The French news is the most interesting
on
UFOs In the News
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· Score: 5, Interesting
In 1999 the French government and military released the COMETA report, which essentially stated that UFOs represented some kind of physical phenomena that was unknown and deserved further study. It did not rule out the Extra Terrestrial Hypothesis, which is most amazing given that this report was published and authored by well known French scientists and military commanders. A translation of that report is available (in pdf form) here:
Yeah. mailbox over NFS is really a legacy thing at my lab. A lot of people like it because it's essentially a zero configuration solution for mail. Visitors and academic collaborators can just sit down, login, and type pine without having to configure their imap client.
But it's causing all sorts of other problems. So... you're spot on right. Anyway, mail over NFS is a security and locking nightmare. Just as you describe. Though I would argue that your complaint about mailbox corruption during a network outage is only true with soft mounts. Not that hard mounts make it a good idea though.:)
Nope. But only because I'm NFS exporting the mail spool to a bunch of 'nix clients, along with providing IMAP/SSL support to other clients. But yeah, I've hit a terrible bottleneck because of that. And NFS filelocking is crappy at best, a nightmare at worst. But you and the previous commenter really did pinpoint my bottleneck - and it's not the fault of imapd, but of the constraints inherent in my broken implementation.
Wait. UID support requires that I write my inbox spool files out in mbx format, right? I can't do that because I'm NFS exporting the mail spool to a bunch of other 'nix clients along with IMAP. Which is why I'm still using traditional sendmail appended spool files. Is this what you were talking about?
Sure. Here's the relevant section of 2060 on unique identifiers:
Another instance in which unique identifiers are regenerated is if the message store has no mechanism to store unique identifiers. Although this specification recognizes that this may be unavoidable in certain server environments, it STRONGLY ENCOURAGES message store implementation techniques that avoid this problem.
I'm actually experiencing this problem on a Debian server running wuimapd and sslwrap. We're seeing tremendous performance problems once users' mailboxes grow beyond a few hundred megabytes, though no problems at all when users move mail into secondary folders. It's possible that UID support is borked though. I previously read through 2060, but I have to admit that I missed the relevance of UIDs to my particular problem. Perhaps you've just solved it. If so, thanks!
Hold on, these draconian policies make a lot of sense from a capitalization standpoint. On the server side, the big bottleneck is data bandwidth between your mail spool disks and server RAM. Even assuming you run fiber channel RAID and get +200MB/sec sustained throughput, that's still much too small when you're dealing with multiple users who each have very large mailboxes. Think about it: forty 500MB spool files being loaded at once and you have gridlock across that disk bus. Remember, every IMAP connection performs a linear traversal of that spool file to extract new mail headers. That's the real problem, and it can't be solved with cheap commodity hardware.
I have an old SNES that still works great. Why re-buy all those old games again? Never mind the difference in manufacturing quality between the SNES and a PS2 or 360. Hell, my first 360 didn't even last an hour; the SNES fifteen years and still going strong.
yeah, right. most europeans have a glass of wine or a beer with lunch, and then a glass or two with dinner. But it's spread out over time and with food, not consumed all at once on an empty stomach.
While I don't currently have or need a support contract from MySQL, I wouldn't transition away from Debian within our machine room just for their sake. I can't say this is a mistake for them, as I don't know what sales numbers they see, but here's one potential customer that's gone as a result.
Later on in this show: A group of nuns visit Amsterdam and don't enjoy it.
Oh, they enjoyed it. That sneering frown is just meant to throw you off, like a bluff at the poker table. There is some question whether they remember the trip, however.
Compulsive consumerism? Beats me. I wanted a diversion, and the games are plenty of fun. However, I'll point out that I bought this at Microcenter in Cambridge, MA, which has a $100 rebate on the Core and Premium. So I paid $299 plus the warranty and tax for the premium unit. Still expensive though.
I was sold by Gears of War and Dead Rising. I'll also probably buy Call of Duty 3, but that's been ported to everything. So, if you've played those games and didn't dig 'em, dump that 360 right now. Sell it on craigslist or whatever.
