So what has changed about the Slashdot audience that leads you to think that those reasons are not valid?
Mainly, it's the sheer size of the user community. As I said near the end of my previous post, with the current size of the Slashdot community, topics can easily receive hundreds, if not thousands, of comments and moderations within minutes of appearance. While I would not say that this necessarily leads to a problem with *all* topics, it is beginning to become a problem on topics that attract interest from a significant percentage of the userbase.
Do you agree that good comments tend to continue to be moderated up until they reach the limit? If yes than clearly allowing more moderations will simply mean more comments reach the limit sooner. At the extreme end of this process every comment would end up either a -1 or a +5. In practice a lot of comments would still get ignored but I am sure that virtually all comments that are currently ending up +3 would instead end up +5.
You're not paying attention. This story has more +5 comments than +4 comments. As I write this the threshold dropdown shows "4: 33" and "5: 22" i.e. 11 +4 comments and 22 +5 comments. Almost all the stories currently on the frontpage also have more +5s than +4s.
But you're talking about far more than doubling the number of moderators so there will be far more points on a per post basis to go around. Infact your saying there should be one point per logged in user per post. So it would only take 9 other logged in readers to agree with you to move a post from 0 to 10. Currently the number of agreeing readers has to be much higher than that because most of them can't moderate and those that can only have a few points to hand out to many good posts. You're advocating flooding the system with points, which can only lead to the scores tending to extremes.
Hmm...you have a point here. I seem to have made a mathematical mistake. Further examination would seem to indicate that, at a certain level, comments tend to be moderated up to the maximum. I would say that this is probably a natural result of many people agreeing that a very high quality comment should be moderated up. However, your assumption that this also happens, or would happen, on the lower end of the scale is not correct, as far as I can see. I would also say that the belief you subscribe to in moderating up more frequently than down is a factor in this effect. I think that it is possible that under the system I describe, if this practice were not discouraged, it could very well lead to exacerbation of that problem, rather than mitigation.
One other point, you are assuming in your example that all moderation would be upward. This may not necessarily be true. I could as easily say it would only take 12 other readers to moderate a +10 post down to -2. The error in your thinking results, once again, from your belief that most moderation should be upward, rather than downward. I still believe that, ideally, a more open, wider system would have the statistical effect of reducing the individual weight of each moderation.
I'll assume you merely misworded that, as I'm sure you know that you can post in a discussion you have moderated (you can't moderate a discussion you've posted in). So you can either post and forfeit any moderations you've made so far (if you feel strongly enough about making a correction) or you can save your points until someone else posts a correction. If no one corrects the poster then perhaps the correction wasn't worth making?
No I didn't "misword" that. Read the FAQ. "'Moderators cannot participate in the same discussion as both amoderator and a poster." While it is certainly possible to post in a previously moderated discussion, your moderation points are removed from that discussion, or at least, they *should* under the current system. I confess that I have not actually tested this, but i
As an aside, I just checked the current moderation status of my original post, as at 0500 UTC. My original post, up to that point, had received "20% Offtopic" moderation. This is a clear example of the failings of the current moderation system. My original post is by definition, not offtopic. To justify the relevance of my original post to this topic, I will refer you to the following quote from the original topic posting by CmdrTaco, otherwise known as Rob Malda, Creator of Slashdot:
And if he (or anyone) wants to make changes more substantial than cosmetic CSS, I'd consider them too. The upcoming Slashdot Redesign contest is intended to be more about design than architecture, but good ideas are good ideas.
Actually, we have this sort of battling already. Just look at the mod wars in any of the more politically-related topics. A more open moderation system would tend to decrease the relevance and visibility of both comment wars and moderation wars.
Secondly being able to edit your posts after you post it for spelling and grammar mistakes and just have the gammar nazis just send you a private message with the spelling and grammar mistakes for you to change if it makes sense.
It's very difficult to see how this could be implemented without undermining the entire moderation system. If editing were implemented, posts could be edited after they are moderated. While I have made my own share of grammatical, spelling, and punctuation mistakes, I see the need to fix posts in virtual stone for the moderation system to have any effectiveness at all.
Mod points shouldn't have a limit (while karma does) but the amount of moderation should go up logarmithicly. So you can get moderations of 6 and 7 but the higer it goes the more moderation it will take to get that high.
