These AJAX sites expect you to have JavsScript enabled, before they will work at all, and this is where they sneak in tracking crap like Google Analytics, Tacoda, etc. NoScript lets me see the sources of the scripts in each page, and whitelist only the ones required to get the site to work. I regularly see tracking scripts that are not declared, that have nothing to do with the service provided by the site.
Slashdot is embedding Tacoda scripts in every page: have a read of their privacy policy for details of what they admit to collecting and selling back to OSTG. If you examine the source code of a Slashdot page, get the script URL and open it, you can how see the script is obfuscated, it generates another script as it runs. Why are they hiding what they do? Why does Slashdot collaborate with these bloodsucking bottomfeeders? How much are Slashdot reader eyeballs worth?
To quote Tom Clancy: "I like writing. It's the most fun I've ever had at anything. You can build your own little world and -- like a kid with his toy trains, -- except instead of trains I have tanks and ships and airplanes and things... I get to make them do all the things I want them to do, and if I don't like the way things work out, I start again."
If I'm reading the Wikipedia AoE article right... AoE is a L2 protocol that can not cross routers. That would immediately rule out the office I work in, in which floors and the data centre are on separate TCP/IP subnets. Small offices only, then?
But, as noted above, if they are claiming that they avoid the cost of ToE NICs for iSCSI, that's a spurious claim, since they are an optional performance enhancer, not a requirement for iSCSI. I've seen surprisingly decent performance without them, with the HP EVA iSCSI bolt-on from QLogic and ordinary Broadcom server NICs.
Here's some conspiracy fodder for y'all: anyone who's read any of Kinky Friedman's books will recognize the name Rambam. He's a longtime personal friend of the Kinkster, and appears in his books, as one of the few characters who doesn't need a checkup from the neck up. Could this arrest be an attempt to discredit Kinky, who is running for a political office this year? The same office once held by George W Bush: Governor of Texas. I smell a Ratso..!
After all, Kinky Friedman's campaign for Guv'nor of Texas is already rather odd. Someone send Jimmy Wales one of the T-shirts, maybe the one that says "Kinky for Governor: How Hard Could It Be?"
Don't put your PC on the Net, Mrs. Worthington... put it behind NAT and keep it there. You still need to watch out for website attacks (dump IE6, use Firefox with NoScript and AdBlockPlus), but you will suffer no more direct attacks. Even the cheapest wireless router is a good start, as long as you change the passwords.
Oh, and when BitTorrent don't work, and the docs tell you to set up Port Forwarding, that's your warning to not use BitTorrent (or Direct Connect, or anything else that leaves known ports permanently open to the Internet). It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you! 8-/
All it needs is for a really mad scientist to get involved, and then we will have... Sunstrike!
I read this book as a teenager and had all but forgotten it. I thought it was fun back then, in a "Flash Gordon" kinda way, but if the reviews are any guide it does not stand up well today.
OK, the Hiragana is rarely used, but it's not totally gone e.g. Wiku is still a girl's name. In any case, Japanese pronunciations are not limited to Hiragana, the language range has expanded to encompass foreign words, which are often written in Katakana, but product names such as Wii will stay in Roman. (Do you really think the Japanese marketing people would choose a name they could not pronounce?)
PS: "hl" is fun - I spent years in South Africa, where I learned to pronounce Zulu words such as "Hluhluwe". It helpth to have a lithp! 8)
One point that's been brought home to me in a very real way, in my position in senior support for one of the major storage system vendors: the hard disks themselves really do make a difference. SCSI disks are much more expensive because of their construction, the duty cycles they can perform to over long periods. You can NOT hammer a SATA disk at 90% of the time, 24/7, and expect it to last the way an enterprise-class SCSI disk does. My company sells low-cost SATA disk systems too, and some customers find that the lower price is a false economy for what they need the system to do.
I'm kinda missing the point of the "editorializing" in this article: when a storage system is doing its job, it IS boring. You put bytes in, assured they will be stored, and you get them out on demand. You want nothing "interesting" to happen to the data that your business is built on! Sure, the technology is stagnant, if that means customers can get access to the data, reliably, year after year. We Slashdotters are prepared to take "bleeding edge" risks that enterprise customers are not.
