Derek Parfit actually took a hard look at our philosophy of personality and how it pertains to science and the "actual" circumstances. He's a philosopher, but the language is understandable and he actually is not afraid to say "good" or "bad" about a particular viewpoint.
Much of the philosophy of Iain Banks' Culture novels can be based on Parfit. He explicitly covers teleportation and running personalities on machines.
One of the problems involved is that this guy has no experience programming. How is he going to know who's experienced and who isn't? I know people who are just barely competent at their jobs after 10+ years of practice and some real wizards who have only been working for two or three years.
Not that there aren't some smart people here, but statistically speaking far more people are going to have used open source software.
TheServerSide has some good reviews on the various enterprise servers, as well as some complete stinkers. A general rule of thumb is to throw out all the comments which seem to be lacking in spelling or logical argument.
I'm not disputing that conspiracy in science is vastly harder to do and hold down for periods of time compared to virtually any other activity, but I think it's a mistake to think that this is a fluke.
Take Walter Stewart as an example; first investigating the David Baltimore case and then measuring scientific misconduct as a whole, he found that "two thirds of a group of forty seven scientists had done something [...] either careless or irresponsible during a three year period." (Hindsights, ISBN 0446671150). His activities have caused him censure, reassignment, threats and worse.
It would be interesting to see how much science gets by on the assumption that the scientific process has been followed. I suspect that a bunch of science papers are written like journalists write articles; written to the deadline, with only as much work as is barely necessary.
What you are describing is classic, textbook Clearcase behaviour. It's not known for speed or stability. It's most likely to be a bug in the kernel patches you're required to install.
The horrible problem (that you don't mention in your post) is that because changes aren't atomic, any time the system crashes, your repository could be left in a corrupt state. At this point it takes a Clearcase trained admin to unwedge it, which could take a while.
In any event, don't beat yourself up over it; it's not likely to be something that your IT department is able to fix.
AFAIK OpenLDAP is the only reasonably complete open source LDAP implementation. There have been many reports about OpenLDAP not scaling up to larger enterprises and missing features, and this is basically because of TANSTAAL.
Novell and iPlanet both sell working directory servers, but I don't know how well they support PKI, although I do know iPlanet supports SASL.
In any event, consider that there may not be a solution in this case. You are talking about a very specialized field with an audience which is corporate almost by definition.
$300 will buy you a decent 3ware Escalade 7410 card, which comes with both Windows and Linux support.
Promise IDE RAID is a lot cheaper, but unreliable; I would get kernel trap exceptions all the time and it wasn't worth the trouble. Asides from a problem setting it up where the onboard motherboard ATA-100 driver was conflicting with the 3ware card, I haven't had so much as a hiccup. There's an erroneous report that says they only work on 64 bit PCI, but they work fine on 32 bit as well.
With CPU speeds being what they are, IO is really the bottleneck in your average computer. I've seen dramatic since the card went in -- I'd guess compilation time has halved.
If you're starting fresh, see if you can get a Tyan motherboard and 64 bit PCI and you should have no problems for the forseeable future.
Personally I like Perforce; it's simple, flexible, straightforward, and it's pretty aware of what its job is and isn't. There's a gui client for Windows, and a command line for Unix, and it handles multi-megabyte binary files just fine. But it doesn't do binary diffs well, and it's not set up for different media types. I've heard it can be pretty cheap if you talk to Perforce Sales right (floating head? Don't ask me.)
One system that I've heard game developers rave over is alienbrain, which has built in support for a bunch of different media types and basically assumes it's dealing with a bunch of binary files or images from the get go.
At 10K for ten users it's not exactly freeware, but from the reviews it looks like some game designers love it like their G4 powerbook. But that's probably too expensive.
So another alternative is BitMover, which at the cheapest will cost you $400 a head. But there's also a leasing option that could work out better for you, and you get the warm fuzzies by supporting the software that keeps Linus calm and happy.