The first part of this removes the need for the second part. If mod points limits are removed, statistically it would take many more points to move a post to the higher end of the scale, since it would still require many more people deeming a post worthy of positive moderation than the number of people deeming it worthy opf negative moderation to end up with a highly-rated comment.
You seem not to have thoroughly read my post before commenting on it, or not thought the ramifications through completely. In any case, you also seem to have ascribed ideas to me which I did not state.
All these limitations are there for solid reasons. If you could moderate in stories that you've posted in you are able to moderate down people who reply to you with posts you don't agree with. If all logged in users can moderate then there would be too many moderations and therefore too many highly rated posts (the ratio between mod points and posts to moderate determine the percentage of +4-5 posts). Same reason for limiting moderators to 5 points, plus it prevents individual moderators having too much control over a particular story.
I do not disagree that the limitations that currently exist had solid reasons for their implementation at the time they were initially implemented. What I disagree with is the inferred conclusion that those reasons are still valid. "Too many moderations"? I don't see how that is possible, except for from a purely pragmatic standpoint of the cost of running sufficient computing power to calculate all the moderations. The key to my stance here is, as stated in my original post, limiting moderation by any given user to one moderation per comment.
The scale is limited to -1 to +5 because that is about all that's useful. In fact I'd say there is little difference between +4 and +5 and would consider dropping the +5. Because moderation is done by many people independently but more or less simultaneously posts have a tendency to get repeatedly moderated in the same way. If you think a particular post is worthwhile then probably so do many other people. That's why you see many more +5s than +4s in most stories. Making the scale -2 to +10 would simply result in a lot of +10s and very few +7 to +9s. And what is the point anyway? What exactly does the difference between a +6 and a +7 tell you?
I have yet to see any story in Slashdot end up with more +5 comments than +4 comments, certainly not "most stories". I still don't agree that a "-1 to +5" system provides fine enough grain to separate the wheat from the chaff. Plus, in a "-2 to +10" system, statistically, it would take approximately twice as many moderation points to move a comment up one level on the scale, precisely because of the "many simultaneous moderations" effect, or at least it should in a system where moderation points are not as scarce as they are in the current system. Yes, if I think a particular post is worthwhile, then probably my sentiment is shared by many others--but exactly how many others?
I don't agree with that practice and I doubt it has the effect you're hoping. If 3 people have moderated a post up to +5 then your -1 is just going to result in someone else putting it back to +5. You would do a greater service by moderating up a well written counterpoint.
Errors should be pointed out in comments, not anonymously punished in moderation. That is why there is no "incorrect" moderation. If you are moderating and don't want to post you should moderate up a well written clarification. Negative moderations should be reserved for flames, trolls, and off-topic posts.
You are entitled to disagree with my practice. Assume there is no "well written counterpoint" to a post I believe to be less than useful to the community. How then should I proceed, given that under the current system, I cannot participate in commenting on a topic in which I have previously participated in moderating? Understand that comments in Slashdot comments are not only integral to the Slashdot Experience, but can meander through a wide range of theses. Why does it seem to be inconceivable that I may wish to comment in one area of comments and moderate in another, all within the same parent topic?
I disagree, as well, with your characterization of the utility of negati
and, of course, it was rejected. I archived to my Journal, but here it is...
I have found my self wondering of late whether or not the Moderation system of Slashdot (meaning, this site in particular, as opposed to the underlying implementation in Slashcode) would be more effective if a few changes were made.
For instance, it seems to me from my own experience, that readers are more likely to post in stories that cover a field in which the reader may have a particular expertise, yet the moderation system disallows those same posters from moderating any posts under the same topic. Would it not be more effective to allow moderation to all posts but one's own? Why isn't the moderation system open to all logged in users at all times? Why are we limited to five moderation points at a time? Why is the moderation scale limited to -1 through +5? Why are we limited to single point changes?
Personally, I have my preferences set to display +4 and above, and most of my own moderation tends to be downward, as I personally feel it is of more value to the community for me to down-mod those posts which I feel do not deserve a 4 or 5 rating. I take my moderation very seriously, and I do not mod on a whim. In fact, many times when I am awarded moderation points, I end up allowing them to expire because I do not feel any affinity for the topics currently being discussed, I do not possess enough expertise in the topics being discussed, or I want to particpate in a debate. Again, those discussions I join tend to be those in which I have particular interest or expertise, and I suspect that many posters here would tell similar tales.