Yup, we've noticed. Considering how many MB extra the libraries take up, and the time they add to the base install, this doesn't bother me. Besides, the target market for Ubuntu is the kind of user who doesn't want to have to compile programs, who doesn't want to know how. As long as the likes of you and I can add that functionality on for ourselves...
"If only they knew that MS will destroy the industry they love."
Um... Fripp does not love the "music industry", and has no sympathy for them, and might view a M$ music venture as an improvement. I'm not kidding - it might mean he actually gets PAID for his work.
Not that there will be much left of the "industry" by the time Apple and Sony are finished with it. You know about Sony; and how iTunes is DRM incarnate, and how Apple has signed away their independence to Hollywood and Madison Avenue? Right?
FWIW, Fripp was a long-time Windows user, up till ~ 2000, when he switched to a Powerbook, but he's never been particularly evangelistic about the OS IIRC. He talks more about the tools, such as NI Guitar Rig.
Fripp, anti-commercial? As noted already, KC music has been used in commercials, and he has been known to refer to himself as the Raging Heartless Venal Leader...
By this I mean that our existence on this planet is an incredible fluke, and there is nothing in Nature that says we are wanted or needed. All that we have could be lost if we don't take care of it ourselves, and Nature will not be doing us any favors - she could hardly care less.
Most importantly: the "prime mover" in the destruction of this planet is the number of people on it; if the numbers were lower, so would the damage. I don't like the idea either, and have no idea what to do about it; I can't think of anything humane, but I won't be surprised to see at least one destructive war in our future.
... the build that was given out ('000s of copies) at the MS PDC from not long ago. The IE version in there had tabs too. I'm running 5219, but not to do any serious work on, and it's just as well: it's a pig, nowhere near ready for release. All that debug code slows it right down.
On one level: yes, it's just a piece of paper. It got widely listed in job specs, so it looked like an easy ticket to a fat paycheck. Hence the growth of the 3rd party crammers, offering a shortcut to the money.
How is this Microsoft's fault? The same could happen to Red Hat RHCE if the market was there for it. I think the failures of such a scheme would become obvious more quickly, but by then the damage would be done. The RHCE is more difficult because Linux is more difficult, not because of RH's exams.
MS Exam difficulty varies widely, according to your MS experience. I did the NT4 MCSE, finishing in 1999, and while most exams were a walkover, I had to repeat one, for lack of some MS-specific experience. (Laugh if you want - see if I care.)
Also, scratch the idea that the MCSE is only about Microsoft. I gained a lot of general TCP/IP knowledge (protocols, routing DNS etc.) that I apply to Linux today. But I'm still glad my current employer hasn't pushed me to "upgrade" to 2000 or 2003 spec, though I will do that myself if I am "decruited"...
Judging the MCSE by the clueless crammers is like judging a car manufacturer by its worst drivers.
How many copies of that book can you get for the cost of one scanner? It doesn't have all the answers - how could it? - it is designed to get you asking.
So you install an expensive scanner at the entrance to Piccadilly Circus tube station. A huge queue forms, waiting to walk through the scanner. Add in a "queuing system" (tansabarriers etc.), so you have 200+ people waiting patiently in an enclosed space.
Bang.
... in my company there's a major outsourcing program underway: Dublin => Bangalore. (That's Ireland, btw, not any of the 8 in the USA.). It affects a department I used to work in before promotion.
I mean, how would the good people in Bangalore gain the knowledge they need to take our jobs, if we didn't train them first? The guys here have known they were losing their jobs for 6 months now, and have been hosting numerous visitors from Karnataka and giving them personal training on their new jobs. If the folks here were given the "marching orders" treatment, the whole support structure would fall down.
There's a price for such good behaviour of course... the people involved received extra cash to stay on till the end, and are getting a very decent redundancy package, plus plenty of time to decide their next moves.
The Grauniad is a "loony left" paper in the UK with a political axe to grind (let's bash the Yankee moneymakers!) and little time for any SF, good or bad. Their ultimate directors are people like Lars von Trier (Oooh! Dogma is so iconoclastic!) or Ken Loach, writer of kitchen-sink dramas about squalor in post-Thatcherite Britain. Star Wars will never find any favour with The Grauniad, because it says little about the daily reality of people's lives - i.e. they don't believe in escapism. "Embrace the misery that is your life!"
