SETI has always had trouble creating enough work units to keep up with user demand. The project is more popular than anyone had ever dreamed.
One of the patches cause the clients to run 30% faster (at least on my clients). I've heard some reports of clients running 50%-70% faster.
SETI just can't generate that much data to munch. If they did speed up all the clients and they ran out of blocks, users would be very upset. Solution... SETI would start sending out the same blocks to be rechecked while waiting for new blocks to be created. And users would be upset because they were doing the same blocks twice.
In either case, they lose.
As for the open source discussion, that is meaningless in terms of SETI. Their problem isn't that the client it too slow, but that it has the potential to be too fast.
One of the reasons NT is so expensive is the heavy duty testing that goes into the product. Are we really to beleive that MS didn't notice that they broke a major application?
I'll give you a hint... big Lotus shops aren't on Microsoft's beta list.
Microsoft offers betas to those folks it has substantial relations with; folks who buy a lot of Microsoft products. I'm sure that Microsoft sent betas to its large Exchange sites and whatnot. Making sure that Lotus runs on NT was not at the top of their concern list.
Geez... The scouts have gone taken a different track since I left. When I was a scout, all we did was tie knots, hike and tell stories (none of which were true) about how we snuck into the neighboring Girl Scout camp.
Of course there are many more applications for a database backed web site than ecommerce, but if you are talking about an expensive high end database like Oracle I think you need some revenue to justify the cost of Oracle.
Oracle is easy to justify if you have a bunch of folks on staff who are already trained in Oracle. You've got to remember that people are almost always more expensive than hardware or software.
Earlier this year, my company budgeted for a pair of IBM H70s running under HACMP for an internal, mission-critical Oracle database application. We're getting toward the end of the year, looking to buy but the bean counters want to save some money and go with Microsoft SQL on NT. (Ugh!)
We've just about got them convinced that Oracle under Linux would be a better solution. The primary reason? We've got half a dozen folks here who have been to Oracle school and another two that are actualy Oracle DBAs. Sure, they could learn SQL 7 but why bother? They already know Oralce.
The same goes for MySQL, MSQL, etc. Yeah, they could learn them but they already know Oracle inside and out.
Oracle on Linux is a wonderful thing because we already know Oracle and our Unix support staff (me {blush}) is better equipped to support a mission-critical application under Linux than anyone on staff is equipped to support the same database under NT.
Well, that, and a dual P-II with similar disk space and RAM is a tenth the cost of an IBM RS/6000 box and about half as much as NT on the same hardware.
Poor Rob. He missed a big date or something and Debbie is pissed. Quick! Use Slashdot to kiss up and make things right. He won't be sleeping in the doghouse tonight.
Why is this even an issue? I'd be complaining if they didn't post the IP addresses.
There isn't a newpaper in this country who values its reputation that runs blind letters to the editor. Period. Every letter must be signed and, at every newspaper I've worked for, the editorial staff goes to great lengths to make sure the name at the bottom of the letter is actually who wrote the letter. Every person who gets a letter published generally gets a phone call before the letter is published.
Folks who use the net expect a greater level of *anonymity* (not privacy) than do most people.
Anonymity and privacy are two different beasts but that's another topic.
I have worked for newspapers nearly ten years now. In that time, we have tried many different mediums for content delivery. First, we started making content available over the telephone. Dial 511 and get the latest news, traffic, weather and sports. It works. Sorta. But folks still wanted their daily paper. Later, we decided that we needed a television presence so we went 50/50 with Time Warner and started delivering our content over a regional 24-hour news channel. It works. Sorta. But a paper still hits my doorstep every morning. (We would be doing radio, too, but the FCC has some reservations (good in theory) about one company owning all the media outlets in a town.) Our latest medium has been the Internet. While somewhat profitable for us (and certainly a pain in the buttocks), it hasn't caused folks to cancel their subscriptions in favor of internet delivery. It's not as though content is different between the platforms. A newspaper reporter writes the story and sends a copy to the online group and the TV station where they make it available in their respective medium. What this tells me is that the medium is more important than the content (though I'm not prepared to say that the medium *is* the message) and that people like paper as their medium.
