I think that's exactly right. Newegg is a classic example of censored comments... but they admit it right up front, basically telling you right to your face that they delete negative comments about products and that you shouldn't make buying decisions solely based on their product feedback.
Now, I don't like their deletion policy, but their honesty about HAVING one means I still trust the corporate entity and continue to buy from them. I mostly ignore the comments, because I know they're biased. I'd PREFER for the comments to be mostly unedited. They would be more useful to me that way. But when they tell me right up front they're not, I have no problem with it.
So it CAN be done that way, and it's still ethical. Without that kind of disclaimer, however, a public comments section carries an implication that the public can freely comment. I don't expect fully uncensored comments, since they ARE a corporate entity and can't exactly be publishing every trollish, obscene, or off-topic thing that anyone wants to say, but it should be edited as lightly as possible.
Deleting negative comments because they are critical is highly unethical unless you are most clear, in big bold print, that you are doing so.
My apologies if there are more than one kind. I've been to at least a couple of IMAX 3D movies in different theaters, including Polar Express, locally, just a few months ago. Both of the systems I've seen used the polarized light method.
Shutter glasses are indeed horrible, and if there really are theaters that use that tech, no WONDER you don't like it.
The polarized 3D, however, is really quite nice. Check it out sometime.
IMAX glasses don't have shutters and don't blink. There is no blinking in IMAX at all. The IMAX system uses polarized light; one eye is polarized vertically and one is polarized horizontally. The light projected on the screen comes from two separate projectors and is also polarized. The glasses reject the 'wrong' light for each eye and allow only the 'right' light through. (If you take the glasses off, you will see two images projected on the screen.)
That's the reason you can't quite see the flicker. It's imaginary.
It's not very well-known, but you might enjoy Beyond Good And Evil. Female protagonist, good story, great voices, excellent game in general. It didn't, apparently, sell very well. I'm rather perplexed about that, because I really enjoyed the heck out of it. I think it's available on pretty much everything, including the PC (where I played it).
If you're into adventure gaming, the single best one I've ever played is The Longest Journey. Grim Fandango is a very close second. Both can be quite difficult. Grim in particular is a real bear about halfway through. If you lose patience easily, however, there's always the walkthroughs. I used them, and enjoyed both games just as much... perhaps more, since I actually FINISHED them. It was the stories that really hooked me, and in my particular case, the actual puzzle-solving wasn't terribly important. I mean, sure, I enjoyed the puzzles, but they're ancillary to the story. Even using walkthroughs, I absolutely got my money's worth from both.
Both of these games are just superb, head and shoulders above the rest of the once-crowded adventure-game field. They are both examples of masterful storytelling that happen to come in computer game format. Many people will miss them because of this, which is really a shame.
There appear to be quite a few copies of The Longest Journey on EBay right now, but Grim is looking pretty thin. I'd recommend picking up a copy soon before they get really scarce.
I can't disagree with you over the ratio of fun/crap games on the GC. The relative quality of that library is very high. But even Nintendo misses once in awhile... Super Mario GC really wasn't all that great. Decent, playable, but not groundgreaking like SM64 was. Wind Waker, on the other hand, was AMAZING, probably the best game of its generation.
PS2 is more of the shotgun approach... throw enough ammo and some of the shots are bound to hit. Huge amount of crap, but some real gems.
I think the XBox is only now really hitting its stride. If Microsoft had had a clue and put 128megs in the console, it would have at AT LEAST two more really good years in it. They really crippled it by only putting in 64. But I think for the remainder of this generation, the really good games will probably be there. Yes, its games are often ported to the PC, but I hate waiting.:)
You know, I wasn't thinking about SNES games.... Chrono Trigger was probably better than either FF7 or KOTOR. Unbelievably good game, particularly when you consider how limited the hardware was. That's another one I found very late, not until around 98 or 99, and I still loved it. So in my original post (GGP of this one??), knock down KOTOR and FF7 one notch each.
I've tried repeatedly on FF3. I always get stuck. I've just never liked it as well as everyone else seems to. I'd probably like it better if I could finish the dumb thing.
Dude, Ico was awesome. It was... wrenching. Sad and exhilarating, a bit funny in some spots, wistful in others. It evoked emotion better than almost any game I can remember, and it did it almost completely without words. I don't think you can call yourself a gamer if you haven't played Ico. Seriously.
I found out about it very late, and played it only about a year ago, and even going in with high expectations, I was STILL blown away. A year later, I can close my eyes and summon up exact pictures of several locations, to the point that I could sketch them out and be pretty accurate. That's how intensely it impressed itself into my memory... no small feat, when you consider that I'm nearer 40 than 30, and have played so many games over the years.
All the consoles have something to offer. Pick one of each up used, for chrissake. Refusing to buy hardware because it's not Nintendo is cutting off your nose to spite your face. All you're hurting is yourself.
I have all three consoles, and I don't have any real attachment to any of them. I suppose, overall, I like the XBox the most at the moment, because it has had the most interesting games of late, and it may have better 'legs' than the other two. Chronicles of Riddick is really good. Burnout 3 is excellent. Jade Empire is quite good... maybe not as good as Knights of the Old Republic, but good. KOTOR was one of the best RPGs ever done, a true classic. Halo was okay, but tremendously overrated.
On the PS2, there's the Grand Theft Auto series and Katamari Damacy as can't-miss titles. And Ico. And probably a zillion others I can't think of right now.... I guess if you've never owned a Playstation, you must have missed all the Final Fantasy games? Final Fantasy 7 is probably the second-best RPG ever made, and you could argue that it was better than KOTOR in some areas. (freedom and duration, mostly.)
