...and then I remembered why the vast majority of web-published fiction is lousy.
The other day I re-read two stories by Orson Scott Card, "A Thousand Deaths" and "Unaccompained Sonata." They are masterpieces and they also contain scenes that make me squirm -- the former in particular is probably ten times as horrific as anything in this novel, and deals with some of the same issues, as well. But it deals with them intelligently, adroitly, and with far less self-important cheapjack exploitation.
I don't know if the author has read this story, but he could probably learn something from it.
The idea is not a good one if only because DV's error correction is not robust enough for this sort of thing. Another poster mentioned compensating for this ahead of time w/compression and redundancy, but the idea still gives me the shudders.
Folks, not for nothing, but being "intelligent" -- read: "egghead," "braniac," or that most spitefully delivered of words, "intellectual" -- has been made into a curse in more ways than I would care to admit at this point:
"If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?"
"I bet you think you're pretty smart."
or
"I bet you think you're smarter than [me, us, the other people in this bar]."
Being intelligent and making use of that intelligence in America more often than not exposes you to ridicule from people. And it's impossible to hide behind the feeling that you are able to do things they can't because you're smarter -- think of the bully whose entire existence consisted of learning where other people lived and following them home to beat them up, or the mechanic who has all these great ways to gouge you without you ever knowing about it, because you have X more lines to code (or diapers to change, or what have you) and can't waste your time with something as trivial as a spark plug.
People seem to have an ongoing, inbred contempt for anyone smarter than them, and high school is not the only place this comes to the surface. I've had friends who have worked in offices that demanded at least a college-level education, and they were consistently appalled at how people who used their smarts to make everyone's jobs easier there got stabbed in the back.
Most of the people that are widely considered enemies of digital freedom -- the RIAA, the MPAA -- are using the law as a bludgeoning tool. Does it make sense to fight back using the law as well -- in a sense adopting the same tactics as the "bad guys" -- or should be consider other alternatives before resorting to lawsuits and pre-emptive legislation?
There was an ad that Apple published back in the days of the Apple ][ that carried this exact headline, and it was the true story of a man's Apple ][ that had survived a housefire. A new case and keyboard was all it needed.
I run a text-chat site that is -- please don't lynch me -- based on Win2K and MS SQL Server. The site does about 10-12 DB transactions a second on a slow day and about 100-150/sec on a fast day. At peak hours we have something like 30% CPU usage on the average (it's a 700 Mhz box, not bleeding-edge).
A friend of mine put someone in touch with me who was trying to build a vaguely similar system and was having no end of problems. Transactions were timing out left and right, and his machine was more than twice as fast as mine. From his experiences -- and from what I've seen in a lot of parallel setups -- there is a difference between being able to code something functional and being able to code something that functions intelligently. I'd learned a lot of ways to cut down massively on system overhead -- use stored procedures, turn off locks when they're not required, don't use transactions unless they're absolutely needed, etc., etc. -- and all of them add up and pay off.
As far as PostgreSQL goes, it's probably going to depend on how good a job they do coding it into their system. If they do it well, I'd imagine PostgreSQL is gonna be quite solid. If they do it like idiots, not even the best database solution in the world -- not Oracle, nothing -- is going to save them.
Heck, even Oracle is going to break if you try to fetch a billion rows at once; the trick is to find smarter ways to partition and subdivide the data, to cut down the amount of time needed for every little step on the way. (I found out that adding ONE index in my system sped things up by about 30% alone, an index I would not have realized I needed until I ran a performance profile.)
Let's see how well they do before we sling tomatoes, OK?
That's including the cost of mastering and whatnot -- most of what I needed what stuff already lying around. The do-it-yourselfer ethic is really making home recording take off, especially considering the level of technology available to a consumer now.
Slashdot has become a kind of unofficial intelligence test, where they give you a completely misleading summary and then you have to write a post that describes in what way they were misleading, and what the real pertinent facts are.
In other words, it's a training ground for analyzing the way most of the mass media operates!
People suing Ogg Theora because it's free and open-sourced? Don't laugh -- with all the stupid stuff I've seen people do lately, I'd bet money that's the next big thing.
TCO isn't everything. We should have learned this by now -- if it costs a lot to maintain your IT dept. but you get results, it's money well spent. It's an investment, something that in theory should make sense to a company, but in practice often winds up being simply seen as "fat."
This is why I worry about what the adoption of Linux will mean. Will it give corporate America a license to cut costs left and right, and underfund IT to the point where they expect you to do everything on a zero budget? They're trying to get more work from less people and spend less money on them all the time; why expect this to be any different?
I don't want to sound too paranoid and cop to something like "we're playing into their hands." But it does worry me that the whole Linux-is-free-as-toast thing is going to give these guys a license to spend nothing, or close to nothing, on a key part of their operation. Then if you're in a corner and you need to spend money on something, fast, and you simply don't have it, and there's nothing free-like-beer to cover it, what then?