Or, finally, you could talk to some CVS consultants. The guys at cyclic could certainly help you out with your problem, and probably more cheaply. At the very least, they should be able to tell you if your problems can be fixed in CVS, and at that point you should have a better shopping list of what to buy in a new system.
There's the Wired article by Charles Platt which goes into detail exactly what happened after he published the first paper.
And finally there's a web site on Gravity called Quantum Cavorite. It seems to be rational, although somewhat optimistic. The main lanl.gov site also has some great material on the two big approaches to G: spin foams & loops (general relativity guys) and noncommutative string geometry (particle physics guys).
What I find really strange about this paper is that after being ignored for years, not having anyone being able to repeat his results reliably and refusing to help out NASA in verifying his methods, the guy is not only back for more, but he's proposing a theory which he says invalidates General Relativity. This looks as suicidal as <obSlash>a startup company proposing to wipe out Microsoft</obSlash>...
This is a fascinating bug, BTW. Discussion about NSA security policy, an NAI developer offering his time for the feature, and the effect the patch would have on the tree.
It's highly unlikely (based on the history and state of 0.92) that the patch will make it into the main build, but if you are brave and foolhardy you can try out the code yourself.
In my experience, IE is as flaky as Netscape. It's not so bad that an unclosed bold tag will crash it, but if you are running your CPU at 100% and start up IE, IE will STAY at 100% CPU until you kill it from the command line. You get the operating system high and IE will never come down.
I try to use Mozilla and Netscape exclusively now, simply because when IE pulls cute stunts like this, it's never predictable what will happen when I kill it. Maybe it will crash the OS, maybe not. I'd rather suck consistently.
The scientists did NOT violate the laws of physics.
<p>
They found a substance in which low energy wavelengths will travel faster than the speed of light in air. This is different than the speed of light in a vacuum, which is a constant and would really screw things up if discovered false.
Dynamo does exactly what you want -- it has JHTML pages with some extra tags which interface into servlets, so that designers never see Java code.
The cool bit is that there's only ONE tag. It's
<droplet bean="ForEach">
<param name="array" value="bean:SomeArray">
<oparam name="output">
This text is output for each element in the array and you can get properties of those elements (like the name) by typing <valueof param="element.name"></valueof>
</oparam>
</droplet>
So you have a concept of a mathematical function (the droplet), then you have input parameters and output parameters (which can also be chunks of HTML). It's possible to nest droplets, so that you can have another droplet in the output parameter which does something to an element, and each of these elements is a javabean. When you say "element.name", it calls getName() on the bean.
Very cool. Beats JSP out by a mile, even with taglibs.
Rsync is a very good tool when you want to grab the
latest downloads from the CVS repository, but don't want to wait. When I still had a Linux box handy, I had it rsync to the CVS repository at midnight every day, and then when I wanted to update, I did it from my local mirror instead of over the wire.
YMMV.
phlebas.com is out of date by a year...
on
Look to Windward
·
· Score: 1
I read through some of the news items. The latest item there is from October 1999.
I tried downloading the four different packages of source code I need to make Gale to work, but all of them are corrupt. I can't even open any of the tar files.
At the very least, I think Gale needs a prebuilt binary and Win32 install system if it's going to be popular.
Slashdot Mirror
Much of the philosophy of Iain Banks' Culture novels can be based on Parfit. He explicitly covers teleportation and running personalities on machines.
The book is called Reasons and Persons.
1a) Learn to recognize an experienced developer.
One of the problems involved is that this guy has no experience programming. How is he going to know who's experienced and who isn't? I know people who are just barely competent at their jobs after 10+ years of practice and some real wizards who have only been working for two or three years.
TheServerSide has some good reviews on the various enterprise servers, as well as some complete stinkers. A general rule of thumb is to throw out all the comments which seem to be lacking in spelling or logical argument.
