My wife used to work in the US under a TN-1 visa. She would habitually renew in Montreal after visiting her grandfather. The US INS staff at Montreal are pleasant and helpful.
On one occasion we were returning to the US via Toronto. Let me just say that the experience was rather less pleasant! Lots and lots of questions and an enormous delay caused us to almost miss our flight (we had allowed 3 hours). Other people were actually missing flights, so much so that the airport dedicated a permanent member of staff to try to get them on one of the last flights home.
She told me later that they were more interested in me (UK national working in the US on an L1-B) than her for some reason.
So if you have the choice between renewing at Montreal or Toronto airports, go for Montreal!
Even if genuine, calls from police charities strike me as downright sinister. How can this country tolerate its law enforcement officers (or others using their name) going begging for funds? The question that always springs to mind is, "What happens if I refuse to give them money?"
Here's an article about a Florida-based firefighters charity that's not what it seems.
The "555" is the clue that this number is fake. Whenever you hear a number read out in a movie, they always use xxx-555-xxxx because by convention the phone companies never hand out a number with this in it.
You walk into a shop and pay $3.00 for a cup of coffee. You'd expect it to be a pretty decent cup of coffee, right? What if you bought a cup of coffee for $1.00? Would you expect it to be more or less good than the $3.00 cup of coffee? The majority of people would expect the $3.00 cup of coffee to be nicer than the $1.00 cup of coffee, but until they taste them both, they don't know
One of Microsoft's better (only?) contributions to the field of computing has been their Notes From the Field books. I'm a Unix guy myself but I have leafed through one on a colleague's desk and it looked interesting. I'd really love some Unix-centric books of this sort covering subjects like working through performance problems, debugging network and DNS.
The best part is that they don't just teach the information but the methodology of troubleshooting and debugging.
> Okay, so the UK have CCTV cameras all over the
> country. Net result ? they can squelch pretty
> thefts in high streets and issue speeding
> tickets automatically. Yet the IRA still strike.
> Gee, I wonder why the camera didn't pick them
> up.
I worked at a university which was just outside the main shopping district of Newcastle. There was some crime in the shopping district, mostly shoplifting and the occasional purse snatch.
The council installed cameras throughout the shopping area with the immediate result that the criminals moved their activities just outside the shopping district to the university and found much easier and richer pickings - universities in the UK traditionally have low security and there are plenty of offices containing purses and wallets, to say nothing of the numerous bicycles that were stolen.
Rural crime in the UK has also risen dramatically, probably for similar reasons: town centres are much better monitored now. The trouble is that you cannot monitor every square mile of the countryside.
There is too much talk of war. The rhetoric from the figures of authority and now the media is slowly taking on the tone of violent armed conflict. This may be what's needed... but first you need an enemy to launch the war against.
When pressed for details of the evidence against the alleged terrorists they reply, "We will not reveal details of how we are getting intelligence." I don't need the how, I need the what! I especially need this if the leader of the country is going to start a war over it. If we don't have this information then the leader is being handed carte blanche to do what ever they want in our name. The word "democracy" is being bandied about - it's time to show what this actually means by sharing this information.
The media machine is now catching up with the situation after initially being pushed onto their back foot. We now have the office slogan, America Under Attack. Soon we will have the official song (I have heard several candidates) and not long after this, the official images. I could do with fewer carefully crafted soundbites from the media commentators and a little more considered analysis of why this has happened, what this country (and the West in general) has done to provoke it, and how they intend to adjust the way they behave towards other countries to prevent it happening again.
"Greenstone is a complete digital library creation, management, and distribution package for Unix or Windows. Users create collections by gathering a set of input documents, specifying a configuration file, and running the build script. It provides full-text and fielded searching, browsable indexes, customised formatting, metadata extraction (acronyms, languages, etc), a Z39.50 client, and many other features. It supports many input formats, the interface is configurable and multi-lingual, and collections can be distributed on the web or on CD-ROM."
