If you knew how to spell Nevada it might not be so hard to find work. [as well as existent, coming, and learn to use you're instead of your and use 'it's' correctly].
I may be in the technology field. I may push bits instead of a pencil, but communication skills are essential.
Now to address anyone with a job right now and what they should do. In my assessment my opinion is 'milk the cow until it dies' unless a guaranteed opportunity comes directly to you for more money in a less expensive location with a company with a very attractive balance sheet. California is difficult, but so is taking a regression in salary. I do believe California will have a severe problem with dealing with the twenty to thirty billion dollar state deficit without raising already alarmingly high state income and sales tax.
I would also like to point out that the dot com bust is an all too convenient scapegoat for the current situation in America (rising unemployment, deflation in wages in certain markets, deficits in state and federal government due to massive capital gain revenue being lost coupled with increased spending in reaction to sudden new 'needs' in national security, etc). Surprisingly, the economy is still growing, just more slowly when compared to they was it was. Politics and the stock market somehow get coalesced in with 'the economy.' Oversimplification is a dangerous tool the masses use upon themselves. Your gloom and doom is a reflection of your confidence, and whatever the source of self deprecation, it tends to have a pronounced effect on nations as a whole, but it's not enough to snuff out entrepreneurial, scientific or philanthropic spirit (thank goodness).
Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, November 28, 2002
Fed Report Says US Economy Growing Slowly The US economy is growing slowly but business conditions are patchy and the jobs market is soft, the US Federal Reserve (Fed) said in a report Wednesday. The US economy is growing slowly but business conditions are patchy and the jobs market is soft, the US Federal Reserve (Fed) said in a report Wednesday. "Economic activity grew slowly, on balance, in late October and early November," said the report known as the "Beige Book" for the color of its cover. It said that buying activity continued into mid-November with six of the Fed's regional bank districts reporting improvement in general merchandise sales despite the fact that auto sales were down across the country. "Service industry activity was generally sluggish," the report said. Manufacturing remained soft in most districts and business investment was limited. "Most Reserve banks reported nearly steady prices at both the consumer and producer levels, with the exception of shipping charges, which have risen in the wake of the West Coast port disruptions." The report will be used by Fed policy-makers when they meet on Dec. 10 to consider whether to cut interest rates again to spur the US economy. With a string of stronger-than-expected economic reports, many economists believe the US Fed will leave its target for overnight bank lending unchanged at a 41-year low of 1.25 percent. The Fed cut the federal funds rate by a half percentage point at its last meeting on Nov. 6.
I have evaluated file systems of late, and wish only to express the need for more attentiveness in one's file system. Being nonchalant about this can lead to "bad situations."
I just finished evaluating JFS 1.0.24 for Linux. My opinion of 1.0.24 and JFS is IBM is doing the port as a courtesy to AIX and OS/2 migrators. It is extremely robust, but slow, 2x slower than XFS or Reiser. I had maximal R/W activity (tar untar create deletes in while loops, Xwin started, downloading via ftp, scp, etc) and power off hot several times, never saw anything but "file system clean."
I am in process or evaluating XFS 1.2pre3. 1.1 XFS for Linux is unreal. It does "everything," it has done it for years, its high performance, has a robust heritage and is all around very good. I have cold killed it, inserted and removed hot swap drives while running, while doing fairly absurd amounts of activity on the test box. Not using this file system is a shame. The release patched kernels, one catering to the Redhat droids and the other is a vanilla with their magic patched in. This isn't a Marcelo kludge either, these are professionals who care greatly in the stability of their product and do a great job in their little cornel of the kernel. The Mandrake and SuSE kernels have this stuff patched in, along with extended attributes and ACLs, and the XFS kernel only has ACL and DMAPI support, and the JFS patches won't apply clean to their kernel, but on thing is true of SGI's version: It actually compiles. The Mandrake 9 and SuSE 8.1 kernels seem not able to compile outside of their proprietary environments. I am upset about this. Typical second tier vendors who fail to bring coherency to fragmented set of projects loosely and informally known as the nebulous "Linux."
EXT3 is a dirty hack (EXT2 with fake journaling). I don't know how EXT3 gets high performance marks - ever - my experience has suggest awful and inconsistent performance with several nasty changes made to e2fsprogs in succession to address potentially severe problems. Its insulting to enterprise customers that RedHat touts this garbage as a journaling filesystem. Reiser is a UFO, and is easily corruptible, and I fail to understand its wide use and early integration in the kernel - my only guess is its simplicity required the least cleaning up of the kludged Linux file system underpinnings. I also get sick to death of Hans blaming everyone and their mother while the guys at XFS and JFS quietly patch away the problems, while Hans whines. Hans did have a good point about the broken RedHat compiler back when it was an issue. I base my opinion of EXTx, and Reiser based on experience. I am appalled, and disappointed at the lack of respect the Linux kernel maintainers have given to XFS. The best of the litter being the last to go in - typical, and Appalling.
UFS+logging on Solaris and UFS+S on FreeBSD are both superior. I have never seen these go haywire. Ever. Interestingly, UFS+S is apparently the 'softcore' journaling method that EXT3 uses, but its far less damageable by empirical determination, and its clearly faster and runs more smoothly. Anytime Veritas appears, which ironically is included in SCO, and is available for Solaris and NT based OSs, things come along quite nicely.
Recently OS X added journaling to the already pathetic HFS+ filesystem. My experience with Mac OS 10.X, including 10.2 has been horrible. I think its inferior, the Mach kernel was deprecated by its progenitors, CMU, in 1994. I think the FreeBSD userland is outdated. I think HFS+ is a pathetic file system and fail to understand why they don't use UFS, but if you have ever tried using it with OS X you know it's not "finished." [defined as: nothing work if UFS is used - don't try and say otherwise] Adding journaling to HFS+ will only slow down an already horrifically bloated and underpowered platform. I find it laughable Apple hardware does not get submitted to www.spec.org, but I have CPU2000 results for PPC 1.25GHz, and of course it is so horrible they can't submit - everything including the SPARC beats it hands down. I also though having to have OS 9 installed on a separate partition as OS X for classic to work properly laughable. I base my deprecation of the Apple efforts on real life experience and objective comparison. I only have to convince myself, but for those who can't easily see where the truth lies on the speed of a Max vs. a PC, my condolences to any significant other you might be lucky to have.
FreeBSD 5. UFS2 will probably be one of the best filesystems to ever see the light of day, and vinum will be there as well.
[I hate Eugenia Dork Loli and her horrible crap "editing" and "journalism," but there are interviews with Steve Best [JFS],Hans Reiser, and Nathan Scott [XFS], held prisoner on OS"News" (more like OSCrapConjecture), very informative; http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=69 ; with some more Journaling info here, http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue55/florido.html showing how Robust XFS is]
When examining the facts, the superiority of XFS becomes clear, and I advocate its use, it's the responsible thing to do. I have recently beaten heavily on a 2.4.19 stock + XFS pre3 of release 1.2 merged in. I can tell you my experience with the Dell 1650 and constant filesystem abuse that the filesystem is that last thing I would worry about in that kernel. I am eagerly awaiting the release of the 2.4.20 kernel, typically long over due as we seem to have an absentee maintainer that rarely speaks, however, upon its release I believe the XFS 1.2 stable will be merged in or completed and I will have a configuration good to go for use on the order of years.
While I may have harsh words from certain practices and sometimes people, I find XFS and the 2.4.19 kernel to be acceptably stable. I ran that 1650 through the washing machine fairly rigorously, and besides the idiotic spurious " Warning - running *really* short on DMA buffers" errors (which caused a flame war on LKML), it seems to be a useful kernel. The RedHat 2.4.18-17.7x kernel, by the way, is the worst most untested pile I have ever seen. What is wrong with these people? Several net drives with no working promiscuous mode, kernel panics, the list is endless.
Size does matter;p. So it is important to point out that a small effective sphere of 8T is much less impressive than a gigantic one of lesser field strength. The Earth relatively "weak" magnetic field has an impressively large area of efficacy that HAMs can attest to. HAARP and the aurora borealis show how large scale weak fields can, if you were to find the total potential the field provides rather than its peak strength, do huge tasks.
Is that the best way to explain it? "if you were to summate all the potential the field provides" rather than look at peak values?
Tesla. 1 Tesla is 10,000 Gauss. Ten thousand gauss equals 1 Tesla. The earth's magnetic field has been calculated to be 5x10-5 Tesla, thus 1.0 Tesla is 20,000 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. A refrigerator magnet typically equals 0.01-0.035 Tesla.
Field effect is fairly well understood and things don't have to be magnetic to be affected by magnetic field, as show by the frog and the water.
I find the use of a superconductor (you can induce a charge around this solenoid and the charge will remain forever creating a permanent magnetic field so long as the superconducting material is kept cold enough, so no perpetual machines for you mad quack scientists) quite impressive. Now to pin point a superconductors that operates at a reasonable temperature, not 138K@1ATM.
The world record Tc of 138 K is now held by a thallium-doped, mercuric-cuprate comprised of the elements Mercury, Thallium, Barium, Calcium, Copper and Oxygen. The Tc of this ceramic superconductor was confirmed by Dr. Ron Goldfarb at the National Institute of Standards and Technology-Colorado in February of 1994. Under extreme pressure its Tc can be coaxed up even higher - approximately 25 to 30 degrees more at 300,000 atmospheres.
Anyways, most of these super X men magneto stories are urban legends brought into the world by the same pseudo science types that concoct warp nacelles and wormholes, I hope these are possible and am unable to prove or disprove these constructs. I hate to piss on the parade, people, let's start with more plausible things. But someone recently was crushed an oxygen tank in a hospital near an MRI (which is an application of NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging) because the tank wasn't properly secured against the wall. I don't buy the scissors in the pocket bull. Because an 8 Tesla field would make short work of and kill people with pacemakers, so because of this (2 million Americans have pacemakers so it's not exceedingly rare) they post all sorts warnings all over the damn place where high field magnets are stored. Also there are permittivity issues; "space" is a good insulator for fields, electrical gravitational just about any disturbance the field tends to rapidly loose strength. So all you Dr. Evil types thinking of ways to abuse a 16 Tesla field think again.
Seriously though, would be scientists and sky watchers x-filers conspiracy theorists and general bullshit artists could do so much better for their cause if they were better educated. In a network of words, rife with information, a whole internetwork that sprung forth from intellectual endeavors, it amazes me the levels of pseudo-science, quackery, pseudo-intellectualism bullshit and other assorted trash that ended up turning a potentially awesome source of information a better source of misinformation. Would be genius who are kings in their own minds are allowed to pump trash at an alarming rate and the hallucinate hoards of drones bleating like sheeple to lick up every last word of quack science they promulgate.
Cobalt and nickel are magnetic, as well as Iron. There are apparently ceramics and other materials that have ordered magnetic. Ordered is an important distinction. In general, ordered magnetic materials are mostly based around the transition metals (there are others besides Co, Ni and Fe), and the rare earths. All rather heavy.
If you want to use the term "magnetic" to mean something that responds to a magnetic field, I would love to see a material that isn't magnetic.
ferromagnetism - Iron, nickel, cobalt and some of the rare earths (gadolinium, dysprosium) exhibit a unique magnetic behavior which is called ferromagnetism because iron (ferric) is the most common and most dramatic example. Ferromagnetic materials exhibit a long-range ordering phenomenon at the atomic level which causes the unpaired electron spins to line up parallel with each other in a region called a domain. Ferromagnets will tend to stay magnetized to some extent after being subjected to an external magnetic field. This tendency to "remember their magnetic history" is called hysteresis.
antiferromagnetic Applied to a ferromagnetic (in the wide sense) substance in which the magnetic lattices are magnetized in exactly equal and opposite directions. Such a substance does not have an external magnetic field in its pure form, but a distorted lattice may result in a parasitic magnetization. This occurs below a certain temperature, called the Néel temperature, when an ordered array of atomic magnetic moments spontaneously forms in which alternate moments have opposite directions. There is therefore no net resultant magnetic moment in the absence of an applied field. In manganese fluoride, for example, this antiparallel arrangement occurs below a Néel temperature of 72 K. Below this temperature the spontaneous ordering opposes the normal tendency of the magnetic moments to align with the applied field. Above the Néel temperature the substance is paramagnetic.
ferrimagnetism a type of magnetism exhibited by the ferrites [[defined as: A member of a class of mixed oxides MO.Fe2O3, where M is a metal such as cobalt, manganese, nickel, or zinc. The ferrites are ceramic materials that show either ferrimagnetism or ferromagnetism, but are not electrical conductors. For this reason they are used in high-frequency circuits as magnetic cores]]. In these materials the magnetic moments of adjacent ions are antiparallel and of unequal strength, or the number of magnetic moments in one direction is greater than those in the opposite direction. By suitable choice of rare-earth ions in the ferrite lattices it is possible to design ferrimagnetic substances with specific magnetizations for use in electronic components
paramagnetism the atoms or molecules of the substance have net orbital or spin magnetic moments that are capable of being aligned in the direction of the applied field. They therefore have a positive (but small) susceptibility and a relative permeability slightly in excess of one. Paramagnetism occurs in all atoms and molecules with unpaired electrons; e.g. free atoms, free radicals, and compounds of transition metals containing ions with unfilled electron shells. It also occurs in metals as a result of the magnetic moments associated with the spins of the conducting electrons.
diamagnetism the magnetization is in the opposite direction to that of the applied field, i.e. the susceptibility is negative. Although all substances are diamagnetic, it is a weak form of magnetism and may be masked by other, stronger, forms. It results from changes induced in the orbits of electrons in the atoms of a substance by the applied field, the direction of the change (in accordance with Lenz's law) opposing the applied flux. There is thus a weak negative susceptibility and a relative permeability that is slightly less than one.
