I admit personal bias against "mebi" and related prefixes because it sounds stupid, but I also think they should be done away with for essentially the same reason as the parent poster. "Mebi" sounds for all the world like some drunk engineer came up with a clever abbreviation for "binary megabyte" and convinced his boss to make it The Standard; history has shown that, except in totalitarian environments, arbitrarily declaring that a de facto standard is wrong never works. (For a demonstration, try counting the number of people who use MiB, GiB and so on to make fun of those who don't, as opposed to those who use it because they really, honestly think that's the right way to do it. Or just look at what measurement system the US is still using.)
I think the real answer is to just ditch the binary units, period. While it may be hard to get away from them at the lowest levels (and I'm not so sure of that--think CDs with 2692(?)-byte raw sectors, 1514-byte Ethernet packets, etc.), there's little reason that files have to be allocated in blocks that are multiples of 512 or 1024 bytes, and none at all that the user should have to be aware of that fact if they are. Leave powers of two to kernel hackers, and just do everything in userland with decimal units.
As far as temporary kludges go, I much prefer the GNU dd way: MB [read "megabyte"] = 1000*1000, M [read "meg"] = 1024*1024. It's still kludgey, but it strikes a better balance with common usage than declaring common usage wrong by fiat.
So, if there's a 10% chance that a single drive fails within the first year, the probability of at least one failure in a 4 drive box within that same year is 1 -.9^4 =.6.
I live in Japan, but was born in the US, lived there through university, and (obviously) have large numbers of family there. Yet it still took a good deal of serious thought before I was able to convince myself to visit "home" for the holidays this past Christmas--the first time I've been to the US since 9/11. And while it was certainly nice to see family and friends again, with all the stupid searches and security measures, it very nearly wasn't worth it. I want to go back occasionally, but I don't want to deal with all this crap . . .
it is NOT that funny anymore (being in german) when I have to figure out a way to enter a chinese char into a chinese email address given that I have no clue about how their char system works at all.
Well, presumably that Chinese person has no interest in receiving E-mail from people who don't speak Chinese, so I don't see the problem.
They work fine when they're *open.* The ATMs mostly close when the banks close.
This was true several years ago. UFJ is running their ATMs 24/365 now, and most other banks' ATMs are open until 8 or 9 in the evening. There are even 24-hour ATMs in convenience stores.
It seems to me that Japan is years behind the US in terms of banking & payment conveniences. Many grocery stores only accept *their* version of the Visa card.
Remember that Japan is, even now, very much a cash-based society; it's less a matter of convenience and more a matter of "we don't like credit cards". Being in debt is generally frowned upon in Japan (as well as many other East Asian countries, from the little I've heard). Most grocery stores probably have little enough card business that it's not worth their time to accept every card in the world.
I wonder what you mean by "wonderful language?" It's not very direct or specific except when it comes to describing fish.
Hito sore-zore -- to each their own. I happen to like Japanese for those very reasons (among others).
Anyway, it seems Japanese is rapidly turning into something else. Come on--"raisu" instead of "gohan?"
It's the cool factor, so to speak, combined with the old "grass-is-greener" way of thinking. Using imported words is the "in" thing these days, but it'll pass.
what strikes me as odd whenever I leave the Nordic countries, and in particular when I decided to live in the UK for half a year or so is how everything elsewhere tend not to work properly.
Just for the record, things work fine here in Japan--no utility problems, trains are on time, wonderful language, the works. The only problem is that the head of the government spends all his time playing American lapdog . . .
But seemingly, a lot of people here have an entitlement complex, where they think they can take whatever the fuck they want for no other reason than that they want it.
The same could be said for both sides . . .
RIAA: Believes it's entitled to racking in all the money it wants solely because it can.
Swappers: Believe they're entitled to racking in all the music they want solely because they can.
Blaming only the side that's obviously breaking the law is not incorrect, but is not likely to lead to a working solution (defined as a solution that both sides agree is reasonable) either.
Recently, thankfully, [DoCoMo's] prices have become sane, but they really don't deserve to be the top carrier in Japan. Currently EzWeb (KDDI) is probably the best, followed by Vodafone (J-Phone), and then DoCoMo...And then TuKa and its glorious bid to avoid going out of business.
I don't know; I haven't been impressed with KDDI ever since I tried reporting spam to them and was told "we don't have a reporting address and we're not taking any action against spam senders". (DoCoMo, on the other hand, set up a reporting address last year, received about 400,000 reports over a one-year period, and took action against about 250 spammers in that period, IIRC. About half the spam I receive these days is from KDDI.) I use DoCoMo, but mostly for coverage: I haven't looked at coverage maps recently, but when I got my first keitai 4 years ago, DoCoMo was substantially ahead of everywhere else. As long as I'm going to have a mobile phone, I want it to be useful, well, mobilely . . .
