Firefox on Linux randomly crashes during normal web browsing at least a half dozen times per day anyway. What is so significant about another way to make Firefox chew CPU? There are LOTS of ways to do that.
Very few ad blocker programs block ads that are not attempting to do something abusive.
It is about blocking intrusive and abusive ads. Doubleclick and ilk want huge centralized databases of personal information and push formats like audio/popup/popunder/floating ads that actively interfere with people using the web.
It is as if you were reading a magazine and everytime you turned the page someone shoved a sign between you and the magazine and wouldn't let you read until you signed something and crumpled the ad up and threw it away.
The free market is just telling marketers don't be evil. Doubleclick is unhappy because their business model is to be as evil as we want to be.
It is noticable that only marketers appear to believe that intrusive advertising (whether you are talking telesolictors, door-to-door salesmen or popups) is something people actually want.
Nothing like fuzzing out a public landmark that is so photographed that I could reconstruct an accurate-to-sub-meter 3d model just from publically available photos on the net.
Like This One.
I remember seeing descriptions of rotating projection plane 3d systems more than a decade ago in magazines.
If someone want to "wow" me, set up a system based on multiple scanning lasers in a transparent medium where two or more beams intersecting cause the medium either to glow or to become opaque depending on the combination of beams intersecting and the non-linear optical properties of the medium.
To prevent 'word of mouth' from killing bad products 'day 1' sales. If 'opinion leader' players decide it sucks by playing limitted quantity 'pre-release' copies and tell all their friends, it will decimate 'day 1' sales that could normally be guaranteed by a marketing blitz even for the lousiest game.
And NONE in the preceding month. Microsoft may (or may not) be fixing them in 24 hours. But they are now officially on a once a month patch RELEASE schedule.
The actual numbers are 84.9 for women, 82.7 for men after preventable causes are excluded. The reporter screwed up.
Re:Howto - Legalized Price Fixing
on
DRAM Price Fixing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You have obviously never heard of a 'hydraulic monopoly'. If you have sole ownership of a resource that people MUST have, at ANY price - the only thing stopping you from raising prices is that your "customers" (some would say "victims") run out of money.
It is called a 'hydraulic' monopoly because the classic example is owning the water supply. The 'law of supply and demand' doesn't work when something has effectively "infinite" value.
I wonder if this is also intended to stop Googlewashing? Google has a history of trying to 'play fair' - and the power of a few well connected blogs to basically 'take possession' of any term works against that philosophy.
The sad thing is that you do get asked. I was doing some volunteer work at a church food kitchen about 4 years ago and an individual who shall remain nameless started badgering me about what my SAT (taken way back in 1984) score was. I have no idea what brought on his evident need to know what my SAT scores had been more than a decade earlier.
Following the Challenger disaster 17 years ago, Richard Feynmann came to the conclusion that catastrophic shuttle disaster had odds off approximately 1 in 100 (See RISKS Digest 18.09) based on the fact that 4% of unmanned space shots go bad - and presumably manned flight gets that 'extra' attention that would reduce their rate a bit.
Challenger was flight STS-51L - this was flight STS-107. I'd say even Feynmann may have been somewhat optimistic (although 2 failures is a thin data set - anyone want to figure a chi-square on it?).
Politicians and other public figures use some rules of thumb about letter writing campaigns that let them gauge the issue's importance to their people 'back home'. One of those rules is that there are X times more people with an opinion than the number of letter writers for each type of letter recieved.
These rules have different levels for 'letters to the editor', 'email to my congresscritter' and 'handwritten letter to my congresscritter'.
What the boilerplate shops are trying to do is 'game' those rules for judging the importance of letters: They lower the threshold for sending a letter (thus making the X factor smaller) while convincing the target that it belongs to a category with a larger X factor. Thus the target believes that the issue is significantly more important to his constituency than it actually is.
This is the basic dishonesty of boilerplate letter campaigns.