Forget the security implications for a moment. Why not start cracking the email accounts for fun? For example, there are a number of Congressmen who use Hotmail accounts. And folks in the media (think: anchors). Heck, even Monica Lewinsky used Hotmail, right? (Try: mlewinsky.) There could be a lot of fun had here before Hotmail fills the hole. (Which I'm surprised they haven't done yet.)
I've seen Blair Witch. In fact, since I live in Orlando, I've saw it at the same small theater that the file makers hang out at. (Or used to before they became big stars.)
If you think the hype is hot in the rest of the country, you can't even begin to understand what it's like here. Every newscast. Every newspaper. Every radio show. The University of Central Florida is now using the BWP to attract students.
The movie, in my every so humble opinion, wasn't that great. The last five minutes were novel for an American film but the sort of stuff you find in European films on a regular basis. Ie: There was no happy ending. The loose ends weren't tied-up.
However, no one seems to want to compare this film to major films.
They want to say it was made for $30k and, thus, that five minutes make up for all the rest of the film. For me, that just is not acceptable. I want more out of a film.
Sure, the movie may have been made for cheap but I still had to pay $7 to see it and that's more than I'm willing to pay for five minutes of fun.
InitZero
Someone Wanna Grab that Palm Pilot?
on
Password Overload
·
· Score: 1
Ron Dilley is a network administrator. He maintains 129 active passwords using a Palm organizer to track his passwords.
I ain't got one (yet) so I've got to ask... How secure is that? Can you get PGP for the Palm? Seems to me he leaves his Palm Pilot on the seat of a taxi or on a restaurant table and he is going to be hating life very mucho a lot and a half.
> I'm one who believes in investing as much disk to swap > as you can afford. 2xRAM is my minimal swap space.
I've got a AIX boxes with two- to eight-gig of real memory. There's no way I could justify putting in 16-gig of swap space. Nor would I ever need 16-gig of swap space. My applications would come to a grinding halt if ever that much memory was swapped-out. Even on 10k rpm SSA drives, it takes a long time to write 16 gig of data.
While your argument has merit, encouraging folks to have at least twice as much swap as physical RAM all willy-nilly is irresponsible. Disk space may be cheap now days but it certainly ain't free. (I wish it were; so many MP3s, so little disk space.)
Folks need to examine what their RAM is used for and what their swap will be used for. In my case, I'm running Oracle. Most of the RAM is used for Oracle to cache data and not for the application itself. In my case, under 340 meg of RAM is actually a candidate for swap and thus I've set aside 512 meg for swapping. And I don't think that has ever been touched.
As the amount of memory in computers expands, old rules (swap must equal RAM; swap must be 2x RAM, etc.) need to fall aside to common sense.
Living in South Florida (home of Bawls), I found the stuff a few years back.
It tastes better than coffee, has a cool blue glass bottle, is cheaper than crack, allows one to walk around proclaiming that one has 'just sucked down some Bawls' and is otherwise pretty darn nifty stuff.
The downside -- you knew there had to be a downside, right? -- is that it's mucho very expensive a lot (for the cost of a 12oz bottle of Bawls, I can buy an entire pot of coffee) and is hard to find.
If you haven't had any Bawls, give it a shot. If you can't get it, you're not missing much.
Badtz-Maru has some great geek merchandise (even wallets, Jonas). I've got a great Badtz-Maru time-keeping device. If you live outside the United States, however, eBay is the only way you're going to be able to get the goods.
It's amusing to note that IBM didn't compare the Linux cluster to its own hardware. I'd be curious to know how a 12-way RS/6000 S70/S7A running AIX under HACMP would stand up to the Netfinity/Linux assult.
As part of a Microsoft promotion when the Ergo keyboards first came out, I got two for $99. (If I remember correctly.) I will use nothing else. Recently, I got another computer and bought one of the new Microsoft keyboards. I tried using it for two weeks and found it totally useless. Whoever came up with the new keyboard layout should be beaten with a rubber hose.
Uhhh... What's that about skipping? I've had a RIO since October and haven't had a single problem with skippage even at 256kbps. In fact, my complaints are few and will be fixed if and when RIO 2.0 is available. I want USB support and more memory. Other than that, RIO rockz hardcore mucho very a lot and a bag of SIMMs.
