Take a postgresql database, run "BEGIN TRANSACTION; SELECT * FROM products" (where products is something referenced everywhere) and leave it like that. It'll work fine, while MSSQL will grind to a halt.
Every row locking database has dire warnings in the documentation about keeping transactions as short as possible, while with postgresql many people set up psql to automatically start a transaction and keep it until the user manually commits or rollbacks.
In "databases" like mySQL (note, MS SQL Server is included here as well) during a transaction locks pile up, as rows are modified in-place. The result is that it's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot, as if one process is updating a row, another wanting to read it has to wait until it's done. This results in rather lousy concurrency. If you're unlucky enough that a transaction happens to progress slowly while holding locks somewhere important, it can easily lead to the whole database grinding to a halt. Other processes wait for the slow transaction, new ones wait for the previous ones, etc.
In postgres, readers don't block readers, and don't block writers either. Writers only block each other when accessing the same row. Concurrency is *much* better, and you can do backups by simply doing a SELECT * FROM table. Try to pull that one off on a large mySQL or MS SQL database, and the whole system will grind to a halt until your query is done.
The price to pay for that is vacuuming the database, but in current versions it's automatic and usually doesn't require extra attention.
First of all, sudo is just a normal application, that can be replaced. Second, there's PAM, which allows you to plug pretty much anything into the security system. You can replace the mechanism for password entry, authenticate with a fingerprint or an USB flash drive, etc, and have it all automatically integrate with existent software -- you don't even need to patch tools like su and sudo to accept different authentication methods, as it's handled through PAM.
Same goes for firewalling, nothing stops you from building whatever UI you want to talk to netfilter. You can ignore iptables completely, which is just an userspace tool.
Then the kernel has a whole system of security hooks which is used by things like SELinux. New security models can be integrated.
What part of "the EU has Microsoft by the balls" don't you understand?
In previous discussions there have been speculations of that the EU could decide to dissolve MS in EU territory if they refused to cooperate, and people argued that the outcome would be a huge mess. But now they have a less drastic alternative that'd be still very painful for MS: Forbid releasing Vista until they're happy with it.
It's perfect, Vista's release is nowhere near critical for the EU, but MS would really feel the hit.
I bet that a good percentage of americans living on other countries also would like the local government to be more like the one in America. I don't think there's anything strange about people used to live in a specific culture wanting things to be just like at their original country.
I bet that you can find chileans living abroad who would have loved it if Pinochet relocated there. Some people can be very strange.
That some companies have a deal with the hard disk manufacturer that they'll ship only the drive's cover when it fails, and destroy the rest. Not 100% sure if this is possible, but if your reason for wanting to wipe the drives is getting a warranty replacement, you might want to consider that.
Otherwise, use thermite, and lots of it. It's cheap and fun.
Ok, then you're way too attached to the old times. Nobody I know gives a damn about a couple percent extra overhead in network traffic (especially when the available bandwidth keeps growing, and my ISP upgrades it for free once in a while), however, everybody loves the idea of getting rid of NAT, having a/48 for themselves, automatic address configuration, and lots of other nice things that come with IPv6. Probably also lower ping times, due to improved routing. I wish they also upgraded the port numbers to 32 bits, but ah well.
IPv6 means your TCP packets will get 20 bytes larger. That means that your downloads will take about 1.5% longer. Oh the horror!
I'm guessing you haven't been using computers for very long.
Remember the mess with hard disk size limits? First it was 528MB limit, because some moron had to be clever and pack data as tightly as possible using ridiculously little space for the CHS addressing mode. Of course, they didn't learn their lesson, so through various hacks we then went through 2GB, 3GB, 4GB, 8GB, 30GB and 128GB limits, plus some filesystem size related ones. *Finally*, with LBA48 the limit was upgraded enough not to be reached in the near future, and all sane filesystems have maximum sizes that shouldn't be reached any time soon as well.
But here you go, finally somebody gets it and allocates so much space that we should never ever run out of it, and morons come out of the woodwork and complain that 128 bit addressing is overkill, completely forgetting the huge mess there was with hard disks, with the associated crap like the Ontrack disk manager.
Don't contradict me if you don't know what you are talking about. It's in the TOS. Yeah, I bet the TOS also says something about reverse engineering, which has zero validity in Europe. Just because the TOS says it, doesn't mean it has legal weight.
No shit. That has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Linden Lab claims that Lindens aren't currency because they are these "units of license" instead. That's great, I can also claim the moon is made of cheese, but that doesn't make it true. Whether L$ is legally currency or not, and whether you can sue for loss of it depends on what the court says, not what the TOS does.