I submit that changing the moderation system to -2 to +10 would result in a more accurate characterization of the relative quality level of the posts I see. I also think that we need a "-2, Incorrect" moderation type for posts that contain information that is just downright wrong, and perhaps a "+2, Definitive" moderation type for stellar examples. Perhaps other new moderation types would also help. Could we not open the moderation to all users at all times and do away with the five points at a time limitation by simply not allowing a particular user to moderate a particular post more than once?
I've read the FAQ section on moderation many times, and it still leaves me a bit disappointed. As a 5-digit UID Slashdotter (just a little way over 15 bits at #33785), I've seen Slashdot go through many different phases, and I'm wondering:
Where does the Slashdot community stand on these issues in 2005?
Well, that 50kW station doesn't have a 100 percent efficient transmitter does it? Nor is the transmitter power the only usage of electricity in a radio station. It takes all sorts of ancillary equipment to enable that transmitter to transmit.
Anyway, let's say that the main transmitter is 50% efficient, or uses 100kW. So, that's 2400kWh/day at, say $0.10/kWh (avg. US price), or $240.00/day, or $87,600/year for electricity just to run the main transmitter. This is probably about what one halfway decent engineer makes as salary, so I'd say the cost of transmitter power is probably pretty insignificant compared to other costs.
A 50kW station in the US is most likely an AM band Class A, clear channel station that has a major share of it's market (think KYW Philadelphia, KDKA Pittsburgh, WABC New York, etc.). These stations make a lot of money. Even on the FM side, there are not that many stations that transmit at 50kW, and all of these will be fairly large stations in their markets, as well. Shortwave stations are another matter, entirely.
KC2OOS, concurring. I just got my ticket in the mail the other day. Officially, I was licensed as of 2005-08-24.
The Element 2 exam should be a breeze for anyone with a modicum of math, science, and technical skills. I passed a practice test online the first time without ever having studied anything specific to amateur radio.
I'm learning the Code now. I want to pass Element 1 before it gets the axe.
If I were more experienced and affiliated with a proper emcomm group, I'd be on my way to LA or MS right now. Last week, at my first club meeting (SJRA, oldest cont. operating club in the US), I hooked up with my township's emcomm coordinator. I'll definitely be getting involved--this won't be the last emergency the world ever sees...
You might want to invest in some higher-quality underwear before you ship out. I'd recommend Smartwool or Ibex wool skivvies. There's a reason why desert-dwellers wear a lot of wool.
If nothing else, if you run into any Brits that don't like the new issue stuff, you might be able to trade. I'd also try the Fox River X-Static silver-threaded anti-bacterial socks. I've been using them for years, and they work very well.
Also, believe it or not, baby diaper rash ointment is a great thing to keep around. I prefer the Burt's Bees brand, myself.
I still fail to see why this is relevant. They're accomplishing the state save by running the OS in a virtual machine environment.
The same exact thing has been available for a very long time via Virtual PC. I admit, that running an x86 OS under Virtual PC on a PPC machine means a big performance hit, but still, it's been done.
Hmm. Interesting site, but I don't anywhere on the site where they make the claim that poeple who have actually tasted real human flesh say that Hufu tastes just like the real thing, or even similar.
Normally I wouldn't bother to respond to such an inane comment, but while I did actually post this from one of my Mac OS X machines, I was actually building YA cheap-ass x86 OpenBSD box when I took a break to post my comments on this topic.
In the same room as that Mac are:
1. OpenBSD on an iMac 2. Fedora Core 4 on an iMac 3. Fedora Core 4 on a generic x86 box 4. Fedora Core 4 on an IBM ThinkPad I borrowed from a client 5. Mac OS 9 on an old, heavily upgraded PM7600 6. Windows XP on a Sony VAIO laptop 7. various HDD that I can swap into the above machines containing various flavors of OpenBSD, BeOS, Mac OS, Mac OS X, Windows 98/ME/NT, Linux, and QNX (I may have missed one or two).
I could have as easily posted my comments on any of the above machines, but my eMac running Mac OS X is the one set up with my normal desktop operating environment.
So, as you can see, your comment was ill-considered.
I hereby apologize for the "Beowulf cluster" post. It's just that I've never had the chance to actually post one before, so I thought I'd get it out of my system. I will sincerely try to never post one of these again.