Slashdot Mirror
SETI has always had trouble creating enough work units to keep up with user demand. The project is more popular than anyone had ever dreamed.
One of the patches cause the clients to run 30% faster (at least on my clients). I've heard some reports of clients running 50%-70% faster.
SETI just can't generate that much data to munch. If they did speed up all the clients and they ran out of blocks, users would be very upset. Solution... SETI would start sending out the same blocks to be rechecked while waiting for new blocks to be created. And users would be upset because they were doing the same blocks twice.
In either case, they lose.
As for the open source discussion, that is meaningless in terms of SETI. Their problem isn't that the client it too slow, but that it has the potential to be too fast.
InitZero
I'll give you a hint... big Lotus shops aren't on Microsoft's beta list.
Microsoft offers betas to those folks it has substantial relations with; folks who buy a lot of Microsoft products. I'm sure that Microsoft sent betas to its large Exchange sites and whatnot. Making sure that Lotus runs on NT was not at the top of their concern list.
And why should it be?
InitZero
Geez... The scouts have gone taken a different track since I left. When I was a scout, all we did was tie knots, hike and tell stories (none of which were true) about how we snuck into the neighboring Girl Scout camp.
InitZero
Oracle is easy to justify if you have a bunch of folks on staff who are already trained in Oracle. You've got to remember that people are almost always more expensive than hardware or software.
Earlier this year, my company budgeted for a pair of IBM H70s running under HACMP for an internal, mission-critical Oracle database application. We're getting toward the end of the year, looking to buy but the bean counters want to save some money and go with Microsoft SQL on NT. (Ugh!)
We've just about got them convinced that Oracle under Linux would be a better solution. The primary reason? We've got half a dozen folks here who have been to Oracle school and another two that are actualy Oracle DBAs. Sure, they could learn SQL 7 but why bother? They already know Oralce.
The same goes for MySQL, MSQL, etc. Yeah, they could learn them but they already know Oracle inside and out.
Oracle on Linux is a wonderful thing because we already know Oracle and our Unix support staff (me {blush}) is better equipped to support a mission-critical application under Linux than anyone on staff is equipped to support the same database under NT.
Well, that, and a dual P-II with similar disk space and RAM is a tenth the cost of an IBM RS/6000 box and about half as much as NT on the same hardware.
InitZero
If the temperature of the Coke machine could be lowered to absolute zero, would the Coke be absolutely free?
Poor Rob. He missed a big date or something and Debbie is pissed. Quick! Use Slashdot to kiss up and make things right. He won't be sleeping in the doghouse tonight.
Lucky guy. I'd have to buy jewelry.
{grin}
InitZero
Why is this even an issue? I'd be complaining if they didn't post the IP addresses.
There isn't a newpaper in this country who values its reputation that runs blind letters to the editor. Period. Every letter must be signed and, at every newspaper I've worked for, the editorial staff goes to great lengths to make sure the name at the bottom of the letter is actually who wrote the letter. Every person who gets a letter published generally gets a phone call before the letter is published.
Folks who use the net expect a greater level of *anonymity* (not privacy) than do most people.
Anonymity and privacy are two different beasts but that's another topic.
InitZero
I have worked for newspapers nearly ten years now. In that time, we have tried many different mediums for content delivery.
First, we started making content available over the telephone. Dial 511 and get the latest news, traffic, weather and sports. It works. Sorta. But folks still wanted their daily paper.
Later, we decided that we needed a television presence so we went 50/50 with Time Warner and started delivering our content over a regional 24-hour news channel. It works. Sorta. But a paper still hits my doorstep every morning.
(We would be doing radio, too, but the FCC has some reservations (good in theory) about one company owning all the media outlets in a town.)
Our latest medium has been the Internet. While somewhat profitable for us (and certainly a pain in the buttocks), it hasn't caused folks to cancel their subscriptions in favor of internet delivery.
It's not as though content is different between the platforms. A newspaper reporter writes the story and sends a copy to the online group and the TV station where they make it available in their respective medium.
What this tells me is that the medium is more important than the content (though I'm not prepared to say that the medium *is* the message) and that people like paper as their medium.