I can't say I'm IN a terrible hurry to go and see Sith, I can't stand fighting queues, but (as others have already said) Ebert's review is more valuable because of its clarity. Neither tPM or AotC get an entry in my Great Movies list, but Sith is still one of my "should see" movies this year. (But what about Batman Begins..?) Comparing The Grauniad's reviewer to Ebert is like comparing Film to The Movies...
Microsoft have had a few problems in this area - see KB281672 for example.
Then they released Windows 2000 Service Pack 3, which fixed some previous cacheing bugs, as documented in KB332023. The article tells you how to set up the "Power Protected" Write Cache Option", which is your way of saying "yes, my storage has a UPS or battery-backed cache, give me the performance and let me worry about the data integrity".
I work for a major storage hardware vendor: to cut a long story short, we knew fsync() (a.k.a. "write-through" or "synchronize cache") was working on our hardware, when the performance started sucking after customers installed W2K SP3, and we had to refer customers to the latter article.
The same storage systems have battery-backed cache, and every write from cache to disks is made write-through (because drive cache is not battery-backed). In other words, in these and other Enterprise-class systems, the burden of honouring fsync() / write-through commands from the OS has switched to the storage controller(s), the drives might as well have no cache for all we care.
But it still matters that the drives do honour the fsync() we send to them from cache, and not signal "clear" when they're not - if they lie, the cache drops that data, and no battery will get it back..!
My employer makes a "convertible" Tablet PC, one that can be used as a standard laptop or a Tablet by flipping it over. I'm trying to get one for business use, to replace my current 4-y.o. desktop.
The idea is: I can do the "spreadsheets and presentations" (not too far off) with a real keyboard and mouse during office hours. Then after hours, I can take the Tablet home and get arty. I'm also curious to see what difference Tablet input makes to games like C&C or Civ 8-)
I'd be a little careful of pigeonholing "business users" as uncreative types who have no use for a Tablet - we need to eat while working on our next magnum opus, eh! Also, don't fall for the Hollywood FUD that only Apple computers are suitable for creative work - if you believe that, congratulations, you've been successfully marketed at (a.k.a brainwashed). It's all about the apps, not the OS.
I saw Ep 1 again recently (on TV), and quite enjoyed it. Mentally screening out JarJar helped a lot!
The "wolf in sheep's clothing" nature of the Naboo was interesting - the way the "queen" with the horrible accent was just putting on a show, until the stuff hit the fan and the blasters came out (on the one hand) and Palpatine started taking over (on the other).
Ah: one small problem. Here's a small-quantity pricelist. 25 pounds of Low 136 costs $2374, but you could buy in bulk: $19,105 gets you 250lb (4000oz), which makes it $4.77 per ounce. How much do you need per heatpipe, say 3-4 ounce? Anyone fancy setting up shop? 8-)
Galinstan(TM) has already been mentioned, but what about Low 117, aka AIM 47, CerroLOW 117, Indalloy 117, or Ostalloy 117?
- Bismuth 44.7%
- Lead 22.6%
- Tin 8.3%
- Cadmium 5.3%
- Indium 19.1%
melts at 117F (47C). If that's too low, this site has other variations. Low 136 (58C) has no Cadmium, which has to be a good thing for safety in this application, eh?
Just like software, music is something that "if you didn't pay for it, it's stolen".
And if you pay Real Networks their $15.00, how much of that will the artist(s) see? Most major label music, especially the back catalog, has been "contractually" stolen from the artist.
Sample scenario: an artist writes songs, the record company offers them a contract which takes ownership of the songs. The artist goes into a studio, records the songs, and the album is released. All the costs of recording are charged back to the artist, including lawyers fees and expenses, dinners, even the cost of the tape/HDD the music was mastered to.
In short: for first albums at least, the artist pays all the costs and loses the assets they created, but retains some rights to play the music live. It's like taking out a mortgage, using it to buy property and build a house on it... after which the bank owns the property, but you have a right to live there, if you pay a reduced rent.
So if you're concerned about the artist getting properly compensated, don't buy any major label music, from Real Networks, iTunes, Microsoft, or Tower Records. Go direct, and support independent music.