How is what the IBM people are doing in any way different from me plugging my iPod loaded with Mac OS X in to any random Mac built in the last six or seven years (has built-in FireWire), and booting it up? Aside from the encryption (which might actually work with FileVault, I'm just not sure if it would mess up the music player or not because I've never tried it), everything that IBM is doing here has been available on the Macintosh for years and years, whether you're talking about external SCSI drives or FireWire drives. Both of these technologies have been built-in to most Macs (one or the other) since about 1985.
There's no news in this article. I can build a Linux or BSD kernel with every device driver known to man in it, and as long as the host PC supports booting from an external drive (most don't), I can store my OS on whatever device pleases me (so long as the host PC has the proper connector for my device).
I repeat--this is not newsworthy!
Now, what would be cool is if IBM could somehow build a fat binary version of Linux that would boot and run on any random hardware at all (PPC Mac, x86 PC, ARM PDA, etc). Theoretically it should be possible, as long as you can find disk format that can be shared among all of the particular platforms.
What Apple is doing, and has done, with fat binaries shows that this should be relatively easy to achieve. It's just that no one has bothered to sit down and compile the packages.
I have heard that the religious strictures against eating pork in some religions exist because pork supposedly tastes very similar to human flesh. There is some discussion of this in the book "Contingency Cannibalism" by Takada Shiguro (Paladin Press, ISBN 1581600259). The most telling part of the book is that the Thai supposedly call human flesh "long pig". Assuming this is true, would it not be also against the ban to eat things that taste like pork?
Not having ever had the opportunity/necessity/curiousity/what-have-you to have ever tasted people more than superficially, I can't really say if this anecdote is true or not...
I don't necessarily agree that the user experience is better under Outlook, especially when you start looking at the sheer complexity of the later versions. That said, most of the problem with usability on the F/OSS side of things is related to the fact that there hasn't been a re-creation of Netscape Communicator Pro w/Calendar. It's the C&S part that really makes or breaks the system.
Netscape SuiteSpot with Communicator Pro was seamless, and light years better than what Microsoft, Lotus, or Novell were offering in 1997-8.
There's a really good article from OSDL about their search for a good cross-platform scheduling solution, and how they never really found anything. Granted, it's from 2003, but it's not as if things have improved much since then. I have to laugh every time somebody brings up Hula or Sunbird. Both of these projects are an utter waste of time for anyone who needs a true scheduling system.
A F/OSS replacement for Exchange is the Holy Grail, as far as I'm concerned. Oh, and a replacement for Visio, too. I'd even take a commercial solution at this point, as long as it was more open than Exchange.
You know, the installation of Mac OS X on my iPods and external, bus-powered FireWire LaCie drives are all bootable on any Macintosh with built-in FireWire (minus the B&W G3's and PCI G4's).
You can even store your iTunes folder on the iPod, and use iTunes to load the thing...
So basically, IBM is just saying that they've discovered that hard drives are a lot smaller and cheaper than they used to be. Wow. I'm impressed!
You realize that Exchange users are a little more demanding on a system then...
Yes, but OpenLDAP, Cyrus IMAP, INN, Apache, SquirrelMail, Majordomo, and Sendmail together can handle almost everything that Exchange can (minus the all-important calendaring/scheduling) and scale a hell of a lot better than that. Now if we could just get a real C&S package as F/OSS, then we'd have something worth a damn.
Someplace out there, I still have a Netscape SuiteSpot install running about 4,000 users off of one dual PII/233 IBM PC Server box with a RAID5 array.
Plus, I didn't say the machines were taxed. We could have slapped on another 15,000 - 25,000 users without many issues besides more space on the SAN.
That makes a lot more sense.
As an aside, check out the system config page for CMU's Cyrus implmentation--especially the pre-Cyrus Murder config, which was able to keep up with (barely) 6800 concurrent connections. Their new system is much more elaborate (on a par with what you described), but it handles 26,000+ accounts.
I have to agree with the earlier poster and say that the hardware configurations you quote above are gratuitously powerful for a system that only served 12,000 users. Quad 2.4GHz Xeons with 4GB of RAM each, plus you have them in Active/Passive clusters? For only 12,000 users? How many machines total did you use--it sounds like at least 4 or 6 of them, plus your SAN, and as you say, those are just the mailbox servers! I know you need this much power to run Exchange, but really, let's inject a little reality into the picture. The fact that Exchange requires this much iron is ridiculous.