The only thing that works that way in SL is the charges for uploads and ratings, and those are tiny. The actual payments for resource usage such as tier must be paid in USD. If you earn L$ and sell it, Linden Labs will then hold some of that converted cash for you so that you can transfer to paypal or use it to pay your tier, but that can't be done directly in L$.
L$ is used mainly between residents to trade goods. What the company charges is almost entirely in USD excepting very tiny bits of payment that are there to discourage people from uploading GBs of textures more than anything else.
Sure, for example, automated programs. Screen scraping, automatic downloading of backups, transferring data that's not HTML at all (such as DAV used for SVN repositories), that sort of things. Those tasks expect the operation to fail. HTTP is used for a lot more than showing the pages to the end user.
Another example is email. If you misspell the domain name, and it doesn't exist, the mail immediately will fail to deliver and bounce. If the server is there but doesn't respond to requests, your mail server assume the other server is down, and will be periodically trying to deliver the mail. Your mail server might send you a message that your mail is being delayed, but this won't happen for a while (easily several hours), and it doesn't tell you anything useful.
Back when the dancemonkeyboy thing was new, I extracted Ballmer's "Whooo! Whoooooo!" from the video, and replaced the "microsoft sound" with it. Seemed a lot more appropiate.
Linux kernels are pretty much interchangeable. Distro patches tend to be things like bugfixes that didn't get integrated into the stable tree yet, various little features that aren't necessarily good enough for the main kernel but still wanted in the distribution, things like grsecurity that are unlikely to get into the mainline because they're weird or too specialized.
For instance, patches added by a distribution that I've seen have been things like bluesmoke (provides ECC RAM support), SMART support for SATA disks, and bootsplash (pretty graphical boot screen). Things like that don't really make the kernel very different, and are mostly there because somebody want them now (say, people that run servers).
Then you have distributions like Debian that are obsessed with stability. Rather than using new versions they backport fixes to the version they originally shipped.
I've never seen a Linux distribution that wouldn't boot if you installed the vanilla kernel on it. The Gentoo version works just fine on Debian, etc. I doubt the same holds for the BSDs.
Fine, VB and C are somewhat bad languages to compare. Pick anything else in its place, Perl or PHP if we're talking about a website for instance. Point still stands.
Here's a real world example to you: VB6. Thousands of corporate internal programs are written in it. And there's no more support. It's dead. Now all those companies have to rewrite their code, or keep using it and hope it still runs on Vista or whatever comes after that. If Vista happens to break something important (say, ADO, or some big vital third party component) you'll be stuck in a very nasty situation.
Compare with say, C. MS may drop their C compiler, but so what? You have lots of others to choose from. It might require minor changes to make it build on GCC, but it's something perfectly doable without rewriting the whole thing in the beginning. Should C disappear completely and GCC development end, the source will still be there. If something prevents GCC from working on a new system you can fix it.
My apologies, but your site has all the "atmosphere" of a waste incineration plant (the one we had here stunk so badly that living right next to a trash dump would have been a vast improvement).
It's nearly unreadable, some browsers render it really slowly (scrolling lags badly in firefox), and I can't easily tell what's a link and what not. Ugh. If I had came across it in other circumstances I wouldn't even have had taken the time to notice there's music on it, as I'd have closed it 1 second after it loaded.
Your calculator could be internally using more precision than it can display. If you try that division several times, then multiply back eventually you'll get something quite different than what you started from. Only needs enough iterations.
I just googled around, and while no price seems to be quoted on the page, a posting in a newsgroup mentions this thing costing $1200. Right. For that price I can get the VIA board, plus a full upgrade to my computer. And my Tyan Tiger MPX which cost about $250 contains a RNG as well.
For a practical solution, I'd just get a VIA Nehemiah CPU. The later ones have an embedded RNG, and do AES at truly amazing speeds. The actual CPU performance is quite bad compared to pretty much anything else, but it makes a nice quiet box if you don't need vast amounts of CPU power.
And besides, why the emphasis on shielding the camera? You'd think that for a RNG interference is good as it adds more randomness.
I switched to Gentoo as well, but Debian definitely holds an advantage here, as Gentoo takes a lot of disk space even for a minimum install due to the development tools.
At home, Debian has been relegated to the firewall, which has no hard disk and runs from a CompactFlash to IDE adapter. The small size of the minimum install comes very useful there.
Slashdot Mirror
And row locking is exactly the problem.
Take a postgresql database, run "BEGIN TRANSACTION; SELECT * FROM products" (where products is something referenced everywhere) and leave it like that. It'll work fine, while MSSQL will grind to a halt.