> Not because it draws 400W during normal operation, but because on startup the disks draw too much current at 12V.
If you buy a 3ware RAID card, it does a "staggered spinup" specifically to get around this problem.
Of course, you still have to have enough power to make sure all the drives can be run for normal operation...
One interesting one is TouchGraph, best known for the google set vista.
Plumb Design also has the Visual Thesaurus, which is cool looking even if it's not really practical.
I'm not disputing that conspiracy in science is vastly harder to do and hold down for periods of time compared to virtually any other activity, but I think it's a mistake to think that this is a fluke.
Take Walter Stewart as an example; first investigating the David Baltimore case and then measuring scientific misconduct as a whole, he found that "two thirds of a group of forty seven scientists had done something [...] either careless or irresponsible during a three year period." (Hindsights, ISBN 0446671150). His activities have caused him censure, reassignment, threats and worse.
It would be interesting to see how much science gets by on the assumption that the scientific process has been followed. I suspect that a bunch of science papers are written like journalists write articles; written to the deadline, with only as much work as is barely necessary.
That's a good question. I don't know whether it's absolutely required for Clearcase to use MVFS.
e le ase/l-k_support_policy.jsp
Still, it's clear that Clearcase support is dependent on specific Linux kernels. You can decide for yourself how bad this is.
http://www.rational.com/support/documentation/r
What you are describing is classic, textbook Clearcase behaviour. It's not known for speed or stability. It's most likely to be a bug in the kernel patches you're required to install.
The horrible problem (that you don't mention in your post) is that because changes aren't atomic, any time the system crashes, your repository could be left in a corrupt state. At this point it takes a Clearcase trained admin to unwedge it, which could take a while.
In any event, don't beat yourself up over it; it's not likely to be something that your IT department is able to fix.
AFAIK OpenLDAP is the only reasonably complete open source LDAP implementation. There have been many reports about OpenLDAP not scaling up to larger enterprises and missing features, and this is basically because of TANSTAAL.
Novell and iPlanet both sell working directory servers, but I don't know how well they support PKI, although I do know iPlanet supports SASL.
In any event, consider that there may not be a solution in this case. You are talking about a very specialized field with an audience which is corporate almost by definition.
Even RAID 1 (mirroring) will give you a performance boost according to this white paper. I'm using RAID 1 and I've noticed a difference. YMMV.
$300 will buy you a decent 3ware Escalade 7410 card, which comes with both Windows and Linux support.
Promise IDE RAID is a lot cheaper, but unreliable; I would get kernel trap exceptions all the time and it wasn't worth the trouble. Asides from a problem setting it up where the onboard motherboard ATA-100 driver was conflicting with the 3ware card, I haven't had so much as a hiccup. There's an erroneous report that says they only work on 64 bit PCI, but they work fine on 32 bit as well.
With CPU speeds being what they are, IO is really the bottleneck in your average computer. I've seen dramatic since the card went in -- I'd guess compilation time has halved.
If you're starting fresh, see if you can get a Tyan motherboard and 64 bit PCI and you should have no problems for the forseeable future.
A shameless plug for Visual Thought. It won't do ERD automatically, but it's great for the stuff you'd use a whiteboard for usually.
If you want to look at the structure of an existing database, try DBVisualizer
Personally I like Perforce; it's simple, flexible, straightforward, and it's pretty aware of what its job is and isn't. There's a gui client for Windows, and a command line for Unix, and it handles multi-megabyte binary files just fine. But it doesn't do binary diffs well, and it's not set up for different media types. I've heard it can be pretty cheap if you talk to Perforce Sales right (floating head? Don't ask me.)
One system that I've heard game developers rave over is alienbrain, which has built in support for a bunch of different media types and basically assumes it's dealing with a bunch of binary files or images from the get go.
At 10K for ten users it's not exactly freeware, but from the reviews it looks like some game designers love it like their G4 powerbook. But that's probably too expensive.