Note that Linus said "we" understood it - a group of people can understand Linux. No group of people, however large, however clever, can understand W2K:)
> I had to wait 1 hr. 15 min. to vote. And later
> I noticed my fly was down the whole time
That's a good way to comment on the American political system. I forward the motion that everybody should unzip their flies when standing in line waiting to vote.
The article starts out talking of "bandwidth starved" processors. But surely it's latency that is of primary importance and bandwidth takes second place?
This is a good point. I remember reading about the physicists working on the Manhattan Project or something - some of their best thoughts came to them while they were having a quiet walk away from their desks and other people.
Nicely put. I would add that the results seem to be skewed in favour of matching client and server OS in the NFS and HTTP tests - compare "NFS char read Linux client" (img18.htm) with "NFS char read FreeBSD client". This probably reflects that the developers prefer test rigs with their OS doing the client piece. It's interesting to see that it makes such a large difference.
The whole idea behind WAVE seems to be correlating certain kinds of behaviour with certains kinds of wrongdoing. How about this: set up a database of all the people who buy torque wrenches and then use it to predict who is going to commit the heinous crime of car maintenance on the weekend. I think there would be a very good correlation.
Wait a minute, car maintenance isn't actually all that damaging to society... so how about setting up a database of all the people who have, say, bought guns and then try to predict those who kill people. I'm willing to bet there'd be at least as good a correlation and this would be something worth having!
To my way of thinking, one of the fundamental problems is an educational system that places too much emphasis on sporting achievement. Many of the messages I have read are questioning why the jocks are able to get away with physical assault on the (so-called) misfits. The reason is that adults grant them status on the basis of their sporting ability. This is because they are the ones who will eventually make it to university (on the basis of their sporting ability) where they will carry the name of the high school with them. And on the basis of this the university, and in turn the high school, derives its status and in turn its funding.
School is about education, it is not about being a sports star. Sure, sport encourages development of teamwork, cooperation, fitness, etc. - all good stuff. But the overemphasis on sport is dangerous.
I remember using a program called Reduce for symbolic algebra in a mainframe context some 8-10 years ago. Does anybody know if it has been ported to PC OSes?
I like the black and white colour scheme, it would be great to run Linux on it - the colours are Tux-like! I wonder if you could put a yellow beak on it or something to make it even more like a Tux?
Not here in Europe we didn't. Millennium paranoia (stockpiling water, food, guns & ammo etc) seems to be almost uniquely an American phenomenon.
I quite agree. As an Englishman living in New York I have found US citizen to be a very panicky lot. Case in point: various vague threats were made by the usual bunch of terrorist lunatics and the authorities actually sent out warnings to people to 'keep clear of crowds', and so on. In the UK the reaction to such threats is "business as usual", they are ignored. Perhaps it's because Britain has been numbed to it by years of IRA threats.
Hear the voice of reason! RAID 5 is good for reads but you suffer a big performance hit for writes. _If_ you can guarantee that all writes are the same size (as with some database servers) then you can tune the stripe size, but I don't think you can guarantee this with a mail server.
And when a disk fails you take a performance hit on reads too - better for your stress level to pick another mirrored RAID level that means you don't have to panic quite so much when this happens.
I would recommend RAID 0+1. I have seen decent performance with Online Disksuite (software RAID) - even if you don't want to run this in production it would give you a chance to try things out without spending too much cash.
The news server application mentioned may suit RAID 5 because a) you have to store a massive amount of data, b) most accesses are READs (people browsing news rather than posting).
For email, you are going to get a good mix of reads and writes rather than just reads. In fact I think you'll find the application is attribute intensive than anything.
There's one thing that you can do for free: increase the DNLC (directory name lookup cache). You do this via/etc/system and it helps a lot on systems that are accessing a lot of files (NFS is the classic application for this but I think a mail server will benefit too). Check docs.sun.com for how to do this.
Almost a year to the day...
on
Antarctica
·
· Score: 1
It's almost a year to the day since the last review of Antarctica on Slashdot. Has this become the 'annual Antarctica review'? Can I do it next year?;) http://slashdot.org/books/98/10/08/0645202.shtml
Slashdot Mirror
My wife used to work in the US under a TN-1 visa. She would habitually renew in Montreal after visiting her grandfather. The US INS staff at Montreal are pleasant and helpful.