Gamecube has Wind Waker, a true masterpiece, though I do feel it was a bit on the short side. Harvest Moon was good, but got old a bit fast. Animal Crossing was a lot of fun for awhile. The Metroids were excellent. Wario Ware is a completely bizarre, but fun, party-type game. I've often gotten the feeling that the console is underused... it really feels like it has more power than what you actually see.
Nintendo makes great consoles, but cripes, you've missed some unbelievably good games because of your platform-centrism. The platform doesn't MATTER. It's the games that matter. Find the games you want to play, and buy the hardware that plays them best. That's really all there is to it.
If you don't want to play Ico just because Nintendo didn't make it, then you're willfully blind and ignorant. Go away, or I shall be forced to taunt you again.
Somewhere along the way, the kernel devs seemed to have dropped 'high reliability' as one of their requirements, and Linux is suffering badly for it. I've had trouble with 2.6 just on my toy servers at home... APIC problems interfering with the md driver, for instance. It directly cost me quite a bit of money to buy hardware, troubleshoot, and eventually realize it was the kernel at fault, not the hardware. I shudder to think of what small businesses must be spending to fix 'hardware problems' that aren't.
It's my belief that the kernel won't really stabilize until they branch off to 2.7. They're too focused on adding new features for the code to ever really shake out and get stable. They're shoveling new stuff in there way way way faster than it can really be debugged.
And they just wave their hands in the air and say that it's up to the distros to make this mess usable.
Until they get over this phase, in which they're pushing the hard work of debugging onto everyone else in the world, the kernel is not going to stabilize. And we will be held hostage by particular vendor kernels, instead of being able to track the 'one true Linux'. If we start with Redhat, we're stuck with Redhat. In the past, we were able to fall back on the One True Kernel if Redhat or Mandrake made a mistake. But that's not really an option anymore... tracking the One True Linux is now dangerous, because the kernel devs don't really care if it works right.
I can't find the precise quote right now, because I can't see my old comments on Slashdot... apparently I now have to pay for the privilege of seeing my OWN old comments.. but one of the senior kernel devs said, approximately, that getting 1 out of 3 stable kernels actually stable was an acceptable outcome.
Until that mindset changes, Linux is just not trustworthy. It needs to be made right BY THE PEOPLE WHO WRITE IT. You can't hack reliability in as an afterthought, it has to be a major focus all the way along. This is exactly the sort of crap we always derided Microsoft for... ship it buggy and then fix it later. I hated this behavior in Microsoft. I hate it just as much in Linux. I switched to Linux because it was, first and foremost, reliable. It no longer offers me that, and I am starting to switch machines over to the BSDs now.
Waving one's hand and expecting 'the distributions' to do the grunt work of actually making the kernel stable is just wishful thinking... it's expecting other people to do the job that should be the very first one on their list. Reliability is THE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE. It's not fun, it's not glamorous, but it's what got Linux so popular that these guys actually get paid to do it. If it doesn't return to relatively bulletproof status, then people are going to use other solutions instead, and there won't be as many Linux jobs available.
It's the reliability that creates the jobs. I wonder if they really grok this?
Well, a worst case scenario will involve a number of queries. First you hit the top-level asking for 'foobar.example.com'. Root server tells you 'talk to these people for.com'. You query the.com root server and it tells you 'example.com's nameservers are here.'. Then you ask example.com's nameservers, which could potentially redirect you again if foobar is a subdomain rather than a single server.
Each of these queries is fairly short, except the last one, which can contain many A records. But there's more going on than just a simple request/reply, unless the information is already cached.
In your case, you were either cached, or your nameserver did the recursive lookups for you.
The single biggest reason I can think of to not run as root is this: if your system has a root-level compromise, it can be hidden from you... so well, in fact, that the compromise is completely invisible to routine inspection. (there are some NASTY rootkits out there.) The only way to be absolutely certain one has disinfected such a system is to rebuild it completely, from scratch, wiping the disk entirely. If you are extremely knowledgeable, you can manually clean it, but all you have to miss is one bad file out of thousands of good ones to remain compromised. It would take a HUGE amount of work to be absolutely certain an installation was secure, far more than just rebuilding it, 99 times out of 100.
User-level compromises, at least, can't be hidden. They can do just as much damage from the user's perspective (delete files, send spam, and whatnot), but they're obvious to anyone with the least clue, and removing them won't take a system rebuild. The system itself can still be trusted, and that's a big deal.
A Linux box with a root-level compromise could be sitting on the net for YEARS before getting rebuilt. If the hacker is careful, the owner will never even notice that anything is wrong. I worked on a system, remotely, that had been hacked that way. It was impossible to 'see' the bad guys except indirectly. There was a bunch of space mysteriously missing on the drive, and there were ports open (to a remote scan) that shouldn't have been... but which didn't register as being open locally. Had they been smarter and used a port-knocking system, they might still own that box. It was on good bandwidth and, from traffic logs, it looked like they'd been using it at least a year before I got there.
(This can also happen with Windows, of course... this is absolutely not a Linux-only problem.)
Running as a normal user just makes it harder on the bad guys. They now must exploit at least two holes, instead of just one. Considering the number of local root compromises there have been in the 2.6 kernel, this may not be that much of a challenge, but anything is better than nothing. The more steps that are required, the more likely it is that one of them will fail.
This isn't defense in depth, it's more like a double-thick eggshell, but it's still better than just a single layer.
The functionality was a mistake to include in the first place. I don't remember precisely WHY this is, but I have read that it is simply impossible to make a secure SUID/SGID script in any current flavor of Unix.
Taking it out will undoubtedly inconvenience some folks, but it's sort of like being given a power tool without some critical piece of safety gear. Apple has, in essence, forced you to install that gear on your power tool, like it or not. If it inconveniences you, then you weren't using the tool safely to begin with.
