The heat from the meteor impact baked the mud, and preserved these dinosaur footprints, some eggs, and other items of interest. It's an absolutely fascinating site, and not one that's generally well-known, because the native Americans who live there have not marketed it as a tourist site.
Visit Meteor Crater, and you'll understand how truly fucked we are if we continue to gamble with the survival of our species as we do. Sooner or later, we're going to lose. And when we lose, we shall lose BIG.
On OS X MPlayer is about the only media player that will balls-out play just anything. Bottom line, this is what it's all about. That's the killer-app of video as far as I'm concerned. The program that does not make it the user's concern what format, what encoding method, or who copyrighted what. Don't hassle me with technical crap. When I want that, I'll open a term window. But when I'm going throug video clips, I certainly don't need that kind of hassle. (often, my right hand is covered with lotion at this point :)
However, there are a couple of clips I've tried playing that'll hang MPlayer in a very ugly way, often taking Finder with it, occasionally taking the whole system along for the ride. (especially if that clip was on a CD). Granted, these files are almost certainly corrupted in some way. And every one of them that hangs MPlayer won't even open for other media players (quicktime, WiMP, VideoLan).
Well, with Windows NT running on the US Navy's Aegis cruisers, we might wake up one day to find out that some Al Queda hacker vaporized New York with a cruise missile.
If it's a soccer mom who's gotta truck around 5 neighborhood kids, that's okay.
If it's a single man, driving to the liquor store alone, and has bought into the Bush administration's logic that "increasing demand will fix the supply problem" - or, "God blesses us with oil because we're Christians, and believe in posting the ten commandments in public buildings, and shooting fags" then I define them as a redneck. Whether they live in the suburbs, or not.
cost of production != market value.
If this were true, I'm sure these cells would sell retail for $14,999.99. Or whatever one-penny cheaper than it would cost to buy electicity from the power company is. Price is what the market will bear. Not what would make life better for everyone.
This is why DSL costs $50/mo, instead of $10/mo. The service doesn't cost that much to provide. It's what the market will bear.
. . .and I'm still not convinced it is - I think I speak for just about every person on the planet; FUCK OPEC, Fuck the oil companies, and FUCK the execs they placed in public office, and FUCK the SUV-driving rednecks who feel it's their patriotic duty to consume as much of a limited nonrenewable resource in THIS generation as humanly possible, if for no other reason than to prevent others from having it.
Of course, if it's not true, then I continue to stick my tongue up the above people's asses, like everybody else.
The point is - if you've got your butt sitting in a lecture hall for 2 hours, you don't have time to stop and smell the roses.
But if you watch a time-compressed video of the lecture in 45 minutes, you have exactly 1 hour and 15 minutes to do all the R. multiflora you want.