So another alternative is BitMover, which at the cheapest will cost you $400 a head. But there's also a leasing option that could work out better for you, and you get the warm fuzzies by supporting the software that keeps Linus calm and happy.
Or, finally, you could talk to some CVS consultants. The guys at cyclic could certainly help you out with your problem, and probably more cheaply. At the very least, they should be able to tell you if your problems can be fixed in CVS, and at that point you should have a better shopping list of what to buy in a new system.
Stanton did good work, and he deserves the rest.
He also deserves a lot more than three comments, but that's fame for you...
Yeah, this is very annoying. The bug number is 25538 if you want to vote on it.
There's the original paper, written in 1992.
There's the Wired article by Charles Platt which goes into detail exactly what happened after he published the first paper.
And finally there's a web site on Gravity called Quantum Cavorite. It seems to be rational, although somewhat optimistic. The main lanl.gov site also has some great material on the two big approaches to G: spin foams & loops (general relativity guys) and noncommutative string geometry (particle physics guys).
What I find really strange about this paper is that after being ignored for years, not having anyone being able to repeat his results reliably and refusing to help out NASA in verifying his methods, the guy is not only back for more, but he's proposing a theory which he says invalidates General Relativity. This looks as suicidal as <obSlash>a startup company proposing to wipe out Microsoft</obSlash>...
This is a fascinating bug, BTW. Discussion about NSA security policy, an NAI developer offering his time for the feature, and the effect the patch would have on the tree.
It's highly unlikely (based on the history and state of 0.92) that the patch will make it into the main build, but if you are brave and foolhardy you can try out the code yourself.
Use helma.xmlrpc.org. It's LGPL, so it won't have that problem.
Dynamo includes all kinds of GPL'ed stuff anyway: it's clearly marked where and how the code is used.
In my experience, IE is as flaky as Netscape. It's not so bad that an unclosed bold tag will crash it, but if you are running your CPU at 100% and start up IE, IE will STAY at 100% CPU until you kill it from the command line. You get the operating system high and IE will never come down.
I try to use Mozilla and Netscape exclusively now, simply because when IE pulls cute stunts like this, it's never predictable what will happen when I kill it. Maybe it will crash the OS, maybe not. I'd rather suck consistently.
The scientists did NOT violate the laws of physics.
<p>
They found a substance in which low energy wavelengths will travel faster than the speed of light in air. This is different than the speed of light in a vacuum, which is a constant and would really screw things up if discovered false.
I've used Groove only once or twice, and know little about Pyra, but I have heard excellent things about both of them.
Disclaimer: I work for ATG.
Dynamo does exactly what you want -- it has JHTML pages with some extra tags which interface into servlets, so that designers never see Java code.
The cool bit is that there's only ONE tag. It's
<droplet bean="ForEach">
<param name="array" value="bean:SomeArray">
<oparam name="output">
This text is output for each element in the array and you can get properties of those elements (like the name) by typing <valueof param="element.name"></valueof>
</oparam>
</droplet>
So you have a concept of a mathematical function (the droplet), then you have input parameters and output parameters (which can also be chunks of HTML). It's possible to nest droplets, so that you can have another droplet in the output parameter which does something to an element, and each of these elements is a javabean. When you say "element.name", it calls getName() on the bean.
Very cool. Beats JSP out by a mile, even with taglibs.
Rsync is a very good tool when you want to grab the
latest downloads from the CVS repository, but don't want to wait. When I still had a Linux box handy, I had it rsync to the CVS repository at midnight every day, and then when I wanted to update, I did it from my local mirror instead of over the wire.
YMMV.
I read through some of the news items. The latest item there is from October 1999.
Save your time.
I tried downloading the four different packages of source code I need to make Gale to work, but all of them are corrupt. I can't even open any of the tar files.
At the very least, I think Gale needs a prebuilt binary and Win32 install system if it's going to be popular.