When I had a large-ish company (75+ employees), it was fairly common to receive bills for things that we didn't order/subscribe-to. There are likely a number of companies whose accounts payable departments simply pay any bill coming in, without cross-referencing it to a purchase order. This is no different, really. (And even many semi-legit services, magazines, and so forth, would simply send an overdue bill, rather than a subscription renewal notice. I was always more surprised at some big names that would pull that somewhat deceptive practice...)
(Is it just me, or does "ordering a halt to an illegal practice" sound kinda stupid? Seizing US assets, extradition, and so forth, fine. Go for it. But "stop doing that illegal stuff!" doesn't sound that useful.:)
And the increased viability of alternative fuels seems to be a playing a role in scaring the Saudis into ramping up production.
Wow, I know it's too late to get any mod points so people will read this, but for those who do drill down into replies:
The Saudi's aren't scared, as another poster pointed out. They are merely trying to poke a bit of a hole into the rampant commodity speculation (and likely price manipulation) that has driven the price of oil (and other commodities) to the point where 60% (according to some estimates) of the price is purely due to speculation.
Just like the.COM bubble (and the TV bubble and many other bubbles before it) drove stock prices unreasonably high, the same is happening with oil (and food and other commodities) now. The dollar is weak, creating piss-poor interest rates, so investors are flocking to these commodities. The normal trading prices for oil used to be subject to oversight and regulation (all major trades had to be reported), to ensure that the oil companies couldn't manipulate prices. Enron was key in creating a loophole where oil futures traded on the OTC (over the counter) market were not subject to tracking and oversight. So the oil companies are likely manipulating and driving prices high through that mechanism.
Normally prices are driven by the economics of supply and demand. The Saudi's are effectively calling "bullshit" on the current prices (and unprecedented oil reserves held by the US), by showing they can easily up the supply. Yes, they are looking out for their interests, but if the poke a hole in the price speculation and price manipulation that is going on, the average consumer is going to benefit greatly (at the expense of big oil). They want to sell oil to us, and they know the current price isn't reasonable nor good for business. More power to them. Hopefully the current prices will scare us into more research of alternative fuels. But the reality is that the consumers, businesses, and general economy relies upon oil today, and is being seriously hurt by the oil companies' price manipulation.
And the run-up of world food prices is supposedly due to a similar speculation in food futures (where greedy North American and European investors' commodity speculation is leading to starvation in some countries).
Good article on it, here. I think I originally came across that via Digg, which seems to be more useful lately than/. Sigh...
Will the oil bubble burst soon? Hard to believe the OTC loophole and other issues will be addressed as long as a man with oil interests, and from a Texan oil family is in the Whitehouse. Talk about a conflict of interest.
But yeah. Individually, and on mixed teams, I've had great luck with women employees (well, no different from with men; some are good, some, not so much). But whenever I've had a women-only department I've had major HR issues with infighting. I don't mean to be sexist, it's just been my experience.
Not to say there weren't pissing matches between the guys, there certainly were. But in the all-female department there always seemed to be daily conflict. The fact that tears were often involved might have made it seem worse than it was. Or maybe a given sex just tends to compete to a greater degree when amongst the same sex. Women have unfairly had a historical disadvantage in the workplace, so maybe there's some extra self-consciousness there when mixed with males, which helps curb any destructive competitive behaviour.
It never seemed to be a problem with a two or three woman project team, that actually worked really well; but when it came to a bit larger department, all hell would break loose.
It could also be related to the fact that the department in question was an admin department, which generally had the lower paying jobs among the departments. Lower paid employees might not always display the same degree of professionalism as the higher paying ones. (There are certainly exceptions, but in general this may be true.)
I don't know the reason for sure, but I've certainly experienced the phenomenon. Apologies if any of this sounds sexist, it's not intended as such in the slightest.
Their definition of "blacked out" for the 2008 contest allows colored rectangles or "random noise" replacing the part of the image to be blacked out. The latter would allow doing something like a crypting of the chunk of the image (in the guise of creating random pixels, of course). In that case, everything could be fully restored; no need to just hide things steganographically in a few low bits of black or anything.
(Of course, the challenge of making the program appear to be doing something else is a key part of the work.)
When 8G flash drives suddenly dropped in price lately, I could choose between a Kingston and an I-Forget-The-Noname-Brand-Offhand at a local small retailer. I picked the Kingston. Installing Linux on it, something seemed terribly off. Reads were fast, but writes were deathly slow. I took it back and swapped with the noname brand, which was a bit smaller physically, and *much* faster in operation.