There are shops I've worked with where they use MS exclusively and have no major issues, and they are willing to spend the money to do it. They're eyeing Linux as a way of "saving money." Fine. But I just have the badddddd feeling that once they start slashing IT budgets, just because they can, they won't be able to stop.
I understand taxi companies nationwide are using Ford, GM, Honda, Nissan and all the other major car companies for "stealing their profits." After all, why should a person take a cab when he can just as easily buy his own car? It's horrible, the amount of sheer flagrant THEFT going on out there!
There are many reasons for hearing loss and tinnitus that have nothing to do with what you listen to or what volume you listen to it at and everything to do with, for instance, degenerative diseases of the inner ear. The article doesn't provide much to persuade me that MP3s are going to make people go deaf.
From what I can see in the discussion here, there are people who are insisting that we support Mandrake because it's apparently our obligation to do so, no matter what we think of the company's business practices or their product, because they're a Linux company and, well, we need to support Linux.
This is a specious argument at best. I don't give money to a company just because I believe they're "doing the right thing" -- especially not if they're doing the right thing in the wrong way. I believe in supporting the company that does the right thing for the right reasons and in the right ways. I use Windows, but I owned stock in RedHat (until recently, due to me rearranging my portfolio) because I wanted to see at least some money go towards one of the better-managed and -executed competitors.
Another thing people have pointed out: what if we do bail them out, and they just dig another, even deeper hole? They haven't done a very good job of managing themselves in the past; why should we stick our necks out for them now?
On a side note, some other folks in the same thread have mentioned rolling their own micro-distros -- a very good idea, especially if you get a distro that solves very specific problems. I'm still looking for one that a) installs cleanly, b) doesn't require 3 CDs of bloat to be functional, and c) has an elegant interface that I don't have to employ guesswork to use. Irony of ironies: Mac OS X was about the closest I ever got to that.
I am lying, wrong, and criminally insane.
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
When does the obsession with privacy stop becoming an adjunct to civilized living and start becoming an excuse to do as you damn well please and not be held accountable for it?
Slashdot Mirror
...and then I remembered why the vast majority of web-published fiction is lousy.
The other day I re-read two stories by Orson Scott Card, "A Thousand Deaths" and "Unaccompained Sonata." They are masterpieces and they also contain scenes that make me squirm -- the former in particular is probably ten times as horrific as anything in this novel, and deals with some of the same issues, as well. But it deals with them intelligently, adroitly, and with far less self-important cheapjack exploitation.
I don't know if the author has read this story, but he could probably learn something from it.
>>without that, we just turn into our parents.
What if your parents were more decent people than you turned out to be?
The idea is not a good one if only because DV's error correction is not robust enough for this sort of thing. Another poster mentioned compensating for this ahead of time w/compression and redundancy, but the idea still gives me the shudders.
Folks, not for nothing, but being "intelligent" -- read: "egghead," "braniac," or that most spitefully delivered of words, "intellectual" -- has been made into a curse in more ways than I would care to admit at this point:
"If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?"
"I bet you think you're pretty smart."
or
"I bet you think you're smarter than [me, us, the other people in this bar]."
Being intelligent and making use of that intelligence in America more often than not exposes you to ridicule from people. And it's impossible to hide behind the feeling that you are able to do things they can't because you're smarter -- think of the bully whose entire existence consisted of learning where other people lived and following them home to beat them up, or the mechanic who has all these great ways to gouge you without you ever knowing about it, because you have X more lines to code (or diapers to change, or what have you) and can't waste your time with something as trivial as a spark plug.
People seem to have an ongoing, inbred contempt for anyone smarter than them, and high school is not the only place this comes to the surface. I've had friends who have worked in offices that demanded at least a college-level education, and they were consistently appalled at how people who used their smarts to make everyone's jobs easier there got stabbed in the back.
Just say no to prejudice against smart people.
Most of the people that are widely considered enemies of digital freedom -- the RIAA, the MPAA -- are using the law as a bludgeoning tool. Does it make sense to fight back using the law as well -- in a sense adopting the same tactics as the "bad guys" -- or should be consider other alternatives before resorting to lawsuits and pre-emptive legislation?
There was an ad that Apple published back in the days of the Apple ][ that carried this exact headline, and it was the true story of a man's Apple ][ that had survived a housefire. A new case and keyboard was all it needed.
Sometimes history repeats itself in good ways.
Standard edition is $5K list per processor; it's much less than that in stores. I saved my pennies. :)
I run a text-chat site that is -- please don't lynch me -- based on Win2K and MS SQL Server. The site does about 10-12 DB transactions a second on a slow day and about 100-150/sec on a fast day. At peak hours we have something like 30% CPU usage on the average (it's a 700 Mhz box, not bleeding-edge).