No - it is SEVERELY encumbered. The very first paragraph of the license basically says "You give us the exclusive right for any existing or future paper, electronic, or undiscovered forms of distribution of this article until the copyright expires. Oh yeah - ditto for all derivative works (translations, summaries, etc)."
The second para then says, "But you can print it on paper or post it on your own website or use it in teaching at your university."
And this is different from giving Nature the copyright and them then granting the original author an extremely restricted license exactly how?
This smells more like Nature is scared that someone is going to figure out a way to say "Nature - you don't own the electronic rights on papers published in your magazine - and never did. Too Bad." Something like the LEXUS-NEXUS fiasco where the courts held that LEXUS-NEXUS has improperly stolen authors works by redistributing them electronically beyond the original paper publication. And so they have come up with a creative way of trying to put contract law on their side while still spinning it as "We are good guys! Really!"
3,000 of them are criminals shot by the public or police
Bedard said that the statistics show that some 177 people have been killed by airbags and about 5,000 have been saved since 1993.
So, for every 1 'legitimate' use of guns, there are 4 'illegitmate' uses of them to kill people. As compared to 27 saved lives for every 1 lost for airbags.
By your own numbers.
It was also dis-ingenuous to include police shootings in the numbers - since they run 3 to 1 in the justified direction and are not relevant to the personal ownership argument as they are official government agents. Once police shootings are excluded, the illegitmate to legitimate gunfire deaths ratio rises to about 5 to 1.
And those gun death numbers are around a decade old - current gunfire death numbers are approaching double that.
People like you are why I question whether 'higher' education has any future in the US.
"Your singular account is quite the exception and not the rule."
BTW: The number of people I've talked to (face to face, mind you, not on the net) who have similar horror stories about PacBell tells me that PacBell's DSL tech support is FUBARed in general.
Basically - nearly EVERYONE who has dealt with them has a horror story to relate about their install. It is just that people normally only have to go through it once: They don't have to repeatedly get their service activated. So they don't realize that the problem wasn't just them - it happens with nearly every install.
They don't even provide a 'priority access' phone number/code for their own techs. You think it is funny sitting on hold for 30 minutes waiting for a human? Try having a PacBell contractor sitting in your kitchen for 45 minutes waiting for a human to answer the phone.
By the way: When PacBell's own contractor left that time, PacBell was still in the dark about why they couldn't make a simple static IP DSL connection work. It was another week before they pulled their head out.
Excuse me if I am, ah, skeptical about my experience being the "exception".
There is a difference between "happened to me once" and "happens every time."
Arrogant or not, listen when someone tells you they configure networks for a living. It takes 30 seconds for me to reel off my network settings and the person at the other end to check that they correct. Leaving the other 9 minutes and 30 seconds to actually fix the problem.
It pisses the hell out of me to have my DSL disconnected once a year for two weeks because the the ISP can't frigging remember who is their customer and who isn't.
And as for the 'support Linux' et al: I'm not asking you to support my damn box - I am more than happy to support my own box. But the ONLY 'my end' problems I've called tech support for since first getting DSL in '98 were flaky ISP provided modems that had to be power cycled after locking up mysteriously in the middle of the night.
Let me nutshell it: The scripts don't work if you have a clue and only call when you have a REAL problem.
I am a 'network engineer' as one of my collateral duties in my job and am quite comfortable troubleshooting network issues. It drives me around the bend when it takes me an hour to manage to reach someone who can understand 'the modem is synced but your gateway can't be pinged' rather than "OK, now click on the 'Control Panel' and choose 'Network Settings'. Now click on 'Advanced'. Now verify that your gateway address is......".
Useful phrase for clueful people: "Why, yes Mr. Level 1 Tech Support, I do run Windows ME." Know why? "I'm sorry, we can't help you unless you are running Windows or Macintosh." Not even if the problem is that the DSL is down because PacBell (hey - why not give them the free advertising that their 'Controlled Customer Interaction' deserved) screwed up and turned it off. The next time I have to reconfigure my home network so that a Windows machine can be plugged directly into the DSL modem because that is the only thing their script supports and they can't discover that THEY have an error until I do this - I am going to BILL them for wasting my time at $200 US dollars an hour.