On one occasion we were returning to the US via Toronto. Let me just say that the experience was rather less pleasant! Lots and lots of questions and an enormous delay caused us to almost miss our flight (we had allowed 3 hours). Other people were actually missing flights, so much so that the airport dedicated a permanent member of staff to try to get them on one of the last flights home.
She told me later that they were more interested in me (UK national working in the US on an L1-B) than her for some reason.
So if you have the choice between renewing at Montreal or Toronto airports, go for Montreal!
I just came across a link on the BBC that has a programme about Ghana.
t m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/1478157.s
I've not watched it but it may have some useful information.
I heard that if a nuclear powerstation had the same level of radioactivity as Grand Central Station in NYC then it would be shut down.
GC is built from granite, granite is radioactive, it even releases radium which, being a gas, can be breathed in - nice!
I've never had a problem with it with Opera (Linux and W2K)
Here's an article about a Florida-based firefighters charity that's not what it seems.
The "555" is the clue that this number is fake. Whenever you hear a number read out in a movie, they always use xxx-555-xxxx because by convention the phone companies never hand out a number with this in it.
Which is the basis of Starbucks' business model!
One of Microsoft's better (only?) contributions to the field of computing has been their Notes From the Field books. I'm a Unix guy myself but I have leafed through one on a colleague's desk and it looked interesting. I'd really love some Unix-centric books of this sort covering subjects like working through performance problems, debugging network and DNS.
The best part is that they don't just teach the information but the methodology of troubleshooting and debugging.
Why do I keep seeing all these instructions for building stringed musical instruments? "Do thing A, do thing B and viola!"
;)
Or perhaps you mean "voila!"
> Okay, so the UK have CCTV cameras all over the
> country. Net result ? they can squelch pretty
> thefts in high streets and issue speeding
> tickets automatically. Yet the IRA still strike.
> Gee, I wonder why the camera didn't pick them
> up.
I worked at a university which was just outside the main shopping district of Newcastle. There was some crime in the shopping district, mostly shoplifting and the occasional purse snatch.
The council installed cameras throughout the shopping area with the immediate result that the criminals moved their activities just outside the shopping district to the university and found much easier and richer pickings - universities in the UK traditionally have low security and there are plenty of offices containing purses and wallets, to say nothing of the numerous bicycles that were stolen.
Rural crime in the UK has also risen dramatically, probably for similar reasons: town centres are much better monitored now. The trouble is that you cannot monitor every square mile of the countryside.
There is too much talk of war. The rhetoric from the figures of authority and now the media is slowly taking on the tone of violent armed conflict. This may be what's needed... but first you need an enemy to launch the war against.
When pressed for details of the evidence against the alleged terrorists they reply, "We will not reveal details of how we are getting intelligence." I don't need the how, I need the what! I especially need this if the leader of the country is going to start a war over it. If we don't have this information then the leader is being handed carte blanche to do what ever they want in our name. The word "democracy" is being bandied about - it's time to show what this actually means by sharing this information.
The media machine is now catching up with the situation after initially being pushed onto their back foot. We now have the office slogan, America Under Attack. Soon we will have the official song (I have heard several candidates) and not long after this, the official images. I could do with fewer carefully crafted soundbites from the media commentators and a little more considered analysis of why this has happened, what this country (and the West in general) has done to provoke it, and how they intend to adjust the way they behave towards other countries to prevent it happening again.
Greenstone
"Greenstone is a complete digital library creation, management, and distribution package for Unix or Windows. Users create collections by gathering a set of input documents, specifying a configuration file, and running the build script. It provides full-text and fielded searching, browsable indexes, customised formatting, metadata extraction (acronyms, languages, etc), a Z39.50 client, and many other features. It supports many input formats, the interface is configurable and multi-lingual, and collections can be distributed on the web or on CD-ROM."
