only 20% of the hosts would use more than 30% of the CPU...
What were the I/O loads on those machines, though? On something like a webserver, the CPU demands are relatively light -- get a file from the disk, push it out through the network, repeat. LDA, STA, LDA, STA. But there are likely to be performance bottlenecks elsewhere on the system.
Putting two virtual machines with 30% CPU utilization each on a single piece of hardware to effect a real CPU utilization of 65% isn't going to improve performance, if the SCSI bus is being pushed at over 100% capacity.
(try listing an item with 'pearl' in the title sometime to see what I'm talking about)
Would you mind just telling me what happens? I'm eager to unload my old Pearl Jam CDs, and my Pearl Export drum kit, but I don't want to do anything that could negatively affect my eBay Seller Rating.
Your enormous block of text has convinced me to advocate Paragraph Reform.
(Which, by the way, is underway already. Before HTML, English writing convention usually meant that the beginning of each paragraph was indented, and that no extra vertical whitespace existed between neighboring paragraphs. Over the past 10-15 years, the default user agent behavior of no indent, and a double newline between paras, has crept more and more ubiquitously into common style.)
centre, centripetal, centrifuge are all connected concepts and share the stem "centr".
The stem there is "centre", not "centr"; surely the suffixes are "-petal" and "-fuge", and not "-ipetal" and "-ifuge"?
The distinction between British "centre" and American "center" is minimal. They both take irregular suffix forms, where either "re" or "er" is changed to "ri" when the suffix is attached. It's just an issue of cultural aesthetic; if asked which one is "more correct", I would have to answer "neither".
the majority of terrorist attacks carried out worldwide are done by militant Islamists. They are violent by nature and it is no suprise that they are the leaders of most terrorist attacks.
If you're suggesting that they're "violent by nature" because they're militant, I would concur.
If you're suggesting that they're "violent by nature" because they're Islamists, I would recommend that you die in a fire.
Complaining about "stupid users" without providing training in the use of the complex equipment sitting in front of them is stupid.
Expecting the IT department to provide that training is equally stupid.
In the "fleet vehicle" example, we don't think that the auto mechanic should also run a private driving school for the employees of the company. It's a vastly different skill set, and while some people may be equally adept at replacing a fried power supply and tutoring an executive on the niceties of file management, it should not be expected that a single employee should excel at both.
Besides which, operating a motor vehicle is a regulated and licensed activity. The company's not going to let you get behind the wheel unless you have a license, possibly with commercial certifications on top of that. There exist no such credentials for operating a computer. If your fleet mechanics had to deal with a dozen calls every day from people who don't remember how to operate the windshield wipers, I'd imagine they'd be frustrated and ornery too.
I can only assume that whomever is responsible for "M.U.S.C.L.E." being on the list must not be familiar with the pink plastic figurines of the same name from the mid-1980s. Giving a video game the same name as the toy line the characters were licensed from can't really be considered a bad name (though it's quite likely that it'll be a bad game, especially if Acclaim or LJN were involved).
As for bad names that didn't make the list: Herzog Zwei. Inexplicably left untranslated from its German title (though "Duke Two" wouldn't have been much of an improvement), this Sega Genesis game never got nearly the amount of attention it should have back in the day, mostly because of the title.
As for Super Castelvania, simple naming convention of the time. Many launch titles for the Super Nintendo were prefixed with Super. This was done both as a marketing gimmick, but also as to help people avoid confusion. CV4 was a sequel, but not for the NES as the first 3 had been.
The SNES game Super Castlevania IV is more of a retelling of the events of the first Castlevania NES game than a true, chronological sequel. But then, Castlevania III took place two generations prior to the events of Castlevanias I and II, and subsequent CV games have been all over the timeline, so who knows.
With that over with, out here in the real world I live in, I've heard exactly one person say anything about the Nintendo Revolution. I've heard a dozen people talking about buying a PS3 or a Xbox 360.
We must live in different real worlds. In the one I live in, I don't know anybody who's bought a 360 yet even though it's been out for six months, all the gamers think it was a horrible mistake for Sony to price the PS3 so high, and I hate walking past Rockefeller Center because people are always stopping in their tracks (and in MY WAY) when they see the Wii demo video on display at Nintendo World.
I guess it goes to show you that personal anecdotes are not statistically relevant.
If he's happy with Mario Brothers, then he's not buying the next generation of game consoles, and therefore his post is off-topic. He's not in the target demographic, so to speak. It's not relevant to the article we're all discussing here.