This wasn't mean to be snarky;p Just and espousing on magnetism. I like magnets.
Relative? Try subjective. I have become accustomed to things taking a certain period of time. I have become cognizant through the use of Macs, PCs and Unix boxes what time things get completed in. I hold the opinion that Macs are not worth the premium they command, particularly if you are AGNOSTIC towards operating systems. I use GUI's to frig with the web [browse the web, chop up pictures], all WORK that I do is done in terminal mode. I'd rather use a junk PC than a junk PPC for "fun". Games, PC. "Free" software / shareware. PC. Warez. PC. [Lets face it, I can not afford to buy myself a HOUSE yet, let alone frittering money on software that doesn't help me make money, the concept of home users paying large sums of money for software that they don't use for business/making money is absurd]. That being said, I am of the opinion that "junk PCs" are better serving their purpose. If it's not a Unix workstation, and OS X on Mot-PPC falls drastically short in my opinion of being a member of that archetype, I want a Junk PC. Do I care about mythical theoretical performance on Photoshop? No. Do I get viruses? No. Do I really need a PC or a Mot-PPC to make a living as a "computer person?" No. it's a home-Nintendo-replacement, a fun time-sink - to me.
It is not the OS's fault entirely.
- Old FreeBSD userland [3.x]. Was it compiled with -O2? Is -O2 supported on PPC stably? Is gcc capable of producing decent PPC binaries or if Apple had the know-how (see: Sun, Microsoft, Intel, Borland) to make a compiler, would it be better? Should Apple be helping the gcc team help PPC along, or deprecate Mot-PPC with something more optimizable?
- Horribly outdated kernel - microkernel is out! (Laugh at Andrew Tannenbaum , he flamed Linus about MK vs. Monolithic/modular, look who uses Minux, look who uses Linux) [note: NT isn't a true microkernel, and solaris/linux/freebsd certainly aren't, its closest relative is HURD]. Mach was dumped by the progenitors of it, CMU, in 1994. Mach to me is very silly. Linux has hackers in and out as does FreeBSD. No one hacks the Mach kernel for fun. No one gives a rat shit about Darwin. Is there anything compelling about using the Mach kernel over Linux or FreeBSD? (Except Steve Jobs zealotry concerning perpetuating the failed NeXT way of doing things.)
PPC. Its SPEC marks aren't ever published, and when SPEC is run on a Mot-PPC, the results are horrible.
It is a clear combination that makes for a rather unpleasant experience. Let's face it, Unix aint no BeOS or RT-OS, its thick. Context switches are expensive. Memory protection is real. Userland activities are fairly "slow" (note NFS being in the Linux kernel). It is protected, extensible, capable, generally secure, granular, multiuser, portable, but it is not a speed demon. It values other things before speed.
Couple Unix's thickness with Mot-PPC's clear inferiority in terms of general (not vector I'm not listening lalalalalala I don't care Photoshop lalalalala) performance, it makes for a slow concoction.
I have a G4-500-1MB+1GB ram and a new 7200FDB Maxtor with a new ATI Radeon 7000 32MB with quartz enabled I built out for a friend as reference. I don't want to hear any claims of greatness, I have verified by running Linux, Darwin (to see a lean *BSD run - and lean it is - it does almost nothing fresh off the CD), Netbsd and OS X on same-era PC, PPCs and other hardware (namely the sparc;) that Apple is not primarily concerned with speed. If you buy a top of the line PC and a top of the line Mot-PPC at any point in time - now run SPEC. Run "openssl speed". Run a kernel compile and time it. Run the same hard drive, the same amount of memory, the same video card, but only have a different CPUI and the result always comes up the same. You get less for more money on Mot-PPC machines. Sorry.
Sun can get away with a laggy SPARC. They offer a LOT of reasons why you would ignore single CPU performance, and continue to utilize that platform [scalability, support, development platform, reliability]. Apple? No way Jose. As time goes on, and as feature sets converge, and more and more of what makes a Good OS ceases to be Novel, Apple's schloctkey hardware performance will come under increasing scrutiny.
I beg to differ about NDS on Windows ever being a problem.
I have no great love for Windows. Novell, I happen to like very much but it is cost prohibitive. But is NDS worth the money? Yes. Also, GroupWise is capable of driving Outlook properly, even better than my beloved OpenMail [RIP, now Samsung Contact - yeach, thanks Carly] was.
My experience since Novell 4.x (I've used it back in the bindery days as well) and NDS has been flawless. It supports DOS, WinALL, and anything else. It has native file sharing so it can appear as a Winderz box. The server is ugly as sin at the console, but it runs more reliably that one would ever imagine, I had several servers stay up for more than a year. The Novell client integration with Windows NT based operations systems is superior, supporting advanced network trashcans, robust undelete for idiots, and does interesting things like server side searches (as in, if you are looking for the word "cat" on a network file system, the server does the searching 'for you.'
Also, NDS is much more scaleable than ADS. It has the proper notion of root, it is possible to merge trunks together, if you've ever used ConsoleOne, you'll see more granularity on this directory and its objects than was ever dreamed possible, cleanly integrated and rather fast.
Is Novell run by intelligent business people? No. Are the products of incredible quality? Yes. Novell's image has been so heinously stained, with angry red color schemes, idiotic pictures of polyester clad fools running around on my console dancing or holding up red N's.
Novell needs to do only this: Change colors to blue or something, and rip out that licensing shit and start offering to replace ADS/Exchange with NDS/GroupWise for $100 bucks. All it costs them is a CD. It would cost Microsoft a lot of pain.
If you haven't given Novell a shot, please do,. You'll realize that the free stuff right now is primitive compared to NDS. Any other comments on good directory service implementations are welcome.
I just setup a Novell 6 server the other day to stay sharp with that stuff. Besides the fools in the marketing department over there, I was impressed with it. I would take a job working with Novell and Unix, but if someone wanted me to deal with Windows ADS or NT4 DS again, and not be open to Samba, I would probably not take the job or demand a premium.
Old site is down....
RvnPhnx - 2002-Oct-06 22:30 - 0 messages The old plex86 web site is no more. I was wondering how long it would take for them to take it down, but it is now--the wondering is over. In any case, this is where the work happens--so be it. I have the old cvs still, in case anybody wants to play with it. I may get it posted here, and then branched/modularized, etc.--but the development is going to focus more on the plex86-release stuff for now.
I have yet to see MAPI plug ins for GroupWise, OpenMail or Notes "emulate" an Exchange server transparently yet [I hate collaboration software so I don't keep up with it]. Give me some links to prove what you say is true. I would like the marketing creeps to get all their globally shared objects, public folders, shared calendars, etc, using Bloatus Notes or "Novel" GroopWise, maybe Bynari or Contact.
Seriously. I would think that the best selling point for any of those back ends would be first and foremost Eliminate Exchange Server from Your Back End SEAMLESSLY, which OpenMail used to proclaim loudly before Carly killed it.
And about Unix users with GroupWise and Notes. What do they use for a client for a shared Calendar? Back to the same problem Exchange has, no support for the Unix users (they offer IMAP, POP, SMTP, but not iCal, or real Outlook LAF to non Winderz users). Not in the same capacity as the users of Win32 get.
This SuSE is a failure. No MAPI plug-in, its just yet another attempt to bundle already existing services into "Exchange". And no calendaring. Its such crap. My sights are set on GroupWise or Samsung Contact (aka OpenMail) if I were begged to implement this again.
SuSE people should really back off hard with the Exchange Killing crap until they can do what Contact does. That's a feature set which half-lives up to that proclamation (a MAPI plug-in namely).
This being said. I deprecate Microsoft monopolism with regards to desktop operating system. I also strongly denounce the availability of things like Exchange Server and the other pieces of their back office attempts for any other target besides Windows operating systems. But I think they earned their monopoly when I see big companies simply ignoring the problems at hand. Brats in marketing departments have been getting Exchange littered about corporate networks with the Unix vendors sitting around scratching tiher heads. Microsoft clearly listens to customers demands first. Unix vendors throw out viable Exchange Killers like OpenMail. Carly Fiorina got some from Bill Gates in a Redmond bathroom and he told her he was her daddy and for more hanky she would have to throw out OpenMail. And she did.
I tried Notes on Linux server 5.0.X not too long ago. I tried to get it to replace Exchange in every capacity and I couldn't get it to work that way. I would like to know how, but since there are no "how to no solicit Microsoft Exchange but still make marketing lunatics happy with a fully functioning copy of outlook." There is no such document I am aware of.
Show me some facts and figures to support you claims. I do not dispute your personal observations about healthcare in Europe. How was it outside the cities? Did you bother to look? I know the infant mortality is slightly lower and the life expectancy is slightly higher, but that's coming from a country that 50 years ago had no qualms with stuffing millions of people in ovens.
Anyways, most of the medical technology is coming from here, and people flock to the USA to cutting edge, "the best of the best" medical care, and whatnot. Sure it costs money. I'm not aware of a better place in the world to deal with cancers, heart diseases - if you can pay for it, or you get on a waiting list, but its here. I don't see rich Americans flock to other countries for "good medical care."
And judging on what most Canadians say about social medicine, I'll take my chances with American PPOs, I have little faith in western medicine, sure they can stop the bleeding. But fatal illnesses are a death sentence everywhere. The USA just capitalizes on it.
Want to live longer? The most high-aged demographic is Japan, the fish eating green tea drinking Okanawans. Is the economy collapsing under the huge stress of lots of old people around - sure is. Should we young ones sacrifice our disposable income in the better part of our lives to subsidize dying people? I don't know. If you are young, you are inclined to be austere towards old people who haven't properly prepared for their own death [a guaranteed eventuality] and somehow magically old and even though it happens to everyone and we all get old a decrepit its a sudden surprise and now that I'm old everyone must be responsible for me because its the right thing to do.
Well, in case you haven't noticed, the third world is growing, the first world is shrinking. I can't afford children, not here, not Germany, not anywhere, and I'm making over 3 times the average. Is part of this due to subsidy of old people? Sure is, 7% of my pay gone for people who didn't prepare for death. Do I expect to see any of that 7%? No, because of pseudo socialism from FDR, I pay for other people's retirement and I have to pay for my own, without the prospect of subsidy. . If I was bought long term bonds/bills for all that money I put in and couldn't touch them until retirement would I have a million in the bank already? Yes. It's a corrupt slush fund. If there was a lean mean government, this wouldn't happen. And if people have more disposable income, it has been proven that in times of great economic prosperity and low taxes philanthropy goes way up. Socialists and Volvo-bike-path-Liberals talk about high taxes and responsibility, but would they care for their own dying again parents or stuff them in a nursing home? No, they get nursing home every time. They just find peace with themselves because they washed their hands of the problem by voicing out against the machine or voting for some corrupt idiot that made people vote for him single issue.
I have also heard in Engine there are statues of limitations on medical care (same as lifetime and policy pay out limits in the USA). If you are over a certain age and you get dialysis for example, you can reach a lifetime social limit, and when the society's obligation is met, if you don't pay for dialysis, plug pulled, see ya.