Fucking scripts.
In the last 3 years I've had my DSL disconnected IN ERROR by PacBell 3 times. Each time it took 2 weeks to get reconnected and the first week was nothing but forcing my way up through the support levels to someone who DIDN'T have a script and COULD fix the damn problem. For the record: The problem is that I have a static IP address and their install people messed up the database entries saying I'm a customer after first messing up and assigning me dynamic addressing. So a year or so down the line when they have a router problem and rebuild all their routes from the database - I get dropped from the routing tables for 'not being a customer'. Two weeks. Three times. Three years. Average of over 10 phone calls lasting more than 30 minutes for each incident. All because the damn problem wasn't on their script.
And it probably didn't occur to you that the number of people calling tech support is significantly reduced when people have some useful forum for getting their problems resolved that doesn't involve getting put on hold for 20 minutes before you ever talk to a human. You can afford to spend 2X as long on a call if 3 calls weren't made as a consequence of a good support forum. People's problems are rarely unique. But by 'hiding' problems and solutions behind phone trees and scripts rather than placing them in open forums, you prevent people from finding the solutions for themselves. Instead you waste your company's time and money doing the exact same thing over and over and over 'By the Script'.
But, hey, no one ever got fired for going 'by the script.'
Re:Drive reliability/backups are major factors
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 1
It isn't that hard. I keep daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly backups on a 3ware RAID backup box with a 'reverse rotation' scheme that guarantees that bad backups don't 'ripple'. It has worked fine for a couple of years now. Remote backups using rsync over SSH works great, too.
This is a summary of how many 'hits' I found for selected terms and pairs of term from 12 Dec 2001 to early July via Google's groups search when I was comparing Postgres and MySQL to see which is more trouble to maintain. You can draw your own conclusions as to their relative quality as based on their 'complaints' percentages.
postgres 17800 100 percent MySQL 248000 100 percent Postgres crash 358 2 percent MySQL crash 1930 0.7 percent Postgres corrupt 41 0.2 percent MySQL corrupt 510 0.2 percent Postgres slow 558 2.3 percent MySQL slow 2830 1.1 percent Postgres buggy 41 0.2 percent MySQL buggy 297 0.1 percent Postgres bugs 612 3 percent MySQL bugs 7540 3 percent Postgres problem 4520 25 percent MySQL problem 42200 17 percent Postgres hung 46 0.3 percent MySQL hung 222 0.1 percent Postgres happy 328 1.8 percent MySQL happy 1810 0.7 percent
-- Benjamin Franz
Lameness filter encountered. Discussion aborted! Reason: Please use less 'lame' filters.
That's the title of the Usenet FAQ page linked to from the referenced web page in the 'SBC/Pacbell to Filer 90%...' story. But the web page itself doesn't discuss that.
A little inside information leakage about future plans?
If the only way the 'Art world' can tell that something is Art is that the artist had to suffer to make it - the "Art" world is badly in need of reformation.
I reminded of the First Prize awarded for an abstract salt sculpture done entirely with the artist's tongue. There were a few red faces when the artist was revealed to be a farmer's cow....
Medium and tools are irrelevant. And elitists to the contrary, is is ok for Art (yes - capital Art) to be 'merely' pretty.
Now I am wondering how the elitists manage to reconcile their artificial requirements for 'thought out' art with the recent trend to 'egoless' criticism (where _even the artist's opinion_ on the Obj'd'Art is not considered definitive as to its 'meaning').
3Ware makes a nice SCSI/IDE RAID board that supports Linux w RAID 0,1,10 or 5 with hot spares. We are using it to support a couple of multi-hundred GB RAID5 servers using IDE drives no problem. You do want to make sure you download their very latest driver and firmware though.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox on Linux randomly crashes during normal web browsing at least a half dozen times per day anyway. What is so significant about another way to make Firefox chew CPU? There are LOTS of ways to do that.