And that makes your bitching about his comment off-off-topic. And the comment you're currently reading, off-off-off-topic.
Besides which, if the topic of discussion is "how people will be gaming from now through 2009", which it is, there's no legitimate reason to limit the available options to just the Xbox 360, PS3, and Nintendo Wii. The gaming market encompasses ALL gaming options -- from home consoles to handhelds to PC gaming to 6-in-1 self-contained controller/consoles to retrogaming and emulation -- and it is entirely relevant for someone to express an intent to revisit favorite games of the past instead of investing in the latest & greatest.
What about people who bought a Tiger game.com? They saw a handheld with a touch screen fail once before, and that might lead them to predict that the DS was a gimmick and that PSP would dominate.
Myself, I once had an Etch-A-Sketch Animator 2000 console, and playing the "Putt Nuts" miniature golf cartridge with the stylus and touchpad convinced me that the DS was going to be a blockbuster.
According to the article, the PSP and the DS are neck and neck.
In terms of North American install base, perhaps.
I'm not so sure that's all that meaningful a metric of success, though. Doesn't the massive dominance of the DS in Japan count for something? What about the number of game titles purchased per system?
I went through their hiring process looking to take on a management role, it was slow and focused on the wrong things....in your opinion. Google's HR department may have a different view of the process.
I think all that can really be concluded from your experience is that you and Google were not a good match for each other.
Free press? A guy video tapes somebody on his doorstep and suddenly that qualifies him as a member of the press?
What WOULD be necessary for him to qualify as a "member of the press" in your mind? A journalism degree from Syracuse?
Freedom of the press is a right afforded to ALL of us, not just to people who work for the newspaper. If a citizen witnesses injustice, he always has the right -- the OBLIGATION, even -- to document and publicize that injustice.
depends on what religion he is. Don't believe me, I can can point you to many pro ACLU posts that essentially say the same thing.
I wouldn't believe those, either.
If you're trying to suggest that the ACLU has a policy of discriminating against persons of certain faiths, you'll need to offer real documentation proving such. Like a memo, or a corroborated quote from an ACLU representative.
IMHO, there should almost be a pre-court judge that can take a look at cases in advance as a checksum against stupidity, and throw them out right away if they are as dumb as this one.
Isn't there already?
Who is it that lawyers submit their "motions to dismiss" and "motion for summary judgment" to?
Please, Slashdot submitters and admins, PLEASE -- give us the courtesy of defining uncommon acronyms the first time they are used. It is not good editorial practice to force the reader to look up unfamiliar terms on their own in order to understand the content.
You can argue that most Slashdotters should know what WGA stands for already -- but should we? This is one of the more Linux-centric sites on the internet. It's far from a given that we would all be familiar with a Windows-based authentication system, even among those of us that are Windows users.
You can argue that it only takes 5 seconds to slap the acronym into Google and find out what it means -- but that doesn't change the fact that the effort would be better made by the one than by the many. Ten thousand Slashdotters Googling the answer is a net loss of 13+ hours of time that could be better spent on other things.
I assumed from the headline that the story would be about the opportunity for Danger Inc., the company that developed the Sidekick handsets and operates its data services, to leverage Mobile Linux on a future version of their device.
It actually may not be a bad idea for them -- their current platform of a custom J2ME implementation on ARM7 doesn't seem to have much of a future. Few developers are producing software for it due to its differences from other handsets (and its restricted distribution model). It's falling behind even less expensive handsets in the market in terms of hardware support for things like Bluetooth and EDGE.
Opening up the platform and making it a tiny Linux box could give Danger a whole new market for the device: techies who don't care much for Blackberries or Treos.
But as long as Paris Hilton and P. Diddy are happy with theirs, that may never happen.
Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that "you know what you stole so I'm not telling." Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say "its in there somewhere, you figure it out."
I agree that an admin need not reinvent the wheel, if pre-built wheels are readily available. But he should inspect it to make sure it's actually a wheel, and not just a pie pan, before he bolts it into the axle. Or at least know what a wheel looks like.
The grandparent excerpt reads "the administrator of a Web site or a Linux/Unix server, would not even have to know the language in order to download these Perl scripts, and use them to solve problems on the job" -- implying that the admin not only doesn't need to WRITE the scripts he runs, but also doesn't need to READ the scripts he runs. That is foolish.
Of course, these same arguments will hold true for CDs and DVDs at some point in the not-too-distant future
Oh, I wouldn't be so sure about that.