From what I understand, it's usually better to use sudo for this anyway... you can set up sudo so that it will only allow you to execute a particular program or set of programs. The sudoers file is more than slightly cryptic, and it's a bit more typing (both "sudo" and possibly the user password), but this will give you much better safety.
If you just absolutely can't stand doing it that way, then write your script in perl or C and SUID that version. Note that it takes special care in both instances... SUID programs are dangerous, and if someone cracks a user account on your system, that's going to be one of the first things they'll look at to try to get root. Don't just toss something together, go look up how to do it safely. (short form: don't trust your environment, don't trust user input). Perl has some special functions just for this purpose, so be sure to read its documentation carefully.
That's because the Amiga created those graphic artists and muscians. The idea of a computer graphic artist didn't really exist before the Amiga.
As the Amiga died, the people who really loved graphics either stayed with it (I knew one person who was still using her Amiga in around y2K to do her painting) or moved to the Mac.
Most artist types don't care about the OS. They just want to paint or make music. Linux is probably the single worst choice for those folks. Even if you DID get good software for it, they're used to their Macs and mostly won't be interested in retraining. And given what Apple is doing with the platform now, I just can't see that the pain would be worth a darn thing for them... they'd suffer through retraining and then end up with poorer tools than they already have. Not a good idea for most of them, I suspect.
I haven't looked at the Scribus format, but very few programs encapsulate the actual font data inside a document. In essence, most word processors include pointers to a given font, but if you don't have the font on your system, it doesn't magically just show up. Instead, you get a replacement font mapping.
In other words, I'm just saying "I thought this document would work best with font X", which would in no way create a GPL obligation. PDFs do, however, include actual font data, so you could presumably be creating a GPL obligation by publishing one.
But remember, unless you EXPLICITLY license a copyright you hold as releasable under the GPL, simply including other GPLed work with it DOES NOT make you lose the rights to your code. You are violating the copyright on the GPLed section, and you may be liable for damages for doing so, but it's not like you magically lose control over the code you wrote yourself.
When you combine your own output with GPLed ouput, the resulting program, in essence, has at least two owners... you, and the person or people who wrote the GPLed section. You can't lose ownership of your code by combining it with GPLed code. You still own the part you created.
Likewise, you can't lose ownership of your document by publishing it with GPL fonts. Even if the GPL is found to be applicable here, about the worst that could happen would be a forced rerelease with a different font. You will never lose control of the actual document information. And the chance of a copyright-infringement lawsuit is nearly zero. In this scenario, it's not clearly obvious that a violation occurred, and the actual damages are most likely zero, since GPLed fonts are usually free-as-in-beer. About the worst that's likely to happen is a nasty letter from some zealot somewhere in the OSS community.
It doesn't MATTER whether or not I can tell the difference. I'm trying to get the archive EXACTLY right so that I don't ever have to do it again. If I'm going to put all the effort in, I might as well do it perfectly, no? I want to make sure that my electronic archive is 100% as good as my physical CDs. Among other things, this will let me recreate the CDs someday, should I need to.
Also, being sure that I get a perfect rip means I won't have any clicks or pops in any of the music. CDs interpolate fairly well, but some damage is quite audible, and I don't have time to manually listen to every second of every track with perfect, unflagging attention. I do, however, have time to inspect 12 or 15 lines per CD rip that tell me I got everything correct.
Other ripping methods may give a bit-perfect rip. On a good cd with a good drive, dd might work just fine. But only with EAC and AccurateRip, in my experience, can I KNOW whether or not it was correct. The other methods may give me the same actual rip quality, but I have no way to be certain.
And as far as your other audiophile comments go... an awful lot of stuff in the audio world is snake oil. That said, computer people in general know *very* little about what good sound is or how to reproduce it. I have only recently been coming to realize just how ignorant I am, in fact. A ritzy computer sound setup is a $400 5.1 set of speakers. In the audio world, that's complete crap. It doesn't even qualify as mid-fi. (Mid-fi is where the value is, and it is head and shoulders above 99% of computer-reproduced sound.)
Just getting a bit-perfect reproduction of a WAV file can be really tough sometimes. Try downloading one of the DTS.wav files from a site like Swedish Radio and see whether or not your player can pipe it successfully to an outboard DTS decoder through either coax or fiber. Chances are quite good that you won't be able to do this. Windows, by default, remixes all.wav files to 48khz and completely screws them up. On a GOOD sound system, this will sound like shit. I spent months thinking that my expensive speakers weren't very good when, in fact, it was Windows and/or my Audigy 2 NX ruining the sound. Now that I have perfect lossless streams hitting my receiver, I'm much better able to appreciate how good those expensive speakers are.
If you're coming from the computer world into the audio world, the single most important thing to do is to drop the assumption of competence. If all you know is computer sound, then your ear and brain will both need a lot of training. Almost certainly, you will be completely incompetent without knowing it, which is the worst possible outcome. I've made the transition to KNOWING I'm an idiot, at least.
Well, they're not gonna have the AccurateRip database, which I personally find very useful, even though it's still a fairly 'young' project. It's a collection of md5sums for extracted tracks, and will tell you whether or not you got the rip right. I've found this to be extremely useful, even though it doesn't yet know some of my CDs.
cdparanoia et al may be just as good at extracting the bits, and you might possibly be able to hack the AR database to work with those.... if you could do that, your end result could well be just as good. I haven't used cdparanoia in a long, long time, so I can't guarantee that.
Truly accurate CD ripping is fairly hard, at least when the CD isn't factory fresh and totally perfect. A simple dd will indeed copy the image, but it's really designed for data, not audio. If your CD has any scratches, it is highly, highly likely that your copy will be imperfect. Audio CDs, unlike data discs, don't have much in the way of redundancy, and it's easy for errors to be missed by the OS.