Either get Leopard solid, stable, and most importantly, *fast* before you move onto the next OS (unless Snow Leopard addresses a lot of these issues).
Typically with an OSX release, the early point versions go through some growing pains, and it's not until the mid point releases that things get rock solid and fast. When I first tried leopard (10.5.0), it broke a number of things; it offered enough extra that I put up with what it broke, but I wouldn't recommend it to others especially for mission critical business stuff. It seems to be getting better with each point release that rolls in, and 10.5.3 just came in the other day (and things actually seem a bit peppier), but I get the impression it has a little way to go yet.
I think Leopard's early problems has hurt Apple a bit, and I'd hate to see a 10.6.0 come out too soon, with a lot of the same issues as Leopard's first release. I want a fast and stable OSX! (Even at its worst, Leopard was head and shoulders above XP in terms of speed and stability and usability, of course; but when I first jumped ship to Mac when Tiger was mature, things were even better stability-wise.)
While the Windows release cycle is painfully slow and buggy, I worry that Apple's is almost a little too fast with this announcement (although the wait for Leopard seemed to take forever.)
Now who knows, maybe Snow Leopard isn't too revolutionary; maybe in losing some of the backwards compatibility hassles of PPC to move Leopard forward it will improve its speed and stability. Keeping my fingers crossed.
One feature I haven't seen any release notes or anyone else talk about, is true scaling of web pages. It always amazed me that in this day and age, that the Alt-plus and Alt-minus zoom only scaled the text, not the graphics. Not terribly useful for zooming in on a page, or seeing more of a page by zooming out. Opera has had this for ages (from the start?), and it's not as though scaling images is processor intensive (I've written blinding fast C code to do this, with smoothing, myself in the past).
Glad to see this is finally in Firefox. Hopefully they've fixed a couple of other annoyances I've seen; the random refusal to load pages (that load after a restart, or in other browsers), and the failure of Alt-F search to find things that I can see right in front of me on the page.
When it comes to The Singularity he is Stone Cold Crazy, and doesn't know the meaning of curbing his enthusiasm. As I said somewhere else, he's so good at glossing over issues he should patent his methods and make a killing in the magazine industry.
I agree that some of his "futurism" is a bit "out there," although no doubt an interesting read nonetheless. But his forward thinking approach in life hasn't been all fluff; he's helped move things closer to the future he imagines (with the character and voice recognition advances, for example).
Personally, I would indeed prefer he continue to apply his forward thinking to exciting new revolutionary products and technologies, rather than writing books on the future. But the guy's legitimately earned his fortune and freedom to do what he wants, so if he wants to pontificate on the future, more power to him.
Check out the Wiki bio on Ray Kurzweill. The summary didn't mention it, but he's an amazing fellow, with a long history of prominent inventions.
He created the first omni-font OCR system. You may have seen the name Kurzweil associated with both voice recognition and a line of music keyboards and synthesizers; they're both his creations. He's also done stuff in the medical field among others. The Wiki article is worth a read.
Are you saying that in your situation a direct file-based approach would be faster than an indexed and range-partitioned table in a database like Oracle?
Faster? Than a properly designed, maintained, backed-up, optimized, licensed, Oracle database? Probably not.
But it's fast enough, scalable, an order of magnitude simpler, doesn't require a six or seven-figure licensing fee once you get big, doesn't require major hardware to run on, and doesn't require a $100k/year Oracle specialist to maintain it. I've also seen a lot of sites down regularly for maintenance (typically db stuff); we *never* had that, ever.
I was founder of a top 100 internet site during the.COM era. We grew to serve millions of hits a day, millions of users, yadda, yadda, yadda.
We initially used a simple file based approach for user data (on vanilla Linux commodity boxes). It worked well.
As we grew, there was some pressure to move to a database approach, so we switched to Sybase (free on Linux). It worked well, and scaled us through a lot of growth.
However, eventually, when the database bogged down and no amount of tuning would help, rather than clustering, we looked at the nature of our data (a user's data was self-contained, generally not related to any other user's data), so having a massive relational database of hundreds of millions of records wasn't really necessary. So we went back to the file-based approach (with a good central "locking daemon" to ensure atomicity of writes), and gained a lot of performance (and simplicity). Even with thousands of bits of information or transactions for a user, a flat file is pretty darn manageable.
