in enterprise environments, only non-critical systems get to see uptimes greater than a a couple of months, six months tops.
one of the reasons are OS patches that require reboot, hardware repairs, or simply stupid managers that think a reboot fixes stuff on unix the same way it does for windows. for us system admins, is easier and less painfull to reboot first and rub his nose on it later (after the reboot fixes nothing, of course), than fighting an uphill battle against a PHB.
now, there's some problems with comercial unixes that actually require reboots to fix. sun boxes connected to large tape libraries, that act as backup servers, the tapes hang sometimes, and only a simultaneous reboot of tape labrary and server fixes the stuff. on HP-UX, NFS is i a big piece of shit. under heavy loads, an HP-UX serving NFS clients will simply stop serving files, and nothing short of a reboot fixes it. on AIX, sometimes it freaks out and refuses to operate tape drives correctly. power cycling the tape unit does nothing, AIX doesn't detect it afterwards. reboot fixes it.
of course, those are anedoctes based on what I saw at my current job. linux have this kind of stuff too, just as much as the commercial products. none of them are perfect.
do you know how much it costs to train someone on a proprietary unix ?
if the choice is between paying through the nose to send people to IBM/HP to learn, or hire someone who already knows solaris, because they could learn the craft at school/university on budget x86 hardware, which one do you think companies would prefer ?
the last model to have PS2 compatibility was the 80GB model, and this one did this with a combination of hardware AND software, while the previous 60 GB had full hardware compatibility.
the 40GB model can't play PS2 disks nor does any other model after the 80 GB one.
linux on PS3 runs on a hyper-visor that hides most of the architecture, this means no access to the vetorial units, GPU and the powerPC CPU embeded on the cell chip is limited to some 600 MHz.
you can bet that those researchers using PS3s also bought a development kit from sony that allows them to develop natively to the PS3 proprietary OS, giving them full acess to all the resources.
I know from experience that some of the voices on the open source movement can be really difficult to deal with (yes, RMS, I'm looking at you). So, what to do in this case? Hide them under a rock?
if it's a server class part, i think they'd do better emulating sun's T2 part. 8 multi-thread cores, a single FPU unit shared by all cores and some logic to improve encryption and networking. this with x86 support would give Xeon a run for it's money.
now, as a desktop part, i think it's idiotic as hell. a low power chip with a decent software stack to offload certain proccessing tasks - like video and audio encoding - to the GPU (wich they also make) would do much better in terms of performance per watt.
but then, none of those options would serve as silicon penile extension, right ? no bragging rights like "dude, i just got a quad-core, 3.4 megahurtz chip! duuude !"
"But there are mathematical election protocols that have self-enforcing properties, and some cryptographers have suggested their use in elections.'"
people already fuck up elections as they are now. put extra layers of complication and mathematical abstraction on top of it, and kiss fair voting goodbye.
anything other than "the vote goes on the paper, the paper goes in the box, the papers from the box are counted in public view" is to complex for joe sixpack to audit and complain by himself, thus inadequate to use on a large scale election.
a silicon chip may bu unable to re-wire itself the same way an organic neuron does, but if you look at the brain the same way one looks at a peer-to-peer network, then things change completelly.
try firing a bittorrent download on you computer, one that have dozens of peers. keep looking at the peer list. see how new peers show up while others disapear, some stays on the list doing nothing, others only uploading, others downloading ?
you want to simulate the brain ? make several multicore chips, all connected to extremely high bandwidth buses, assign each a unique MAC address, let them talk to each other like in a P2P network.
the dinamic rewiring of neurons would happen in the internet layer, the layer occupied by the IP, ICMP and IGMP protocols on the internet stack, those protocols can exchange packets with any host on a network dinamically, independent of the physical topology of link layer, which in the case of our neuron simulating chips, would be the high speed system bus.
actually, like gold, it's scarcity (natural or artificial), combined with demand.
gold is a pretty useless metal outside of the electronics industry. even when a low reactivity metal is required, platinum is a lot more usefull. the thing with gold is that it's a beutifull metal. only gold, copper and cesium fall outside the white-many shades of grey-black color spectrum, but since copper oxidizes in an ugly brown color and cesium explodes in contact with moisture, gold is the only alternative when you want something colorfull and pretty to wear on your neck or wrist, this makes it desired and expensive.