EAC, on a good drive, will see problems that dd just doesn't catch. It knows how to talk to the better drives, like the Plextors, that will report C2 error information. When it finds a problem, it will retry numerous times at different speeds, trying like mad to get a solid copy. It's surprising just how good a job it does, even on rather questionable CDs. dd offers none of this. It's not an audio ripper, it's just a data copier.
EAC, combined with the AccurateRip database, is a way to be CERTAIN you got a perfect rip, or at least the exact same results that other people have gotten. You simply have no way to know if you extracted properly with dd.
And don't think that just because your CDs are unscratched that they will extract perfectly. I have a couple of CDs that report errors even though their surfaces are apparently perfect. My copy of the old Lost Boys soundtrack is particularly bad. I've run it through several polishing sessions, and there are no visible scratches of any kind, but EAC has a heck of a time with it. I assume that it must be a poor-quality pressing. A couple of tracks on the disk are damaged past EAC's ability to compensate, and I need to find new copies. Had I been using dd, I wouldn't have known.
Remember, I'm trying to archive here. I'm trying to get it PERFECT, so that I never, ever have to do it again. If you just want a casual rip to toss in your iPod, that's a rather different goal.
I invested in a good-sized array (5 250g drives in a RAID-5), and I'm in the middle of reripping my entire collection.
The format I am using is BIN/CUE... I'm trying to take a perfect copy of the actual CD, so that I can recreate it when I wish. My original goal was to copy every bit on the CD.
From what I have found, however, none of the CD image utilities out there make a bit-perfect copy of audio CDs. I have tried Alchohol, Blindwrite, and something else, and NONE of them result in bit-perfect rips with EAC from the image afterward.
The only way I found I could get bit-perfect copies of the music was to use EAC with its AccurateRip database. EAC won't copy anything but sound, so I'm losing the 'extra' content that comes on some CDs. However, what I really care about is the music, so if I have a bit-perfect copy of that, I'm happy.
There are two major ways to make BIN/CUES... separate wav files, or a single wav file. Both require a CUE sheet to reassemble into a CD image. I chose the single-wav format, because this makes tagging when I actually extract the data into whatever I want to use easier. The separate wav file approach would allow you to more easily access the individual files with a script. I suspect this may be a technically superior approach. But I'm using single WAVs anyway, even though it takes more work.
My actual rip process:
Buy a really good CD drive to rip with. I'm using a Plextor Premium. Install CYGWIN or find some other way to script a quick 'diff'. (I'll put my tiny script at the end). Install Daemon Tools to mount images. Run EAC (I have installed the AccurateRip database as well) Set EAC to rip to Track%N.wav when extracting. Rip CD to individual WAVS on the C drive, ensure that everything is either bit perfect or the CD is unknown. AccurateRip only understands individual tracks, so this is the only way I've found to verify that my original CD is perfect. Have EAC create a separate-files CUE sheet 'with leftout gaps'. Edit CUE sheet to remove anything but INDEX 00 lines. Remove all PREGAP and INDEX 01 lines. (This was the only way I could get bit-perfect second-generation rips.) Mount CD image. Rip again to a single-file BIN/CUE image. (this is very fast, 30 seconds to 1 minute on my system) (this will be what you keep) Mount new image. Rip AGAIN to individual files in a separate directory. (again very fast) Run a 'diff' between the first generation rips and the final generation. If they're exact copies, then you have a bit-perfect BIN/CUE. Copy BIN/CUE to server. Delete everything and start on the next CD.
It would be perfectly possible to skip the second and third-generation rips, since you know you got a good copy the first time, but I prefer the single-file approach... I don't want to work with the wav files directly because I don't have tag info for them in that format. And it doesn't take very long to create the single-file image, so I go ahead and do it that way.
Then the next step is to mount the images and rip with whatever software you want to use. I'm using iTunes. I just mount the images with Daemon Tools off the server and rip with iTunes, which always seems to recognize the CDs. I also found that if I bump iTunes' priority down to Below Normal, my rips go ENORMOUSLY faster... they jump from about 8x (dismal) to about 45x. I assume Daemon Tools isn't running at very high priority and iTunes interferes with it... by bumping iTunes down, it doesn't interfere as much and rips faster.
Oh, iTunes also didn't like the 'Generic' label that Daemon Tools uses by default, it seems to be coded to explicitly not recognize a drive with that label. I changed mine to be a 'Pioneer' 'DVR-1X' during the Daemon Tools install, and then iTunes used it fine.
Once you're done ripping, then script something on your server to compress your WAVs with whatever compressor you want. You won't be able to mount them without uncompressing them again, but you'll save a lot
I don't think there's a whole lot to get wrong here. I was running the most current firmware and most current utilities, and I manually patched the most recent driver into the 2.4 kernel. (at the time, the 2.6 kernel wasn't supported by the monitoring utilities, so I stayed on 2.4). I was probably using ReiserFS, though I don't remember for sure. I didn't start using XFS until later.
All I had to do to make interactive use of the machine exceedingly painful was to start dumping a big file from my Windows box onto the RAID. Everything would come to a near-halt, stuck on I/O... the CPU wasn't loaded, but good luck running any new programs or doing much of anything with the disk. This was on an Athlon 1900, I believe with a KT333 chipset.
I had the same results on a server machine at work. That one was on a gigahertz P3 with an Intel chipset... very similar results/symptoms. RAID-10 was okay on both machines, but didn't come anywhere near the speed I was expecting. hdparm reported about 30mb/second, instead of the 60 or so I was expecting off a four-drive RAID-10. It didn't get bogged down or give me problems in RAID-10 mode, but it wasn't fast.