Well, I ban the word "County" because "Count" is a title in an archaic nobility system that has no place in modern American culture. Take that, L.A. *****y!
But don't come off pretending to be ignorant. The law is clear. This is theft.
s/theft/copyright infringement/ and you would at least be correct. But whether ignorance of the law constitutes a valid defense (it doesn't) isn't the point. The point is that, as a matter of fact, many, many users don't believe--whether due to ignorance or to conscious moral stand--that distributing music files is, or should be, illegal, and the RIAA is telling all these people that they're wrong. While the RIAA may be within their legal rights, neither angering nor scaring your customers is a sane long-term business strategy, and it would be in the RIAA's own best interest to quit doing this and find ways to work with its customers instead of against them.
And what was it they said about a law not supported by the majority of the population?
The worm in question attempted to install a back door into my machine and was foiled by the greatest security measure ever taken: not having a LF on the end of/etc/inetd.conf (!)
I had a similar thing happen once: I got bitten by the big imapd exploit back in 1998 or so, and the attacker added a new entry to inetd.conf (which did have a trailing LF) and restarted the daemon. Unfortunately for the attacker, I was running xinetd, and xinetd doesn't give a flying cowpie about the contents of inetd.conf.;)
Now that I don't run a provider anymore, I have my system firewalled, about half my network daemons are self-written, and BIND is safely chrooted away where it can (hopefully?) do no harm until I get around to writing a replacement . . .
What if Microsoft embedded an ASF video in the word format?
Then you say "sorry, this part of the document can't be read" and skip over it. Who'd save video data in WP documents anyway? (And if it was a dummy video just for patent's sake, you treat it as binary data and don't try to parse it as ASF, problem solved.)
Depends. If you're on Linux, the Flash player seems to have weird shared library dependencies that always make it segfault on my system. Under Windows, the only problems I've had installing Flash are some weird interactions with Samba that make upgrades fail when installing to a network drive--uninstalling and reinstalling fixed it.
I find it ironic that you advocate disallowing such subsidies because they may be used to suppress free views, yet your signature reminds us that Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est ("A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand"). Why not just take action against the countries/governments that do misuse the subsidy that way?
As far as people "find[ing] Western culture to be alluring" and "adopting it by th[ei]r own free choice", I'd argue that they're only adopting it because the US and its corporations are making it financially impossible to do otherwise, but I haven't done enough research to make a solid defense, so I'll leave that for another time.
Finally on most modern 40X-48X media, burning at 24X or 32X is fine for data/music cd's. Burning at 4X is just plain stupid for what most people do and serves no purpose except to enforce old wives tales.
I wouldn't go quite so far; on a spindle of 48x Memorex discs (yeah, yeah...) I went through recently, I got 2 or 3 coasters out of the first 10 discs burning at 24x, then dropped down to 4x and no more coasters. What you say may hold true for good media and good drives, but some combinations just don't work well at high speeds.
the only CDs I have that have lasted more than 19 months or so are my Kodak Golds, the oldest of which were burned sometime in 1995. In particular, I've found any CDs that use a blue dye to be the most fragile/short-lived.
I have some 650MB TDKs (blue) I burned 5 years ago that are still readable now. Just another data point . . .
It also helps to use standard 650MB CD-R media with the ISO 9660 filesystem
Yeah, if you can find 650MB discs anymore. I went spindle-shopping the other day and couldn't find any 650MB media (except generic ones which I don't trust anyway). Maybe it was just a bad day. <shrug>
The only really reliable way to archive something is to make 2/3 copies of it and place them in different areas.
And check the integrity of the data periodically! Setting aside the issue of media becoming obsolete, everything decays sooner or later, and you want to get your data onto new media before that happens.
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I admit personal bias against "mebi" and related prefixes because it sounds stupid, but I also think they should be done away with for essentially the same reason as the parent poster. "Mebi" sounds for all the world like some drunk engineer came up with a clever abbreviation for "binary megabyte" and convinced his boss to make it The Standard; history has shown that, except in totalitarian environments, arbitrarily declaring that a de facto standard is wrong never works. (For a demonstration, try counting the number of people who use MiB, GiB and so on to make fun of those who don't, as opposed to those who use it because they really, honestly think that's the right way to do it. Or just look at what measurement system the US is still using.)