Right. 8 car bombs a day in Baghdad is so much better.
No, really: Tunguska, June 30th 1908. :)
Very few ad blocker programs block ads that are not attempting to do something abusive. It is about blocking intrusive and abusive ads. Doubleclick and ilk want huge centralized databases of personal information and push formats like audio/popup/popunder/floating ads that actively interfere with people using the web.
It is as if you were reading a magazine and everytime you turned the page someone shoved a sign between you and the magazine and wouldn't let you read until you signed something and crumpled the ad up and threw it away.
The free market is just telling marketers don't be evil. Doubleclick is unhappy because their business model is to be as evil as we want to be.
It is noticable that only marketers appear to believe that intrusive advertising (whether you are talking telesolictors, door-to-door salesmen or popups) is something people actually want.
Nothing like fuzzing out a public landmark that is so photographed that I could reconstruct an accurate-to-sub-meter 3d model just from publically available photos on the net. Like This One.
I remember seeing descriptions of rotating projection plane 3d systems more than a decade ago in magazines.
If someone want to "wow" me, set up a system based on multiple scanning lasers in a transparent medium where two or more beams intersecting cause the medium either to glow or to become opaque depending on the combination of beams intersecting and the non-linear optical properties of the medium.
*That* would be cool.
To prevent 'word of mouth' from killing bad products 'day 1' sales. If 'opinion leader' players decide it sucks by playing limitted quantity 'pre-release' copies and tell all their friends, it will decimate 'day 1' sales that could normally be guaranteed by a marketing blitz even for the lousiest game.
A few square kilometers of concentrated sunlight makes a great weapon.
And NONE in the preceding month. Microsoft may (or may not) be fixing them in 24 hours. But they are now officially on a once a month patch RELEASE schedule.
The actual numbers are 84.9 for women, 82.7 for men after preventable causes are excluded. The reporter screwed up.
You have obviously never heard of a 'hydraulic monopoly'. If you have sole ownership of a resource that people MUST have, at ANY price - the only thing stopping you from raising prices is that your "customers" (some would say "victims") run out of money.
It is called a 'hydraulic' monopoly because the classic example is owning the water supply. The 'law of supply and demand' doesn't work when something has effectively "infinite" value.
I wonder if this is also intended to stop Googlewashing? Google has a history of trying to 'play fair' - and the power of a few well connected blogs to basically 'take possession' of any term works against that philosophy.
The sad thing is that you do get asked. I was doing some volunteer work at a church food kitchen about 4 years ago and an individual who shall remain nameless started badgering me about what my SAT (taken way back in 1984) score was. I have no idea what brought on his evident need to know what my SAT scores had been more than a decade earlier.
Following the Challenger disaster 17 years ago, Richard Feynmann came to the conclusion that catastrophic shuttle disaster had odds off approximately 1 in 100 (See RISKS Digest 18.09) based on the fact that 4% of unmanned space shots go bad - and presumably manned flight gets that 'extra' attention that would reduce their rate a bit.
Challenger was flight STS-51L - this was flight STS-107. I'd say even Feynmann may have been somewhat optimistic (although 2 failures is a thin data set - anyone want to figure a chi-square on it?).
Politicians and other public figures use some rules of thumb about letter writing campaigns that let them gauge the issue's importance to their people 'back home'. One of those rules is that there are X times more people with an opinion than the number of letter writers for each type of letter recieved.
These rules have different levels for 'letters to the editor', 'email to my congresscritter' and 'handwritten letter to my congresscritter'.
What the boilerplate shops are trying to do is 'game' those rules for judging the importance of letters: They lower the threshold for sending a letter (thus making the X factor smaller) while convincing the target that it belongs to a category with a larger X factor. Thus the target believes that the issue is significantly more important to his constituency than it actually is.