I don't think it was the chipsets, since both the Intel and the VIA failed to perform well. And I had all the most recent code for everything. It just sucked terribly at writing.
I've read multiple reviews that seemed to support this view... they certainly didn't shake it any. RAID-5 on the 8500s and earlier is fine for reading... if that's mostly what you'll be doing, it's okay. (I see, for instance, that your described system load is mostly reading.)
I get much better performance on both reads AND writes using the md driver. I'm very happy with the machine's performance now. It feels very snappy, even under a substantial load.
And, of course, the ICP Vortex absolutely kicks ass and takes names.. and you can get those used for not too much money. The disk space is still relatively expensive, but if you want it to run really fast, SCSI is still the way to go, and will be for awhile longer yet. You can get reasonably priced enclosures from Cremax that fit into open drive bays on your existing computer... you can get 3-in-2 and 4-in-3, among others, with supplemental fans and failure alarms on both the fans and on temperature. They're quite noisy, so not good for a desktop, but they're a great way to build a solid SCSI server, including hotswap capability, without spending much money at all.
If, however, you need it both big and cheap, then software RAID over either SATA or PATA seems to be where it's at.
Your own arguments aren't self-supporting. You talk about how nasty that war was before we dropped the atomic bombs, how much damage we were doing to the Japanese and how many people were dying. There would have been more of that without Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm not sure any of us can intelligently estimate, anymore, how long an invasion would have taken -- most of the people who really knew have died. But I saw estimates that the war, prosecuted by conventional means, would have taken another year and at least a million Japanese lives... as well as a very large number of our own.
In war, the first duty is to protect one's own country and one's own citizens... if a thousand enemies have to die to save one of yours, then you DO that. We should, as a country, avoid war at all costs... Iraq is an incredible blunder. But once you are in a war, you fight to WIN. Fighting to be nice is fighting to lose. We did NOT start that war, it was inflicted upon us, and we did exactly what we should have.
And peace negotiations aren't something you get into with someone who deliberately and sneakily attacked you as the Japanese did. What we wanted (and got) was a total, unconditional surrender. And I would argue that the world has benefited enormously from doing so... had we been 'merciful' and hoped like heck for peace negotiations, we'd have been pinning our hopes on maybes instead of reality. And it's entirely posssible that Japan's old government and old, nasty way of doing business would have survived a peace negotiation. By forcing an unconditional surrender, we got the foundation laid for Japan to make itself into what it is now... an economic powerhouse with the most advanced technology on the planet. And no military or aspirations to invade anyone.
Your argument that 'war is only as hellish as you make it' is the argument of someone who's likely to lose. You fight to WIN. Don't pick fights, avoid them when you can... go FAR out of your way to avoid them if possible... but if forced to fight, WIN. Win so thoroughly that you'll never have to fight that opponent again.
You must know, on some level, that what you are arguing is specious, since you won't sign your name to it.
Expecting an apology from the US is foolish historical revisionism. Not sure the variation you learned in school, but they attacked us first. We lost a good chunk of our Pacific fleet, and it was only by the grace of God that they didn't hit the fuel dumps in Pearl Harbor. Had that happened, the war would have taken at least another year, possibly two.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible events, but war IS terrible. By concentrating all the awfulness into just two events, overall many lives were probably saved. Particularly ours, which must be our primary consideration in war.
In my opinion, the deliberately-induced firestorm in Dresden was at least as great a crime. What is it about people's thinking.... a whole bunch of small explosions that kill tens of thousands of people are okay, but a single BIG explosion that kills fewer people is a crime against humanity?
Remember, Dresden was a follow-on to Hamburg. We knew what was likely to happen and we deliberately induced the exact same effect. By dropping incendiary bombs over several days, they started a raging fire that engulfed more than eight square miles. It generated so much heat that it became its own weather system, creating hurricane-force winds that literally sucked everyone and everything around to their destruction. More than 200,000 bodies were recovered, and the total death toll is believed to exceed 250,000.
Between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, about 120,000 died... less than half.
Your bleating about an apology from the US is just emotional handwringing with no basis in reality. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were humane by the standards of WW2... they did, after all, end the war.
(and to those who start bitching about radiation effects... we didn't KNOW very much about radiation effects at the time. In the middle of a war, where the enemy is trying desperately to kill you and those you love, you don't worry a lot about long-term consequences. You ask, "will using this weapon hurt our people in any way?" If the answer is no, and the weapon is a good one, it's going to get used.)
Wars are very easy to start, but very hard to stop. We stopped a war in its tracks by killing 120,000 people with two planes and two big bombs. It was the right decision, and no apology should ever be expected.
The 3ware cards are well-supported, but they're SLOW. I have an older generation 8500, one that is supposedly 'optimized' for RAID-5. When under a heavy write load, the machine essentially grinds to a near-halt, making interactive use of the system very painful. Just abysmal performance. RAID-10 was reasonably snappy, but no speed demon. They make big speed claims, but they just don't deliver on them, in my experience.
It works great, however, in JBOD mode (Just a Bunch of Disks), running software RAID on my Athlon 1900+. I get good throughput, even on writes (25 megs/second or thereabouts, maybe faster... I'd have to look at my bonnie numbers, which I don't have right now). And the interactive response stays excellent, even when stressing the system. But there are far, far cheaper ways to get 4 SATA ports.
Just as an aside, I do know what a RAID card should look like. I have an ICP Vortex SCSI RAID Controller that kicks ass and takes names, relatively speaking. I believe the write performance was around 40 megabytes/second on six 10KRPM SCSI drives, and read performance was on the order of 80 megs/second. For a PCI controller, that's exellent, and THAT is what a good RAID controller should look like.