Slashdot Mirror
These AJAX sites expect you to have JavsScript enabled, before they will work at all, and this is where they sneak in tracking crap like Google Analytics, Tacoda, etc. NoScript lets me see the sources of the scripts in each page, and whitelist only the ones required to get the site to work. I regularly see tracking scripts that are not declared, that have nothing to do with the service provided by the site.
Slashdot is embedding Tacoda scripts in every page: have a read of their privacy policy for details of what they admit to collecting and selling back to OSTG. If you examine the source code of a Slashdot page, get the script URL and open it, you can how see the script is obfuscated, it generates another script as it runs. Why are they hiding what they do? Why does Slashdot collaborate with these bloodsucking bottomfeeders? How much are Slashdot reader eyeballs worth?
To quote Tom Clancy: "I like writing. It's the most fun I've ever had at anything. You can build your own little world and -- like a kid with his toy trains, -- except instead of trains I have tanks and ships and airplanes and things... I get to make them do all the things I want them to do, and if I don't like the way things work out, I start again."
Couldn't have said it better myself!
If I'm reading the Wikipedia AoE article right... AoE is a L2 protocol that can not cross routers. That would immediately rule out the office I work in, in which floors and the data centre are on separate TCP/IP subnets. Small offices only, then?
But, as noted above, if they are claiming that they avoid the cost of ToE NICs for iSCSI, that's a spurious claim, since they are an optional performance enhancer, not a requirement for iSCSI. I've seen surprisingly decent performance without them, with the HP EVA iSCSI bolt-on from QLogic and ordinary Broadcom server NICs.
Here's some conspiracy fodder for y'all: anyone who's read any of Kinky Friedman's books will recognize the name Rambam. He's a longtime personal friend of the Kinkster, and appears in his books, as one of the few characters who doesn't need a checkup from the neck up. Could this arrest be an attempt to discredit Kinky, who is running for a political office this year? The same office once held by George W Bush: Governor of Texas. I smell a Ratso..!
After all, Kinky Friedman's campaign for Guv'nor of Texas is already rather odd. Someone send Jimmy Wales one of the T-shirts, maybe the one that says "Kinky for Governor: How Hard Could It Be?"
Don't put your PC on the Net, Mrs. Worthington... put it behind NAT and keep it there. You still need to watch out for website attacks (dump IE6, use Firefox with NoScript and AdBlockPlus), but you will suffer no more direct attacks. Even the cheapest wireless router is a good start, as long as you change the passwords.
Oh, and when BitTorrent don't work, and the docs tell you to set up Port Forwarding, that's your warning to not use BitTorrent (or Direct Connect, or anything else that leaves known ports permanently open to the Internet). It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you! 8-/
All it needs is for a really mad scientist to get involved, and then we will have... Sunstrike!
I read this book as a teenager and had all but forgotten it. I thought it was fun back then, in a "Flash Gordon" kinda way, but if the reviews are any guide it does not stand up well today.
I've been under the impression that the development kits for XBox & PlayStation are hellishly expensive, aren't they?
Besides, don't the real indies develop for Linux? TuxRacer would be huge on any other platform IMHO..!
OK, the Hiragana is rarely used, but it's not totally gone e.g. Wiku is still a girl's name. In any case, Japanese pronunciations are not limited to Hiragana, the language range has expanded to encompass foreign words, which are often written in Katakana, but product names such as Wii will stay in Roman. (Do you really think the Japanese marketing people would choose a name they could not pronounce?)
PS: "hl" is fun - I spent years in South Africa, where I learned to pronounce Zulu words such as "Hluhluwe". It helpth to have a lithp! 8)
Don't care? Or just haven't got around to it? If you care that they get involved, write to them: info at rush dot com. Don't assume the worst! 8-/
One point that's been brought home to me in a very real way, in my position in senior support for one of the major storage system vendors: the hard disks themselves really do make a difference. SCSI disks are much more expensive because of their construction, the duty cycles they can perform to over long periods. You can NOT hammer a SATA disk at 90% of the time, 24/7, and expect it to last the way an enterprise-class SCSI disk does. My company sells low-cost SATA disk systems too, and some customers find that the lower price is a false economy for what they need the system to do.