Generally people jump at databases as a default way to store data. If a single user's data is fairly manageable, and you have millions of users, there are times when plain old files suffice. (Doing some smart things like ensuring that directories don't grow arbitrarily and such also help, but that stuff is generally a lot easier than db design and maintenance.)
It sounds like Twitter didn't have well-thought out foundations, and they're reworking some of that. Good for them. (I've actually found some good consulting work in helping companies like them deal with scalability issues, from my experience with such things...)
I remember as a kid spending hundreds of hours with Edmunds stuff that my dad bought us.
A three stage water rocket, that was so cool; each stage would use up it's water/fuel, separate, and the next one would blast off. I think the final stage even deployed a parachute for effect. Nowadays, I think they might have a boring one-stage water rocket (I can make one of those out of a coke bottle, big deal.)
But the coolest kit was an optics kid with hundreds of parts; lenses, tubes, housings, photosensitive paper, and so on. It had plans for telescopes, microscopes, periscopes, and the final project was a full functioning SLR camera with zoom lens that worked! Truly amazing. I'd love to find a kit like that again for my kids (okay, okay, and me), but they don't seem to offer much like this any more. Sigh.
Even anticipating and reading their catalogue brought many hours of enjoyment each year.
If I logged into the account where Lala was installed, it would crash with that fatal OS error.
I logged into an alternative admin-level account, did a virus scan. It found nothing. I removed the Lala program files directory (didn't see an uninstall option anywhere), and I was able to log into the primary account where I had installed Lala originally.
Again, it may simply be a bug with their software, but it's a fatal one to the operating system, which seems highly suspect to me.
I tried out their downloadable client this morning. Seemed to work as expected.
Then windows died with a "Windows Subsystem System process has terminated unexpectedly." I get this every time I boot up and log in. The only recent change is installing Lala's client.
It could be unrelated, it could be an innocent bug in their software. I'll try to isolate the problem and report back as a reply to this message, but in the interim I thought some people may want to hold off trying the client for now.
I'll vouch for the underpinnings of andLinux and Ulteo, which is coLinux. I've been using it for years (an Ubuntu distro) and it's extremely solid, reliable, and efficient. It's a great way to have your Linux dev world near at hand, while needing a Windows box for other reasons. (In fact, I run my home PBX smoothly in a coLinux service on an XP PVR box.)
I hear so little about coLinux, I feel like it's one of Linux's best kept secrets. It's cool that we're starting to see meta-distributions based upon it.
The first one I had, circa 1999-2000, was the size of a VHS casette and fairly competent for its day
A couple of years ago, I upgraded to the newer 100CT, with a couple of gig of ram and such. It's a nice machine. Definitely takes getting used to the keyboard, but for portability, it can't be beat. And just throw a bluetooth or USB keyboard and external display on it when you're tethered.
But when you're on the road, tossing it in a small camera bag, having 5 hours of battery life for the long flights, having room for your laptop and a drink and not worrying about being crushed by the seat in front of you, is very liberating. Similarly, fitting into a small camera bag (honestly, it's not a purse), it goes with me everywhere; I pop it out at the pub or a restaurant or on the road.
Despite the fact I happened to snag one at Future Shop (ugh), in general subnotebooks are something the public doesn't even seem to know exists. I get a lot of comments from people just fascinated by it, thinking it must just be a Windows CE machine at first, and being blown away when they realize how powerful it is.
There is one downside: one time on a flight, the female flight attendant saw it, pointed down towards my lap, and said loudly, "wow, that's the smallest one of those I ever saw!" With the ensuing laughter, she turned many shades of red...
I just tell people that with such a small laptop, I'm clearly not trying to compensate for anything:P
This reeks of "if you can't meet a requirement, change some definitions" approach. "I did not have 'sex' with that woman." "It all depends upon what your definition of is is." Or like the Bill Gates deposition.
It's pretty clear what "ready for the desktop" means. It means for the typical consumer. Linux has clearly been ready for the desktop for geeks since its first stable release; we know the ins and outs, the quirks, the configuration, so it's was ready for the desktop for a certain group of people.
The phrase clearly means the masses, the typical consumer, your grandma. With Ubuntu's great hardware support, flash, and Java, I think it's almost there, if not there. The fact you're seeing EEE PC's, Wal-Mart PC's, and other consumer electronic entries into the field, shows that it's starting to take root.
Changing the definition or throwing out the term "ready for the desktop" because we took longer to get here than we should have, doesn't reflect well on the Linux community or its confidence in the consumer market at all...