Every row locking database has dire warnings in the documentation about keeping transactions as short as possible, while with postgresql many people set up psql to automatically start a transaction and keep it until the user manually commits or rollbacks.
The serial type in postgresql is the same as AUTO_INCREMENT in mysql
You've got to consider concurrent queries.
In "databases" like mySQL (note, MS SQL Server is included here as well) during a transaction locks pile up, as rows are modified in-place. The result is that it's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot, as if one process is updating a row, another wanting to read it has to wait until it's done. This results in rather lousy concurrency. If you're unlucky enough that a transaction happens to progress slowly while holding locks somewhere important, it can easily lead to the whole database grinding to a halt. Other processes wait for the slow transaction, new ones wait for the previous ones, etc.
In postgres, readers don't block readers, and don't block writers either. Writers only block each other when accessing the same row. Concurrency is *much* better, and you can do backups by simply doing a SELECT * FROM table. Try to pull that one off on a large mySQL or MS SQL database, and the whole system will grind to a halt until your query is done.
The price to pay for that is vacuuming the database, but in current versions it's automatic and usually doesn't require extra attention.
Linux security is very customizable.
First of all, sudo is just a normal application, that can be replaced. Second, there's PAM, which allows you to plug pretty much anything into the security system. You can replace the mechanism for password entry, authenticate with a fingerprint or an USB flash drive, etc, and have it all automatically integrate with existent software -- you don't even need to patch tools like su and sudo to accept different authentication methods, as it's handled through PAM.
Same goes for firewalling, nothing stops you from building whatever UI you want to talk to netfilter. You can ignore iptables completely, which is just an userspace tool.
Then the kernel has a whole system of security hooks which is used by things like SELinux. New security models can be integrated.
What part of "the EU has Microsoft by the balls" don't you understand?
In previous discussions there have been speculations of that the EU could decide to dissolve MS in EU territory if they refused to cooperate, and people argued that the outcome would be a huge mess. But now they have a less drastic alternative that'd be still very painful for MS: Forbid releasing Vista until they're happy with it.
It's perfect, Vista's release is nowhere near critical for the EU, but MS would really feel the hit.
What's surprising about that?
I bet that a good percentage of americans living on other countries also would like the local government to be more like the one in America. I don't think there's anything strange about people used to live in a specific culture wanting things to be just like at their original country.
I bet that you can find chileans living abroad who would have loved it if Pinochet relocated there. Some people can be very strange.
That some companies have a deal with the hard disk manufacturer that they'll ship only the drive's cover when it fails, and destroy the rest. Not 100% sure if this is possible, but if your reason for wanting to wipe the drives is getting a warranty replacement, you might want to consider that.
Otherwise, use thermite, and lots of it. It's cheap and fun.
Ok, then you're way too attached to the old times. Nobody I know gives a damn about a couple percent extra overhead in network traffic (especially when the available bandwidth keeps growing, and my ISP upgrades it for free once in a while), however, everybody loves the idea of getting rid of NAT, having a /48 for themselves, automatic address configuration, and lots of other nice things that come with IPv6. Probably also lower ping times, due to improved routing. I wish they also upgraded the port numbers to 32 bits, but ah well.
IPv6 means your TCP packets will get 20 bytes larger. That means that your downloads will take about 1.5% longer. Oh the horror!
I'm guessing you haven't been using computers for very long.
Remember the mess with hard disk size limits? First it was 528MB limit, because some moron had to be clever and pack data as tightly as possible using ridiculously little space for the CHS addressing mode. Of course, they didn't learn their lesson, so through various hacks we then went through 2GB, 3GB, 4GB, 8GB, 30GB and 128GB limits, plus some filesystem size related ones. *Finally*, with LBA48 the limit was upgraded enough not to be reached in the near future, and all sane filesystems have maximum sizes that shouldn't be reached any time soon as well.
But here you go, finally somebody gets it and allocates so much space that we should never ever run out of it, and morons come out of the woodwork and complain that 128 bit addressing is overkill, completely forgetting the huge mess there was with hard disks, with the associated crap like the Ontrack disk manager.
Don't contradict me if you don't know what you are talking about. It's in the TOS.
Yeah, I bet the TOS also says something about reverse engineering, which has zero validity in Europe. Just because the TOS says it, doesn't mean it has legal weight.
No shit. That has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Linden Lab claims that Lindens aren't currency because they are these "units of license" instead.
That's great, I can also claim the moon is made of cheese, but that doesn't make it true. Whether L$ is legally currency or not, and whether you can sue for loss of it depends on what the court says, not what the TOS does.
"units of license"? Not really.