I'm kinda missing the point of the "editorializing" in this article: when a storage system is doing its job, it IS boring. You put bytes in, assured they will be stored, and you get them out on demand. You want nothing "interesting" to happen to the data that your business is built on! Sure, the technology is stagnant, if that means customers can get access to the data, reliably, year after year. We Slashdotters are prepared to take "bleeding edge" risks that enterprise customers are not.
Yup, we've noticed. Considering how many MB extra the libraries take up, and the time they add to the base install, this doesn't bother me. Besides, the target market for Ubuntu is the kind of user who doesn't want to have to compile programs, who doesn't want to know how. As long as the likes of you and I can add that functionality on for ourselves...
"If only they knew that MS will destroy the industry they love."
Um... Fripp does not love the "music industry", and has no sympathy for them, and might view a M$ music venture as an improvement. I'm not kidding - it might mean he actually gets PAID for his work.
Not that there will be much left of the "industry" by the time Apple and Sony are finished with it. You know about Sony; and how iTunes is DRM incarnate, and how Apple has signed away their independence to Hollywood and Madison Avenue? Right?
FWIW, Fripp was a long-time Windows user, up till ~ 2000, when he switched to a Powerbook, but he's never been particularly evangelistic about the OS IIRC. He talks more about the tools, such as NI Guitar Rig.
Fripp, anti-commercial? As noted already, KC music has been used in commercials, and he has been known to refer to himself as the Raging Heartless Venal Leader...
By this I mean that our existence on this planet is an incredible fluke, and there is nothing in Nature that says we are wanted or needed. All that we have could be lost if we don't take care of it ourselves, and Nature will not be doing us any favors - she could hardly care less.
Most importantly: the "prime mover" in the destruction of this planet is the number of people on it; if the numbers were lower, so would the damage. I don't like the idea either, and have no idea what to do about it; I can't think of anything humane, but I won't be surprised to see at least one destructive war in our future.
... the build that was given out ('000s of copies) at the MS PDC from not long ago. The IE version in there had tabs too. I'm running 5219, but not to do any serious work on, and it's just as well: it's a pig, nowhere near ready for release. All that debug code slows it right down.
On one level: yes, it's just a piece of paper. It got widely listed in job specs, so it looked like an easy ticket to a fat paycheck. Hence the growth of the 3rd party crammers, offering a shortcut to the money. How is this Microsoft's fault? The same could happen to Red Hat RHCE if the market was there for it. I think the failures of such a scheme would become obvious more quickly, but by then the damage would be done. The RHCE is more difficult because Linux is more difficult, not because of RH's exams. MS Exam difficulty varies widely, according to your MS experience. I did the NT4 MCSE, finishing in 1999, and while most exams were a walkover, I had to repeat one, for lack of some MS-specific experience. (Laugh if you want - see if I care.) Also, scratch the idea that the MCSE is only about Microsoft. I gained a lot of general TCP/IP knowledge (protocols, routing DNS etc.) that I apply to Linux today. But I'm still glad my current employer hasn't pushed me to "upgrade" to 2000 or 2003 spec, though I will do that myself if I am "decruited"... Judging the MCSE by the clueless crammers is like judging a car manufacturer by its worst drivers.
How many copies of that book can you get for the cost of one scanner? It doesn't have all the answers - how could it? - it is designed to get you asking. So you install an expensive scanner at the entrance to Piccadilly Circus tube station. A huge queue forms, waiting to walk through the scanner. Add in a "queuing system" (tansabarriers etc.), so you have 200+ people waiting patiently in an enclosed space. Bang.
... in my company there's a major outsourcing program underway: Dublin => Bangalore. (That's Ireland, btw, not any of the 8 in the USA.). It affects a department I used to work in before promotion.
I mean, how would the good people in Bangalore gain the knowledge they need to take our jobs, if we didn't train them first? The guys here have known they were losing their jobs for 6 months now, and have been hosting numerous visitors from Karnataka and giving them personal training on their new jobs. If the folks here were given the "marching orders" treatment, the whole support structure would fall down.
There's a price for such good behaviour of course... the people involved received extra cash to stay on till the end, and are getting a very decent redundancy package, plus plenty of time to decide their next moves.