With a more efficient system, you ought to be able to run several hundred thousand users off of hardware like that, if not a million plus.
Thank you. I always like it when somebody can understand that there is no substitute for Exchange. The only product I've ever seen that could do what Exchange does is Netscape SuiteSpot, back in the Version 3 days when they were still licensing CS&T's Calendar Server.
Unfortunately, that product no longer exists. CS&T became Steltor, and sold out to Oracle. Netscape imploded. The F/OSS community seems to have little understanding of what exactly it is that Exchange does, or the reasons why Exchange is such an effective tool.
We need less of dumb WebDAV enabled calendaring F/OSS projects, and more real enterprise scheduling projects that can handle things like delegation, resource management, and conflict resolution. Scheduling is critical for an organization, and even some small organizations could benefit from computerized scheduling management.
Now that RedHat owns the Netscape Servers (sadly, not Netscape Calendar Server), perhaps we'll see a revival of SuiteSpot. The Combination of Netscape Enterprise, Certificate, Messaging, Collabra, Directory, and Calendar Servers with Communicator Pro as a client kicked some serious Exchange 5 ass back in the day, but Microsoft has had many years of development time in improving Exchange while the rest of the world has had no response.
If anybody would like to see first hand what Netscape SuiteSpot could do nearly a decade ago, I'd be more than happy to burn you a copy of my installer CD (runs on NT, various *nix's). Just drop me a line.
And of course, the only thing that could make that install better is if Uwe Ross would just get over his aversion to Macs and port VAG-COM to Mac OS X so I could have on-board diagnostic software...I suppose I'll have to hack in a PC as well with a KVM to switch between them.
Slashdot Mirror
Mainly, it's the sheer size of the user community. As I said near the end of my previous post, with the current size of the Slashdot community, topics can easily receive hundreds, if not thousands, of comments and moderations within minutes of appearance. While I would not say that this necessarily leads to a problem with *all* topics, it is beginning to become a problem on topics that attract interest from a significant percentage of the userbase.
Hmm...you have a point here. I seem to have made a mathematical mistake. Further examination would seem to indicate that, at a certain level, comments tend to be moderated up to the maximum. I would say that this is probably a natural result of many people agreeing that a very high quality comment should be moderated up. However, your assumption that this also happens, or would happen, on the lower end of the scale is not correct, as far as I can see. I would also say that the belief you subscribe to in moderating up more frequently than down is a factor in this effect. I think that it is possible that under the system I describe, if this practice were not discouraged, it could very well lead to exacerbation of that problem, rather than mitigation.
One other point, you are assuming in your example that all moderation would be upward. This may not necessarily be true. I could as easily say it would only take 12 other readers to moderate a +10 post down to -2. The error in your thinking results, once again, from your belief that most moderation should be upward, rather than downward. I still believe that, ideally, a more open, wider system would have the statistical effect of reducing the individual weight of each moderation.
No I didn't "misword" that. Read the FAQ. "'Moderators cannot participate in the same discussion as both amoderator and a poster." While it is certainly possible to post in a previously moderated discussion, your moderation points are removed from that discussion, or at least, they *should* under the current system. I confess that I have not actually tested this, but i
Actually, we have this sort of battling already. Just look at the mod wars in any of the more politically-related topics. A more open moderation system would tend to decrease the relevance and visibility of both comment wars and moderation wars.
It's very difficult to see how this could be implemented without undermining the entire moderation system. If editing were implemented, posts could be edited after they are moderated. While I have made my own share of grammatical, spelling, and punctuation mistakes, I see the need to fix posts in virtual stone for the moderation system to have any effectiveness at all.
The first part of this removes the need for the second part. If mod points limits are removed, statistically it would take many more points to move a post to the higher end of the scale, since it would still require many more people deeming a post worthy of positive moderation than the number of people deeming it worthy opf negative moderation to end up with a highly-rated comment.
I do not disagree that the limitations that currently exist had solid reasons for their implementation at the time they were initially implemented. What I disagree with is the inferred conclusion that those reasons are still valid. "Too many moderations"? I don't see how that is possible, except for from a purely pragmatic standpoint of the cost of running sufficient computing power to calculate all the moderations. The key to my stance here is, as stated in my original post, limiting moderation by any given user to one moderation per comment.