Oh, I disagree. I think the current 90nm based 360 hardware is junk. But the games are incredible, and the PS3 will be no better in the near term. I've decided to stick with the 360 for my own online gaming fun, and buy a Wii for party games with friends. This - I think - is the sweet spot right now.
OK. After bitching over how my first 360 died within an hour, instead of returning it I exchanged it for a new unit and a 2 year warranty. I'm pretty sure the second unit will croak, but I'm am totally sucked in by Gears of War and Dead Rising. Shit. I want to hate this thing, but the games are freak'n great.
If that's true then I'm even further convinced to dump the thing. One of the principal reasons I bought it was for Xbox Live. If MS is bricking systems with their updates, and then charging people to fix their mistakes, why in hell would I want to expose myself to that kind of hassle?
I don't know what caused the problem. I just know that I bought a worthless piece of junk and I thank God I can still return it for my money back.
I just bought a 360 from a local store last Sunday, along with Gears of War and Dead Rising. I took it home, set it atop a rear projection HDTV, and connected the various component, power, and network cables. There was plenty of room in the rear for fan outflow, and nothing obstructing the unit on the top or sides. Then I created an Xbox Live account and it downloaded a firmware update. I figured I was ready to play.
First I stuck in Dead Rising. Played single-user for about thirty minutes or so until the screen froze dead mid-action. I reset the 360. Played again until about twenty minutes later the system froze again. So I thought that perhaps it was a bad game disc, so I put in Gears of War: it didn't last long enough to make it through the introductory cut-scenes. I reset the system again and got to play less than five minutes before the system froze again.
At this point I decided that I must have bought a defective unit. A quick google search of "360 freeze" listed a ridiculous amount of hits. I note that the terms of the MS warranty are 90 days, after which customers must pay a $139.00 repair fee plus shipping. I guess I was lucky enough to have bought a unit DOA rather than dead three months out. I know I could exchange and buy an extended warranty, but I fear a never ending revolving door of hardware failures followed by customer service and shipping hassles. Forget it.
I've decided to return the system and wait out another hardware revision. These things are too damn temperamental and Microsoft clearly is not willing to back up their hardware with a reasonable warranty. The games look great, but what's the point if I can't play them?
Right. Slower system with less RAM is a slower box with less RAM.:)
'nix on a PDP-11 with 128KW (16 bit) of RAM is the smallest I've ever seen. Of course it didn't run X. Hell, it didn't even have a network stack. I could handle 16 concurrent users on dumb terminals though. You should have seen compilations on the damn thing. Whoa. Talk about slow.
Going back to the Mac, System 6 with Multifinder was pretty nice. Right about the time the II/FX, II/ci and II/cx were released I came really close to buying a Mac. But I just couldn't afford it. So I bought a 386sx/16 with 4mb and stuck Win 3.0 on it. God, I hated that thing. What a piece of shit. It wasn't until I got 386BSD installed that I finally felt like that computer could do actual _work_. Then Linux started getting better hardware support and I switched to that. 386BSD really stagnated while the whole AT&T lawsuit was worked out.
a) Assuming you had installed Linux or 386BSD, I strongly doubt you ran X in 2mb of RAM on a 386/33; even if you were running Tiny X using an MGA Hercules card. I seem to remember that was impossible.
b) How does that matter? Well, the question is: Can X11 outperform Aqua/Quartz on low end machines? The answer is: Yes. And the evidence for that answer is to show X11 running on extremely low-end hardware.
As for whether MacOS X is a "hog" in comparison to modern Windows or 'NIX variants, I don't know. Modern computers have new functionality not possible back in the late '80s. For example, not even very high end visual workstations could have handled nonlinear video editing back then. Today, a little laptop can do that. But to perform those tasks, one needs software and OS library support. Is that wasteful bloat? I don't think so. Pervasive device independent vectorization of fonts and icons is something those old systems couldn't handle. Is it worth doing, or is it bloat? I say it's worth doing.
But still - you wouldn't want to install that crap on a ten or fifteen year old computer.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1999 the French government and military released the COMETA report, which essentially stated that UFOs represented some kind of physical phenomena that was unknown and deserved further study. It did not rule out the Extra Terrestrial Hypothesis, which is most amazing given that this report was published and authored by well known French scientists and military commanders. A translation of that report is available (in pdf form) here:
http://www.cufos.org/cometa.pdf
(Note that I don't promote cufos.org, nor know anything about the site.)