I love sailing. I find it to almost be an art, managing the interactions of the wind and the water to make a vehicle move, while watching for the best route (especially when racing), managing and training the crew, and enjoying the splendor all around you.
One of the aspects I love about sailing, is the challenge of dealing with dozens of inputs (wind direction, wind speed, boat heel, current, etc.) and controls. Most people don't realize the level of detail with which one can adjust a sail. While airplanes are stuck with a fixed aerofoil, sails can be adjusted by stretching the front (luff), the back (leach), the bottom (the foot). You control these three sides with the halliard (raises the sail), downhaul (pulls down on the sail, easier to tighten the luff after the sail has been raised), outhaul (tightens the foot), leech line (tightens the leech/back of the sail), boom vang (pulls down on the bottom of the sail). With these, you can set the depth and shape of the sail to accommodate the current wind. (Heavier winds work better with flatter sails, lighter winds, with a bit fuller sails.) And of course you have to keep the proper angle of the sail with the wind by using the mainsheet, traveller, vang.
It really is a thing of beauty to get a sail working properly; then you combine that with a foresail (jib) that helps the flow over the set of sails. (There are often bits of yarn, ticklers, that help you see the flow over the sails, and see if it's laminar or turbulent.)
All that being said, pretty much every one of these many factors could be measured, analyzed, and appropriately adjusted by a computer and associated sensing/control hardware. And in some ways, seeing a system manage all those factors so accurately and elegantly is a bit of art in itself.
And there very few dangerous situations (wind coming around behind to flip the sail over in a crash jibe) that the computer and sensors could spot and deal with before they become a problem.
The main thing the computer lacks is the ability to appreciate the water rushing by the hull, the seabirds, the seals, the beauty.
It is still a worthwhile endeavor. Plus, the technology from such projects could filter down into products for sailors, who might be unable or unwilling to deal with a lot of the details. A lot of cruising sailors would love to have their sails trimmed properly by a computer. More power to them. It's not for me, I want to tweak every bit of the boat myself, for the joy of it; but if someone (including myself at times) wants to kick back and relax, while still having the boat perform, sure, let the computers do some work.
I'm as libertarian as the next person, let people do what they want, as long as they don't hurt anyone. Unfortunately, *in public*, where you can't expect privacy, people still do things that hurt other people and society. Let the record it. I'm sure the people involved in those 3% of robberies it helped, are grateful for the system. And what percentage of street crime was solved before the cameras? 0%? 1%?
I've had my house robbed twice, and I now have 24/7 video surveillance of the house/street, so if it happens again, I'll have something on tape. I'd have nothing against street cameras that would have helped the last two times.
Last week my neighbor mysteriously died in a field next door in a grass fire. He was a volunteer fire fighter. They don't know what happened, who started it, why he couldn't get out, and so forth. There are rumours of kids starting the grass fire (like the losers tend to do in this town). But this will probably go unsolved. I wish my camera had covered the area in question, and it might have caught any culprits, or at least solved the mystery for his poor family...
If you want to smoke pot, have orgies, whatever, there's lots of room for privacy away from the public streets.
Tags are obviously a great way to flag topics of common interest and track them. Although as another posted suggested, a forum seems like a better tool for this purpose.
Which leads me to this question: is there any hosted service that provides either email or forum that gives detailed and accurate read-tracking? I have a need for two parties to communicate, and to legally prove when each party reads a given message. Return receipts in traditional email are a joke. I've googled quite a bit, and other than a couple of pricey "registered email" services, I have come up empty handed. (Third party is preferable, since if I host it myself, I can be accused of faking the information.)
Don't use an Intel or AMD CPU. The schematics of those CPUs are not Open. Nor is the schematic diagram of your motherboard, monitor etc.
Oh, dear God, don't tell Stallman, or he'll toss his EEEPC (which he switched to, bizarrely enough, solely because it had an open BIOS). If you're tossing the BIOS (which isn't really used much by any operating system these days) on moral grounds, you'd be a hypocrite to stick with closed-source CPU's, I/O chips, and such...
Just another tip; before overwriting any password, save the old/etc/passwd and/etc/shadow, in case you do want to brute-force the password later. His login password might be the same as the password he uses for email or other accounts that you otherwise couldn't crack easily. (It's easier to brute force a local/etc/shadow than a remote web site.)