When compact discs were introduced to the market, most of us were saving our documents onto 360-kilobyte 1.44" floppy discs. Today it's not uncommon to have a quarter-terabyte of hard disk storage in a desktop PC, and yet our machines are still capable of reading CDs that were manufactured 25 years ago.
I see no reason why optical discs will not continue to be an accessible archival format for many more years to come.
Group 2 are the chronic homeless. They are the alcoholics, the drug addicts, the mentally insane. Their only goal in life is their next drink. You can institutionalize them or let them be on the street, but you can't help them.
Do you mean the singular "you", or collective?
One person with some change in his pocket can't help them. But "we", as in society, can help them if: 1) they have the will to be helped, and 2) there is a support system in place to help overcome addictions, and promote mental health
Most of the time one or the other of these conditions is not met. Often, both.
Some people by gift certificates for restaurants and when a homeless person asks for "money for food" they give the gift certificates. Someone who really just wants to eat with be greatful. Someone who was planning on buying a bottle of hooch, will not be able to get over on you.
Unless they accept the gift certificate from you, then resell it to someone else for half of its face value, and use the cash to buy a bottle of hooch.
What kinds of restaurants are these certificates for, anyway? I'd imagine fine dining establishments would be reluctant to seat a disheveled, malodorous street person, and if they're for fast-food places it might actually be better for their health to get the hooch.
If an RIAA exec wants to encrypt his music, good for him, but he has no business encrypting music I PAID FOR.
Dude isn't ssh'ing onto your box and encrypting your music against your will, you know. If you have DRM-encrypted music files on your hard drive, it's probably because you consented to have them put there.
If you don't like mandatory DRM on music distribution, don't support music formats that have mandatory DRM. And encourage people you know to do the same.
Essentially, consumers expect certain rights when they purchase things.
In most cases, mere expectations don't carry force of law. Just because car manufacturers have been selling cars that run on gasoline purchased at any gas station doesn't mean the consumer has a fundamental and inviolable right to mix-n-match car & fuel however they please. You won't ever see a Chevrolet automobile that only runs on a fuel blend sold at Chevron stations, though, because the market would reject it. It's the market, not the law, that keeps things the way they have been.
Slashdot Mirror
only 20% of the hosts would use more than 30% of the CPU ...
What were the I/O loads on those machines, though? On something like a webserver, the CPU demands are relatively light -- get a file from the disk, push it out through the network, repeat. LDA, STA, LDA, STA. But there are likely to be performance bottlenecks elsewhere on the system.
Putting two virtual machines with 30% CPU utilization each on a single piece of hardware to effect a real CPU utilization of 65% isn't going to improve performance, if the SCSI bus is being pushed at over 100% capacity.
(try listing an item with 'pearl' in the title sometime to see what I'm talking about)
Would you mind just telling me what happens? I'm eager to unload my old Pearl Jam CDs, and my Pearl Export drum kit, but I don't want to do anything that could negatively affect my eBay Seller Rating.
Your enormous block of text has convinced me to advocate Paragraph Reform.
(Which, by the way, is underway already. Before HTML, English writing convention usually meant that the beginning of each paragraph was indented, and that no extra vertical whitespace existed between neighboring paragraphs. Over the past 10-15 years, the default user agent behavior of no indent, and a double newline between paras, has crept more and more ubiquitously into common style.)
centre, centripetal, centrifuge are all connected concepts and share the stem "centr".
The stem there is "centre", not "centr"; surely the suffixes are "-petal" and "-fuge", and not "-ipetal" and "-ifuge"?
The distinction between British "centre" and American "center" is minimal. They both take irregular suffix forms, where either "re" or "er" is changed to "ri" when the suffix is attached. It's just an issue of cultural aesthetic; if asked which one is "more correct", I would have to answer "neither".
(Or would that be "neithre"?)
the majority of terrorist attacks carried out worldwide are done by militant Islamists. They are violent by nature and it is no suprise that they are the leaders of most terrorist attacks.
If you're suggesting that they're "violent by nature" because they're militant, I would concur.
If you're suggesting that they're "violent by nature" because they're Islamists, I would recommend that you die in a fire.
Complaining about "stupid users" without providing training in the use of the complex equipment sitting in front of them is stupid.
Expecting the IT department to provide that training is equally stupid.
In the "fleet vehicle" example, we don't think that the auto mechanic should also run a private driving school for the employees of the company. It's a vastly different skill set, and while some people may be equally adept at replacing a fried power supply and tutoring an executive on the niceties of file management, it should not be expected that a single employee should excel at both.