The 3Ware card, on the other hand, was probably giving me 6-8 megs/second on writes, and rendering the system unusable to do it. The 8000 generation is woefully underpowered. Hardware RAID is really nice when it works, because you can hide the details from the OS, but the 3Ware implementation is so bad that you're far better off with JBOD mode and software RAID. $400 will buy you a motherboard with 4 SATA ports, possibly 8... along with a new CPU and RAM to boot!
The 9000 series may be better, but they look to have pretty similar specs. The 8500 was bad enough that I'm not likely to buy 3Ware again until I KNOW they're delivering on their performance claims. I love their Linux support, but earlier generations of their cards didn't come CLOSE to delivering what they promised.
1. Give popular agency completely unrealistic goal; 2. Underfund agency; 3. Destroy all real science coming out of agency; 4. When unrealistic goal fails, blame agency for not even producing any science; 5. Dissolve agency and let 'private sector' take over.
The Bushies don't debate and they don't compromise, they just hijack and destroy. This is probably their way to get rid of NASA.
$0 down and 10 payments of $100 is usually better. That is because you can use the asset you bought to help generate the money to pay for itself. And you can use the $500 you DIDN'T spend today to buy something else to help you make money even faster.
It is also better even for a consumption item, because money later is always worth less than money today. You can make interest on the money you didn't pay upfront, so $0 down and 10 payments of $100 will leave a few more bucks in your pocket than will $500 down and 10 payments of $50. Additionally, because of inflation, the money in later periods will be worth a little less than it is now.
It gets much more complex if you are taking out a loan, but on a purely cash basis, no money today is almost always better.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's exactly right. Newegg is a classic example of censored comments... but they admit it right up front, basically telling you right to your face that they delete negative comments about products and that you shouldn't make buying decisions solely based on their product feedback.
Now, I don't like their deletion policy, but their honesty about HAVING one means I still trust the corporate entity and continue to buy from them. I mostly ignore the comments, because I know they're biased. I'd PREFER for the comments to be mostly unedited. They would be more useful to me that way. But when they tell me right up front they're not, I have no problem with it.
So it CAN be done that way, and it's still ethical. Without that kind of disclaimer, however, a public comments section carries an implication that the public can freely comment. I don't expect fully uncensored comments, since they ARE a corporate entity and can't exactly be publishing every trollish, obscene, or off-topic thing that anyone wants to say, but it should be edited as lightly as possible.
Deleting negative comments because they are critical is highly unethical unless you are most clear, in big bold print, that you are doing so.
If they haven't already used it, at least one of these moons should be 'Sagan'. :-)
My apologies if there are more than one kind. I've been to at least a couple of IMAX 3D movies in different theaters, including Polar Express, locally, just a few months ago. Both of the systems I've seen used the polarized light method.
Shutter glasses are indeed horrible, and if there really are theaters that use that tech, no WONDER you don't like it.
The polarized 3D, however, is really quite nice. Check it out sometime.
IMAX glasses don't have shutters and don't blink. There is no blinking in IMAX at all. The IMAX system uses polarized light; one eye is polarized vertically and one is polarized horizontally. The light projected on the screen comes from two separate projectors and is also polarized. The glasses reject the 'wrong' light for each eye and allow only the 'right' light through. (If you take the glasses off, you will see two images projected on the screen.)
That's the reason you can't quite see the flicker. It's imaginary.
It's not very well-known, but you might enjoy Beyond Good And Evil. Female protagonist, good story, great voices, excellent game in general. It didn't, apparently, sell very well. I'm rather perplexed about that, because I really enjoyed the heck out of it. I think it's available on pretty much everything, including the PC (where I played it).
If you're into adventure gaming, the single best one I've ever played is The Longest Journey. Grim Fandango is a very close second. Both can be quite difficult. Grim in particular is a real bear about halfway through. If you lose patience easily, however, there's always the walkthroughs. I used them, and enjoyed both games just as much... perhaps more, since I actually FINISHED them. It was the stories that really hooked me, and in my particular case, the actual puzzle-solving wasn't terribly important. I mean, sure, I enjoyed the puzzles, but they're ancillary to the story. Even using walkthroughs, I absolutely got my money's worth from both.
Both of these games are just superb, head and shoulders above the rest of the once-crowded adventure-game field. They are both examples of masterful storytelling that happen to come in computer game format. Many people will miss them because of this, which is really a shame.
There appear to be quite a few copies of The Longest Journey on EBay right now, but Grim is looking pretty thin. I'd recommend picking up a copy soon before they get really scarce.
I can't disagree with you over the ratio of fun/crap games on the GC. The relative quality of that library is very high. But even Nintendo misses once in awhile... Super Mario GC really wasn't all that great. Decent, playable, but not groundgreaking like SM64 was. Wind Waker, on the other hand, was AMAZING, probably the best game of its generation.
:)
PS2 is more of the shotgun approach... throw enough ammo and some of the shots are bound to hit. Huge amount of crap, but some real gems.
I think the XBox is only now really hitting its stride. If Microsoft had had a clue and put 128megs in the console, it would have at AT LEAST two more really good years in it. They really crippled it by only putting in 64. But I think for the remainder of this generation, the really good games will probably be there. Yes, its games are often ported to the PC, but I hate waiting.
You know, I wasn't thinking about SNES games.... Chrono Trigger was probably better than either FF7 or KOTOR. Unbelievably good game, particularly when you consider how limited the hardware was. That's another one I found very late, not until around 98 or 99, and I still loved it. So in my original post (GGP of this one??), knock down KOTOR and FF7 one notch each.
