...but also a horde of absolutely brilliant PR weasels which can turn black to white when you're not watching...
"Oh, that was easy!", said a Microsoft PR manager, after proving the non-existance of God. Then he went on to prove that black is white, and white is black, and gets killed at the next zebra crossing.
"We didn't want to go through all of the waste of creating compatiblity with a minority of users running Apple (or Linux for that matter). So, we will use this as an opportunity to forward our own issues and blame it on a lack of suitable DRM. So, we'll deflect the issue, and advance one of our own goals at the same time."
Yeah. It is pretty much impossible. Like making your own viable operating system as open source. The hundreds of thousands of man-hours and expertise required is impossible.
Okay, so I just made fun of you. Actually, I still agree with what you said. It would take a LOT of talent which is really interested in text-to-speach for this to happen. But really, I think the pay-offs to society would be time and energy very well spent....as long as they don't put that technology back into coke machines again.
I think I'm pretty safe as long as I *don't* have a case constructed out of radioactive elements that have a half-life in the millionths of a second.;)
To be honest, I don't see myself getting much value in having a computer case out of mundane materials. Aesthetic, utilitarian, environmental, economic, or otherwise. While some people may wax poetic out of goat cheese made from swiss monks, personally, I'd rather brag about how technological it is. After all, we're talking about computers here!;)
I've had the pleasure of playing with RAM based storage devices at work. They're a lot of fun. The particular models we used were external, SCSI, memory based, with a battery backup and internal disk for long-term storage.
The nice thing is that they can drive as many reads/writes as you can get out of the SCSI channel. Seek time isn't a factor at all. We're talking disk performance through the roof here! There are also UltraSCSI and other types that'll go even faster. But the only real limitation is the link between the drive and the computer.
Still, the data rate doesn't approach what this PCI based solution has going. But what I use is a more 'enterprise' solution. You've got internal battery backup and disk backup. If the unit is off the mains, the battery kicks in. After 30 minutes, it stops all IO, dumps to disk, and shuts off. When power is restored, it loads back in from disk.
This PCI solution is way cheaper than the external drives that I've used. Just it doesn't appear to have the reliability... or the commodity standards that'll let it hook up to just about any type of system. Still, quite neat!
Frankly, I don't know one person who has returned a crippled CD to a store because 'it didn't work'.
Answer: Those of us who 'don't matter' should buy crippled CDs in the store, return them because it didn't work. Have them assume it is damaged. Exchange for another one. Later, rinse, repeat. We should actually patronize these companies and buy their crippled CDs, if only to fill the return pile.
I laughed anyhow. I'm sorry. It was even better in this situation than the previous ones I've been exposed to, because of the goto step just before it.
Ph33r my mighty analog plug, you slack-jawed marketroid fuckwits.
You know, I really don't get why the majority of us even need bit-for-bit perfect CD quality sound. I mean, if you listen to MP3s, and they're good enough for you (which is the case for the majority of people, but yes, there are exceptions), then why do I even care if it is a first generation analog copy?
And that's the other thing. We're talking about a first generation analog copy. With each successive copy, it isn't dropping a generation in quality. It is still a first generation analog copy. I think we, as consumers, need to get over the need of having a bit-for-bit perfect copy. Frankly, we don't need it. And if we realize that, it would definately give the RIAA fits when they see the shift.
I'm with you. But I like it better the way it was explained to me. In American style news, you have the "he said, she said" style reporting. Person A said blah, blah, but person B points out "antiblah, antiblah+."
In English (European?) style journalism, journalists themselves are allowed to have opinions and to express them themselves, rather than through the puppet characters that Americans use. So, yes, they are slanted. American news is slanted, too, but the slant is done with the puppets. That's all.
I read the Score: 4+ posts and didn't see this point of view. I'll give it a try.
Anyone else remember when copy protection of software became REALLY BIG in the 80s? And back then, they were using some pretty darn good technology for the time. After years and years of copy protection, guess what the software industry decided? Those high tech solutions just don't work. It went away, put was replaced with the low-hanging fruits of copy protection "is the product CD in the cdrom drive"?
This isn't to say that there aren't copy protections here and there today. I think this Palladium thing wants to encourage them to get back into the copy protection business. A story in itself.