I can't be convinced that if I really, really needed great care for a really hard to survive illness I would want to go anywhere but the top hospital in the USA.
Christopher Reeves finger now moves. He has a broken neck. He is a rich man, he has done well, and he is giving large sums of money to cure paralysis. I refuse to believe philanthropy doesn't exist in a pure capitalist system. It's the fake socialist stuff that causes issues.
Do I trust the medical system here? No. Do I base my opinion about the system on one doctor? No, when I have a problem, I see two or three doctors. Some of them suck, some of them do great. Do I think every patient should get an MRI for every hospital visit? Yes! Is that going to cost something? YES! But here in America, I still have enough disposable cash to get the MRI, a full body scan, head scan and virtual colonoscopy is about $1000. Do they give MRIs and complete blood work if you are "paranoid" in your said country? I have been paranoid, I'm somewhat of a hypochondriac, and I have gotten complete blood work and an MRI at little cost to myself. The peace of mind is great.
I know from a friend who came from Europe what happens. Ever sniffle, sneeze cough drip-drop gastrointestinal pain costs the medical systems in the EU lots of money. Subsidized health care and social security is a huge portion of the budget in the EU nations. Do I see people here trying to find ways to retire in Sweden and burden their youth with their age and "retire in style" and get all this free shit? No. In fact, I see a lot of people here who love life, like Christopher Reeve, who advocate for a cause, and raise philanthropic (read: op in feel good money not forced tax money) interest in a cause for the love of life and liberty.
I just don't like the idea of some person's conception of the ideal being forcibly manifested. I may live in Canada, New Zealand or somewhere else someday as I am the firm believer in "don't like it? LEAVE." I haven't found a compelling reason to leave yet. I know Bush sounds silly, and Ashcroft is a fascist, and American Geopolitical policy isn't the greatest (we are not good, nor evil just as no other countries are good, nor evil, they just *ARE*, the exist, and they have a survival instincts and playing fair is back seated to survival), and the US-Reichstag may have burned, or it may have not, but if the Reichstag has burned, metaphorically, then I will live out my years somewhere else. But not for health care. For freedom.
Now don't believe the hype about the US either. If you are not fucking stupid and lazy, you can pick up a decent job for the government or an education system, with awesome retirement plans and health care, maternity leave, continuing education, education subsidy, you name it, the welfares for the taking. I find it amusing that most people who leverage this best are smart, or not from this country - they immigrate here, and they *never* leave [not that I have seen], and most of my proximal friends right now are foreign. But seriously, government jobs here are such government cheese, and if you like the Socialist way, work for the government. It's really not hard. Every single DMV, Police Station Employees (not the cops per se), City Hall, Court Clerks, Libraries, Military personnel, Government Contractors, tax exempt non profit companies and generally anyone who isn't working for a for profit business are living the great life - and having brains and working there are not mutually inclusive.
Now, I don't know about you people but an increase in seek performance that is easily 2.4 times better that the best IDE for something that occurs that many times a second, well, I'm convinced that the drive is considerably faster. Think of any "worst case" scenarios, and this extra speed is likely never to go un-wasted on a computer.
I am also in accord with alsta's skepticism that SATA will be anything but a consumer grade technology. I am an ardent supporter of Firewire and SCSI, and it clear the SCSI standard has much to offer because implementations of SCSI over IP are planned to deprecate FC in favor of iSCSI over 10GE. To me this SATA is a day late and performance short. I think it is nice we can now clean up the crap connectors, but I will not be deluded into believing that SATA has a prayer in terms of beating SCSI.
I also have seen many reviews on IDE RAID and must concur that it is nearly impossible to IDE up to single drive SCSI performance without doing some hardcore RAID-ing. I cannot provide links to support this statement, but peruse through a site like Storage Review and you can see clearly where and why and how SCSI drives cremate their IDE counterparts.
I have IDE and would buy SATA for mass cheap storage at home, but it was a sad day when PC vendors stopped offerering SCSI upgrades from the factory on their cheesier machines and Apple stopped using them by default. This essentially was the advent of the "Geo" or "Kia" of the computer world. I hate hackneyed car analogies, but in this case, as I have seen in acerbic reviews of the said cars, "Why buy this cars where there are better used ones around?", directly applies. I can think of many "used" scsi drives and how badly they destroy consumer grade stuff with ease. This is both from L&F and measure performance metrics.
IDE does not support tagged commands, and it is still unclear if SATA's implementation will be as robust as SCSI. This alsta's statement is again correct with regards to terrible simultaneous access. Try running a busy Unix box with 100s of people copying files and doing this or that, compiling crap, etc. The disk needs to be serious about handling jumpy situations. Seek time and command tagging comes in handy here.
Unfortunately larger buffers can only mask problems. There are many situations where consistency is not guaranteed, and where the cache can easily be blown. I like buffers to be there to make an already fast situations move along more regularly, like a capacitor helps regulate power. I don't like an already bad situations being masked by case specific buffering optimizations.
I will,as alsta indicates he will, continue to use SCSI as my most preferred storage bus. I cannot think of reasons not to, if I have an dumping ground for "crap" in my IDE large capacity hard drives. Also suspect is the standard being ratified over a year ago and nothing materializing yet. Also, I think the SMART works better in SCSI, I think sector sparing is essential and IDE and apparently SATA wont do that, and I like 5 year drive warranties not ONE like most IDE drives moved to now, and I liked support, and I like knowing that the company I bought the device from made an okay profit so I can get amenities like advanced replacement. It's a preferred choice, and if you can afford it, so it.
Just because you may not be able to afford it or don't think storage is not the way you should spend your hard earned money, don't knock SCSI. And certainly don't come to Slashdot and suppress other people's views on the subject.
warning: bitkeeper has a strange license, please consider it very carefully. I do not agree with the use of this license but Linux likes it and it helps development
Just an FYI for people getting into kernel stuff with RedHat-ish systems:
Follow the instructions and it will tell you how to download and install BitKeeper.
Then, clone the main Linux tree using BitKeeper:
$ cd/usr/src/linux-2.5.40 (or wherever you would like your stuff)
$ bk clone bk://linux.bkbits.net/linux-2.5
$ ln -s linux-2.5.40 linux
$ (optional if needed, ln -s linux-2.5.40 linux-2.4 ; ln -s linux-2.5.40 linux-2.5) - sometimes dists and weird driver SRPMS look for linux/include in all sorts of places
$ cd linux
$ bk -r co
Also don't forget.
-/usr/src/linux ,/usr/src/scsi ;/usr/src/asm ;/usr/src/asm-generic should all be re-linked to the right places in/usr/src/linux/include [if this is no longer necessary let me know] - make install doesn't work with grub, so you have to do your thing manually now - recommended compiler is gcc-2.9.5.3 [for 2.4 and 2.5 now], I always have extra compilers ready to go just in case. Make sure all the tools are the proper version, and that you have a recent ksymoops (if you need to do any messing around looking for problems ), modutils - etc.
If the build fails, find the offending code and remove from selection, or try to hack it if you need it.
I would like to also mention cvsup and FreeBSD. I like cvsup quite a bit and its free and open. I only wish the linux kernel was using the same method FreeBSD does. I like FreeBSD for its coherency speed and ease of maintenance, and that the kernel is released with a system for a very smooth ride. If you havent tried FreeBSD, please try it.
rsync is also very good. use it. I would also like to promote the purchasing of very cheap CDroms to get your started, and FreeBSD CD is great because you can use CVSUP to diff the whole thing with minimal bandwidth abuse.
Plextor has a new SCSI version in the works. Unfortunately quality and efficiency is secondary to volume. I personally have a Plextor 12X SCSI, and it has never burned a coaster and this was before Just Right and Burn Proof. Jörg Schilling has a fetish for Plextor as well (he writes cdrecord).
Real hardware zealots appreciate SCSI stuff in a machine. Steven peddles "Dell Dude's approved Hi Val Lite On Combo Re-Writer" but the reality of the situation is grim.
My first epiphany with regards to SCSI being superior came form this "old POS" 486 server I found lying around somewhere. But it was a SCSI system. Not that I condone dumpster diving, but when these new fangled Packard Bell pieces of crap with their feeble Pentium 90 with FDIV [PENTIUM - Produces Erroneous Numbers Through Incorrect Understanding of Math] error and cheesy IDE hard disks, looking around for real alternatives isn't a bad idea.. Needless to say the SCSI 486 box lived far beyond its intended day of deprecation.
What IDE comes down to is its Intel backed. Not that Intel is a bad thing for the industry in terms of volume, they bring cheap and fast to the masses, nor are they bad to keep things competitive. But they sell CPUs and endorse IDE/EIDE/ATA/ATAPI and USB/1/2. That means SCSI and Firewire is better.
SCSI - first to implement SMART. This stuff has worked for me first hand. SCSI uses sector sparing which remaps defects to spare sectors, not marks them as "bad." ATAPI is a subset of the total commands available to the SCSI, and SCSI being the superset it has more commands available to it to perform various extra things. IDE drives have primitive understanding of tagged commands, if at all. If you have to write, Say, ABCD to the disk - but the placement on the physical platter was ACDB. SCSI would write them out as ACBD, to say the disk from having to do extra work. IDE class would start at A, then pass up the C locations to write the B, then rewind to the C location, then forward to the D location. Grossly inefficient. SCSI drives have superior warranties. SCSI drive vendors will advance replace hard drives, not requiring you to rip out your drive and send it off as IDE vendors do. SCSI vendors make money on SCSI drives - this is a good thing because that means they actually support he product. SCSI implementations on UNIX are clean, and most IDE "SCSI-like" devices are emulated as SCSI for a reason. If you think SCSI is a myth, try this one on. Novell 4 provided an IDE driver so that people could use IDE CD-ROM. They specifically asked that IDE drives not be used to serve Novell shares, the devices generally could not handle the extremely aggressive (and pleasantly fast and recoverable) Novell file system. Low and behold, my cheesy boss thought to put an IDE disk in there. It seized up a year later. Literally. The drive wouldn't even spin up. Luckily I noticed this condition and was able to copy the info off (we had backups but hey, up to the minute is better). After power off and power on, drive, dead. This drive was not one of those drives prone to failure, like the 75GXP or a 6GB WD. It died a horrible death due to inferior capability.
I like my Adaptec and LSI/Symbios high end SCSI cards. I like low CPU usage. I like a proactive approach to error detection and correction - sector sparing and SMART. I like calling and getting support.
Notable - the price for 80 pin SCA equipment is in expensive. If you need cheap SCSI disks this is the way to go, there seems to be overstock of said drives and places like Hypermicro will give you a converter from 80 to 68 pin (LVD safe) for free with 80 pin purchase.
Now a drawback with SCSI is the idiotic cabling, high cost. The answer to idiotic cabling was SCA a SAF-TE enclosure. Hot swappable and all. Clearly with SCSI-over-IP coming, and 10GE with SCSI-over-IP being a planned alternative to FC, there is something alluring about SCSI to keep it going on in the 10 GE era.
I would like to see a firewire-like connector adaptation of SCSI at some point. I like SCSI. The driver support is universal for AIC78xx and NCR/Symbios/LSI 53C8xx/53C7xx. The performance is superior and handles very busy multi user stuff far more gracefully. Better warranties. Better data reliability. Interestingly cheap backchannel for 80 pin SCA.
For DVD-ROMS, I would like to see SCSI and firewire come out first, the crud adaptations to USB and ATAPI come out later.
I am repulsed by ATAPI add in cards, btw. I don't like Promise too much, I don't like HPT at all. I think 3Ware is a nice idea but it's a hack and it makes not sense to do anything but mirror an IDE to me.
Do I have a 120 MB 8MB buffer hard drive? Yes. Do I wish it was a SCSI yes. Would I buy another CDR burner when I have a Plextor SCSI 12X? No, not until another SCSI one comes out. I already have the SCSI subsystem in place so the incremental cost in getting a SCSI drive is worth it.
So in summation, I am supporting "alsta's argument and desire for SCSI versions of hardware. I also makes it easy to stuff new things into SCSI only platforms like some Sun Ultra workstations. And interestingly enough, lots of former Mac zealots and I agree, Apple jumped the sharkhard when they bailed on SCSI. For anti SCSI zealots I will condone only Firewire. And then maybe USB for junk like keyboards and mice. I wish that machines were all build with the SCA or FC backplane that the Sun workstations get. Its elegant, reliable, easy to service, hot swappable and guess what, if you care about what's on your hard drive no price seems to high to guarantee better data availability.