Note that Linus said "we" understood it - a group of people can understand Linux. No group of people, however large, however clever, can understand W2K :)
> I had to wait 1 hr. 15 min. to vote. And later
> I noticed my fly was down the whole time
That's a good way to comment on the American political system. I forward the motion that everybody should unzip their flies when standing in line waiting to vote.
The article starts out talking of "bandwidth starved" processors. But surely it's latency that is of primary importance and bandwidth takes second place?
This is a good point. I remember reading about the physicists working on the Manhattan Project or something - some of their best thoughts came to them while they were having a quiet walk away from their desks and other people.
Nicely put. I would add that the results seem to be skewed in favour of matching client and server OS in the NFS and HTTP tests - compare "NFS char read Linux client" (img18.htm) with "NFS char read FreeBSD client". This probably reflects that the developers prefer test rigs with their OS doing the client piece. It's interesting to see that it makes such a large difference.
The whole idea behind WAVE seems to be correlating certain kinds of behaviour with certains kinds of wrongdoing. How about this: set up a database of all the people who buy torque wrenches and then use it to predict who is going to commit the heinous crime of car maintenance on the weekend. I think there would be a very good correlation.
Wait a minute, car maintenance isn't actually all that damaging to society... so how about setting up a database of all the people who have, say, bought guns and then try to predict those who kill people. I'm willing to bet there'd be at least as good a correlation and this would be something worth having!
To my way of thinking, one of the fundamental problems is an educational system that places too much emphasis on sporting achievement. Many of the messages I have read are questioning why the jocks are able to get away with physical assault on the (so-called) misfits. The reason is that adults grant them status on the basis of their sporting ability. This is because they are the ones who will eventually make it to university (on the basis of their sporting ability) where they will carry the name of the high school with them. And on the basis of this the university, and in turn the high school, derives its status and in turn its funding.
School is about education, it is not about being a sports star. Sure, sport encourages development of teamwork, cooperation, fitness, etc. - all good stuff. But the overemphasis on sport is dangerous.
I remember using a program called Reduce for symbolic algebra in a mainframe context some 8-10 years ago. Does anybody know if it has been ported to PC OSes?
I like the black and white colour scheme, it would
be great to run Linux on it - the colours are
Tux-like! I wonder if you could put a yellow
beak on it or something to make it even more like
a Tux?
I think you mean 47K. I read "47G" as "47 gig." (hey, this is a geek site). Approx. 5 x 10^10 dollars is a lot of money for a robot!
Not here in Europe we didn't. Millennium paranoia (stockpiling water, food, guns & ammo etc) seems to be almost uniquely an American phenomenon.
I quite agree. As an Englishman living in New York I have found US citizen to be a very panicky lot. Case in point: various vague threats were made by the usual bunch of terrorist lunatics and the authorities actually sent out warnings to people to 'keep clear of crowds', and so on. In the UK the reaction to such threats is "business as usual", they are ignored. Perhaps it's because Britain has been numbed to it by years of IRA threats.
Hear the voice of reason! RAID 5 is good for reads but you suffer a big performance hit for writes. _If_ you can guarantee that all writes are the same size (as with some database servers) then you can tune the stripe size, but I don't think you can guarantee this with a mail server.
/etc/system and it helps a lot on systems that are accessing a lot of files (NFS is the classic application for this but I think a mail server will benefit too). Check docs.sun.com for how to do this.
And when a disk fails you take a performance hit on reads too - better for your stress level to pick another mirrored RAID level that means you don't have to panic quite so much when this happens.
I would recommend RAID 0+1. I have seen decent performance with Online Disksuite (software RAID) - even if you don't want to run this in production it would give you a chance to try things out without spending too much cash.
The news server application mentioned may suit RAID 5 because a) you have to store a massive amount of data, b) most accesses are READs (people browsing news rather than posting).
For email, you are going to get a good mix of reads and writes rather than just reads. In fact I think you'll find the application is attribute intensive than anything.
There's one thing that you can do for free: increase the DNLC (directory name lookup cache). You do this via
It's almost a year to the day since the last review of Antarctica on Slashdot. Has this become the 'annual Antarctica review'? Can I do it next year? ;) /0645202.shtml
http://slashdot.org/books/98/10/08