But you stopped seeing intentional bad sectors, dongles, and other technological goodies placed in software because they simply weren't effective in relation to the cost. And they caused problems.
Of course, things are a bit different today. The CD industry has a nice chain of stories that won't allow you to return CDs like you could return defective software years ago. But then again, today, there is internet distribution. All it takes is a few people with compromised DACs and your "latest and greatest copy protection scheme" is just as good as the low-hanging-fruit of software protection.
So, watch as the music industry plays the copy protection arms race. But I think the Internet, for reasons of providing alternative legitimate and illegitimate distributions, and sharing of information, aside from following the copy-protection lifecycle, will punish the RIAAs members above and beyond that.
So finding these things isn't too hard. It is comparing them and knowing what to look for, or measuring one against the other that seems to be the most difficult. The Advanced Academics would appear to be a decent choice. Can't really judge the quality from the outside. They seem to be able to hook some students up with financing by basically enrolling them in a remote high school.
Of course, lowest price is not the primary factor here. But it is a little tough to know what to be looking for and to measure one against the other. [shrug] Ideas?
If I had mod points right now, I'm not sure which I would mark your message as. Off-topic, or troll? Go back and read the question...
> There seems to be a few services available > online, but it is hard to tell very much about > them from the outside. What should we be looking > for? Are there any good deals (as far as quality > or cost) out there?
I really wasn't looking for a debate on "is home school bad" / "shouldn't he be socializing". That issue has been decided in this case. The question is more about online high-school learning possibilities.
Re:Linux needs a more professional evangelist
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 1
You're right. The term "smoking crack" has worked itself very well into the vocabulary of the business world.
I'm debating whether you've listed a number of reasons, or you've set up a straw man to knock down. Unless TiVos have gone up significantly in price, they should be available well under that $400 mark you gave. Looking at eBay's *completed* auctions, for example, the vast majority are well under $400. Just a quick scan and I saw 30 hour units for $200.
ReplayTV is a power-user unit and shouldn't even be considered.
But you're right in that they (Ad Age) probably had an axe to grind. And that they (TiVo) don't have good market pentration. But the large majority of people blame it not on the price, but on the education (marketing) of what the device actually does.
This is the primary reason why Slashdot should NOT do obituaries. These types of stories don't spur much in the way of discussion or add much other than a post-it note: "This guy died and I liked him. If you're curious, you might check out some of his works."
You'll have 20 or so redundant "Wow. He did great stuff. I'll miss him." messages. And then you'll have just as many complete trolls, "He didn't really die! He cross-gendered into a woman and his family is just morning the public passing of his old persona!" or "I'm still here! The reports of my death are greatly exagerated!"
The fact that this particular person is shown disrespect is nothing new. Attempt to search back (with the lack of a obit category) on similar stories previously posted. You'll see a trollfest far greater than you have here.
Sad, but a true statement of the way things are here.
I appreciate that this man has made significant contributions to Science Fiction, however, I really don't want to use headline space for every person who dies who is of interest to the Slashdot crew. Actresses, potentially transgendered computer sciences (remember that one?), etc.
And generally, a great deal of disrespect is generated with stories, such as these. A spinning grave icon, indeed. But this isn't news for nerds.
Oh. That sounds like a good one. All Microsoft has to do is hide their IP under shill companies, and they've got instant protection....and don't think they won't do it if it is an issue.
It would be an awfully good antidote to Sun's N1, which aims to replace large numbers of systems administrators with a little program that Sun wrote.;)
Original message: here (Probably will not be available in the future after the migration.)
My reply: I'm sure I could do better with some tweaking. I benchmarked against the same URL as the original tester. But then again, the URL probably has more data attached now, and there is less traffic on the server.
I did the ab command: ab -c 200 -n 1000
The result was 11952 kbits of traffic received.
(Assuming 1kbyte=8kbits. Ab gives results in kbytes/second, so I'm multiplying the results by 8 to get kbits.)
Then, I took two different E10ks in two different datacenters with semi-diverse paths to brak. Woah! One had a duplex issue. I fixed it on the fly. I ran the same command on both of them at *about* the same time (+/-.5 seconds).