This is the basic dishonesty of boilerplate letter campaigns.
No - it is SEVERELY encumbered. The very first paragraph of the license basically says "You give us the exclusive right for any existing or future paper, electronic, or undiscovered forms of distribution of this article until the copyright expires. Oh yeah - ditto for all derivative works (translations, summaries, etc)."
The second para then says, "But you can print it on paper or post it on your own website or use it in teaching at your university."
And this is different from giving Nature the copyright and them then granting the original author an extremely restricted license exactly how?
This smells more like Nature is scared that someone is going to figure out a way to say "Nature - you don't own the electronic rights on papers published in your magazine - and never did. Too Bad." Something like the LEXUS-NEXUS fiasco where the courts held that LEXUS-NEXUS has improperly stolen authors works by redistributing them electronically beyond the original paper publication. And so they have come up with a creative way of trying to put contract law on their side while still spinning it as "We are good guys! Really!"
So, for every 1 'legitimate' use of guns, there are 4 'illegitmate' uses of them to kill people. As compared to 27 saved lives for every 1 lost for airbags.
By your own numbers.
It was also dis-ingenuous to include police shootings in the numbers - since they run 3 to 1 in the justified direction and are not relevant to the personal ownership argument as they are official government agents. Once police shootings are excluded, the illegitmate to legitimate gunfire deaths ratio rises to about 5 to 1.
And those gun death numbers are around a decade old - current gunfire death numbers are approaching double that.
People like you are why I question whether 'higher' education has any future in the US.
BTW: The number of people I've talked to (face to face, mind you, not on the net) who have similar horror stories about PacBell tells me that PacBell's DSL tech support is FUBARed in general.
Basically - nearly EVERYONE who has dealt with them has a horror story to relate about their install. It is just that people normally only have to go through it once: They don't have to repeatedly get their service activated. So they don't realize that the problem wasn't just them - it happens with nearly every install.
They don't even provide a 'priority access' phone number/code for their own techs. You think it is funny sitting on hold for 30 minutes waiting for a human? Try having a PacBell contractor sitting in your kitchen for 45 minutes waiting for a human to answer the phone.
By the way: When PacBell's own contractor left that time, PacBell was still in the dark about why they couldn't make a simple static IP DSL connection work. It was another week before they pulled their head out.
Excuse me if I am, ah, skeptical about my experience being the "exception".
There is a difference between "happened to me once" and "happens every time."
Arrogant or not, listen when someone tells you they configure networks for a living. It takes 30 seconds for me to reel off my network settings and the person at the other end to check that they correct. Leaving the other 9 minutes and 30 seconds to actually fix the problem.
It pisses the hell out of me to have my DSL disconnected once a year for two weeks because the the ISP can't frigging remember who is their customer and who isn't.
And as for the 'support Linux' et al: I'm not asking you to support my damn box - I am more than happy to support my own box. But the ONLY 'my end' problems I've called tech support for since first getting DSL in '98 were flaky ISP provided modems that had to be power cycled after locking up mysteriously in the middle of the night.
Really.
Let me nutshell it: The scripts don't work if you have a clue and only call when you have a REAL problem.
......".
I am a 'network engineer' as one of my collateral duties in my job and am quite comfortable troubleshooting network issues. It drives me around the bend when it takes me an hour to manage to reach someone who can understand 'the modem is synced but your gateway can't be pinged' rather than "OK, now click on the 'Control Panel' and choose 'Network Settings'. Now click on 'Advanced'. Now verify that your gateway address is
Useful phrase for clueful people: "Why, yes Mr. Level 1 Tech Support, I do run Windows ME." Know why? "I'm sorry, we can't help you unless you are running Windows or Macintosh." Not even if the problem is that the DSL is down because PacBell (hey - why not give them the free advertising that their 'Controlled Customer Interaction' deserved) screwed up and turned it off. The next time I have to reconfigure my home network so that a Windows machine can be plugged directly into the DSL modem because that is the only thing their script supports and they can't discover that THEY have an error until I do this - I am going to BILL them for wasting my time at $200 US dollars an hour.