Besides which, operating a motor vehicle is a regulated and licensed activity. The company's not going to let you get behind the wheel unless you have a license, possibly with commercial certifications on top of that. There exist no such credentials for operating a computer. If your fleet mechanics had to deal with a dozen calls every day from people who don't remember how to operate the windshield wipers, I'd imagine they'd be frustrated and ornery too.
"Computers, those are the huge things that big businesses and the government use, right?"
He became comatose in 1987, not 1967. Home computers were not quite ubiquitous back then, but they were far from uncommon.
Heck, he could been a Mac user back when. He certainly seems to have taken the "Think Different" motto to heart...
I can only assume that whomever is responsible for "M.U.S.C.L.E." being on the list must not be familiar with the pink plastic figurines of the same name from the mid-1980s. Giving a video game the same name as the toy line the characters were licensed from can't really be considered a bad name (though it's quite likely that it'll be a bad game, especially if Acclaim or LJN were involved).
As for bad names that didn't make the list: Herzog Zwei. Inexplicably left untranslated from its German title (though "Duke Two" wouldn't have been much of an improvement), this Sega Genesis game never got nearly the amount of attention it should have back in the day, mostly because of the title.
As for Super Castelvania, simple naming convention of the time. Many launch titles for the Super Nintendo were prefixed with Super. This was done both as a marketing gimmick, but also as to help people avoid confusion. CV4 was a sequel, but not for the NES as the first 3 had been.
The SNES game Super Castlevania IV is more of a retelling of the events of the first Castlevania NES game than a true, chronological sequel. But then, Castlevania III took place two generations prior to the events of Castlevanias I and II, and subsequent CV games have been all over the timeline, so who knows.
With that over with, out here in the real world I live in, I've heard exactly one person say anything about the Nintendo Revolution. I've heard a dozen people talking about buying a PS3 or a Xbox 360.
We must live in different real worlds. In the one I live in, I don't know anybody who's bought a 360 yet even though it's been out for six months, all the gamers think it was a horrible mistake for Sony to price the PS3 so high, and I hate walking past Rockefeller Center because people are always stopping in their tracks (and in MY WAY) when they see the Wii demo video on display at Nintendo World.
I guess it goes to show you that personal anecdotes are not statistically relevant.
If he's happy with Mario Brothers, then he's not buying the next generation of game consoles, and therefore his post is off-topic. He's not in the target demographic, so to speak. It's not relevant to the article we're all discussing here.
And that makes your bitching about his comment off-off-topic. And the comment you're currently reading, off-off-off-topic.
Besides which, if the topic of discussion is "how people will be gaming from now through 2009", which it is, there's no legitimate reason to limit the available options to just the Xbox 360, PS3, and Nintendo Wii. The gaming market encompasses ALL gaming options -- from home consoles to handhelds to PC gaming to 6-in-1 self-contained controller/consoles to retrogaming and emulation -- and it is entirely relevant for someone to express an intent to revisit favorite games of the past instead of investing in the latest & greatest.
What about people who bought a Tiger game.com? They saw a handheld with a touch screen fail once before, and that might lead them to predict that the DS was a gimmick and that PSP would dominate.
Myself, I once had an Etch-A-Sketch Animator 2000 console, and playing the "Putt Nuts" miniature golf cartridge with the stylus and touchpad convinced me that the DS was going to be a blockbuster.
According to the article, the PSP and the DS are neck and neck.
In terms of North American install base, perhaps.
I'm not so sure that's all that meaningful a metric of success, though. Doesn't the massive dominance of the DS in Japan count for something? What about the number of game titles purchased per system?
I went through their hiring process looking to take on a management role, it was slow and focused on the wrong things. ...in your opinion. Google's HR department may have a different view of the process.
I think all that can really be concluded from your experience is that you and Google were not a good match for each other.
Free press? A guy video tapes somebody on his doorstep and suddenly that qualifies him as a member of the press?
What WOULD be necessary for him to qualify as a "member of the press" in your mind? A journalism degree from Syracuse?
Freedom of the press is a right afforded to ALL of us, not just to people who work for the newspaper. If a citizen witnesses injustice, he always has the right -- the OBLIGATION, even -- to document and publicize that injustice.
depends on what religion he is. Don't believe me, I can can point you to many pro ACLU posts that essentially say the same thing.
I wouldn't believe those, either.
If you're trying to suggest that the ACLU has a policy of discriminating against persons of certain faiths, you'll need to offer real documentation proving such. Like a memo, or a corroborated quote from an ACLU representative.