I have yet to see any story in Slashdot end up with more +5 comments than +4 comments, certainly not "most stories". I still don't agree that a "-1 to +5" system provides fine enough grain to separate the wheat from the chaff. Plus, in a "-2 to +10" system, statistically, it would take approximately twice as many moderation points to move a comment up one level on the scale, precisely because of the "many simultaneous moderations" effect, or at least it should in a system where moderation points are not as scarce as they are in the current system. Yes, if I think a particular post is worthwhile, then probably my sentiment is shared by many others--but exactly how many others?
You are entitled to disagree with my practice. Assume there is no "well written counterpoint" to a post I believe to be less than useful to the community. How then should I proceed, given that under the current system, I cannot participate in commenting on a topic in which I have previously participated in moderating? Understand that comments in Slashdot comments are not only integral to the Slashdot Experience, but can meander through a wide range of theses. Why does it seem to be inconceivable that I may wish to comment in one area of comments and moderate in another, all within the same parent topic?
I disagree, as well, with your characterization of the utility of negati
and, of course, it was rejected. I archived to my Journal, but here it is...
I have found my self wondering of late whether or not the Moderation system of Slashdot (meaning, this site in particular, as opposed to the underlying implementation in Slashcode) would be more effective if a few changes were made.
For instance, it seems to me from my own experience, that readers are more likely to post in stories that cover a field in which the reader may have a particular expertise, yet the moderation system disallows those same posters from moderating any posts under the same topic. Would it not be more effective to allow moderation to all posts but one's own? Why isn't the moderation system open to all logged in users at all times? Why are we limited to five moderation points at a time? Why is the moderation scale limited to -1 through +5? Why are we limited to single point changes?
Personally, I have my preferences set to display +4 and above, and most of my own moderation tends to be downward, as I personally feel it is of more value to the community for me to down-mod those posts which I feel do not deserve a 4 or 5 rating. I take my moderation very seriously, and I do not mod on a whim. In fact, many times when I am awarded moderation points, I end up allowing them to expire because I do not feel any affinity for the topics currently being discussed, I do not possess enough expertise in the topics being discussed, or I want to particpate in a debate. Again, those discussions I join tend to be those in which I have particular interest or expertise, and I suspect that many posters here would tell similar tales.
I submit that changing the moderation system to -2 to +10 would result in a more accurate characterization of the relative quality level of the posts I see. I also think that we need a "-2, Incorrect" moderation type for posts that contain information that is just downright wrong, and perhaps a "+2, Definitive" moderation type for stellar examples. Perhaps other new moderation types would also help. Could we not open the moderation to all users at all times and do away with the five points at a time limitation by simply not allowing a particular user to moderate a particular post more than once?
I've read the FAQ section on moderation many times, and it still leaves me a bit disappointed. As a 5-digit UID Slashdotter (just a little way over 15 bits at #33785), I've seen Slashdot go through many different phases, and I'm wondering:
Where does the Slashdot community stand on these issues in 2005?
Well, that 50kW station doesn't have a 100 percent efficient transmitter does it? Nor is the transmitter power the only usage of electricity in a radio station. It takes all sorts of ancillary equipment to enable that transmitter to transmit.
Anyway, let's say that the main transmitter is 50% efficient, or uses 100kW. So, that's 2400kWh/day at, say $0.10/kWh (avg. US price), or $240.00/day, or $87,600/year for electricity just to run the main transmitter. This is probably about what one halfway decent engineer makes as salary, so I'd say the cost of transmitter power is probably pretty insignificant compared to other costs.
A 50kW station in the US is most likely an AM band Class A, clear channel station that has a major share of it's market (think KYW Philadelphia, KDKA Pittsburgh, WABC New York, etc.). These stations make a lot of money. Even on the FM side, there are not that many stations that transmit at 50kW, and all of these will be fairly large stations in their markets, as well. Shortwave stations are another matter, entirely.
KC2OOS, concurring. I just got my ticket in the mail the other day. Officially, I was licensed as of 2005-08-24.
The Element 2 exam should be a breeze for anyone with a modicum of math, science, and technical skills. I passed a practice test online the first time without ever having studied anything specific to amateur radio.
I'm learning the Code now. I want to pass Element 1 before it gets the axe.