Apparently, the President of Media Breakaway has now admitted to the Washington Post that his company has been occupying and using the 134.17.0.0/16 block and that front company JKS Media, which provides routing to the block, is actually owned by Media Breakaway.
If he is president of a company that owns the company that provides routing for the block, doesn't that mean he has legal ownership of that block?
Yes, if the block is used primarily for spam, I'm all for people blackholing the range. And if he's using it for illegal purposes, yes, he should be punished (and the range appropriated). But I don't see where the term "hijacking" could be applied at all.
If I own some cars and use them in crimes, I haven't "hijacked" anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
When I had a large-ish company (75+ employees), it was fairly common to receive bills for things that we didn't order/subscribe-to. There are likely a number of companies whose accounts payable departments simply pay any bill coming in, without cross-referencing it to a purchase order. This is no different, really. (And even many semi-legit services, magazines, and so forth, would simply send an overdue bill, rather than a subscription renewal notice. I was always more surprised at some big names that would pull that somewhat deceptive practice...)
:)
(Is it just me, or does "ordering a halt to an illegal practice" sound kinda stupid? Seizing US assets, extradition, and so forth, fine. Go for it. But "stop doing that illegal stuff!" doesn't sound that useful.
Wow, I know it's too late to get any mod points so people will read this, but for those who do drill down into replies:
The Saudi's aren't scared, as another poster pointed out. They are merely trying to poke a bit of a hole into the rampant commodity speculation (and likely price manipulation) that has driven the price of oil (and other commodities) to the point where 60% (according to some estimates) of the price is purely due to speculation.
Just like the
Normally prices are driven by the economics of supply and demand. The Saudi's are effectively calling "bullshit" on the current prices (and unprecedented oil reserves held by the US), by showing they can easily up the supply. Yes, they are looking out for their interests, but if the poke a hole in the price speculation and price manipulation that is going on, the average consumer is going to benefit greatly (at the expense of big oil). They want to sell oil to us, and they know the current price isn't reasonable nor good for business. More power to them. Hopefully the current prices will scare us into more research of alternative fuels. But the reality is that the consumers, businesses, and general economy relies upon oil today, and is being seriously hurt by the oil companies' price manipulation.
And the run-up of world food prices is supposedly due to a similar speculation in food futures (where greedy North American and European investors' commodity speculation is leading to starvation in some countries).
Good article on it, here. I think I originally came across that via Digg, which seems to be more useful lately than
Will the oil bubble burst soon? Hard to believe the OTC loophole and other issues will be addressed as long as a man with oil interests, and from a Texan oil family is in the Whitehouse. Talk about a conflict of interest.
s/harmonic/harmoniously/
But yeah. Individually, and on mixed teams, I've had great luck with women employees (well, no different from with men; some are good, some, not so much). But whenever I've had a women-only department I've had major HR issues with infighting. I don't mean to be sexist, it's just been my experience.
Not to say there weren't pissing matches between the guys, there certainly were. But in the all-female department there always seemed to be daily conflict. The fact that tears were often involved might have made it seem worse than it was. Or maybe a given sex just tends to compete to a greater degree when amongst the same sex. Women have unfairly had a historical disadvantage in the workplace, so maybe there's some extra self-consciousness there when mixed with males, which helps curb any destructive competitive behaviour.
It never seemed to be a problem with a two or three woman project team, that actually worked really well; but when it came to a bit larger department, all hell would break loose.
It could also be related to the fact that the department in question was an admin department, which generally had the lower paying jobs among the departments. Lower paid employees might not always display the same degree of professionalism as the higher paying ones. (There are certainly exceptions, but in general this may be true.)
I don't know the reason for sure, but I've certainly experienced the phenomenon. Apologies if any of this sounds sexist, it's not intended as such in the slightest.
Their definition of "blacked out" for the 2008 contest allows colored rectangles or "random noise" replacing the part of the image to be blacked out. The latter would allow doing something like a crypting of the chunk of the image (in the guise of creating random pixels, of course). In that case, everything could be fully restored; no need to just hide things steganographically in a few low bits of black or anything.
(Of course, the challenge of making the program appear to be doing something else is a key part of the work.)
When 8G flash drives suddenly dropped in price lately, I could choose between a Kingston and an I-Forget-The-Noname-Brand-Offhand at a local small retailer. I picked the Kingston. Installing Linux on it, something seemed terribly off. Reads were fast, but writes were deathly slow. I took it back and swapped with the noname brand, which was a bit smaller physically, and *much* faster in operation.