I think the real answer is to just ditch the binary units, period. While it may be hard to get away from them at the lowest levels (and I'm not so sure of that--think CDs with 2692(?)-byte raw sectors, 1514-byte Ethernet packets, etc.), there's little reason that files have to be allocated in blocks that are multiples of 512 or 1024 bytes, and none at all that the user should have to be aware of that fact if they are. Leave powers of two to kernel hackers, and just do everything in userland with decimal units.
As far as temporary kludges go, I much prefer the GNU dd way: MB [read "megabyte"] = 1000*1000, M [read "meg"] = 1024*1024. It's still kludgey, but it strikes a better balance with common usage than declaring common usage wrong by fiat.
So, if there's a 10% chance that a single drive fails within the first year, the probability of at least one failure in a 4 drive box within that same year is 1 - .9^4 = .6.
.9^4 = .6561
.9^4 = .3439
1 -
I live in Japan, but was born in the US, lived there through university, and (obviously) have large numbers of family there. Yet it still took a good deal of serious thought before I was able to convince myself to visit "home" for the holidays this past Christmas--the first time I've been to the US since 9/11. And while it was certainly nice to see family and friends again, with all the stupid searches and security measures, it very nearly wasn't worth it. I want to go back occasionally, but I don't want to deal with all this crap . . .
Sigh.
In Mandrake, you type "urpmi programname".
And now we see why Linux has so little marketshare. Who would want the slightest thing to do with a system that has commands like urpmi?
it is NOT that funny anymore (being in german) when I have to figure out a way to enter a chinese char into a chinese email address given that I have no clue about how their char system works at all.
Well, presumably that Chinese person has no interest in receiving E-mail from people who don't speak Chinese, so I don't see the problem.
They work fine when they're *open.* The ATMs mostly close when the banks close.
This was true several years ago. UFJ is running their ATMs 24/365 now, and most other banks' ATMs are open until 8 or 9 in the evening. There are even 24-hour ATMs in convenience stores.
It seems to me that Japan is years behind the US in terms of banking & payment conveniences. Many grocery stores only accept *their* version of the Visa card.
Remember that Japan is, even now, very much a cash-based society; it's less a matter of convenience and more a matter of "we don't like credit cards". Being in debt is generally frowned upon in Japan (as well as many other East Asian countries, from the little I've heard). Most grocery stores probably have little enough card business that it's not worth their time to accept every card in the world.
I wonder what you mean by "wonderful language?" It's not very direct or specific except when it comes to describing fish.
Hito sore-zore -- to each their own. I happen to like Japanese for those very reasons (among others).
Anyway, it seems Japanese is rapidly turning into something else. Come on--"raisu" instead of "gohan?"
It's the cool factor, so to speak, combined with the old "grass-is-greener" way of thinking. Using imported words is the "in" thing these days, but it'll pass.
what strikes me as odd whenever I leave the Nordic countries, and in particular when I decided to live in the UK for half a year or so is how everything elsewhere tend not to work properly.
Just for the record, things work fine here in Japan--no utility problems, trains are on time, wonderful language, the works. The only problem is that the head of the government spends all his time playing American lapdog . . .
Nope, but it tastes real good with au jus gravy.
But seemingly, a lot of people here have an entitlement complex, where they think they can take whatever the fuck they want for no other reason than that they want it.
The same could be said for both sides . . .
RIAA: Believes it's entitled to racking in all the money it wants solely because it can.
Swappers: Believe they're entitled to racking in all the music they want solely because they can.
Blaming only the side that's obviously breaking the law is not incorrect, but is not likely to lead to a working solution (defined as a solution that both sides agree is reasonable) either.
they will be limited to simple Web browsing (on a phone? come on...)
. . . says he who has never actually tried it, I assume? I find browsing capabilities quite useful for:
- Reading news
- Checking mail (on my server at home)
- Checking train timetables
among other things.Recently, thankfully, [DoCoMo's] prices have become sane, but they really don't deserve to be the top carrier in Japan. Currently EzWeb (KDDI) is probably the best, followed by Vodafone (J-Phone), and then DoCoMo...And then TuKa and its glorious bid to avoid going out of business.
I don't know; I haven't been impressed with KDDI ever since I tried reporting spam to them and was told "we don't have a reporting address and we're not taking any action against spam senders". (DoCoMo, on the other hand, set up a reporting address last year, received about 400,000 reports over a one-year period, and took action against about 250 spammers in that period, IIRC. About half the spam I receive these days is from KDDI.) I use DoCoMo, but mostly for coverage: I haven't looked at coverage maps recently, but when I got my first keitai 4 years ago, DoCoMo was substantially ahead of everywhere else. As long as I'm going to have a mobile phone, I want it to be useful, well, mobilely . . .