The Grauniad is a "loony left" paper in the UK with a political axe to grind (let's bash the Yankee moneymakers!) and little time for any SF, good or bad. Their ultimate directors are people like Lars von Trier (Oooh! Dogma is so iconoclastic!) or Ken Loach, writer of kitchen-sink dramas about squalor in post-Thatcherite Britain. Star Wars will never find any favour with The Grauniad, because it says little about the daily reality of people's lives - i.e. they don't believe in escapism. "Embrace the misery that is your life!"
I can't say I'm IN a terrible hurry to go and see Sith, I can't stand fighting queues, but (as others have already said) Ebert's review is more valuable because of its clarity. Neither tPM or AotC get an entry in my Great Movies list, but Sith is still one of my "should see" movies this year. (But what about Batman Begins..?) Comparing The Grauniad's reviewer to Ebert is like comparing Film to The Movies...
Then they released Windows 2000 Service Pack 3, which fixed some previous cacheing bugs, as documented in KB332023. The article tells you how to set up the "Power Protected" Write Cache Option", which is your way of saying "yes, my storage has a UPS or battery-backed cache, give me the performance and let me worry about the data integrity".
I work for a major storage hardware vendor: to cut a long story short, we knew fsync() (a.k.a. "write-through" or "synchronize cache") was working on our hardware, when the performance started sucking after customers installed W2K SP3, and we had to refer customers to the latter article.
The same storage systems have battery-backed cache, and every write from cache to disks is made write-through (because drive cache is not battery-backed). In other words, in these and other Enterprise-class systems, the burden of honouring fsync() / write-through commands from the OS has switched to the storage controller(s), the drives might as well have no cache for all we care. But it still matters that the drives do honour the fsync() we send to them from cache, and not signal "clear" when they're not - if they lie, the cache drops that data, and no battery will get it back..!
My employer makes a "convertible" Tablet PC, one that can be used as a standard laptop or a Tablet by flipping it over. I'm trying to get one for business use, to replace my current 4-y.o. desktop. The idea is: I can do the "spreadsheets and presentations" (not too far off) with a real keyboard and mouse during office hours. Then after hours, I can take the Tablet home and get arty. I'm also curious to see what difference Tablet input makes to games like C&C or Civ 8-) I'd be a little careful of pigeonholing "business users" as uncreative types who have no use for a Tablet - we need to eat while working on our next magnum opus, eh! Also, don't fall for the Hollywood FUD that only Apple computers are suitable for creative work - if you believe that, congratulations, you've been successfully marketed at (a.k.a brainwashed). It's all about the apps, not the OS.
I saw Ep 1 again recently (on TV), and quite enjoyed it. Mentally screening out JarJar helped a lot!
The "wolf in sheep's clothing" nature of the Naboo was interesting - the way the "queen" with the horrible accent was just putting on a show, until the stuff hit the fan and the blasters came out (on the one hand) and Palpatine started taking over (on the other).
Ah: one small problem. Here's a small-quantity pricelist. 25 pounds of Low 136 costs $2374, but you could buy in bulk: $19,105 gets you 250lb (4000oz), which makes it $4.77 per ounce. How much do you need per heatpipe, say 3-4 ounce? Anyone fancy setting up shop? 8-)
Galinstan(TM) has already been mentioned, but what about Low 117, aka AIM 47, CerroLOW 117, Indalloy 117, or Ostalloy 117?
- Bismuth 44.7%
- Lead 22.6%
- Tin 8.3%
- Cadmium 5.3%
- Indium 19.1%
melts at 117F (47C). If that's too low, this site has other variations. Low 136 (58C) has no Cadmium, which has to be a good thing for safety in this application, eh?
And if you pay Real Networks their $15.00, how much of that will the artist(s) see? Most major label music, especially the back catalog, has been "contractually" stolen from the artist.
Sample scenario: an artist writes songs, the record company offers them a contract which takes ownership of the songs. The artist goes into a studio, records the songs, and the album is released. All the costs of recording are charged back to the artist, including lawyers fees and expenses, dinners, even the cost of the tape/HDD the music was mastered to.
In short: for first albums at least, the artist pays all the costs and loses the assets they created, but retains some rights to play the music live. It's like taking out a mortgage, using it to buy property and build a house on it... after which the bank owns the property, but you have a right to live there, if you pay a reduced rent.
So if you're concerned about the artist getting properly compensated, don't buy any major label music, from Real Networks, iTunes, Microsoft, or Tower Records. Go direct, and support independent music.