Oh yeah, using the Wiimote to *avoid physical labor*. lol!
Cellular Automata
Yeah. mailbox over NFS is really a legacy thing at my lab. A lot of people like it because it's essentially a zero configuration solution for mail. Visitors and academic collaborators can just sit down, login, and type pine without having to configure their imap client.
:)
But it's causing all sorts of other problems. So... you're spot on right. Anyway, mail over NFS is a security and locking nightmare. Just as you describe. Though I would argue that your complaint about mailbox corruption during a network outage is only true with soft mounts. Not that hard mounts make it a good idea though.
Nope. But only because I'm NFS exporting the mail spool to a bunch of 'nix clients, along with providing IMAP/SSL support to other clients. But yeah, I've hit a terrible bottleneck because of that. And NFS filelocking is crappy at best, a nightmare at worst. But you and the previous commenter really did pinpoint my bottleneck - and it's not the fault of imapd, but of the constraints inherent in my broken implementation.
Wait. UID support requires that I write my inbox spool files out in mbx format, right? I can't do that because I'm NFS exporting the mail spool to a bunch of other 'nix clients along with IMAP. Which is why I'm still using traditional sendmail appended spool files. Is this what you were talking about?
I'm actually experiencing this problem on a Debian server running wuimapd and sslwrap. We're seeing tremendous performance problems once users' mailboxes grow beyond a few hundred megabytes, though no problems at all when users move mail into secondary folders. It's possible that UID support is borked though. I previously read through 2060, but I have to admit that I missed the relevance of UIDs to my particular problem. Perhaps you've just solved it. If so, thanks!
Hold on, these draconian policies make a lot of sense from a capitalization standpoint. On the server side, the big bottleneck is data bandwidth between your mail spool disks and server RAM. Even assuming you run fiber channel RAID and get +200MB/sec sustained throughput, that's still much too small when you're dealing with multiple users who each have very large mailboxes. Think about it: forty 500MB spool files being loaded at once and you have gridlock across that disk bus. Remember, every IMAP connection performs a linear traversal of that spool file to extract new mail headers. That's the real problem, and it can't be solved with cheap commodity hardware.
If I buy a Wii, one of the first games I'll download is Bionic Commando for the NES. I really miss that game. :)
I have an old SNES that still works great. Why re-buy all those old games again? Never mind the difference in manufacturing quality between the SNES and a PS2 or 360. Hell, my first 360 didn't even last an hour; the SNES fifteen years and still going strong.
yeah, right. most europeans have a glass of wine or a beer with lunch, and then a glass or two with dinner. But it's spread out over time and with food, not consumed all at once on an empty stomach.
In point of fact, we are already running a PostgreSQL server as a backend for a call tracking system. So... yeah. :)
While I don't currently have or need a support contract from MySQL, I wouldn't transition away from Debian within our machine room just for their sake. I can't say this is a mistake for them, as I don't know what sales numbers they see, but here's one potential customer that's gone as a result.
Later on in this show: A group of nuns visit Amsterdam and don't enjoy it.
Oh, they enjoyed it. That sneering frown is just meant to throw you off, like a bluff at the poker table. There is some question whether they remember the trip, however.
Compulsive consumerism? Beats me. I wanted a diversion, and the games are plenty of fun. However, I'll point out that I bought this at Microcenter in Cambridge, MA, which has a $100 rebate on the Core and Premium. So I paid $299 plus the warranty and tax for the premium unit. Still expensive though.
I was sold by Gears of War and Dead Rising. I'll also probably buy Call of Duty 3, but that's been ported to everything. So, if you've played those games and didn't dig 'em, dump that 360 right now. Sell it on craigslist or whatever.
But I'm totally hooked. --M
Oh, I disagree. I think the current 90nm based 360 hardware is junk. But the games are incredible, and the PS3 will be no better in the near term. I've decided to stick with the 360 for my own online gaming fun, and buy a Wii for party games with friends. This - I think - is the sweet spot right now.