If I were more experienced and affiliated with a proper emcomm group, I'd be on my way to LA or MS right now. Last week, at my first club meeting (SJRA, oldest cont. operating club in the US), I hooked up with my township's emcomm coordinator. I'll definitely be getting involved--this won't be the last emergency the world ever sees...
Leaving the solar system takes a hell of a lot more power than it takes to escape from earth...
Maybe, but it takes a whole lot more time and distance, so the required impulse (force, that is) is quite a bit less.
Vivin:
You might want to invest in some higher-quality underwear before you ship out. I'd recommend Smartwool or Ibex wool skivvies. There's a reason why desert-dwellers wear a lot of wool.
If nothing else, if you run into any Brits that don't like the new issue stuff, you might be able to trade. I'd also try the Fox River X-Static silver-threaded anti-bacterial socks. I've been using them for years, and they work very well.
Also, believe it or not, baby diaper rash ointment is a great thing to keep around. I prefer the Burt's Bees brand, myself.
Oh, and good luck Over There. Come back alive.
I still fail to see why this is relevant. They're accomplishing the state save by running the OS in a virtual machine environment.
The same exact thing has been available for a very long time via Virtual PC. I admit, that running an x86 OS under Virtual PC on a PPC machine means a big performance hit, but still, it's been done.
Hmm. Interesting site, but I don't anywhere on the site where they make the claim that poeple who have actually tasted real human flesh say that Hufu tastes just like the real thing, or even similar.
Normally I wouldn't bother to respond to such an inane comment, but while I did actually post this from one of my Mac OS X machines, I was actually building YA cheap-ass x86 OpenBSD box when I took a break to post my comments on this topic.
In the same room as that Mac are:
1. OpenBSD on an iMac
2. Fedora Core 4 on an iMac
3. Fedora Core 4 on a generic x86 box
4. Fedora Core 4 on an IBM ThinkPad I borrowed from a client
5. Mac OS 9 on an old, heavily upgraded PM7600
6. Windows XP on a Sony VAIO laptop
7. various HDD that I can swap into the above machines containing various flavors of OpenBSD, BeOS, Mac OS, Mac OS X, Windows 98/ME/NT, Linux, and QNX (I may have missed one or two).
I could have as easily posted my comments on any of the above machines, but my eMac running Mac OS X is the one set up with my normal desktop operating environment.
So, as you can see, your comment was ill-considered.
I hereby apologize for the "Beowulf cluster" post. It's just that I've never had the chance to actually post one before, so I thought I'd get it out of my system. I will sincerely try to never post one of these again.
I can't believe this got modded up to five.
How is what the IBM people are doing in any way different from me plugging my iPod loaded with Mac OS X in to any random Mac built in the last six or seven years (has built-in FireWire), and booting it up? Aside from the encryption (which might actually work with FileVault, I'm just not sure if it would mess up the music player or not because I've never tried it), everything that IBM is doing here has been available on the Macintosh for years and years, whether you're talking about external SCSI drives or FireWire drives. Both of these technologies have been built-in to most Macs (one or the other) since about 1985.
There's no news in this article. I can build a Linux or BSD kernel with every device driver known to man in it, and as long as the host PC supports booting from an external drive (most don't), I can store my OS on whatever device pleases me (so long as the host PC has the proper connector for my device).
I repeat--this is not newsworthy!
Now, what would be cool is if IBM could somehow build a fat binary version of Linux that would boot and run on any random hardware at all (PPC Mac, x86 PC, ARM PDA, etc). Theoretically it should be possible, as long as you can find disk format that can be shared among all of the particular platforms.
What Apple is doing, and has done, with fat binaries shows that this should be relatively easy to achieve. It's just that no one has bothered to sit down and compile the packages.
I have heard that the religious strictures against eating pork in some religions exist because pork supposedly tastes very similar to human flesh. There is some discussion of this in the book "Contingency Cannibalism" by Takada Shiguro (Paladin Press, ISBN 1581600259). The most telling part of the book is that the Thai supposedly call human flesh "long pig". Assuming this is true, would it not be also against the ban to eat things that taste like pork?
Not having ever had the opportunity/necessity/curiousity/what-have-you to have ever tasted people more than superficially, I can't really say if this anecdote is true or not...
I don't necessarily agree that the user experience is better under Outlook, especially when you start looking at the sheer complexity of the later versions. That said, most of the problem with usability on the F/OSS side of things is related to the fact that there hasn't been a re-creation of Netscape Communicator Pro w/Calendar. It's the C&S part that really makes or breaks the system.