A friend of mine put someone in touch with me who was trying to build a vaguely similar system and was having no end of problems. Transactions were timing out left and right, and his machine was more than twice as fast as mine. From his experiences -- and from what I've seen in a lot of parallel setups -- there is a difference between being able to code something functional and being able to code something that functions intelligently. I'd learned a lot of ways to cut down massively on system overhead -- use stored procedures, turn off locks when they're not required, don't use transactions unless they're absolutely needed, etc., etc. -- and all of them add up and pay off.
As far as PostgreSQL goes, it's probably going to depend on how good a job they do coding it into their system. If they do it well, I'd imagine PostgreSQL is gonna be quite solid. If they do it like idiots, not even the best database solution in the world -- not Oracle, nothing -- is going to save them.
Heck, even Oracle is going to break if you try to fetch a billion rows at once; the trick is to find smarter ways to partition and subdivide the data, to cut down the amount of time needed for every little step on the way. (I found out that adding ONE index in my system sped things up by about 30% alone, an index I would not have realized I needed until I ran a performance profile.)
Let's see how well they do before we sling tomatoes, OK?
Get it here.
1. Obtain a copy of the Broadcast Transmissions Summary Document, colloquially known as "TV Guide."
;)
2. Use the stylus to systematically eliminate programming choices that cannot be realistically maintained in the desired timeframe.
This ought to do it.
...just watch less TV?
Not that you'll have trouble cutting down with the amount of utter garbage out there.
Slashdotdotdotdotdotdot.
I cringed while reading this.
Slashdot has become a kind of unofficial intelligence test, where they give you a completely misleading summary and then you have to write a post that describes in what way they were misleading, and what the real pertinent facts are.
In other words, it's a training ground for analyzing the way most of the mass media operates!
Go Slashdot!
People suing Ogg Theora because it's free and open-sourced? Don't laugh -- with all the stupid stuff I've seen people do lately, I'd bet money that's the next big thing.
...as opposed to that nasty fake artificial DRM.
TCO isn't everything. We should have learned this by now -- if it costs a lot to maintain your IT dept. but you get results, it's money well spent. It's an investment, something that in theory should make sense to a company, but in practice often winds up being simply seen as "fat."
This is why I worry about what the adoption of Linux will mean. Will it give corporate America a license to cut costs left and right, and underfund IT to the point where they expect you to do everything on a zero budget? They're trying to get more work from less people and spend less money on them all the time; why expect this to be any different?
I don't want to sound too paranoid and cop to something like "we're playing into their hands." But it does worry me that the whole Linux-is-free-as-toast thing is going to give these guys a license to spend nothing, or close to nothing, on a key part of their operation. Then if you're in a corner and you need to spend money on something, fast, and you simply don't have it, and there's nothing free-like-beer to cover it, what then?
There are shops I've worked with where they use MS exclusively and have no major issues, and they are willing to spend the money to do it. They're eyeing Linux as a way of "saving money." Fine. But I just have the badddddd feeling that once they start slashing IT budgets, just because they can, they won't be able to stop.
Call me faithless....
New slang term for Linux advocacy?
...Now that's an innovation!
I understand taxi companies nationwide are using Ford, GM, Honda, Nissan and all the other major car companies for "stealing their profits." After all, why should a person take a cab when he can just as easily buy his own car? It's horrible, the amount of sheer flagrant THEFT going on out there!
There are many reasons for hearing loss and tinnitus that have nothing to do with what you listen to or what volume you listen to it at and everything to do with, for instance, degenerative diseases of the inner ear. The article doesn't provide much to persuade me that MP3s are going to make people go deaf.
From what I can see in the discussion here, there are people who are insisting that we support Mandrake because it's apparently our obligation to do so, no matter what we think of the company's business practices or their product, because they're a Linux company and, well, we need to support Linux.
This is a specious argument at best. I don't give money to a company just because I believe they're "doing the right thing" -- especially not if they're doing the right thing in the wrong way. I believe in supporting the company that does the right thing for the right reasons and in the right ways. I use Windows, but I owned stock in RedHat (until recently, due to me rearranging my portfolio) because I wanted to see at least some money go towards one of the better-managed and -executed competitors.
Another thing people have pointed out: what if we do bail them out, and they just dig another, even deeper hole? They haven't done a very good job of managing themselves in the past; why should we stick our necks out for them now?
On a side note, some other folks in the same thread have mentioned rolling their own micro-distros -- a very good idea, especially if you get a distro that solves very specific problems. I'm still looking for one that a) installs cleanly, b) doesn't require 3 CDs of bloat to be functional, and c) has an elegant interface that I don't have to employ guesswork to use. Irony of ironies: Mac OS X was about the closest I ever got to that.
This sentence is false.
This sentence no verb.
Well, the Weak Anthropic Principle was never terribly controversial to begin with, and --
--oh, not THAT WAP? Sorry.
When does the obsession with privacy stop becoming an adjunct to civilized living and start becoming an excuse to do as you damn well please and not be held accountable for it?