OK. After bitching over how my first 360 died within an hour, instead of returning it I exchanged it for a new unit and a 2 year warranty. I'm pretty sure the second unit will croak, but I'm am totally sucked in by Gears of War and Dead Rising. Shit. I want to hate this thing, but the games are freak'n great.
Oh! The blood!!!
If that's true then I'm even further convinced to dump the thing. One of the principal reasons I bought it was for Xbox Live. If MS is bricking systems with their updates, and then charging people to fix their mistakes, why in hell would I want to expose myself to that kind of hassle?
I don't know what caused the problem. I just know that I bought a worthless piece of junk and I thank God I can still return it for my money back.
I just bought a 360 from a local store last Sunday, along with Gears of War and Dead Rising. I took it home, set it atop a rear projection HDTV, and connected the various component, power, and network cables. There was plenty of room in the rear for fan outflow, and nothing obstructing the unit on the top or sides. Then I created an Xbox Live account and it downloaded a firmware update. I figured I was ready to play.
First I stuck in Dead Rising. Played single-user for about thirty minutes or so until the screen froze dead mid-action. I reset the 360. Played again until about twenty minutes later the system froze again. So I thought that perhaps it was a bad game disc, so I put in Gears of War: it didn't last long enough to make it through the introductory cut-scenes. I reset the system again and got to play less than five minutes before the system froze again.
At this point I decided that I must have bought a defective unit. A quick google search of "360 freeze" listed a ridiculous amount of hits. I note that the terms of the MS warranty are 90 days, after which customers must pay a $139.00 repair fee plus shipping. I guess I was lucky enough to have bought a unit DOA rather than dead three months out. I know I could exchange and buy an extended warranty, but I fear a never ending revolving door of hardware failures followed by customer service and shipping hassles. Forget it.
I've decided to return the system and wait out another hardware revision. These things are too damn temperamental and Microsoft clearly is not willing to back up their hardware with a reasonable warranty. The games look great, but what's the point if I can't play them?
*sigh*
Microsoft is their own worst enemy.
They even have their own supported Linux Distribution, currently based on Scientific Linux 3.x.
No.
Right. Slower system with less RAM is a slower box with less RAM. :)
'nix on a PDP-11 with 128KW (16 bit) of RAM is the smallest I've ever seen. Of course it didn't run X. Hell, it didn't even have a network stack. I could handle 16 concurrent users on dumb terminals though. You should have seen compilations on the damn thing. Whoa. Talk about slow.
Going back to the Mac, System 6 with Multifinder was pretty nice. Right about the time the II/FX, II/ci and II/cx were released I came really close to buying a Mac. But I just couldn't afford it. So I bought a 386sx/16 with 4mb and stuck Win 3.0 on it. God, I hated that thing. What a piece of shit. It wasn't until I got 386BSD installed that I finally felt like that computer could do actual _work_. Then Linux started getting better hardware support and I switched to that. 386BSD really stagnated while the whole AT&T lawsuit was worked out.
Anyway. History and all that.
Your computer is just a calculator that displays its sums as colored dots on the display. Nothing more.
Yes yes yes yes yes!!!
a) Assuming you had installed Linux or 386BSD, I strongly doubt you ran X in 2mb of RAM on a 386/33; even if you were running Tiny X using an MGA Hercules card. I seem to remember that was impossible.
b) How does that matter? Well, the question is: Can X11 outperform Aqua/Quartz on low end machines? The answer is: Yes. And the evidence for that answer is to show X11 running on extremely low-end hardware.
As for whether MacOS X is a "hog" in comparison to modern Windows or 'NIX variants, I don't know. Modern computers have new functionality not possible back in the late '80s. For example, not even very high end visual workstations could have handled nonlinear video editing back then. Today, a little laptop can do that. But to perform those tasks, one needs software and OS library support. Is that wasteful bloat? I don't think so. Pervasive device independent vectorization of fonts and icons is something those old systems couldn't handle. Is it worth doing, or is it bloat? I say it's worth doing.
But still - you wouldn't want to install that crap on a ten or fifteen year old computer.