High-Quality! Inexpensive! Superior-Performance! - pick any two.
I do agree BK is technically wrong and think that RMS is right in this case. I would like for them (those who decide where Linux sources live, Tosatti, Linux, Cox, et. al.) to use Subversion, or maybe even CVS and a program like cvsup like on FreeBSD - seems to work more than adequately for a project which a much larger in scope than just a kernel. RMS can seem loony at times, but in this case I agree with his argument. Non free software is not a desirable end because I contest the argument that, in this specific case, non free software is necessarily better. Not with competition like Subversion. Not when you weight the ramifications of a heavy thick restrictive license which is "worse" than GPL. (I can not personally decide on BSD vs. GPL licensing, but I lean towards BSD because it's a good compromise to allow corporations to leverage meritorious free/open work while being able to tweak and tune to a platform without giving away too many specifics) but random proprietary license of the day and reams of EULA trash don't belong in the center piece of the GNU/Linux arena, IMHO.
There are many, and there have been many ways to utilize fiber for years. As I indicated above, a NIC is not a NIC, I have found the Tigon 3 to be most effective at keeping utilization low under load. If you think a D-Link is going to perform, you would be mistaken, I would venture to guess that in the right situation, with the right packet size, and the right amount of ingress, a more capable 100 mbit controller from 3COM or Intel would outperform a D-Link (which uses a national semiconductor ASIC I believe, that's a guess, but I wont bother to find out because I don't care about D-Link).
I also touched on ingress traffic and live lock in interrupt driven kernels. It's a real problem. Also, speed is relative to packet size (jumbo packets), interrupts coalescence and tcp checksumming offload.
I find that fiber's performance does not denigrate at all as you approach maximum limit in length. I find that Copper is sensitive to RF, and, while gigabit does not have this notion of crossover because it uses all 4 pairs, I hate the idea of crossovers at all (most GE cards now do auto MDX for 10/100).
As I also indicated, there are usually fiber uplinks on switches, as seen here. It has 48 ports, and two fiber ports. [$1300 bucks]. This is a typical use, as is suggested by the design. Clearly it is wise to use the 10/100 to connect to got to workstations, and here, we see a switch with 24 10/100/1000 ports (Cu), and uplink ports, which can be SM or MM fiber. [$2300]
I would say one would use fiber to connect switches to one another, basically deprecating "spanning" style switches, where one must get proprietary cables and whatnot. This gives the flexibility of moving switches far away, and these switches above have options for single mode which can drastically increase range, making cross-corporate-campus communications as trivial as laying the fiber down and very cheap compared to the days of old when repeaters were used.
So fiber switches are expensive. But they are good, the can aggregate lots of things from far away, and they are generally newer, always managed. The cheapest 100% fiber switches are in the $4000 range, usually starting at 8 ports.
So is fiber for gamers? No. Is fiber a cheap way to hook up your client machines or low bandwidth servers? No. Is it useful to span switches distances near and far, and to allow certain high volume servers excellent access to bandwidth, and be tappable easily and cheaply, yes! I have been very pleased with both the original AceNIC and the Tigon 3 controllers, and the Alteon switches.
Fiber is essentially a distance giver, and most of the NIC I pointed out in my original post have the same ASIC for both the GigE Cu and the Fiber rendition of the card, but I have found that fiber is more reliable, easier to push to the theoretical maximum speeds for a given packet size. I would probably buy going forward Cu 10/100/1000 switches, and span them with fiber uplinks and aggregate them into a fiber switch and give critical routers and servers access to that aggregate switch.
Another thing to pay attention to when buying switches, is the switching fabric. A lot of cheaper switches out there cant handle every single port going full duplex and 1000 mbit. This is where the fabric becomes the theoretical limiter. Be careful of garbage brands, stick to Intel, 3Com, Sun, Cisco, Extreme, Juniper, Foundry and beefy vendors. Intel and 3COM may be seen as cheesy and cheap to hang with the more scaleable vendors, but they build decent stuff for basic use.
We work with them all the time, and have for years. One of the earlier supported gigabit fiber cards is the Alteon AceNIC, with the driver being written by Sorensen in 1998 for Linux. Here is a list, more current (no by any means comprehensive):
Farallon PN9000SX, HP 1000BASE-SX Gigabit Ethernet LAN Adapter
IBM Gigabit Ethernet SX Server Adapter
Intel PRO/1000 XF Server Adapter
GA621 NetGear Fiber Gigabit Ethernet Card
SMC SMC9462SX Tiger Card 1000
SysKonnect 1000BASE-SX PCI Adapter
Toshiba 1GB Ethernet Adapter.
Many of these are on the second or third revision of the card. I have found the "Tigon 3", Broadcom 57XX (5701) (tg3 and bcm5700, supported in FreeBSD, Linux, and others) 3COM 3C996 (SX and T) to be a very good card, the best of the bunch, as it has advanced packet coalescence, checksum offloading, and has the least number of interrupts with even insane amounts of malformed/attack ingress traffic. The medium seems to make little difference in the short haul.
I have also seen single mode cards for PCI, and I have also been working with single mode POS OC3, OC12 and OC48 cards for PCI.
So, with OC48 being 2.5Gbit/sec, I think PCI/PCI-32/33/PCI-64/66 and PCI-X 133 have all seen their fair share of gigabit speed. Most of the cards listen above work rather nicely.
The point? Backbones are best done in fiber. Most switches support fiber, often they have removable transceivers or cards that let you pick single or multimode. I think that its easier to guarantee throughput with fiber as well, as RF and other interference doesn't play a role, and more often than not you aren't even coming close to the limits of the fiber in terms of distance.
Copper GigE is a good cheap fast short haul way to get servers hooked up to your switches. I have never had any problems using regular CAT 5e, and CAT 6 cabling demands a premium and isn't clear what the benefit is in terms of throughput. As far as better "CATS", I don't think they Spec for CAT 7 or any others has even been drafted, so its mainly marketing drivel at this point.
You will be surprised to see that these cards can all feed PCs far more information than they can take, and you will often see disks trying to keep up, and in certain interrupt driven kernels, if you put the adapter in promiscuous mode (we do this to analyze traffic) you can create kernel live lock because the driver desperately needs to poll the input to prevent userland CPU deprivation.
Again, not using Fiber for backbone is not a good idea. The cost differential is not as bad as it used to be, and you can by most any length of pre terminated SC and LX fiber. In fact, the interesting thing about fiber is the length of the cable barely affects cost. A 10 meter cable and a 100m cable are usually very close in price. It's the endpoints that cost the cash.
I just got RedHat 8.0 (psyche) up and working last night (full install over 4GB, no JFS or XFS options during install, only EXT3/2), with their gcc-3.2, all the stuff done just right (that is to say, the RedHat way, I don' not use RedHat or Linux much anymore, I use FreeBSD but like to pay attention to Linux). I've been having problems with getting the 2.5.xx series to compile cleanly of late, lots of broken patches seem to make it into this thing, which is to be expected at this stage in the game. One thing I wish was a requisite before the kernel version is revved is that everything compiles and if it doesn't I gets flagged as such in the configurators so one doesn't spend copious amounts of time figuring stuff like that out empirically. 2.5.40 also crashed out of "make menuconfig" if I went into the ALSA section. I wish that the release process for Linux would get a bit more refined, using a source management tool was step one, now I think its time to build a base system around Linux to ensure me of more things when I get it. You could say, get a standalone kernel, or more desirable, a mini system with a c library and compiler and some tools - so that the kernel guys say, we know it works here, with this compiler, and this library, that's what we use. This is coherency I enjoy in other places. This isn't to say Linux isn't meritorious, quite to the contrary, but I would personally like to see things differently - I'm sure I'm re-hashing something that has been said a billion times already. I just though it ironic that 2.5.40 doesn't compile on RedHat 8.0 release -strange considering a good number of the RedHat people are kernel hackers.
Linux distributions vary wildly in their various eclectic incarnations as to how things are supposed to get done. My favorite system I have seen thus far is Gentoo. I like to see source usage encouraged, base system clearly defined, reference design and methods of extension al la ports (or emerge).
An open question, if I have suggestions or problems, is there a place for people who don't have time to live and die by Linux to "drop it in the suggestion box?" I had some problems here and there in the past and have found that people "don't want to hear it." I don't mind being incorrect, but I don't take correction without explanation. I have yet to year why there is a good reason for things that don't compile being checked into 2.4.STABLE - which I also follow.
So as far as beta testing goes for Linux kernel. Do they want beta testers? The attitude on the mailing lists ranges from super helpful (some code maintainers are very good about dealing with breakage) to this "if you cant write a better implementation, FO, I don't want to hear its broke, don't like it don't use it". In any case, how is it exactly us trying to use this kernel going to help the better it if the method of information ingress is unclear? Is there a procedure? Like Mozilla when it faults, you get to send errors in, stuff like that. Is there a memory dump in the kernel yet or is that still a patch (it's a tradition that kernels dump to swap then copy on boot do you can see what the computer was doing if it panics). One thing about Linux - if you compile it, load the crap out of it to test it, if it doesn't panic in the 1st day it seems to never panic - which is good.
Just an FYI for people getting into kernel stuff with RedHat-ish systems:
Follow the instructions and it will tell you how to download and install BitKeeper.
Then, clone the main Linux tree using BitKeeper:
$ cd/usr/src/linux-2.5.40 (or wherever you would like your stuff)
$ bk clone bk://linux.bkbits.net/linux-2.5
$ ln -s linux-2.5.40 linux
$ (optional if needed, ln -s linux-2.5.40 linux-2.4 ; ln -s linux-2.5.40 linux-2.5) - sometimes dists and weird driver SRPMS look for linux/include in all sorts of places
$ cd linux
$ bk -r co
Also don't forget.
-/usr/src/linux ,/usr/src/scsi ;/usr/src/asm ;/usr/src/asm-generic should all be re-linked to the right places in/usr/src/linux/include [if this is no longer necessary let me know] - make install doesn't work with grub, so you have to do your thing manually now - recommended compiler is gcc-2.9.5.3 [for 2.4 and 2.5 now], I always have extra compilers ready to go just in case. Make sure all the tools are the proper version, and that you have a recent ksymoops (if you need to do any messing around looking for problems ), modutils - etc.
If the build fails, find the offending code and remove from selection, or try to hack it if you need it.
Lorenzo's oil was about a father whose son contracts a debilitating degenerative disease. (Potential spoiler in this synopsis, if you trust this movie is good, do not read further, go rent it now.) The disease is one that degenerates the myelin sheathing on the nerves in the body. The father is deeply trouble by his son's increasing inability to function at the most basic levels and in a race against time he basically becomes a doctor. This, from what I can remember, is a true story. Anyways, after studying like crazy, and studying everything known about his son's diseases, he comes up with an idea that a long hydrocarbon [I believe the length was 26 e.g. CH3-(CH2)24-CH3), but with lots of other functional groups here and there.] oil is somehow going to protect the myelin from further denigration. He finds a natural substance that is similar to the protected oil he theorized about, and apparently it works and stops the never degenerations. Sadly, it is too late for his son, as it only stops the damage, but does not restore it. The movie ends kind of somberly, but inspiring, as the father helped many others with his incessant and furious research in a mad dash to save his son. Anyways, it was a moving movie, and quite well done and an inspiration to us all.
Much of the science that is used to theorize about the cosmos is verifiable right here on earth. (Fusion, fission, properties of light relativity, force, gravity) The question is does what (LITTLE) we know here properly extrapolate ad infinitum.
I am relatively convinced that there are people smart enough to understand that which can only be verified as a single point observer. The verification of a system of this scale is exceedingly difficult - but should be just be defeatist and mire ourselves in religious texts and ignore the existence of the cosmos and remaining in a comfort zone?
There are those who watch, say Star Trek (in reality there are quite a few people inspire by this show who do interesting things), and want this to be true, even in the face of near impossibly using the same physics that helped to verify the "flicker of light" in article above. They will spend a lifetime seek what now seems foolish. Then there are those who are defeatist and simply what to fulfill Maslow's triangle and live this life out.
If you would have asked about getting to the moon 200 years ago you would have been told its impossible.
Same situation today; the question we ask is faster than light travel? Are there transcendental methods of travel? Do the fundamental laws of physics change as the universal timeline progresses, . as some recent studies have suggested?