Macs are the same thing. they stands out on look alone, and they keep their shine longer than other brands, this makes macs higly desirable. and since apple have a monopoly on macs, they become scarce, thus expensive.
i bought one to my mother some years ago. they're not so muche easier to use than windows or linux with KDE. all this "intuitiveveness" of Mac OS X is just apples reality distortion field at work. won't fall for that anymore, just like i don't buy golden bling.
i agree fully with you. altought Seven still have some rough edges, it's on the right track to became my favorite windows ever, one notch above win2k professional.
the relese candidate is installed on my girlfriends notebook and i have to say, any "hype" around it is well deserved.
the only reason i don't have it on my own computer ? because i wouldn't be caught dead using anything different than windowmaker. easy as that.
any "l33t hax0r" in the house brave enought to try this shit on the NSA ?
considering that i never heard of any snafu from those guys, either their pretty good at sevuring their stuff, or incredibly efficient at snuffing anyone who tries it before news get to public.
sincerely, i don't know which one is the scariest scenario.
I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?
it's the same thing with iPods. the 30 GB model I had was enough to put all my music there, but I only listened to a small subset of it, nothing that a cell phone with a 4 GB couldn't handle.
so, wouldn't it be better to have a smaller, but more energy efficient and thougher disk better ?
then, at home just load and unload what you need, and that's it.
volkswagen beetles are a measure of volume football stadiums are a measure of area round trips to the moon is a measure of lenght parsecs are a measure of time shitloads are a mesure of weight bajillions are a dimensionless quantity and the measure of power is a universal constant: 1.21 jigawatts
doing the math, that's 45.5 MB/s, pretty much the sustained data transfer rates of a SATA hard disk.
and that over a wireless link, right ?
I hate to bust their scam, but you're gonna need a very special, fine tunned setup to get this kind of transfer rates over _wired_ gigabit ethernet. the fastest wireless standard is 54 mbps (not counting draft standards), 1/20th the performance of gigabit. to transfer an SD movie over wireless from my linux notebook to the PS3 takes about 30 min.
if we take the comparativelly slow data rates of HSDPA 3G cell networks, even the best operators top at 14 Mbps, which would require buffering to watch a standard def movie.
to get the kind of speeds these guys are talking about, they'd have to use link aggregation/trunking to combine almost 100 HSDPA channels to match gigabit ethernet's speed. completelly unrealistic.
While I agree that upgrading a windows install is not a good idea, this notion that XP needs to be reinstalled every year is a myth. the notebook I use at work (company owned) is running with the very same XP install it had when I got it. 3 solid years. no reinstalls.
I give you that it's running a little slower today than when I got it, but this has nothing to do with microsoft, patches or anything. it was because of a brain dead decision from upper management a year ago of deploying mcafee antivirus to everyonee. while the corporative version of mcafee is far better than the consumer version, it still hoses the system. BUT, wipping windows and doing a fresh install in this case would solve NOTHING. after reinstalling I'd still have mcafee running and hosing the system.
here's the tips to avoid this fabled windows "aging" proccess:
- don't install crap all the time. stick to the basics. office suite, browser, e-mail app. everything else, run in a virtual machine. hardware today is powerfull enough so you wont notice it's not running nativelly.
- don't install and unistall stuff frequently. only install nativelly stuff you want to keep that you tested on a VM
- don't install games. full stop. buy a PS3 or Xbox360. if you want casual games, there's lots of them on the web, run them on your browser.
- keep your files separate from your software. a 20-30GB partition for windows and apps, everything else on a secondary partition. configure the system so "Documents and settings" reside on the second partition (usually D:\ )
- disable every crappy service you don't need from control pannel.
this worked for me for the last 3 years. i'm the only guy in my work group who didn't have to completely rebuild my machine in all this time.
said by someone who never had^H^H^Hlived with a cat. *
to grown up male cats, humans are a source of food and entertainment. maybe like a brother. to females, humans are more like ofsprings. that's why they bring in dead and half-dead animals home. they want you - the human - to use that carcass/weakened creature as play toys. this teaches usefull hunting and killing skills.
* humans don't own cats. we live with them in the bast-case scenario. in the worst case, the CAT owns YOU! cue the "in soviet russia" jokes.