I've tried repeatedly on FF3. I always get stuck. I've just never liked it as well as everyone else seems to. I'd probably like it better if I could finish the dumb thing.
Dude, Ico was awesome. It was... wrenching. Sad and exhilarating, a bit funny in some spots, wistful in others. It evoked emotion better than almost any game I can remember, and it did it almost completely without words. I don't think you can call yourself a gamer if you haven't played Ico. Seriously.
I found out about it very late, and played it only about a year ago, and even going in with high expectations, I was STILL blown away. A year later, I can close my eyes and summon up exact pictures of several locations, to the point that I could sketch them out and be pretty accurate. That's how intensely it impressed itself into my memory... no small feat, when you consider that I'm nearer 40 than 30, and have played so many games over the years.
All the consoles have something to offer. Pick one of each up used, for chrissake. Refusing to buy hardware because it's not Nintendo is cutting off your nose to spite your face. All you're hurting is yourself.
I have all three consoles, and I don't have any real attachment to any of them. I suppose, overall, I like the XBox the most at the moment, because it has had the most interesting games of late, and it may have better 'legs' than the other two. Chronicles of Riddick is really good. Burnout 3 is excellent. Jade Empire is quite good... maybe not as good as Knights of the Old Republic, but good. KOTOR was one of the best RPGs ever done, a true classic. Halo was okay, but tremendously overrated.
On the PS2, there's the Grand Theft Auto series and Katamari Damacy as can't-miss titles. And Ico. And probably a zillion others I can't think of right now.... I guess if you've never owned a Playstation, you must have missed all the Final Fantasy games? Final Fantasy 7 is probably the second-best RPG ever made, and you could argue that it was better than KOTOR in some areas. (freedom and duration, mostly.)
Gamecube has Wind Waker, a true masterpiece, though I do feel it was a bit on the short side. Harvest Moon was good, but got old a bit fast. Animal Crossing was a lot of fun for awhile. The Metroids were excellent. Wario Ware is a completely bizarre, but fun, party-type game. I've often gotten the feeling that the console is underused... it really feels like it has more power than what you actually see.
Nintendo makes great consoles, but cripes, you've missed some unbelievably good games because of your platform-centrism. The platform doesn't MATTER. It's the games that matter. Find the games you want to play, and buy the hardware that plays them best. That's really all there is to it.
If you don't want to play Ico just because Nintendo didn't make it, then you're willfully blind and ignorant. Go away, or I shall be forced to taunt you again.
Somewhere along the way, the kernel devs seemed to have dropped 'high reliability' as one of their requirements, and Linux is suffering badly for it. I've had trouble with 2.6 just on my toy servers at home... APIC problems interfering with the md driver, for instance. It directly cost me quite a bit of money to buy hardware, troubleshoot, and eventually realize it was the kernel at fault, not the hardware. I shudder to think of what small businesses must be spending to fix 'hardware problems' that aren't.
.. but one of the senior kernel devs said, approximately, that getting 1 out of 3 stable kernels actually stable was an acceptable outcome.
It's my belief that the kernel won't really stabilize until they branch off to 2.7. They're too focused on adding new features for the code to ever really shake out and get stable. They're shoveling new stuff in there way way way faster than it can really be debugged.
And they just wave their hands in the air and say that it's up to the distros to make this mess usable.
Until they get over this phase, in which they're pushing the hard work of debugging onto everyone else in the world, the kernel is not going to stabilize. And we will be held hostage by particular vendor kernels, instead of being able to track the 'one true Linux'. If we start with Redhat, we're stuck with Redhat. In the past, we were able to fall back on the One True Kernel if Redhat or Mandrake made a mistake. But that's not really an option anymore... tracking the One True Linux is now dangerous, because the kernel devs don't really care if it works right.
I can't find the precise quote right now, because I can't see my old comments on Slashdot... apparently I now have to pay for the privilege of seeing my OWN old comments
Until that mindset changes, Linux is just not trustworthy. It needs to be made right BY THE PEOPLE WHO WRITE IT. You can't hack reliability in as an afterthought, it has to be a major focus all the way along. This is exactly the sort of crap we always derided Microsoft for... ship it buggy and then fix it later. I hated this behavior in Microsoft. I hate it just as much in Linux. I switched to Linux because it was, first and foremost, reliable. It no longer offers me that, and I am starting to switch machines over to the BSDs now.
Waving one's hand and expecting 'the distributions' to do the grunt work of actually making the kernel stable is just wishful thinking... it's expecting other people to do the job that should be the very first one on their list. Reliability is THE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE. It's not fun, it's not glamorous, but it's what got Linux so popular that these guys actually get paid to do it. If it doesn't return to relatively bulletproof status, then people are going to use other solutions instead, and there won't be as many Linux jobs available.
It's the reliability that creates the jobs. I wonder if they really grok this?
How can you be an orphan when your parents respawn every 10 minutes?
Well, a worst case scenario will involve a number of queries. First you hit the top-level asking for 'foobar.example.com'. Root server tells you 'talk to these people for .com'. You query the .com root server and it tells you 'example.com's nameservers are here.'. Then you ask example.com's nameservers, which could potentially redirect you again if foobar is a subdomain rather than a single server.
Each of these queries is fairly short, except the last one, which can contain many A records. But there's more going on than just a simple request/reply, unless the information is already cached.
In your case, you were either cached, or your nameserver did the recursive lookups for you.
The single biggest reason I can think of to not run as root is this: if your system has a root-level compromise, it can be hidden from you... so well, in fact, that the compromise is completely invisible to routine inspection. (there are some NASTY rootkits out there.) The only way to be absolutely certain one has disinfected such a system is to rebuild it completely, from scratch, wiping the disk entirely. If you are extremely knowledgeable, you can manually clean it, but all you have to miss is one bad file out of thousands of good ones to remain compromised. It would take a HUGE amount of work to be absolutely certain an installation was secure, far more than just rebuilding it, 99 times out of 100.