One of the more intriguing things about intelligent people I meet is this; they all know that intelligence aptitude may be innate, this can be leveraged with conditioning, but the ultimate test of intellect is to realize that the more you find out the more you realize how much less of the whole you seek you know. The universe, physics, even material science regarding CPUs, signaling in hard drives (what does the signal really look like that is a 1 or 0? You would be surprised. )is inexorably complex.
I think accepting the work of those who are doing what some day may be the salvation of human existence. Being a scientist these days isn't easy. But they must have fun. It pays bad, the aprecation by your peers is fleeting, religious zealots are all to quick to ignore something as basic as carbon dating and take a work of man as a literal and corporate swine, such as Carly Fiorina, expect results or you're fired (never mind the meritorious nature of your research, or the good it may produce for humanity, as were the ideals of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard [as is reflected by the huge charitable foundations left in their wake], who made equipment because it was needed by science, such as liquid chromatography machines, oscilloscopes, etc. It wasn't about the money, it was about passion for science and engineering.)
Ask yourself to have an open mind, imagine the possibilities, maybe even help to seed a super genius.
I always enjoyed physics. I enjoy using the by product of applied physics every day, TVs, planes, computers, energy, electricity, you name it, the predictability of complex systems that use the fundaments of physics and other sciences is quite impressive, and the amount of work that gets done in a planful way rather than an empirical way is also impressive. Things are build, rarely are they haphazardly conjured.
Who would I aspire to be? Carly Fiorina/Gill Bates or the next Einstein? I have a strong feeling that even the king and queen of gluttony will fade into footnotes while the real pioneers and innovated remain time honored potentially for millennia, maybe even forever...
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I liked the guy growling in the background - is that you? - and the song in general. It's actually a catchy tune.
These guys at MP3.com are screwing you over?
I may be in the technology field. I may push bits instead of a pencil, but communication skills are essential.
Now to address anyone with a job right now and what they should do. In my assessment my opinion is 'milk the cow until it dies' unless a guaranteed opportunity comes directly to you for more money in a less expensive location with a company with a very attractive balance sheet. California is difficult, but so is taking a regression in salary. I do believe California will have a severe problem with dealing with the twenty to thirty billion dollar state deficit without raising already alarmingly high state income and sales tax.
I would also like to point out that the dot com bust is an all too convenient scapegoat for the current situation in America (rising unemployment, deflation in wages in certain markets, deficits in state and federal government due to massive capital gain revenue being lost coupled with increased spending in reaction to sudden new 'needs' in national security, etc). Surprisingly, the economy is still growing, just more slowly when compared to they was it was. Politics and the stock market somehow get coalesced in with 'the economy.' Oversimplification is a dangerous tool the masses use upon themselves. Your gloom and doom is a reflection of your confidence, and whatever the source of self deprecation, it tends to have a pronounced effect on nations as a whole, but it's not enough to snuff out entrepreneurial, scientific or philanthropic spirit (thank goodness).
Failure can be a self fulfilling prophecy. The founder of Dunkin' Donuts made his first fortune in the great depression.
(article linked to above blockquoted, slow link>
I laughed at this. Quite a bit. Thank You!
I have evaluated file systems of late, and wish only to express the need for more attentiveness in one's file system. Being nonchalant about this can lead to "bad situations."
I just finished evaluating JFS 1.0.24 for Linux. My opinion of 1.0.24 and JFS is IBM is doing the port as a courtesy to AIX and OS/2 migrators. It is extremely robust, but slow, 2x slower than XFS or Reiser. I had maximal R/W activity (tar untar create deletes in while loops, Xwin started, downloading via ftp, scp, etc) and power off hot several times, never saw anything but "file system clean."
I am in process or evaluating XFS 1.2pre3. 1.1 XFS for Linux is unreal. It does "everything," it has done it for years, its high performance, has a robust heritage and is all around very good. I have cold killed it, inserted and removed hot swap drives while running, while doing fairly absurd amounts of activity on the test box. Not using this file system is a shame. The release patched kernels, one catering to the Redhat droids and the other is a vanilla with their magic patched in. This isn't a Marcelo kludge either, these are professionals who care greatly in the stability of their product and do a great job in their little cornel of the kernel. The Mandrake and SuSE kernels have this stuff patched in, along with extended attributes and ACLs, and the XFS kernel only has ACL and DMAPI support, and the JFS patches won't apply clean to their kernel, but on thing is true of SGI's version: It actually compiles. The Mandrake 9 and SuSE 8.1 kernels seem not able to compile outside of their proprietary environments. I am upset about this. Typical second tier vendors who fail to bring coherency to fragmented set of projects loosely and informally known as the nebulous "Linux."
EXT3 is a dirty hack (EXT2 with fake journaling). I don't know how EXT3 gets high performance marks - ever - my experience has suggest awful and inconsistent performance with several nasty changes made to e2fsprogs in succession to address potentially severe problems. Its insulting to enterprise customers that RedHat touts this garbage as a journaling filesystem. Reiser is a UFO, and is easily corruptible, and I fail to understand its wide use and early integration in the kernel - my only guess is its simplicity required the least cleaning up of the kludged Linux file system underpinnings. I also get sick to death of Hans blaming everyone and their mother while the guys at XFS and JFS quietly patch away the problems, while Hans whines. Hans did have a good point about the broken RedHat compiler back when it was an issue. I base my opinion of EXTx, and Reiser based on experience. I am appalled, and disappointed at the lack of respect the Linux kernel maintainers have given to XFS. The best of the litter being the last to go in - typical, and Appalling.
UFS+logging on Solaris and UFS+S on FreeBSD are both superior. I have never seen these go haywire. Ever. Interestingly, UFS+S is apparently the 'softcore' journaling method that EXT3 uses, but its far less damageable by empirical determination, and its clearly faster and runs more smoothly. Anytime Veritas appears, which ironically is included in SCO, and is available for Solaris and NT based OSs, things come along quite nicely.
Recently OS X added journaling to the already pathetic HFS+ filesystem. My experience with Mac OS 10.X, including 10.2 has been horrible. I think its inferior, the Mach kernel was deprecated by its progenitors, CMU, in 1994. I think the FreeBSD userland is outdated. I think HFS+ is a pathetic file system and fail to understand why they don't use UFS, but if you have ever tried using it with OS X you know it's not "finished." [defined as: nothing work if UFS is used - don't try and say otherwise] Adding journaling to HFS+ will only slow down an already horrifically bloated and underpowered platform. I find it laughable Apple hardware does not get submitted to www.spec.org, but I have CPU2000 results for PPC 1.25GHz, and of course it is so horrible they can't submit - everything including the SPARC beats it hands down. I also though having to have OS 9 installed on a separate partition as OS X for classic to work properly laughable. I base my deprecation of the Apple efforts on real life experience and objective comparison. I only have to convince myself, but for those who can't easily see where the truth lies on the speed of a Max vs. a PC, my condolences to any significant other you might be lucky to have.
FreeBSD 5. UFS2 will probably be one of the best filesystems to ever see the light of day, and vinum will be there as well.
[I hate Eugenia Dork Loli and her horrible crap "editing" and "journalism," but there are interviews with Steve Best [JFS],Hans Reiser, and Nathan Scott [XFS], held prisoner on OS"News" (more like OSCrapConjecture), very informative; http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=69 ; with some more Journaling info here, http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue55/florido.html showing how Robust XFS is]
When examining the facts, the superiority of XFS becomes clear, and I advocate its use, it's the responsible thing to do. I have recently beaten heavily on a 2.4.19 stock + XFS pre3 of release 1.2 merged in. I can tell you my experience with the Dell 1650 and constant filesystem abuse that the filesystem is that last thing I would worry about in that kernel. I am eagerly awaiting the release of the 2.4.20 kernel, typically long over due as we seem to have an absentee maintainer that rarely speaks, however, upon its release I believe the XFS 1.2 stable will be merged in or completed and I will have a configuration good to go for use on the order of years.
While I may have harsh words from certain practices and sometimes people, I find XFS and the 2.4.19 kernel to be acceptably stable. I ran that 1650 through the washing machine fairly rigorously, and besides the idiotic spurious " Warning - running *really* short on DMA buffers" errors (which caused a flame war on LKML), it seems to be a useful kernel. The RedHat 2.4.18-17.7x kernel, by the way, is the worst most untested pile I have ever seen. What is wrong with these people? Several net drives with no working promiscuous mode, kernel panics, the list is endless.
Thank you for your mention of FreeBSD. I concur with you in this "me too" post.
The quality and speed of FreeBSD leaves much to be desired in other operating systems, including Linux.
The MRI machines used in hospitals have 8-12 ton magnets. The biggest magnet now is 150 tons.
;p. So it is important to point out that a small effective sphere of 8T is much less impressive than a gigantic one of lesser field strength. The Earth relatively "weak" magnetic field has an impressively large area of efficacy that HAMs can attest to. HAARP and the aurora borealis show how large scale weak fields can, if you were to find the total potential the field provides rather than its peak strength, do huge tasks.
Size does matter
Is that the best way to explain it? "if you were to summate all the potential the field provides" rather than look at peak values?
Tesla. 1 Tesla is 10,000 Gauss. Ten thousand gauss equals 1 Tesla. The earth's magnetic field has been calculated to be 5x10-5 Tesla, thus 1.0 Tesla is 20,000 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. A refrigerator magnet typically equals 0.01-0.035 Tesla.
Field effect is fairly well understood and things don't have to be magnetic to be affected by magnetic field, as show by the frog and the water.
I find the use of a superconductor (you can induce a charge around this solenoid and the charge will remain forever creating a permanent magnetic field so long as the superconducting material is kept cold enough, so no perpetual machines for you mad quack scientists) quite impressive. Now to pin point a superconductors that operates at a reasonable temperature, not 138K@1ATM.
The world record Tc of 138 K is now held by a thallium-doped, mercuric-cuprate comprised of the elements Mercury, Thallium, Barium, Calcium, Copper and Oxygen. The Tc of this ceramic superconductor was confirmed by Dr. Ron Goldfarb at the National Institute of Standards and Technology-Colorado in February of 1994. Under extreme pressure its Tc can be coaxed up even higher - approximately 25 to 30 degrees more at 300,000 atmospheres.
Anyways, most of these super X men magneto stories are urban legends brought into the world by the same pseudo science types that concoct warp nacelles and wormholes, I hope these are possible and am unable to prove or disprove these constructs. I hate to piss on the parade, people, let's start with more plausible things. But someone recently was crushed an oxygen tank in a hospital near an MRI (which is an application of NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging) because the tank wasn't properly secured against the wall. I don't buy the scissors in the pocket bull. Because an 8 Tesla field would make short work of and kill people with pacemakers, so because of this (2 million Americans have pacemakers so it's not exceedingly rare) they post all sorts warnings all over the damn place where high field magnets are stored. Also there are permittivity issues; "space" is a good insulator for fields, electrical gravitational just about any disturbance the field tends to rapidly loose strength. So all you Dr. Evil types thinking of ways to abuse a 16 Tesla field think again.
Seriously though, would be scientists and sky watchers x-filers conspiracy theorists and general bullshit artists could do so much better for their cause if they were better educated. In a network of words, rife with information, a whole internetwork that sprung forth from intellectual endeavors, it amazes me the levels of pseudo-science, quackery, pseudo-intellectualism bullshit and other assorted trash that ended up turning a potentially awesome source of information a better source of misinformation. Would be genius who are kings in their own minds are allowed to pump trash at an alarming rate and the hallucinate hoards of drones bleating like sheeple to lick up every last word of quack science they promulgate.
Cobalt and nickel are magnetic, as well as Iron. There are apparently ceramics and other materials that have ordered magnetic. Ordered is an important distinction. In general, ordered magnetic materials are mostly based around the transition metals (there are others besides Co, Ni and Fe), and the rare earths. All rather heavy.
;p Just and espousing on magnetism. I like magnets.