Server #1: 6138kbits/sec Server #2: 6556kbits/sec TOTAL 1+2: 12694kbits/sec
At the very same time, within those datacenter's networks, I browsed other (non-slashdot) off-site web pages during the test with no problem... bandwidth was ample to the outside world. I used a third connection (local ISP) to visit brak with a web browser. Brak wasn't serving pages during the test. Although not scientific, what this tells me is that the limitation was at the Slashdot test server farm.
The maximum throughput of the new servers is in the *neighborhood* of 12Mbps for dynamic pages. Requests per second under high load (in several tests) was a low number approaching 20 requests/second.
I did a quick test against a story of about the same size on the live production slashdot. (Sorry, scientific curiousity... I did lower the count, though, to minimize impact.) The transfer rate was a bit higher... 12896kbps. Requests per second was lower... around 13. But then again, it does have a greater load on it right now and people actually using it.
So those are my results.
Bigoted summary: You need a better server farm for your dynamic pages. Have you considered an E10k farm with large cached fiber storage towers and big network pipes?;)
You'll find a few of these posts on the brak server itself (when it comes back to life). The code went something like this:
while [ 1 ]
do
wget "http://brak.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/29/ 2028219&mode=thread&tid=124" & [--- Remove the extra space in the middle ---]
echo "hello"
done
I run that on an Ultra Enterprise 10000 with a 100mbit/full network drop (not the best network connection but my gigabit ether boxes were doing "real" work). Because this system had 4gb of RAM in it, Maxusers was very high, which resulted in the maxprocs being very high. And the kernel seemed to work very well under that kind of pressure.
Then, for fun, add in another box or two. Presto! Instant simulated Slashdot effect. But then again, I happen to be using a MASSIVE network connection from a very well-known telco. So that gives me a big advantage over most people.
Lesson learned: Wow. I can slashdot Slashdot itself.
Slashdot Mirror
How old is Solaris? Their binary compatibility hasn't stopped them from letting age-old code on Sparc 5s run on Sunfire 15k servers.
And Windows has had some discontinuities. Like 98 vs 2000/NT, for example.
...but also a horde of absolutely brilliant PR weasels which can turn black to white when you're not watching...
"Oh, that was easy!", said a Microsoft PR manager, after proving the non-existance of God. Then he went on to prove that black is white, and white is black, and gets killed at the next zebra crossing.
Stolen from Douglas Adams. It fit all-too-well.
"We didn't want to go through all of the waste of creating compatiblity with a minority of users running Apple (or Linux for that matter). So, we will use this as an opportunity to forward our own issues and blame it on a lack of suitable DRM. So, we'll deflect the issue, and advance one of our own goals at the same time."
Tiny little man? Or Giant Beer Bottle?
Yeah. It is pretty much impossible. Like making your own viable operating system as open source. The hundreds of thousands of man-hours and expertise required is impossible.
...as long as they don't put that technology back into coke machines again.
Okay, so I just made fun of you. Actually, I still agree with what you said. It would take a LOT of talent which is really interested in text-to-speach for this to happen. But really, I think the pay-offs to society would be time and energy very well spent.
I think I'm pretty safe as long as I *don't* have a case constructed out of radioactive elements that have a half-life in the millionths of a second. ;)
;)
To be honest, I don't see myself getting much value in having a computer case out of mundane materials. Aesthetic, utilitarian, environmental, economic, or otherwise. While some people may wax poetic out of goat cheese made from swiss monks, personally, I'd rather brag about how technological it is. After all, we're talking about computers here!
I've had the pleasure of playing with RAM based storage devices at work. They're a lot of fun. The particular models we used were external, SCSI, memory based, with a battery backup and internal disk for long-term storage.
The nice thing is that they can drive as many reads/writes as you can get out of the SCSI channel. Seek time isn't a factor at all. We're talking disk performance through the roof here! There are also UltraSCSI and other types that'll go even faster. But the only real limitation is the link between the drive and the computer.
Still, the data rate doesn't approach what this PCI based solution has going. But what I use is a more 'enterprise' solution. You've got internal battery backup and disk backup. If the unit is off the mains, the battery kicks in. After 30 minutes, it stops all IO, dumps to disk, and shuts off. When power is restored, it loads back in from disk.
This PCI solution is way cheaper than the external drives that I've used. Just it doesn't appear to have the reliability... or the commodity standards that'll let it hook up to just about any type of system. Still, quite neat!