InitZero
Forget the security implications for a moment. Why not start cracking the email accounts for fun? For example, there are a number of Congressmen who use Hotmail accounts. And folks in the media (think: anchors). Heck, even Monica Lewinsky used Hotmail, right? (Try: mlewinsky.) There could be a lot of fun had here before Hotmail fills the hole. (Which I'm surprised they haven't done yet.)
I've seen Blair Witch. In fact, since I live in Orlando, I've saw it at the same small theater that the file makers hang out at. (Or used to before they became big stars.)
If you think the hype is hot in the rest of the country, you can't even begin to understand what it's like here. Every newscast. Every newspaper. Every radio show. The University of Central Florida is now using the BWP to attract students.
The movie, in my every so humble opinion, wasn't that great. The last five minutes were novel for an American film but the sort of stuff you find in European films on a regular basis. Ie: There was no happy ending. The loose ends weren't tied-up.
However, no one seems to want to compare this film to major films.
They want to say it was made for $30k and, thus, that five minutes make up for all the rest of the film. For me, that just is not acceptable. I want more out of a film.
Sure, the movie may have been made for cheap but I still had to pay $7 to see it and that's more than I'm willing to pay for five minutes of fun.
InitZero
Ron Dilley is a network administrator. He maintains 129 active passwords using a Palm organizer to track his passwords.
I ain't got one (yet) so I've got to ask... How secure is that? Can you get PGP for the Palm? Seems to me he leaves his Palm Pilot on the seat of a taxi or on a restaurant table and he is going to be hating life very mucho a lot and a half.
> I'm one who believes in investing as much disk to swap
> as you can afford. 2xRAM is my minimal swap space.
I've got a AIX boxes with two- to eight-gig of real memory. There's no way I could justify putting in 16-gig of swap space. Nor would I ever need 16-gig of swap space. My applications would come to a grinding halt if ever that much memory was swapped-out. Even on 10k rpm SSA drives, it takes a long time to write 16 gig of data.
While your argument has merit, encouraging folks to have at least twice as much swap as physical RAM all willy-nilly is irresponsible. Disk space may be cheap now days but it certainly ain't free. (I wish it were; so many MP3s, so little disk space.)
Folks need to examine what their RAM is used for and what their swap will be used for. In my case, I'm running Oracle. Most of the RAM is used for Oracle to cache data and not for the application itself. In my case, under 340 meg of RAM is actually a candidate for swap and thus I've set aside 512 meg for swapping. And I don't think that has ever been touched.
As the amount of memory in computers expands, old rules (swap must equal RAM; swap must be 2x RAM, etc.) need to fall aside to common sense.
Matt
It tastes better than coffee, has a cool blue glass bottle, is cheaper than crack, allows one to walk around proclaiming that one has 'just sucked down some Bawls' and is otherwise pretty darn nifty stuff.
The downside -- you knew there had to be a downside, right? -- is that it's mucho very expensive a lot (for the cost of a 12oz bottle of Bawls, I can buy an entire pot of coffee) and is hard to find.
If you haven't had any Bawls, give it a shot. If you can't get it, you're not missing much.
InitZero
Badtz-Maru has some great geek merchandise (even wallets, Jonas). I've got a great Badtz-Maru time-keeping device. If you live outside the United States, however, eBay is the only way you're going to be able to get the goods.
--InitZero--
It's amusing to note that IBM didn't compare the Linux cluster to its own hardware. I'd be curious to know how a 12-way RS/6000 S70/S7A running AIX under HACMP would stand up to the Netfinity/Linux assult.
InitZero
As part of a Microsoft promotion when the Ergo keyboards first came out, I got two for $99. (If I remember correctly.) I will use nothing else.
Recently, I got another computer and bought one of the new Microsoft keyboards. I tried using it for two weeks and found it totally useless. Whoever came up with the new keyboard layout should be beaten with a rubber hose.
InitZero
Uhhh... What's that about skipping? I've had a RIO since October and haven't had a single problem with skippage even at 256kbps. In fact, my complaints are few and will be fixed if and when RIO 2.0 is available. I want USB support and more memory. Other than that, RIO rockz hardcore mucho very a lot and a bag of SIMMs.
InitZero