If you want to use the term "magnetic" to mean something that responds to a magnetic field, I would love to see a material that isn't magnetic.
ferromagnetism - Iron, nickel, cobalt and some of the rare earths (gadolinium, dysprosium) exhibit a unique magnetic behavior which is called ferromagnetism because iron (ferric) is the most common and most dramatic example. Ferromagnetic materials exhibit a long-range ordering phenomenon at the atomic level which causes the unpaired electron spins to line up parallel with each other in a region called a domain. Ferromagnets will tend to stay magnetized to some extent after being subjected to an external magnetic field. This tendency to "remember their magnetic history" is called hysteresis.
antiferromagnetic Applied to a ferromagnetic (in the wide sense) substance in which the magnetic lattices are magnetized in exactly equal and opposite directions. Such a substance does not have an external magnetic field in its pure form, but a distorted lattice may result in a parasitic magnetization. This occurs below a certain temperature, called the Néel temperature, when an ordered array of atomic magnetic moments spontaneously forms in which alternate moments have opposite directions. There is therefore no net resultant magnetic moment in the absence of an applied field. In manganese fluoride, for example, this antiparallel arrangement occurs below a Néel temperature of 72 K. Below this temperature the spontaneous ordering opposes the normal tendency of the magnetic moments to align with the applied field. Above the Néel temperature the substance is paramagnetic.
ferrimagnetism a type of magnetism exhibited by the ferrites [[defined as: A member of a class of mixed oxides MO.Fe2O3, where M is a metal such as cobalt, manganese, nickel, or zinc. The ferrites are ceramic materials that show either ferrimagnetism or ferromagnetism, but are not electrical conductors. For this reason they are used in high-frequency circuits as magnetic cores]]. In these materials the magnetic moments of adjacent ions are antiparallel and of unequal strength, or the number of magnetic moments in one direction is greater than those in the opposite direction. By suitable choice of rare-earth ions in the ferrite lattices it is possible to design ferrimagnetic substances with specific magnetizations for use in electronic components
paramagnetism the atoms or molecules of the substance have net orbital or spin magnetic moments that are capable of being aligned in the direction of the applied field. They therefore have a positive (but small) susceptibility and a relative permeability slightly in excess of one. Paramagnetism occurs in all atoms and molecules with unpaired electrons; e.g. free atoms, free radicals, and compounds of transition metals containing ions with unfilled electron shells. It also occurs in metals as a result of the magnetic moments associated with the spins of the conducting electrons.
diamagnetism the magnetization is in the opposite direction to that of the applied field, i.e. the susceptibility is negative. Although all substances are diamagnetic, it is a weak form of magnetism and may be masked by other, stronger, forms. It results from changes induced in the orbits of electrons in the atoms of a substance by the applied field, the direction of the change (in accordance with Lenz's law) opposing the applied flux. There is thus a weak negative susceptibility and a relative permeability that is slightly less than one.
This wasn't mean to be snarky
Relative? Try subjective. I have become accustomed to things taking a certain period of time. I have become cognizant through the use of Macs, PCs and Unix boxes what time things get completed in. I hold the opinion that Macs are not worth the premium they command, particularly if you are AGNOSTIC towards operating systems. I use GUI's to frig with the web [browse the web, chop up pictures], all WORK that I do is done in terminal mode. I'd rather use a junk PC than a junk PPC for "fun". Games, PC. "Free" software / shareware. PC. Warez. PC. [Lets face it, I can not afford to buy myself a HOUSE yet, let alone frittering money on software that doesn't help me make money, the concept of home users paying large sums of money for software that they don't use for business/making money is absurd]. That being said, I am of the opinion that "junk PCs" are better serving their purpose. If it's not a Unix workstation, and OS X on Mot-PPC falls drastically short in my opinion of being a member of that archetype, I want a Junk PC. Do I care about mythical theoretical performance on Photoshop? No. Do I get viruses? No. Do I really need a PC or a Mot-PPC to make a living as a "computer person?" No. it's a home-Nintendo-replacement, a fun time-sink - to me.
;) that Apple is not primarily concerned with speed. If you buy a top of the line PC and a top of the line Mot-PPC at any point in time - now run SPEC. Run "openssl speed". Run a kernel compile and time it. Run the same hard drive, the same amount of memory, the same video card, but only have a different CPUI and the result always comes up the same. You get less for more money on Mot-PPC machines. Sorry.
It is not the OS's fault entirely.
- Old FreeBSD userland [3.x]. Was it compiled with -O2? Is -O2 supported on PPC stably? Is gcc capable of producing decent PPC binaries or if Apple had the know-how (see: Sun, Microsoft, Intel, Borland) to make a compiler, would it be better? Should Apple be helping the gcc team help PPC along, or deprecate Mot-PPC with something more optimizable?
- Horribly outdated kernel - microkernel is out! (Laugh at Andrew Tannenbaum , he flamed Linus about MK vs. Monolithic/modular, look who uses Minux, look who uses Linux) [note: NT isn't a true microkernel, and solaris/linux/freebsd certainly aren't, its closest relative is HURD]. Mach was dumped by the progenitors of it, CMU, in 1994. Mach to me is very silly. Linux has hackers in and out as does FreeBSD. No one hacks the Mach kernel for fun. No one gives a rat shit about Darwin. Is there anything compelling about using the Mach kernel over Linux or FreeBSD? (Except Steve Jobs zealotry concerning perpetuating the failed NeXT way of doing things.)
PPC. Its SPEC marks aren't ever published, and when SPEC is run on a Mot-PPC, the results are horrible.
It is a clear combination that makes for a rather unpleasant experience. Let's face it, Unix aint no BeOS or RT-OS, its thick. Context switches are expensive. Memory protection is real. Userland activities are fairly "slow" (note NFS being in the Linux kernel). It is protected, extensible, capable, generally secure, granular, multiuser, portable, but it is not a speed demon. It values other things before speed.
Couple Unix's thickness with Mot-PPC's clear inferiority in terms of general (not vector I'm not listening lalalalalala I don't care Photoshop lalalalala) performance, it makes for a slow concoction.
I have a G4-500-1MB+1GB ram and a new 7200FDB Maxtor with a new ATI Radeon 7000 32MB with quartz enabled I built out for a friend as reference. I don't want to hear any claims of greatness, I have verified by running Linux, Darwin (to see a lean *BSD run - and lean it is - it does almost nothing fresh off the CD), Netbsd and OS X on same-era PC, PPCs and other hardware (namely the sparc
Sun can get away with a laggy SPARC. They offer a LOT of reasons why you would ignore single CPU performance, and continue to utilize that platform [scalability, support, development platform, reliability]. Apple? No way Jose. As time goes on, and as feature sets converge, and more and more of what makes a Good OS ceases to be Novel, Apple's schloctkey hardware performance will come under increasing scrutiny.
I beg to differ about NDS on Windows ever being a problem.
I have no great love for Windows. Novell, I happen to like very much but it is cost prohibitive. But is NDS worth the money? Yes. Also, GroupWise is capable of driving Outlook properly, even better than my beloved OpenMail [RIP, now Samsung Contact - yeach, thanks Carly] was.
My experience since Novell 4.x (I've used it back in the bindery days as well) and NDS has been flawless. It supports DOS, WinALL, and anything else. It has native file sharing so it can appear as a Winderz box. The server is ugly as sin at the console, but it runs more reliably that one would ever imagine, I had several servers stay up for more than a year. The Novell client integration with Windows NT based operations systems is superior, supporting advanced network trashcans, robust undelete for idiots, and does interesting things like server side searches (as in, if you are looking for the word "cat" on a network file system, the server does the searching 'for you.'
Also, NDS is much more scaleable than ADS. It has the proper notion of root, it is possible to merge trunks together, if you've ever used ConsoleOne, you'll see more granularity on this directory and its objects than was ever dreamed possible, cleanly integrated and rather fast.
Is Novell run by intelligent business people? No. Are the products of incredible quality? Yes. Novell's image has been so heinously stained, with angry red color schemes, idiotic pictures of polyester clad fools running around on my console dancing or holding up red N's.
Novell needs to do only this: Change colors to blue or something, and rip out that licensing shit and start offering to replace ADS/Exchange with NDS/GroupWise for $100 bucks. All it costs them is a CD. It would cost Microsoft a lot of pain.
If you haven't given Novell a shot, please do,. You'll realize that the free stuff right now is primitive compared to NDS. Any other comments on good directory service implementations are welcome.
I just setup a Novell 6 server the other day to stay sharp with that stuff. Besides the fools in the marketing department over there, I was impressed with it. I would take a job working with Novell and Unix, but if someone wanted me to deal with Windows ADS or NT4 DS again, and not be open to Samba, I would probably not take the job or demand a premium.
I have yet to see MAPI plug ins for GroupWise, OpenMail or Notes "emulate" an Exchange server transparently yet [I hate collaboration software so I don't keep up with it]. Give me some links to prove what you say is true. I would like the marketing creeps to get all their globally shared objects, public folders, shared calendars, etc, using Bloatus Notes or "Novel" GroopWise, maybe Bynari or Contact.
Seriously. I would think that the best selling point for any of those back ends would be first and foremost Eliminate Exchange Server from Your Back End SEAMLESSLY, which OpenMail used to proclaim loudly before Carly killed it.
And about Unix users with GroupWise and Notes. What do they use for a client for a shared Calendar? Back to the same problem Exchange has, no support for the Unix users (they offer IMAP, POP, SMTP, but not iCal, or real Outlook LAF to non Winderz users). Not in the same capacity as the users of Win32 get.
This SuSE is a failure. No MAPI plug-in, its just yet another attempt to bundle already existing services into "Exchange". And no calendaring. Its such crap. My sights are set on GroupWise or Samsung Contact (aka OpenMail) if I were begged to implement this again.
SuSE people should really back off hard with the Exchange Killing crap until they can do what Contact does. That's a feature set which half-lives up to that proclamation (a MAPI plug-in namely).
This being said. I deprecate Microsoft monopolism with regards to desktop operating system. I also strongly denounce the availability of things like Exchange Server and the other pieces of their back office attempts for any other target besides Windows operating systems. But I think they earned their monopoly when I see big companies simply ignoring the problems at hand. Brats in marketing departments have been getting Exchange littered about corporate networks with the Unix vendors sitting around scratching tiher heads. Microsoft clearly listens to customers demands first. Unix vendors throw out viable Exchange Killers like OpenMail. Carly Fiorina got some from Bill Gates in a Redmond bathroom and he told her he was her daddy and for more hanky she would have to throw out OpenMail. And she did.
I tried Notes on Linux server 5.0.X not too long ago. I tried to get it to replace Exchange in every capacity and I couldn't get it to work that way. I would like to know how, but since there are no "how to no solicit Microsoft Exchange but still make marketing lunatics happy with a fully functioning copy of outlook." There is no such document I am aware of.
Show me some facts and figures to support you claims. I do not dispute your personal observations about healthcare in Europe. How was it outside the cities? Did you bother to look? I know the infant mortality is slightly lower and the life expectancy is slightly higher, but that's coming from a country that 50 years ago had no qualms with stuffing millions of people in ovens.
Anyways, most of the medical technology is coming from here, and people flock to the USA to cutting edge, "the best of the best" medical care, and whatnot. Sure it costs money. I'm not aware of a better place in the world to deal with cancers, heart diseases - if you can pay for it, or you get on a waiting list, but its here. I don't see rich Americans flock to other countries for "good medical care."
And judging on what most Canadians say about social medicine, I'll take my chances with American PPOs, I have little faith in western medicine, sure they can stop the bleeding. But fatal illnesses are a death sentence everywhere. The USA just capitalizes on it.
Want to live longer? The most high-aged demographic is Japan, the fish eating green tea drinking Okanawans. Is the economy collapsing under the huge stress of lots of old people around - sure is. Should we young ones sacrifice our disposable income in the better part of our lives to subsidize dying people? I don't know. If you are young, you are inclined to be austere towards old people who haven't properly prepared for their own death [a guaranteed eventuality] and somehow magically old and even though it happens to everyone and we all get old a decrepit its a sudden surprise and now that I'm old everyone must be responsible for me because its the right thing to do.
Well, in case you haven't noticed, the third world is growing, the first world is shrinking. I can't afford children, not here, not Germany, not anywhere, and I'm making over 3 times the average. Is part of this due to subsidy of old people? Sure is, 7% of my pay gone for people who didn't prepare for death. Do I expect to see any of that 7%? No, because of pseudo socialism from FDR, I pay for other people's retirement and I have to pay for my own, without the prospect of subsidy. . If I was bought long term bonds/bills for all that money I put in and couldn't touch them until retirement would I have a million in the bank already? Yes. It's a corrupt slush fund. If there was a lean mean government, this wouldn't happen. And if people have more disposable income, it has been proven that in times of great economic prosperity and low taxes philanthropy goes way up. Socialists and Volvo-bike-path-Liberals talk about high taxes and responsibility, but would they care for their own dying again parents or stuff them in a nursing home? No, they get nursing home every time. They just find peace with themselves because they washed their hands of the problem by voicing out against the machine or voting for some corrupt idiot that made people vote for him single issue.