Children don't really begin to understand abstracts until around 10-12 years old.
I dunno, I was programming in BASIC at age 6 . . .
Now I can pile stuff up till it falls on the floor without worry.
If it's falling onto the floor, you're not using enough floor space to begin with.
Well, I ban the word "County" because "Count" is a title in an archaic nobility system that has no place in modern American culture. Take that, L.A. *****y!
But don't come off pretending to be ignorant. The law is clear. This is theft.
s/theft/copyright infringement/ and you would at least be correct. But whether ignorance of the law constitutes a valid defense (it doesn't) isn't the point. The point is that, as a matter of fact, many, many users don't believe--whether due to ignorance or to conscious moral stand--that distributing music files is, or should be, illegal, and the RIAA is telling all these people that they're wrong. While the RIAA may be within their legal rights, neither angering nor scaring your customers is a sane long-term business strategy, and it would be in the RIAA's own best interest to quit doing this and find ways to work with its customers instead of against them.
And what was it they said about a law not supported by the majority of the population?
Don't hit the post button if your joke requires a life support system such as:
"oh, never mind"
Erm, but that is the joke . . .
The worm in question attempted to install a back door into my machine and was foiled by the greatest security measure ever taken: not having a LF on the end of /etc/inetd.conf (!)
I had a similar thing happen once: I got bitten by the big imapd exploit back in 1998 or so, and the attacker added a new entry to inetd.conf (which did have a trailing LF) and restarted the daemon. Unfortunately for the attacker, I was running xinetd, and xinetd doesn't give a flying cowpie about the contents of inetd.conf. ;)
Now that I don't run a provider anymore, I have my system firewalled, about half my network daemons are self-written, and BIND is safely chrooted away where it can (hopefully?) do no harm until I get around to writing a replacement . . .
What if Microsoft embedded an ASF video in the word format?
Then you say "sorry, this part of the document can't be read" and skip over it. Who'd save video data in WP documents anyway? (And if it was a dummy video just for patent's sake, you treat it as binary data and don't try to parse it as ASF, problem solved.)
Depends. If you're on Linux, the Flash player seems to have weird shared library dependencies that always make it segfault on my system. Under Windows, the only problems I've had installing Flash are some weird interactions with Samba that make upgrades fail when installing to a network drive--uninstalling and reinstalling fixed it.
For $800, you can buy four or five reasonably nice bookshelf speakers and a subwoofer (and even get change back!)
Five reasonably nice bookshelf speakers: $800.
Bookshelves to place them on: $80.
Nails and brackets to install the bookshelves: $8.
The look on your landlord's face when he finds out you've completely remodeled your apartment: Priceless.
I find it ironic that you advocate disallowing such subsidies because they may be used to suppress free views, yet your signature reminds us that Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est ("A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand"). Why not just take action against the countries/governments that do misuse the subsidy that way?
As far as people "find[ing] Western culture to be alluring" and "adopting it by th[ei]r own free choice", I'd argue that they're only adopting it because the US and its corporations are making it financially impossible to do otherwise, but I haven't done enough research to make a solid defense, so I'll leave that for another time.
Finally on most modern 40X-48X media, burning at 24X or 32X is fine for data/music cd's. Burning at 4X is just plain stupid for what most people do and serves no purpose except to enforce old wives tales.
I wouldn't go quite so far; on a spindle of 48x Memorex discs (yeah, yeah...) I went through recently, I got 2 or 3 coasters out of the first 10 discs burning at 24x, then dropped down to 4x and no more coasters. What you say may hold true for good media and good drives, but some combinations just don't work well at high speeds.
the only CDs I have that have lasted more than 19 months or so are my Kodak Golds, the oldest of which were burned sometime in 1995. In particular, I've found any CDs that use a blue dye to be the most fragile/short-lived.
I have some 650MB TDKs (blue) I burned 5 years ago that are still readable now. Just another data point . . .
It also helps to use standard 650MB CD-R media with the ISO 9660 filesystem
Yeah, if you can find 650MB discs anymore. I went spindle-shopping the other day and couldn't find any 650MB media (except generic ones which I don't trust anyway). Maybe it was just a bad day. <shrug>
The only really reliable way to archive something is to make 2/3 copies of it and place them in different areas.
And check the integrity of the data periodically! Setting aside the issue of media becoming obsolete, everything decays sooner or later, and you want to get your data onto new media before that happens.