Yes, you don't have to plug your laptop's TV-out into the TV, nor do you have to plug speakers into your laptop!
"Zooma ut"??? What the hell does that mean???
Either get Leopard solid, stable, and most importantly, *fast* before you move onto the next OS (unless Snow Leopard addresses a lot of these issues).
Typically with an OSX release, the early point versions go through some growing pains, and it's not until the mid point releases that things get rock solid and fast. When I first tried leopard (10.5.0), it broke a number of things; it offered enough extra that I put up with what it broke, but I wouldn't recommend it to others especially for mission critical business stuff. It seems to be getting better with each point release that rolls in, and 10.5.3 just came in the other day (and things actually seem a bit peppier), but I get the impression it has a little way to go yet.
I think Leopard's early problems has hurt Apple a bit, and I'd hate to see a 10.6.0 come out too soon, with a lot of the same issues as Leopard's first release. I want a fast and stable OSX! (Even at its worst, Leopard was head and shoulders above XP in terms of speed and stability and usability, of course; but when I first jumped ship to Mac when Tiger was mature, things were even better stability-wise.)
While the Windows release cycle is painfully slow and buggy, I worry that Apple's is almost a little too fast with this announcement (although the wait for Leopard seemed to take forever.)
Now who knows, maybe Snow Leopard isn't too revolutionary; maybe in losing some of the backwards compatibility hassles of PPC to move Leopard forward it will improve its speed and stability. Keeping my fingers crossed.
One feature I haven't seen any release notes or anyone else talk about, is true scaling of web pages. It always amazed me that in this day and age, that the Alt-plus and Alt-minus zoom only scaled the text, not the graphics. Not terribly useful for zooming in on a page, or seeing more of a page by zooming out. Opera has had this for ages (from the start?), and it's not as though scaling images is processor intensive (I've written blinding fast C code to do this, with smoothing, myself in the past).
Glad to see this is finally in Firefox. Hopefully they've fixed a couple of other annoyances I've seen; the random refusal to load pages (that load after a restart, or in other browsers), and the failure of Alt-F search to find things that I can see right in front of me on the page.
I agree that some of his "futurism" is a bit "out there," although no doubt an interesting read nonetheless. But his forward thinking approach in life hasn't been all fluff; he's helped move things closer to the future he imagines (with the character and voice recognition advances, for example).
Personally, I would indeed prefer he continue to apply his forward thinking to exciting new revolutionary products and technologies, rather than writing books on the future. But the guy's legitimately earned his fortune and freedom to do what he wants, so if he wants to pontificate on the future, more power to him.
Check out the Wiki bio on Ray Kurzweill. The summary didn't mention it, but he's an amazing fellow, with a long history of prominent inventions.
He created the first omni-font OCR system. You may have seen the name Kurzweil associated with both voice recognition and a line of music keyboards and synthesizers; they're both his creations. He's also done stuff in the medical field among others. The Wiki article is worth a read.
Faster? Than a properly designed, maintained, backed-up, optimized, licensed, Oracle database? Probably not.
But it's fast enough, scalable, an order of magnitude simpler, doesn't require a six or seven-figure licensing fee once you get big, doesn't require major hardware to run on, and doesn't require a $100k/year Oracle specialist to maintain it. I've also seen a lot of sites down regularly for maintenance (typically db stuff); we *never* had that, ever.
I was founder of a top 100 internet site during the .COM era. We grew to serve millions of hits a day, millions of users, yadda, yadda, yadda.
We initially used a simple file based approach for user data (on vanilla Linux commodity boxes). It worked well.
As we grew, there was some pressure to move to a database approach, so we switched to Sybase (free on Linux). It worked well, and scaled us through a lot of growth.
However, eventually, when the database bogged down and no amount of tuning would help, rather than clustering, we looked at the nature of our data (a user's data was self-contained, generally not related to any other user's data), so having a massive relational database of hundreds of millions of records wasn't really necessary. So we went back to the file-based approach (with a good central "locking daemon" to ensure atomicity of writes), and gained a lot of performance (and simplicity). Even with thousands of bits of information or transactions for a user, a flat file is pretty darn manageable.
Generally people jump at databases as a default way to store data. If a single user's data is fairly manageable, and you have millions of users, there are times when plain old files suffice. (Doing some smart things like ensuring that directories don't grow arbitrarily and such also help, but that stuff is generally a lot easier than db design and maintenance.)