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in enterprise environments, only non-critical systems get to see uptimes greater than a a couple of months, six months tops.
one of the reasons are OS patches that require reboot, hardware repairs, or simply stupid managers that think a reboot fixes stuff on unix the same way it does for windows. for us system admins, is easier and less painfull to reboot first and rub his nose on it later (after the reboot fixes nothing, of course), than fighting an uphill battle against a PHB.
now, there's some problems with comercial unixes that actually require reboots to fix. sun boxes connected to large tape libraries, that act as backup servers, the tapes hang sometimes, and only a simultaneous reboot of tape labrary and server fixes the stuff. on HP-UX, NFS is i a big piece of shit. under heavy loads, an HP-UX serving NFS clients will simply stop serving files, and nothing short of a reboot fixes it. on AIX, sometimes it freaks out and refuses to operate tape drives correctly. power cycling the tape unit does nothing, AIX doesn't detect it afterwards. reboot fixes it.
of course, those are anedoctes based on what I saw at my current job. linux have this kind of stuff too, just as much as the commercial products. none of them are perfect.
do you know how much it costs to train someone on a proprietary unix ?
if the choice is between paying through the nose to send people to IBM/HP to learn, or hire someone who already knows solaris, because they could learn the craft at school/university on budget x86 hardware, which one do you think companies would prefer ?
the "fat" PS3 doesn't already.
the last model to have PS2 compatibility was the 80GB model, and this one did this with a combination of hardware AND software, while the previous 60 GB had full hardware compatibility.
the 40GB model can't play PS2 disks nor does any other model after the 80 GB one.
linux on PS3 runs on a hyper-visor that hides most of the architecture, this means no access to the vetorial units, GPU and the powerPC CPU embeded on the cell chip is limited to some 600 MHz.
you can bet that those researchers using PS3s also bought a development kit from sony that allows them to develop natively to the PS3 proprietary OS, giving them full acess to all the resources.
he's been a prick to ME. refusing an autograph on Suse install CD because "it contained proprietary software".
fanaticism like this is guaranteed to generate a bad impression on the mainstream press.
I know from experience that some of the voices on the open source movement can be really difficult to deal with (yes, RMS, I'm looking at you). So, what to do in this case? Hide them under a rock?
according to the police here in my contry (brasil), yes. that's exactly what the victim should do.
they're constantly stressing that a victim of robery should not react or take action, just hand the goods and pray for the best.
if it's a server class part, i think they'd do better emulating sun's T2 part. 8 multi-thread cores, a single FPU unit shared by all cores and some logic to improve encryption and networking. this with x86 support would give Xeon a run for it's money.
now, as a desktop part, i think it's idiotic as hell. a low power chip with a decent software stack to offload certain proccessing tasks - like video and audio encoding - to the GPU (wich they also make) would do much better in terms of performance per watt.
but then, none of those options would serve as silicon penile extension, right ? no bragging rights like "dude, i just got a quad-core, 3.4 megahurtz chip! duuude !"
"But there are mathematical election protocols that have self-enforcing properties, and some cryptographers have suggested their use in elections.'"
people already fuck up elections as they are now. put extra layers of complication and mathematical abstraction on top of it, and kiss fair voting goodbye.
anything other than "the vote goes on the paper, the paper goes in the box, the papers from the box are counted in public view" is to complex for joe sixpack to audit and complain by himself, thus inadequate to use on a large scale election.
id3v2 adds support for a lot of stuff, including embeded artwork
a silicon chip may bu unable to re-wire itself the same way an organic neuron does, but if you look at the brain the same way one looks at a peer-to-peer network, then things change completelly.
try firing a bittorrent download on you computer, one that have dozens of peers. keep looking at the peer list. see how new peers show up while others disapear, some stays on the list doing nothing, others only uploading, others downloading ?
you want to simulate the brain ? make several multicore chips, all connected to extremely high bandwidth buses, assign each a unique MAC address, let them talk to each other like in a P2P network.
the dinamic rewiring of neurons would happen in the internet layer, the layer occupied by the IP, ICMP and IGMP protocols on the internet stack, those protocols can exchange packets with any host on a network dinamically, independent of the physical topology of link layer, which in the case of our neuron simulating chips, would be the high speed system bus.
actually, like gold, it's scarcity (natural or artificial), combined with demand.
gold is a pretty useless metal outside of the electronics industry. even when a low reactivity metal is required, platinum is a lot more usefull. the thing with gold is that it's a beutifull metal. only gold, copper and cesium fall outside the white-many shades of grey-black color spectrum, but since copper oxidizes in an ugly brown color and cesium explodes in contact with moisture, gold is the only alternative when you want something colorfull and pretty to wear on your neck or wrist, this makes it desired and expensive.