Frankly, I don't know one person who has returned a crippled CD to a store because 'it didn't work'.
Answer: Those of us who 'don't matter' should buy crippled CDs in the store, return them because it didn't work. Have them assume it is damaged. Exchange for another one. Later, rinse, repeat. We should actually patronize these companies and buy their crippled CDs, if only to fill the return pile.
I laughed anyhow. I'm sorry. It was even better in this situation than the previous ones I've been exposed to, because of the goto step just before it.
Ph33r my mighty analog plug, you slack-jawed marketroid fuckwits.
You know, I really don't get why the majority of us even need bit-for-bit perfect CD quality sound. I mean, if you listen to MP3s, and they're good enough for you (which is the case for the majority of people, but yes, there are exceptions), then why do I even care if it is a first generation analog copy?
And that's the other thing. We're talking about a first generation analog copy. With each successive copy, it isn't dropping a generation in quality. It is still a first generation analog copy. I think we, as consumers, need to get over the need of having a bit-for-bit perfect copy. Frankly, we don't need it. And if we realize that, it would definately give the RIAA fits when they see the shift.
pee-in-the-pool effect kicks in, and the copyprotection-free version will be around forever
Thank you for forever tainting my enjoyment of swimming pools, just for the sole benefit of furthering your P2P argument.
Translation: You're right, damnit. But now I've got the pool to worry about.
I'm with you. But I like it better the way it was explained to me. In American style news, you have the "he said, she said" style reporting. Person A said blah, blah, but person B points out "antiblah, antiblah+."
In English (European?) style journalism, journalists themselves are allowed to have opinions and to express them themselves, rather than through the puppet characters that Americans use. So, yes, they are slanted. American news is slanted, too, but the slant is done with the puppets. That's all.
I read the Score: 4+ posts and didn't see this point of view. I'll give it a try.
Anyone else remember when copy protection of software became REALLY BIG in the 80s? And back then, they were using some pretty darn good technology for the time. After years and years of copy protection, guess what the software industry decided? Those high tech solutions just don't work. It went away, put was replaced with the low-hanging fruits of copy protection "is the product CD in the cdrom drive"?
This isn't to say that there aren't copy protections here and there today. I think this Palladium thing wants to encourage them to get back into the copy protection business. A story in itself.
But you stopped seeing intentional bad sectors, dongles, and other technological goodies placed in software because they simply weren't effective in relation to the cost. And they caused problems.
Of course, things are a bit different today. The CD industry has a nice chain of stories that won't allow you to return CDs like you could return defective software years ago. But then again, today, there is internet distribution. All it takes is a few people with compromised DACs and your "latest and greatest copy protection scheme" is just as good as the low-hanging-fruit of software protection.
So, watch as the music industry plays the copy protection arms race. But I think the Internet, for reasons of providing alternative legitimate and illegitimate distributions, and sharing of information, aside from following the copy-protection lifecycle, will punish the RIAAs members above and beyond that.
Well, I have managed to find a few!
So finding these things isn't too hard. It is comparing them and knowing what to look for, or measuring one against the other that seems to be the most difficult. The Advanced Academics would appear to be a decent choice. Can't really judge the quality from the outside. They seem to be able to hook some students up with financing by basically enrolling them in a remote high school.
Of course, lowest price is not the primary factor here. But it is a little tough to know what to be looking for and to measure one against the other. [shrug] Ideas?
If I had mod points right now, I'm not sure which I would mark your message as. Off-topic, or troll? Go back and read the question...
> There seems to be a few services available
> online, but it is hard to tell very much about
> them from the outside. What should we be looking
> for? Are there any good deals (as far as quality
> or cost) out there?
I really wasn't looking for a debate on "is home school bad" / "shouldn't he be socializing". That issue has been decided in this case. The question is more about online high-school learning possibilities.
You're right. The term "smoking crack" has worked itself very well into the vocabulary of the business world.
I'm debating whether you've listed a number of reasons, or you've set up a straw man to knock down. Unless TiVos have gone up significantly in price, they should be available well under that $400 mark you gave. Looking at eBay's *completed* auctions, for example, the vast majority are well under $400. Just a quick scan and I saw 30 hour units for $200.