It sounds like Twitter didn't have well-thought out foundations, and they're reworking some of that. Good for them. (I've actually found some good consulting work in helping companies like them deal with scalability issues, from my experience with such things...)
I remember as a kid spending hundreds of hours with Edmunds stuff that my dad bought us.
A three stage water rocket, that was so cool; each stage would use up it's water/fuel, separate, and the next one would blast off. I think the final stage even deployed a parachute for effect. Nowadays, I think they might have a boring one-stage water rocket (I can make one of those out of a coke bottle, big deal.)
But the coolest kit was an optics kid with hundreds of parts; lenses, tubes, housings, photosensitive paper, and so on. It had plans for telescopes, microscopes, periscopes, and the final project was a full functioning SLR camera with zoom lens that worked! Truly amazing. I'd love to find a kit like that again for my kids (okay, okay, and me), but they don't seem to offer much like this any more. Sigh.
Even anticipating and reading their catalogue brought many hours of enjoyment each year.
If I logged into the account where Lala was installed, it would crash with that fatal OS error.
I logged into an alternative admin-level account, did a virus scan. It found nothing. I removed the Lala program files directory (didn't see an uninstall option anywhere), and I was able to log into the primary account where I had installed Lala originally.
Again, it may simply be a bug with their software, but it's a fatal one to the operating system, which seems highly suspect to me.
I'm staying clear for now.
I tried out their downloadable client this morning. Seemed to work as expected.
Then windows died with a "Windows Subsystem System process has terminated unexpectedly." I get this every time I boot up and log in. The only recent change is installing Lala's client.
It could be unrelated, it could be an innocent bug in their software. I'll try to isolate the problem and report back as a reply to this message, but in the interim I thought some people may want to hold off trying the client for now.
Anyone else have similar experiences?
I'll vouch for the underpinnings of andLinux and Ulteo, which is coLinux. I've been using it for years (an Ubuntu distro) and it's extremely solid, reliable, and efficient. It's a great way to have your Linux dev world near at hand, while needing a Windows box for other reasons. (In fact, I run my home PBX smoothly in a coLinux service on an XP PVR box.)
I hear so little about coLinux, I feel like it's one of Linux's best kept secrets. It's cool that we're starting to see meta-distributions based upon it.
I've always been a big fan of Toshiba Libretto's.
:P
The first one I had, circa 1999-2000, was the size of a VHS casette and fairly competent for its day
A couple of years ago, I upgraded to the newer 100CT, with a couple of gig of ram and such. It's a nice machine. Definitely takes getting used to the keyboard, but for portability, it can't be beat. And just throw a bluetooth or USB keyboard and external display on it when you're tethered.
But when you're on the road, tossing it in a small camera bag, having 5 hours of battery life for the long flights, having room for your laptop and a drink and not worrying about being crushed by the seat in front of you, is very liberating. Similarly, fitting into a small camera bag (honestly, it's not a purse), it goes with me everywhere; I pop it out at the pub or a restaurant or on the road.
Despite the fact I happened to snag one at Future Shop (ugh), in general subnotebooks are something the public doesn't even seem to know exists. I get a lot of comments from people just fascinated by it, thinking it must just be a Windows CE machine at first, and being blown away when they realize how powerful it is.
There is one downside: one time on a flight, the female flight attendant saw it, pointed down towards my lap, and said loudly, "wow, that's the smallest one of those I ever saw!" With the ensuing laughter, she turned many shades of red...
I just tell people that with such a small laptop, I'm clearly not trying to compensate for anything
This reeks of "if you can't meet a requirement, change some definitions" approach. "I did not have 'sex' with that woman." "It all depends upon what your definition of is is." Or like the Bill Gates deposition.
It's pretty clear what "ready for the desktop" means. It means for the typical consumer. Linux has clearly been ready for the desktop for geeks since its first stable release; we know the ins and outs, the quirks, the configuration, so it's was ready for the desktop for a certain group of people.
The phrase clearly means the masses, the typical consumer, your grandma. With Ubuntu's great hardware support, flash, and Java, I think it's almost there, if not there. The fact you're seeing EEE PC's, Wal-Mart PC's, and other consumer electronic entries into the field, shows that it's starting to take root.
Changing the definition or throwing out the term "ready for the desktop" because we took longer to get here than we should have, doesn't reflect well on the Linux community or its confidence in the consumer market at all...
I love sailing. I find it to almost be an art, managing the interactions of the wind and the water to make a vehicle move, while watching for the best route (especially when racing), managing and training the crew, and enjoying the splendor all around you.