Fucking scripts.
In the last 3 years I've had my DSL disconnected IN ERROR by PacBell 3 times. Each time it took 2 weeks to get reconnected and the first week was nothing but forcing my way up through the support levels to someone who DIDN'T have a script and COULD fix the damn problem. For the record: The problem is that I have a static IP address and their install people messed up the database entries saying I'm a customer after first messing up and assigning me dynamic addressing. So a year or so down the line when they have a router problem and rebuild all their routes from the database - I get dropped from the routing tables for 'not being a customer'. Two weeks. Three times. Three years. Average of over 10 phone calls lasting more than 30 minutes for each incident. All because the damn problem wasn't on their script.
And it probably didn't occur to you that the number of people calling tech support is significantly reduced when people have some useful forum for getting their problems resolved that doesn't involve getting put on hold for 20 minutes before you ever talk to a human. You can afford to spend 2X as long on a call if 3 calls weren't made as a consequence of a good support forum. People's problems are rarely unique. But by 'hiding' problems and solutions behind phone trees and scripts rather than placing them in open forums, you prevent people from finding the solutions for themselves. Instead you waste your company's time and money doing the exact same thing over and over and over 'By the Script'.
But, hey, no one ever got fired for going 'by the script.'
It isn't that hard. I keep daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly backups on a 3ware RAID backup box with a 'reverse rotation' scheme that guarantees that bad backups don't 'ripple'. It has worked fine for a couple of years now. Remote backups using rsync over SSH works great, too.
This is a summary of how many 'hits' I found for selected terms and pairs of term from 12 Dec 2001 to early July via Google's groups search when I was comparing Postgres and MySQL to see which is more trouble to maintain. You can draw your own conclusions as to their relative quality as based on their 'complaints' percentages.
postgres 17800 100 percent
MySQL 248000 100 percent
Postgres crash 358 2 percent
MySQL crash 1930 0.7 percent
Postgres corrupt 41 0.2 percent
MySQL corrupt 510 0.2 percent
Postgres slow 558 2.3 percent
MySQL slow 2830 1.1 percent
Postgres buggy 41 0.2 percent
MySQL buggy 297 0.1 percent
Postgres bugs 612 3 percent
MySQL bugs 7540 3 percent
Postgres problem 4520 25 percent
MySQL problem 42200 17 percent
Postgres hung 46 0.3 percent
MySQL hung 222 0.1 percent
Postgres happy 328 1.8 percent
MySQL happy 1810 0.7 percent
--
Benjamin Franz
Lameness filter encountered. Discussion aborted!
Reason: Please use less 'lame' filters.
That's the title of the Usenet FAQ page linked to from the referenced web page in the 'SBC/Pacbell to Filer 90%...' story. But the web page itself doesn't discuss that.
A little inside information leakage about future plans?
If the only way the 'Art world' can tell that something is Art is that the artist had to suffer to make it - the "Art" world is badly in need of reformation.
I reminded of the First Prize awarded for an abstract salt sculpture done entirely with the artist's tongue. There were a few red faces when the artist was revealed to be a farmer's cow....
Medium and tools are irrelevant. And elitists to the contrary, is is ok for Art (yes - capital Art) to be 'merely' pretty.
Now I am wondering how the elitists manage to reconcile their artificial requirements for 'thought out' art with the recent trend to 'egoless' criticism (where _even the artist's opinion_ on the Obj'd'Art is not considered definitive as to its 'meaning').
3Ware makes a nice SCSI/IDE RAID board that supports Linux w RAID 0,1,10 or 5 with hot spares. We are using it to support a couple of multi-hundred GB RAID5 servers using IDE drives no problem. You do want to make sure you download their very latest driver and firmware though.