ReplayTV is a power-user unit and shouldn't even be considered.
But you're right in that they (Ad Age) probably had an axe to grind. And that they (TiVo) don't have good market pentration. But the large majority of people blame it not on the price, but on the education (marketing) of what the device actually does.
DUDE! You're getting a ... a ... a something. What's that called again? Adel?
This is the primary reason why Slashdot should NOT do obituaries. These types of stories don't spur much in the way of discussion or add much other than a post-it note: "This guy died and I liked him. If you're curious, you might check out some of his works."
You'll have 20 or so redundant "Wow. He did great stuff. I'll miss him." messages. And then you'll have just as many complete trolls, "He didn't really die! He cross-gendered into a woman and his family is just morning the public passing of his old persona!" or "I'm still here! The reports of my death are greatly exagerated!"
The fact that this particular person is shown disrespect is nothing new. Attempt to search back (with the lack of a obit category) on similar stories previously posted. You'll see a trollfest far greater than you have here.
Sad, but a true statement of the way things are here.
I appreciate that this man has made significant contributions to Science Fiction, however, I really don't want to use headline space for every person who dies who is of interest to the Slashdot crew. Actresses, potentially transgendered computer sciences (remember that one?), etc.
And generally, a great deal of disrespect is generated with stories, such as these. A spinning grave icon, indeed. But this isn't news for nerds.
Oh. That sounds like a good one. All Microsoft has to do is hide their IP under shill companies, and they've got instant protection. ...and don't think they won't do it if it is an issue.
It would be an awfully good antidote to Sun's N1, which aims to replace large numbers of systems administrators with a little program that Sun wrote. ;)
At least, that's their goal, anyhow.
Original message: here
.5 seconds).
;)
(Probably will not be available in the future after the migration.)
My reply:
I'm sure I could do better with some tweaking. I benchmarked against the same URL as the original tester. But then again, the URL probably has more data attached now, and there is less traffic on the server.
I did the ab command:
ab -c 200 -n 1000
The result was 11952 kbits of traffic received.
(Assuming 1kbyte=8kbits. Ab gives results in kbytes/second, so I'm multiplying the results by 8 to get kbits.)
Then, I took two different E10ks in two different datacenters with semi-diverse paths to brak. Woah! One had a duplex issue. I fixed it on the fly. I ran the same command on both of them at *about* the same time (+/-
Server #1: 6138kbits/sec
Server #2: 6556kbits/sec
TOTAL 1+2: 12694kbits/sec
At the very same time, within those datacenter's networks, I browsed other (non-slashdot) off-site web pages during the test with no problem... bandwidth was ample to the outside world. I used a third connection (local ISP) to visit brak with a web browser. Brak wasn't serving pages during the test. Although not scientific, what this tells me is that the limitation was at the Slashdot test server farm.
The maximum throughput of the new servers is in the *neighborhood* of 12Mbps for dynamic pages. Requests per second under high load (in several tests) was a low number approaching 20 requests/second.
I did a quick test against a story of about the same size on the live production slashdot. (Sorry, scientific curiousity... I did lower the count, though, to minimize impact.) The transfer rate was a bit higher... 12896kbps. Requests per second was lower... around 13. But then again, it does have a greater load on it right now and people actually using it.
So those are my results.
Bigoted summary: You need a better server farm for your dynamic pages. Have you considered an E10k farm with large cached fiber storage towers and big network pipes?
You'll find a few of these posts on the brak server itself (when it comes back to life). The code went something like this:
/ 2028219&mode=thread&tid=124" & [--- Remove the extra space in the middle ---]
while [ 1 ]
do
wget "http://brak.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/29
echo "hello"
done
I run that on an Ultra Enterprise 10000 with a 100mbit/full network drop (not the best network connection but my gigabit ether boxes were doing "real" work). Because this system had 4gb of RAM in it, Maxusers was very high, which resulted in the maxprocs being very high. And the kernel seemed to work very well under that kind of pressure.
Then, for fun, add in another box or two. Presto! Instant simulated Slashdot effect. But then again, I happen to be using a MASSIVE network connection from a very well-known telco. So that gives me a big advantage over most people.
Lesson learned: Wow. I can slashdot Slashdot itself.