Netscape SuiteSpot with Communicator Pro was seamless, and light years better than what Microsoft, Lotus, or Novell were offering in 1997-8.
There's a really good article from OSDL about their search for a good cross-platform scheduling solution, and how they never really found anything. Granted, it's from 2003, but it's not as if things have improved much since then. I have to laugh every time somebody brings up Hula or Sunbird. Both of these projects are an utter waste of time for anyone who needs a true scheduling system.
A F/OSS replacement for Exchange is the Holy Grail, as far as I'm concerned. Oh, and a replacement for Visio, too. I'd even take a commercial solution at this point, as long as it was more open than Exchange.
Yeah, but can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of...
Oh, never mind...
You know, the installation of Mac OS X on my iPods and external, bus-powered FireWire LaCie drives are all bootable on any Macintosh with built-in FireWire (minus the B&W G3's and PCI G4's).
You can even store your iTunes folder on the iPod, and use iTunes to load the thing...
So basically, IBM is just saying that they've discovered that hard drives are a lot smaller and cheaper than they used to be. Wow. I'm impressed!
Yes, but OpenLDAP, Cyrus IMAP, INN, Apache, SquirrelMail, Majordomo, and Sendmail together can handle almost everything that Exchange can (minus the all-important calendaring/scheduling) and scale a hell of a lot better than that. Now if we could just get a real C&S package as F/OSS, then we'd have something worth a damn.
Someplace out there, I still have a Netscape SuiteSpot install running about 4,000 users off of one dual PII/233 IBM PC Server box with a RAID5 array.
That makes a lot more sense.
As an aside, check out the system config page for CMU's Cyrus implmentation--especially the pre-Cyrus Murder config, which was able to keep up with (barely) 6800 concurrent connections. Their new system is much more elaborate (on a par with what you described), but it handles 26,000+ accounts.
You did notice that your supposedly "local newspaper" is simply regurgitating the same AP wire dispatch as every other news outlet, right?
I have to agree with the earlier poster and say that the hardware configurations you quote above are gratuitously powerful for a system that only served 12,000 users. Quad 2.4GHz Xeons with 4GB of RAM each, plus you have them in Active /Passive clusters? For only 12,000 users? How many machines total did you use--it sounds like at least 4 or 6 of them, plus your SAN, and as you say, those are just the mailbox servers! I know you need this much power to run Exchange, but really, let's inject a little reality into the picture. The fact that Exchange requires this much iron is ridiculous.
With a more efficient system, you ought to be able to run several hundred thousand users off of hardware like that, if not a million plus.
Thank you. I always like it when somebody can understand that there is no substitute for Exchange. The only product I've ever seen that could do what Exchange does is Netscape SuiteSpot, back in the Version 3 days when they were still licensing CS&T's Calendar Server.
Unfortunately, that product no longer exists. CS&T became Steltor, and sold out to Oracle. Netscape imploded. The F/OSS community seems to have little understanding of what exactly it is that Exchange does, or the reasons why Exchange is such an effective tool.
We need less of dumb WebDAV enabled calendaring F/OSS projects, and more real enterprise scheduling projects that can handle things like delegation, resource management, and conflict resolution. Scheduling is critical for an organization, and even some small organizations could benefit from computerized scheduling management.
Now that RedHat owns the Netscape Servers (sadly, not Netscape Calendar Server), perhaps we'll see a revival of SuiteSpot. The Combination of Netscape Enterprise, Certificate, Messaging, Collabra, Directory, and Calendar Servers with Communicator Pro as a client kicked some serious Exchange 5 ass back in the day, but Microsoft has had many years of development time in improving Exchange while the rest of the world has had no response.
If anybody would like to see first hand what Netscape SuiteSpot could do nearly a decade ago, I'd be more than happy to burn you a copy of my installer CD (runs on NT, various *nix's). Just drop me a line.
And of course, the only thing that could make that install better is if Uwe Ross would just get over his aversion to Macs and port VAG-COM to Mac OS X so I could have on-board diagnostic software...I suppose I'll have to hack in a PC as well with a KVM to switch between them.
Thanks for that link. I especially like the Griffin PowerMate in the brake handle well.
Now to see what my wife thinks when I start cutting up her Jetta...