IMHO, there should almost be a pre-court judge that can take a look at cases in advance as a checksum against stupidity, and throw them out right away if they are as dumb as this one.
Isn't there already?
Who is it that lawyers submit their "motions to dismiss" and "motion for summary judgment" to?
Please, Slashdot submitters and admins, PLEASE -- give us the courtesy of defining uncommon acronyms the first time they are used. It is not good editorial practice to force the reader to look up unfamiliar terms on their own in order to understand the content.
You can argue that most Slashdotters should know what WGA stands for already -- but should we? This is one of the more Linux-centric sites on the internet. It's far from a given that we would all be familiar with a Windows-based authentication system, even among those of us that are Windows users.
You can argue that it only takes 5 seconds to slap the acronym into Google and find out what it means -- but that doesn't change the fact that the effort would be better made by the one than by the many. Ten thousand Slashdotters Googling the answer is a net loss of 13+ hours of time that could be better spent on other things.
I assumed from the headline that the story would be about the opportunity for Danger Inc., the company that developed the Sidekick handsets and operates its data services, to leverage Mobile Linux on a future version of their device.
It actually may not be a bad idea for them -- their current platform of a custom J2ME implementation on ARM7 doesn't seem to have much of a future. Few developers are producing software for it due to its differences from other handsets (and its restricted distribution model). It's falling behind even less expensive handsets in the market in terms of hardware support for things like Bluetooth and EDGE.
Opening up the platform and making it a tiny Linux box could give Danger a whole new market for the device: techies who don't care much for Blackberries or Treos.
But as long as Paris Hilton and P. Diddy are happy with theirs, that may never happen.
Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that "you know what you stole so I'm not telling." Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say "its in there somewhere, you figure it out."
Probably it was the $250 cookie recipe.
I agree that an admin need not reinvent the wheel, if pre-built wheels are readily available. But he should inspect it to make sure it's actually a wheel, and not just a pie pan, before he bolts it into the axle. Or at least know what a wheel looks like.
The grandparent excerpt reads "the administrator of a Web site or a Linux/Unix server, would not even have to know the language in order to download these Perl scripts, and use them to solve problems on the job" -- implying that the admin not only doesn't need to WRITE the scripts he runs, but also doesn't need to READ the scripts he runs. That is foolish.
Of course, these same arguments will hold true for CDs and DVDs at some point in the not-too-distant future
Oh, I wouldn't be so sure about that.
When compact discs were introduced to the market, most of us were saving our documents onto 360-kilobyte 1.44" floppy discs. Today it's not uncommon to have a quarter-terabyte of hard disk storage in a desktop PC, and yet our machines are still capable of reading CDs that were manufactured 25 years ago.
I see no reason why optical discs will not continue to be an accessible archival format for many more years to come.
Group 2 are the chronic homeless. They are the alcoholics, the drug addicts, the mentally insane. Their only goal in life is their next drink. You can institutionalize them or let them be on the street, but you can't help them.
Do you mean the singular "you", or collective?
One person with some change in his pocket can't help them. But "we", as in society, can help them if:
1) they have the will to be helped, and
2) there is a support system in place to help overcome addictions, and promote mental health
Most of the time one or the other of these conditions is not met. Often, both.
Some people by gift certificates for restaurants and when a homeless person asks for "money for food" they give the gift certificates. Someone who really just wants to eat with be greatful. Someone who was planning on buying a bottle of hooch, will not be able to get over on you.
Unless they accept the gift certificate from you, then resell it to someone else for half of its face value, and use the cash to buy a bottle of hooch.
What kinds of restaurants are these certificates for, anyway? I'd imagine fine dining establishments would be reluctant to seat a disheveled, malodorous street person, and if they're for fast-food places it might actually be better for their health to get the hooch.
If an RIAA exec wants to encrypt his music, good for him, but he has no business encrypting music I PAID FOR.
Dude isn't ssh'ing onto your box and encrypting your music against your will, you know. If you have DRM-encrypted music files on your hard drive, it's probably because you consented to have them put there.
If you don't like mandatory DRM on music distribution, don't support music formats that have mandatory DRM. And encourage people you know to do the same.
Essentially, consumers expect certain rights when they purchase things.
In most cases, mere expectations don't carry force of law. Just because car manufacturers have been selling cars that run on gasoline purchased at any gas station doesn't mean the consumer has a fundamental and inviolable right to mix-n-match car & fuel however they please. You won't ever see a Chevrolet automobile that only runs on a fuel blend sold at Chevron stations, though, because the market would reject it. It's the market, not the law, that keeps things the way they have been.