The only thing that works that way in SL is the charges for uploads and ratings, and those are tiny. The actual payments for resource usage such as tier must be paid in USD. If you earn L$ and sell it, Linden Labs will then hold some of that converted cash for you so that you can transfer to paypal or use it to pay your tier, but that can't be done directly in L$.
L$ is used mainly between residents to trade goods. What the company charges is almost entirely in USD excepting very tiny bits of payment that are there to discourage people from uploading GBs of textures more than anything else.
Sure, for example, automated programs. Screen scraping, automatic downloading of backups, transferring data that's not HTML at all (such as DAV used for SVN repositories), that sort of things. Those tasks expect the operation to fail. HTTP is used for a lot more than showing the pages to the end user.
Another example is email. If you misspell the domain name, and it doesn't exist, the mail immediately will fail to deliver and bounce. If the server is there but doesn't respond to requests, your mail server assume the other server is down, and will be periodically trying to deliver the mail. Your mail server might send you a message that your mail is being delayed, but this won't happen for a while (easily several hours), and it doesn't tell you anything useful.
"Guepardo" is cheetah, "guarrete" is from "guarro", which would be "filthy" or "obscene".
Back when the dancemonkeyboy thing was new, I extracted Ballmer's "Whooo! Whoooooo!" from the video, and replaced the "microsoft sound" with it. Seemed a lot more appropiate.
Linux kernels are pretty much interchangeable. Distro patches tend to be things like bugfixes that didn't get integrated into the stable tree yet, various little features that aren't necessarily good enough for the main kernel but still wanted in the distribution, things like grsecurity that are unlikely to get into the mainline because they're weird or too specialized.
For instance, patches added by a distribution that I've seen have been things like bluesmoke (provides ECC RAM support), SMART support for SATA disks, and bootsplash (pretty graphical boot screen). Things like that don't really make the kernel very different, and are mostly there because somebody want them now (say, people that run servers).
Then you have distributions like Debian that are obsessed with stability. Rather than using new versions they backport fixes to the version they originally shipped.
I've never seen a Linux distribution that wouldn't boot if you installed the vanilla kernel on it. The Gentoo version works just fine on Debian, etc. I doubt the same holds for the BSDs.
Fine, VB and C are somewhat bad languages to compare. Pick anything else in its place, Perl or PHP if we're talking about a website for instance. Point still stands.
Are you kidding?
Here's a real world example to you: VB6. Thousands of corporate internal programs are written in it. And there's no more support. It's dead. Now all those companies have to rewrite their code, or keep using it and hope it still runs on Vista or whatever comes after that. If Vista happens to break something important (say, ADO, or some big vital third party component) you'll be stuck in a very nasty situation.
Compare with say, C. MS may drop their C compiler, but so what? You have lots of others to choose from. It might require minor changes to make it build on GCC, but it's something perfectly doable without rewriting the whole thing in the beginning. Should C disappear completely and GCC development end, the source will still be there. If something prevents GCC from working on a new system you can fix it.
My apologies, but your site has all the "atmosphere" of a waste incineration plant (the one we had here stunk so badly that living right next to a trash dump would have been a vast improvement).
It's nearly unreadable, some browsers render it really slowly (scrolling lags badly in firefox), and I can't easily tell what's a link and what not. Ugh. If I had came across it in other circumstances I wouldn't even have had taken the time to notice there's music on it, as I'd have closed it 1 second after it loaded.
After all, it's got all that massive parallelism and capability of continuing working after parts are damaged and even routing around damage.
Second Life. You can buy currency, and you can sell it back. Some people even make a living on it.
You can't touch the cash in your bank account either, but do you think it's somehow less real than if it was physically in paper somewhere?
Your calculator could be internally using more precision than it can display. If you try that division several times, then multiply back eventually you'll get something quite different than what you started from. Only needs enough iterations.
I just googled around, and while no price seems to be quoted on the page, a posting in a newsgroup mentions this thing costing $1200. Right. For that price I can get the VIA board, plus a full upgrade to my computer. And my Tyan Tiger MPX which cost about $250 contains a RNG as well.
For a practical solution, I'd just get a VIA Nehemiah CPU. The later ones have an embedded RNG, and do AES at truly amazing speeds. The actual CPU performance is quite bad compared to pretty much anything else, but it makes a nice quiet box if you don't need vast amounts of CPU power.
And besides, why the emphasis on shielding the camera? You'd think that for a RNG interference is good as it adds more randomness.
I switched to Gentoo as well, but Debian definitely holds an advantage here, as Gentoo takes a lot of disk space even for a minimum install due to the development tools.
At home, Debian has been relegated to the firewall, which has no hard disk and runs from a CompactFlash to IDE adapter. The small size of the minimum install comes very useful there.