One of the aspects I love about sailing, is the challenge of dealing with dozens of inputs (wind direction, wind speed, boat heel, current, etc.) and controls. Most people don't realize the level of detail with which one can adjust a sail. While airplanes are stuck with a fixed aerofoil, sails can be adjusted by stretching the front (luff), the back (leach), the bottom (the foot). You control these three sides with the halliard (raises the sail), downhaul (pulls down on the sail, easier to tighten the luff after the sail has been raised), outhaul (tightens the foot), leech line (tightens the leech/back of the sail), boom vang (pulls down on the bottom of the sail). With these, you can set the depth and shape of the sail to accommodate the current wind. (Heavier winds work better with flatter sails, lighter winds, with a bit fuller sails.) And of course you have to keep the proper angle of the sail with the wind by using the mainsheet, traveller, vang.
It really is a thing of beauty to get a sail working properly; then you combine that with a foresail (jib) that helps the flow over the set of sails. (There are often bits of yarn, ticklers, that help you see the flow over the sails, and see if it's laminar or turbulent.)
All that being said, pretty much every one of these many factors could be measured, analyzed, and appropriately adjusted by a computer and associated sensing/control hardware. And in some ways, seeing a system manage all those factors so accurately and elegantly is a bit of art in itself.
And there very few dangerous situations (wind coming around behind to flip the sail over in a crash jibe) that the computer and sensors could spot and deal with before they become a problem.
The main thing the computer lacks is the ability to appreciate the water rushing by the hull, the seabirds, the seals, the beauty.
It is still a worthwhile endeavor. Plus, the technology from such projects could filter down into products for sailors, who might be unable or unwilling to deal with a lot of the details. A lot of cruising sailors would love to have their sails trimmed properly by a computer. More power to them. It's not for me, I want to tweak every bit of the boat myself, for the joy of it; but if someone (including myself at times) wants to kick back and relax, while still having the boat perform, sure, let the computers do some work.
I'm as libertarian as the next person, let people do what they want, as long as they don't hurt anyone. Unfortunately, *in public*, where you can't expect privacy, people still do things that hurt other people and society. Let the record it. I'm sure the people involved in those 3% of robberies it helped, are grateful for the system. And what percentage of street crime was solved before the cameras? 0%? 1%?
I've had my house robbed twice, and I now have 24/7 video surveillance of the house/street, so if it happens again, I'll have something on tape. I'd have nothing against street cameras that would have helped the last two times.
Last week my neighbor mysteriously died in a field next door in a grass fire. He was a volunteer fire fighter. They don't know what happened, who started it, why he couldn't get out, and so forth. There are rumours of kids starting the grass fire (like the losers tend to do in this town). But this will probably go unsolved. I wish my camera had covered the area in question, and it might have caught any culprits, or at least solved the mystery for his poor family...
If you want to smoke pot, have orgies, whatever, there's lots of room for privacy away from the public streets.
Tags are obviously a great way to flag topics of common interest and track them. Although as another posted suggested, a forum seems like a better tool for this purpose.
Which leads me to this question: is there any hosted service that provides either email or forum that gives detailed and accurate read-tracking? I have a need for two parties to communicate, and to legally prove when each party reads a given message. Return receipts in traditional email are a joke. I've googled quite a bit, and other than a couple of pricey "registered email" services, I have come up empty handed. (Third party is preferable, since if I host it myself, I can be accused of faking the information.)
Thanks...
Oh, dear God, don't tell Stallman, or he'll toss his EEEPC (which he switched to, bizarrely enough, solely because it had an open BIOS). If you're tossing the BIOS (which isn't really used much by any operating system these days) on moral grounds, you'd be a hypocrite to stick with closed-source CPU's, I/O chips, and such...
Article here.
Just another tip; before overwriting any password, save the old /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, in case you do want to brute-force the password later. His login password might be the same as the password he uses for email or other accounts that you otherwise couldn't crack easily. (It's easier to brute force a local /etc/shadow than a remote web site.)
If he is president of a company that owns the company that provides routing for the block, doesn't that mean he has legal ownership of that block?
Yes, if the block is used primarily for spam, I'm all for people blackholing the range. And if he's using it for illegal purposes, yes, he should be punished (and the range appropriated). But I don't see where the term "hijacking" could be applied at all.
If I own some cars and use them in crimes, I haven't "hijacked" anyone.
What am I missing?