I have also heard in Engine there are statues of limitations on medical care (same as lifetime and policy pay out limits in the USA). If you are over a certain age and you get dialysis for example, you can reach a lifetime social limit, and when the society's obligation is met, if you don't pay for dialysis, plug pulled, see ya.
I can't be convinced that if I really, really needed great care for a really hard to survive illness I would want to go anywhere but the top hospital in the USA.
Christopher Reeves finger now moves. He has a broken neck. He is a rich man, he has done well, and he is giving large sums of money to cure paralysis. I refuse to believe philanthropy doesn't exist in a pure capitalist system. It's the fake socialist stuff that causes issues.
Do I trust the medical system here? No. Do I base my opinion about the system on one doctor? No, when I have a problem, I see two or three doctors. Some of them suck, some of them do great. Do I think every patient should get an MRI for every hospital visit? Yes! Is that going to cost something? YES! But here in America, I still have enough disposable cash to get the MRI, a full body scan, head scan and virtual colonoscopy is about $1000. Do they give MRIs and complete blood work if you are "paranoid" in your said country? I have been paranoid, I'm somewhat of a hypochondriac, and I have gotten complete blood work and an MRI at little cost to myself. The peace of mind is great.
I know from a friend who came from Europe what happens. Ever sniffle, sneeze cough drip-drop gastrointestinal pain costs the medical systems in the EU lots of money. Subsidized health care and social security is a huge portion of the budget in the EU nations. Do I see people here trying to find ways to retire in Sweden and burden their youth with their age and "retire in style" and get all this free shit? No. In fact, I see a lot of people here who love life, like Christopher Reeve, who advocate for a cause, and raise philanthropic (read: op in feel good money not forced tax money) interest in a cause for the love of life and liberty.
I just don't like the idea of some person's conception of the ideal being forcibly manifested. I may live in Canada, New Zealand or somewhere else someday as I am the firm believer in "don't like it? LEAVE." I haven't found a compelling reason to leave yet. I know Bush sounds silly, and Ashcroft is a fascist, and American Geopolitical policy isn't the greatest (we are not good, nor evil just as no other countries are good, nor evil, they just *ARE*, the exist, and they have a survival instincts and playing fair is back seated to survival), and the US-Reichstag may have burned, or it may have not, but if the Reichstag has burned, metaphorically, then I will live out my years somewhere else. But not for health care. For freedom.
Now don't believe the hype about the US either. If you are not fucking stupid and lazy, you can pick up a decent job for the government or an education system, with awesome retirement plans and health care, maternity leave, continuing education, education subsidy, you name it, the welfares for the taking. I find it amusing that most people who leverage this best are smart, or not from this country - they immigrate here, and they *never* leave [not that I have seen], and most of my proximal friends right now are foreign. But seriously, government jobs here are such government cheese, and if you like the Socialist way, work for the government. It's really not hard. Every single DMV, Police Station Employees (not the cops per se), City Hall, Court Clerks, Libraries, Military personnel, Government Contractors, tax exempt non profit companies and generally anyone who isn't working for a for profit business are living the great life - and having brains and working there are not mutually inclusive.
I have to agree with alsta here and vehemently disagree with the moderation "flamebait."
Lets got over this supposed flamebait.
* SCSI has much better seek times than IDE disks
This is irrefutable. This is in industry rule. I refer people to the fastest hard drive I could think off the top of my head here: http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/desk/ds180gxp.htm Deskstar 180GXP - Average seek time - 8.5 ms
and to here: http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/mar
Now, I don't know about you people but an increase in seek performance that is easily 2.4 times better that the best IDE for something that occurs that many times a second, well, I'm convinced that the drive is considerably faster. Think of any "worst case" scenarios, and this extra speed is likely never to go un-wasted on a computer.
I am also in accord with alsta's skepticism that SATA will be anything but a consumer grade technology. I am an ardent supporter of Firewire and SCSI, and it clear the SCSI standard has much to offer because implementations of SCSI over IP are planned to deprecate FC in favor of iSCSI over 10GE. To me this SATA is a day late and performance short. I think it is nice we can now clean up the crap connectors, but I will not be deluded into believing that SATA has a prayer in terms of beating SCSI.
I also have seen many reviews on IDE RAID and must concur that it is nearly impossible to IDE up to single drive SCSI performance without doing some hardcore RAID-ing. I cannot provide links to support this statement, but peruse through a site like Storage Review and you can see clearly where and why and how SCSI drives cremate their IDE counterparts.
I have IDE and would buy SATA for mass cheap storage at home, but it was a sad day when PC vendors stopped offerering SCSI upgrades from the factory on their cheesier machines and Apple stopped using them by default. This essentially was the advent of the "Geo" or "Kia" of the computer world. I hate hackneyed car analogies, but in this case, as I have seen in acerbic reviews of the said cars, "Why buy this cars where there are better used ones around?", directly applies. I can think of many "used" scsi drives and how badly they destroy consumer grade stuff with ease. This is both from L&F and measure performance metrics.
IDE does not support tagged commands, and it is still unclear if SATA's implementation will be as robust as SCSI. This alsta's statement is again correct with regards to terrible simultaneous access. Try running a busy Unix box with 100s of people copying files and doing this or that, compiling crap, etc. The disk needs to be serious about handling jumpy situations. Seek time and command tagging comes in handy here.
Unfortunately larger buffers can only mask problems. There are many situations where consistency is not guaranteed, and where the cache can easily be blown. I like buffers to be there to make an already fast situations move along more regularly, like a capacitor helps regulate power. I don't like an already bad situations being masked by case specific buffering optimizations.
I will
Just because you may not be able to afford it or don't think storage is not the way you should spend your hard earned money, don't knock SCSI. And certainly don't come to Slashdot and suppress other people's views on the subject.
Just an FYI for people getting into kernel stuff with RedHat-ish systems:
Getting Linux via bitkeeper.
Also don't forget.
-
- make install doesn't work with grub, so you have to do your thing manually now
- recommended compiler is gcc-2.9.5.3 [for 2.4 and 2.5 now], I always have extra compilers ready to go just in case. Make sure all the tools are the proper version, and that you have a recent ksymoops (if you need to do any messing around looking for problems ), modutils - etc.
If the build fails, find the offending code and remove from selection, or try to hack it if you need it.
I would like to also mention cvsup and FreeBSD. I like cvsup quite a bit and its free and open. I only wish the linux kernel was using the same method FreeBSD does. I like FreeBSD for its coherency speed and ease of maintenance, and that the kernel is released with a system for a very smooth ride. If you havent tried FreeBSD, please try it.
rsync is also very good. use it. I would also like to promote the purchasing of very cheap CDroms to get your started, and FreeBSD CD is great because you can use CVSUP to diff the whole thing with minimal bandwidth abuse.
Plextor has a new SCSI version in the works. Unfortunately quality and efficiency is secondary to volume. I personally have a Plextor 12X SCSI, and it has never burned a coaster and this was before Just Right and Burn Proof. Jörg Schilling has a fetish for Plextor as well (he writes cdrecord).
Real hardware zealots appreciate SCSI stuff in a machine. Steven peddles "Dell Dude's approved Hi Val Lite On Combo Re-Writer" but the reality of the situation is grim.
My first epiphany with regards to SCSI being superior came form this "old POS" 486 server I found lying around somewhere. But it was a SCSI system. Not that I condone dumpster diving, but when these new fangled Packard Bell pieces of crap with their feeble Pentium 90 with FDIV [PENTIUM - Produces Erroneous Numbers Through Incorrect Understanding of Math] error and cheesy IDE hard disks, looking around for real alternatives isn't a bad idea.. Needless to say the SCSI 486 box lived far beyond its intended day of deprecation.
What IDE comes down to is its Intel backed. Not that Intel is a bad thing for the industry in terms of volume, they bring cheap and fast to the masses, nor are they bad to keep things competitive. But they sell CPUs and endorse IDE/EIDE/ATA/ATAPI and USB/1/2. That means SCSI and Firewire is better.
SCSI - first to implement SMART. This stuff has worked for me first hand. SCSI uses sector sparing which remaps defects to spare sectors, not marks them as "bad." ATAPI is a subset of the total commands available to the SCSI, and SCSI being the superset it has more commands available to it to perform various extra things. IDE drives have primitive understanding of tagged commands, if at all. If you have to write, Say, ABCD to the disk - but the placement on the physical platter was ACDB. SCSI would write them out as ACBD, to say the disk from having to do extra work. IDE class would start at A, then pass up the C locations to write the B, then rewind to the C location, then forward to the D location. Grossly inefficient. SCSI drives have superior warranties. SCSI drive vendors will advance replace hard drives, not requiring you to rip out your drive and send it off as IDE vendors do. SCSI vendors make money on SCSI drives - this is a good thing because that means they actually support he product. SCSI implementations on UNIX are clean, and most IDE "SCSI-like" devices are emulated as SCSI for a reason. If you think SCSI is a myth, try this one on. Novell 4 provided an IDE driver so that people could use IDE CD-ROM. They specifically asked that IDE drives not be used to serve Novell shares, the devices generally could not handle the extremely aggressive (and pleasantly fast and recoverable) Novell file system. Low and behold, my cheesy boss thought to put an IDE disk in there. It seized up a year later. Literally. The drive wouldn't even spin up. Luckily I noticed this condition and was able to copy the info off (we had backups but hey, up to the minute is better). After power off and power on, drive, dead. This drive was not one of those drives prone to failure, like the 75GXP or a 6GB WD. It died a horrible death due to inferior capability.
I like my Adaptec and LSI/Symbios high end SCSI cards. I like low CPU usage. I like a proactive approach to error detection and correction - sector sparing and SMART. I like calling and getting support.
Notable - the price for 80 pin SCA equipment is in expensive. If you need cheap SCSI disks this is the way to go, there seems to be overstock of said drives and places like Hypermicro will give you a converter from 80 to 68 pin (LVD safe) for free with 80 pin purchase.
Also, just recently, be cognizant of the fact that FireWire creamed USB 2.0 despite the higher bandwidth maximums. Intel sell CPUs. Eating more and more CPU power created a need for bigger better faster more.
Now a drawback with SCSI is the idiotic cabling, high cost. The answer to idiotic cabling was SCA a SAF-TE enclosure. Hot swappable and all. Clearly with SCSI-over-IP coming, and 10GE with SCSI-over-IP being a planned alternative to FC, there is something alluring about SCSI to keep it going on in the 10 GE era.
I would like to see a firewire-like connector adaptation of SCSI at some point. I like SCSI. The driver support is universal for AIC78xx and NCR/Symbios/LSI 53C8xx/53C7xx. The performance is superior and handles very busy multi user stuff far more gracefully. Better warranties. Better data reliability. Interestingly cheap backchannel for 80 pin SCA.
For DVD-ROMS, I would like to see SCSI and firewire come out first, the crud adaptations to USB and ATAPI come out later.
I am repulsed by ATAPI add in cards, btw. I don't like Promise too much, I don't like HPT at all. I think 3Ware is a nice idea but it's a hack and it makes not sense to do anything but mirror an IDE to me.
Do I have a 120 MB 8MB buffer hard drive? Yes. Do I wish it was a SCSI yes. Would I buy another CDR burner when I have a Plextor SCSI 12X? No, not until another SCSI one comes out. I already have the SCSI subsystem in place so the incremental cost in getting a SCSI drive is worth it.
So in summation, I am supporting "alsta's argument and desire for SCSI versions of hardware. I also makes it easy to stuff new things into SCSI only platforms like some Sun Ultra workstations. And interestingly enough, lots of former Mac zealots and I agree, Apple jumped the shark hard when they bailed on SCSI. For anti SCSI zealots I will condone only Firewire. And then maybe USB for junk like keyboards and mice. I wish that machines were all build with the SCA or FC backplane that the Sun workstations get. Its elegant, reliable, easy to service, hot swappable and guess what, if you care about what's on your hard drive no price seems to high to guarantee better data availability.
High-Quality! Inexpensive! Superior-Performance! - pick any two.