Macs are the same thing. they stands out on look alone, and they keep their shine longer than other brands, this makes macs higly desirable. and since apple have a monopoly on macs, they become scarce, thus expensive.
i bought one to my mother some years ago. they're not so muche easier to use than windows or linux with KDE. all this "intuitiveveness" of Mac OS X is just apples reality distortion field at work. won't fall for that anymore, just like i don't buy golden bling.
are they supporting theora (like firefox) or just h.264 ? both would be great, of course.
i agree fully with you. altought Seven still have some rough edges, it's on the right track to became my favorite windows ever, one notch above win2k professional.
the relese candidate is installed on my girlfriends notebook and i have to say, any "hype" around it is well deserved.
the only reason i don't have it on my own computer ? because i wouldn't be caught dead using anything different than windowmaker. easy as that.
it does. you can run Vim inside EMACS, you know ?
any "l33t hax0r" in the house brave enought to try this shit on the NSA ?
considering that i never heard of any snafu from those guys, either their pretty good at sevuring their stuff, or incredibly efficient at snuffing anyone who tries it before news get to public.
sincerely, i don't know which one is the scariest scenario.
"you seem to be planning an insurgency. what do you want me to do:
- deploy marines;
- scramble A10 warthogs;
- send a predator to bomb your car;
- other options"
you forgot operator precence. logical operators like AND/OR/XOR/NOT have precedence over arithmetic ones like + - * /
A laser diode is much more robust than a laser diode and the frequency-doubling package of nonlinear crystals.
see ?
OK, I'm convinced. where can i get one of these here in brasil ???
I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?
it's the same thing with iPods. the 30 GB model I had was enough to put all my music there, but I only listened to a small subset of it, nothing that a cell phone with a 4 GB couldn't handle.
so, wouldn't it be better to have a smaller, but more energy efficient and thougher disk better ?
then, at home just load and unload what you need, and that's it.
volkswagen beetles are a measure of volume
football stadiums are a measure of area
round trips to the moon is a measure of lenght
parsecs are a measure of time
shitloads are a mesure of weight
bajillions are a dimensionless quantity
and the measure of power is a universal constant: 1.21 jigawatts
doing the math, that's 45.5 MB/s, pretty much the sustained data transfer rates of a SATA hard disk.
and that over a wireless link, right ?
I hate to bust their scam, but you're gonna need a very special, fine tunned setup to get this kind of transfer rates over _wired_ gigabit ethernet. the fastest wireless standard is 54 mbps (not counting draft standards), 1/20th the performance of gigabit. to transfer an SD movie over wireless from my linux notebook to the PS3 takes about 30 min.
if we take the comparativelly slow data rates of HSDPA 3G cell networks, even the best operators top at 14 Mbps, which would require buffering to watch a standard def movie.
to get the kind of speeds these guys are talking about, they'd have to use link aggregation/trunking to combine almost 100 HSDPA channels to match gigabit ethernet's speed. completelly unrealistic.
While I agree that upgrading a windows install is not a good idea, this notion that XP needs to be reinstalled every year is a myth. the notebook I use at work (company owned) is running with the very same XP install it had when I got it. 3 solid years. no reinstalls.
I give you that it's running a little slower today than when I got it, but this has nothing to do with microsoft, patches or anything. it was because of a brain dead decision from upper management a year ago of deploying mcafee antivirus to everyonee. while the corporative version of mcafee is far better than the consumer version, it still hoses the system. BUT, wipping windows and doing a fresh install in this case would solve NOTHING. after reinstalling I'd still have mcafee running and hosing the system.
here's the tips to avoid this fabled windows "aging" proccess:
- don't install crap all the time. stick to the basics. office suite, browser, e-mail app. everything else, run in a virtual machine. hardware today is powerfull enough so you wont notice it's not running nativelly. - don't install and unistall stuff frequently. only install nativelly stuff you want to keep that you tested on a VM - don't install games. full stop. buy a PS3 or Xbox360. if you want casual games, there's lots of them on the web, run them on your browser. - keep your files separate from your software. a 20-30GB partition for windows and apps, everything else on a secondary partition. configure the system so "Documents and settings" reside on the second partition (usually D:\ ) - disable every crappy service you don't need from control pannel.
this worked for me for the last 3 years. i'm the only guy in my work group who didn't have to completely rebuild my machine in all this time.
said by someone who never had^H^H^Hlived with a cat. *
to grown up male cats, humans are a source of food and entertainment. maybe like a brother. to females, humans are more like ofsprings. that's why they bring in dead and half-dead animals home. they want you - the human - to use that carcass/weakened creature as play toys. this teaches usefull hunting and killing skills.
* humans don't own cats. we live with them in the bast-case scenario. in the worst case, the CAT owns YOU! cue the "in soviet russia" jokes.
original ? which original ?
which of the more than 15,000 pages of "original" korans held by the yemeni government you guys like to memorize ?
the koran has as much history as any other sacred book out there. it's just that other religions are more willing to accept the fact.