I do agree BK is technically wrong and think that RMS is right in this case. I would like for them (those who decide where Linux sources live, Tosatti, Linux, Cox, et. al.) to use Subversion, or maybe even CVS and a program like cvsup like on FreeBSD - seems to work more than adequately for a project which a much larger in scope than just a kernel. RMS can seem loony at times, but in this case I agree with his argument. Non free software is not a desirable end because I contest the argument that, in this specific case, non free software is necessarily better. Not with competition like Subversion. Not when you weight the ramifications of a heavy thick restrictive license which is "worse" than GPL. (I can not personally decide on BSD vs. GPL licensing, but I lean towards BSD because it's a good compromise to allow corporations to leverage meritorious free/open work while being able to tweak and tune to a platform without giving away too many specifics) but random proprietary license of the day and reams of EULA trash don't belong in the center piece of the GNU/Linux arena, IMHO.
There are many, and there have been many ways to utilize fiber for years. As I indicated above, a NIC is not a NIC, I have found the Tigon 3 to be most effective at keeping utilization low under load. If you think a D-Link is going to perform, you would be mistaken, I would venture to guess that in the right situation, with the right packet size, and the right amount of ingress, a more capable 100 mbit controller from 3COM or Intel would outperform a D-Link (which uses a national semiconductor ASIC I believe, that's a guess, but I wont bother to find out because I don't care about D-Link).
I also touched on ingress traffic and live lock in interrupt driven kernels. It's a real problem. Also, speed is relative to packet size (jumbo packets), interrupts coalescence and tcp checksumming offload.
I find that fiber's performance does not denigrate at all as you approach maximum limit in length. I find that Copper is sensitive to RF, and, while gigabit does not have this notion of crossover because it uses all 4 pairs, I hate the idea of crossovers at all (most GE cards now do auto MDX for 10/100).
As I also indicated, there are usually fiber uplinks on switches, as seen here. It has 48 ports, and two fiber ports. [$1300 bucks]. This is a typical use, as is suggested by the design. Clearly it is wise to use the 10/100 to connect to got to workstations, and here, we see a switch with 24 10/100/1000 ports (Cu), and uplink ports, which can be SM or MM fiber. [$2300]
I would say one would use fiber to connect switches to one another, basically deprecating "spanning" style switches, where one must get proprietary cables and whatnot. This gives the flexibility of moving switches far away, and these switches above have options for single mode which can drastically increase range, making cross-corporate-campus communications as trivial as laying the fiber down and very cheap compared to the days of old when repeaters were used.
I work with a 10/100/1000 combo copper fiber switch, and Alteon 180, and we use that to aggregate switches that span out copper to the lab of machines we use to test various things. I find fiber a joy to work with, and tapping fiber connections is far easier. The aforementioned switch would cost in and about $15,000 new, but on Ebay who knows. Clearly fiber to the desktop is not the intent of using fiber, but not using for backbones is the right choice. Flexible transceivers, cables which are priced right when you want to go far distances, and it isn't subject to RF noise, and is easy to tap - and cheap. The taps for tapping single or multimode fiber [70/30 split] are about $600. The taps for gigabit copper are way over that price (this just came out - its neat, and cutting edge, but according to hearsay not at all easy to do because of the 4 channel system GigE Cu uses).
So fiber switches are expensive. But they are good, the can aggregate lots of things from far away, and they are generally newer, always managed. The cheapest 100% fiber switches are in the $4000 range, usually starting at 8 ports.
So is fiber for gamers? No. Is fiber a cheap way to hook up your client machines or low bandwidth servers? No. Is it useful to span switches distances near and far, and to allow certain high volume servers excellent access to bandwidth, and be tappable easily and cheaply, yes! I have been very pleased with both the original AceNIC and the Tigon 3 controllers, and the Alteon switches.
Fiber is essentially a distance giver, and most of the NIC I pointed out in my original post have the same ASIC for both the GigE Cu and the Fiber rendition of the card, but I have found that fiber is more reliable, easier to push to the theoretical maximum speeds for a given packet size. I would probably buy going forward Cu 10/100/1000 switches, and span them with fiber uplinks and aggregate them into a fiber switch and give critical routers and servers access to that aggregate switch.
Another thing to pay attention to when buying switches, is the switching fabric. A lot of cheaper switches out there cant handle every single port going full duplex and 1000 mbit. This is where the fabric becomes the theoretical limiter. Be careful of garbage brands, stick to Intel, 3Com, Sun, Cisco, Extreme, Juniper, Foundry and beefy vendors. Intel and 3COM may be seen as cheesy and cheap to hang with the more scaleable vendors, but they build decent stuff for basic use.
Many of these are on the second or third revision of the card. I have found the "Tigon 3", Broadcom 57XX (5701) (tg3 and bcm5700, supported in FreeBSD, Linux, and others) 3COM 3C996 (SX and T) to be a very good card, the best of the bunch, as it has advanced packet coalescence, checksum offloading, and has the least number of interrupts with even insane amounts of malformed/attack ingress traffic. The medium seems to make little difference in the short haul.
I have also seen single mode cards for PCI, and I have also been working with single mode POS OC3, OC12 and OC48 cards for PCI.
POS OC3/OC12 for PCI here , Lucent OC12 and OC 48 cards here, just to name a few.
So, with OC48 being 2.5Gbit/sec, I think PCI/PCI-32/33/PCI-64/66 and PCI-X 133 have all seen their fair share of gigabit speed. Most of the cards listen above work rather nicely.
Now, one should use fiber wherever possible, especially for longer hauls. I have OC3 long haul cards for a 7507 at work that are rated to go 80Km in single mode. Multimode fiber transceivers and go up to 500 meters. Consumer grade fiber cards can go up to 10,000 meters as indicated by this 3COM article.
The point? Backbones are best done in fiber. Most switches support fiber, often they have removable transceivers or cards that let you pick single or multimode. I think that its easier to guarantee throughput with fiber as well, as RF and other interference doesn't play a role, and more often than not you aren't even coming close to the limits of the fiber in terms of distance.
Copper GigE is a good cheap fast short haul way to get servers hooked up to your switches. I have never had any problems using regular CAT 5e, and CAT 6 cabling demands a premium and isn't clear what the benefit is in terms of throughput. As far as better "CATS", I don't think they Spec for CAT 7 or any others has even been drafted, so its mainly marketing drivel at this point.
You will be surprised to see that these cards can all feed PCs far more information than they can take, and you will often see disks trying to keep up, and in certain interrupt driven kernels, if you put the adapter in promiscuous mode (we do this to analyze traffic) you can create kernel live lock because the driver desperately needs to poll the input to prevent userland CPU deprivation.
Again, not using Fiber for backbone is not a good idea. The cost differential is not as bad as it used to be, and you can by most any length of pre terminated SC and LX fiber. In fact, the interesting thing about fiber is the length of the cable barely affects cost. A 10 meter cable and a 100m cable are usually very close in price. It's the endpoints that cost the cash.
Linux distributions vary wildly in their various eclectic incarnations as to how things are supposed to get done. My favorite system I have seen thus far is Gentoo. I like to see source usage encouraged, base system clearly defined, reference design and methods of extension al la ports (or emerge).
An open question, if I have suggestions or problems, is there a place for people who don't have time to live and die by Linux to "drop it in the suggestion box?" I had some problems here and there in the past and have found that people "don't want to hear it." I don't mind being incorrect, but I don't take correction without explanation. I have yet to year why there is a good reason for things that don't compile being checked into 2.4.STABLE - which I also follow.
So as far as beta testing goes for Linux kernel. Do they want beta testers? The attitude on the mailing lists ranges from super helpful (some code maintainers are very good about dealing with breakage) to this "if you cant write a better implementation, FO, I don't want to hear its broke, don't like it don't use it". In any case, how is it exactly us trying to use this kernel going to help the better it if the method of information ingress is unclear? Is there a procedure? Like Mozilla when it faults, you get to send errors in, stuff like that. Is there a memory dump in the kernel yet or is that still a patch (it's a tradition that kernels dump to swap then copy on boot do you can see what the computer was doing if it panics). One thing about Linux - if you compile it, load the crap out of it to test it, if it doesn't panic in the 1st day it seems to never panic - which is good.
Just an FYI for people getting into kernel stuff with RedHat-ish systems:
Getting Linux via bitkeeper.
Also don't forget.
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- make install doesn't work with grub, so you have to do your thing manually now
- recommended compiler is gcc-2.9.5.3 [for 2.4 and 2.5 now], I always have extra compilers ready to go just in case. Make sure all the tools are the proper version, and that you have a recent ksymoops (if you need to do any messing around looking for problems ), modutils - etc.
If the build fails, find the offending code and remove from selection, or try to hack it if you need it.
Lorenzo's oil was about a father whose son contracts a debilitating degenerative disease. (Potential spoiler in this synopsis, if you trust this movie is good, do not read further, go rent it now.) The disease is one that degenerates the myelin sheathing on the nerves in the body. The father is deeply trouble by his son's increasing inability to function at the most basic levels and in a race against time he basically becomes a doctor. This, from what I can remember, is a true story. Anyways, after studying like crazy, and studying everything known about his son's diseases, he comes up with an idea that a long hydrocarbon [I believe the length was 26 e.g. CH3-(CH2)24-CH3), but with lots of other functional groups here and there.] oil is somehow going to protect the myelin from further denigration. He finds a natural substance that is similar to the protected oil he theorized about, and apparently it works and stops the never degenerations. Sadly, it is too late for his son, as it only stops the damage, but does not restore it. The movie ends kind of somberly, but inspiring, as the father helped many others with his incessant and furious research in a mad dash to save his son. Anyways, it was a moving movie, and quite well done and an inspiration to us all.
I re-read your comment. I dont know why I responsed to you in that fashion. I was probably meaning to go anon on another comment.
Anyways, totalitarians and lack of du process are indeed scary.
Cheers, sorry about the mishap.
As for the top 10 experiments of all time, as the tagline indicates, that remains to be seen.
That was funny.
But MoneyT is a fucking idiot asshole troll.
I wouldnt waste my mod points on him though, to let him speak loudly only makes him look more the fool. He is a complete jerk.
Much of the science that is used to theorize about the cosmos is verifiable right here on earth. (Fusion, fission, properties of light relativity, force, gravity) The question is does what (LITTLE) we know here properly extrapolate ad infinitum.
I am relatively convinced that there are people smart enough to understand that which can only be verified as a single point observer. The verification of a system of this scale is exceedingly difficult - but should be just be defeatist and mire ourselves in religious texts and ignore the existence of the cosmos and remaining in a comfort zone?
There are those who watch, say Star Trek (in reality there are quite a few people inspire by this show who do interesting things), and want this to be true, even in the face of near impossibly using the same physics that helped to verify the "flicker of light" in article above. They will spend a lifetime seek what now seems foolish. Then there are those who are defeatist and simply what to fulfill Maslow's triangle and live this life out.
If you would have asked about getting to the moon 200 years ago you would have been told its impossible.
Same situation today; the question we ask is faster than light travel? Are there transcendental methods of travel? Do the fundamental laws of physics change as the universal timeline progresses, . as some recent studies have suggested?
One of the more intriguing things about intelligent people I meet is this; they all know that intelligence aptitude may be innate, this can be leveraged with conditioning, but the ultimate test of intellect is to realize that the more you find out the more you realize how much less of the whole you seek you know. The universe, physics, even material science regarding CPUs, signaling in hard drives (what does the signal really look like that is a 1 or 0? You would be surprised. )is inexorably complex.
I think accepting the work of those who are doing what some day may be the salvation of human existence. Being a scientist these days isn't easy. But they must have fun. It pays bad, the aprecation by your peers is fleeting, religious zealots are all to quick to ignore something as basic as carbon dating and take a work of man as a literal and corporate swine, such as Carly Fiorina, expect results or you're fired (never mind the meritorious nature of your research, or the good it may produce for humanity, as were the ideals of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard [as is reflected by the huge charitable foundations left in their wake], who made equipment because it was needed by science, such as liquid chromatography machines, oscilloscopes, etc. It wasn't about the money, it was about passion for science and engineering.)
Ask yourself to have an open mind, imagine the possibilities, maybe even help to seed a super genius.
I always enjoyed physics. I enjoy using the by product of applied physics every day, TVs, planes, computers, energy, electricity, you name it, the predictability of complex systems that use the fundaments of physics and other sciences is quite impressive, and the amount of work that gets done in a planful way rather than an empirical way is also impressive. Things are build, rarely are they haphazardly conjured.
Who would I aspire to be? Carly Fiorina/Gill Bates or the next Einstein? I have a strong feeling that even the king and queen of gluttony will fade into footnotes while the real pioneers and innovated remain time honored potentially for millennia, maybe even forever...