User-level compromises, at least, can't be hidden. They can do just as much damage from the user's perspective (delete files, send spam, and whatnot), but they're obvious to anyone with the least clue, and removing them won't take a system rebuild. The system itself can still be trusted, and that's a big deal.
A Linux box with a root-level compromise could be sitting on the net for YEARS before getting rebuilt. If the hacker is careful, the owner will never even notice that anything is wrong. I worked on a system, remotely, that had been hacked that way. It was impossible to 'see' the bad guys except indirectly. There was a bunch of space mysteriously missing on the drive, and there were ports open (to a remote scan) that shouldn't have been... but which didn't register as being open locally. Had they been smarter and used a port-knocking system, they might still own that box. It was on good bandwidth and, from traffic logs, it looked like they'd been using it at least a year before I got there.
(This can also happen with Windows, of course... this is absolutely not a Linux-only problem.)
Running as a normal user just makes it harder on the bad guys. They now must exploit at least two holes, instead of just one. Considering the number of local root compromises there have been in the 2.6 kernel, this may not be that much of a challenge, but anything is better than nothing. The more steps that are required, the more likely it is that one of them will fail.
This isn't defense in depth, it's more like a double-thick eggshell, but it's still better than just a single layer.
The functionality was a mistake to include in the first place. I don't remember precisely WHY this is, but I have read that it is simply impossible to make a secure SUID/SGID script in any current flavor of Unix.
Taking it out will undoubtedly inconvenience some folks, but it's sort of like being given a power tool without some critical piece of safety gear. Apple has, in essence, forced you to install that gear on your power tool, like it or not. If it inconveniences you, then you weren't using the tool safely to begin with.
From what I understand, it's usually better to use sudo for this anyway... you can set up sudo so that it will only allow you to execute a particular program or set of programs. The sudoers file is more than slightly cryptic, and it's a bit more typing (both "sudo" and possibly the user password), but this will give you much better safety.
If you just absolutely can't stand doing it that way, then write your script in perl or C and SUID that version. Note that it takes special care in both instances... SUID programs are dangerous, and if someone cracks a user account on your system, that's going to be one of the first things they'll look at to try to get root. Don't just toss something together, go look up how to do it safely. (short form: don't trust your environment, don't trust user input). Perl has some special functions just for this purpose, so be sure to read its documentation carefully.
That's because the Amiga created those graphic artists and muscians. The idea of a computer graphic artist didn't really exist before the Amiga.
As the Amiga died, the people who really loved graphics either stayed with it (I knew one person who was still using her Amiga in around y2K to do her painting) or moved to the Mac.
Most artist types don't care about the OS. They just want to paint or make music. Linux is probably the single worst choice for those folks. Even if you DID get good software for it, they're used to their Macs and mostly won't be interested in retraining. And given what Apple is doing with the platform now, I just can't see that the pain would be worth a darn thing for them... they'd suffer through retraining and then end up with poorer tools than they already have. Not a good idea for most of them, I suspect.
I haven't looked at the Scribus format, but very few programs encapsulate the actual font data inside a document. In essence, most word processors include pointers to a given font, but if you don't have the font on your system, it doesn't magically just show up. Instead, you get a replacement font mapping.
In other words, I'm just saying "I thought this document would work best with font X", which would in no way create a GPL obligation. PDFs do, however, include actual font data, so you could presumably be creating a GPL obligation by publishing one.
But remember, unless you EXPLICITLY license a copyright you hold as releasable under the GPL, simply including other GPLed work with it DOES NOT make you lose the rights to your code. You are violating the copyright on the GPLed section, and you may be liable for damages for doing so, but it's not like you magically lose control over the code you wrote yourself.
When you combine your own output with GPLed ouput, the resulting program, in essence, has at least two owners... you, and the person or people who wrote the GPLed section. You can't lose ownership of your code by combining it with GPLed code. You still own the part you created.
Likewise, you can't lose ownership of your document by publishing it with GPL fonts. Even if the GPL is found to be applicable here, about the worst that could happen would be a forced rerelease with a different font. You will never lose control of the actual document information. And the chance of a copyright-infringement lawsuit is nearly zero. In this scenario, it's not clearly obvious that a violation occurred, and the actual damages are most likely zero, since GPLed fonts are usually free-as-in-beer. About the worst that's likely to happen is a nasty letter from some zealot somewhere in the OSS community.
I think I can safely risk that.
It doesn't MATTER whether or not I can tell the difference. I'm trying to get the archive EXACTLY right so that I don't ever have to do it again. If I'm going to put all the effort in, I might as well do it perfectly, no? I want to make sure that my electronic archive is 100% as good as my physical CDs. Among other things, this will let me recreate the CDs someday, should I need to.
.wav files from a site like Swedish Radio and see whether or not your player can pipe it successfully to an outboard DTS decoder through either coax or fiber. Chances are quite good that you won't be able to do this. Windows, by default, remixes all .wav files to 48khz and completely screws them up. On a GOOD sound system, this will sound like shit. I spent months thinking that my expensive speakers weren't very good when, in fact, it was Windows and/or my Audigy 2 NX ruining the sound. Now that I have perfect lossless streams hitting my receiver, I'm much better able to appreciate how good those expensive speakers are.
Also, being sure that I get a perfect rip means I won't have any clicks or pops in any of the music. CDs interpolate fairly well, but some damage is quite audible, and I don't have time to manually listen to every second of every track with perfect, unflagging attention. I do, however, have time to inspect 12 or 15 lines per CD rip that tell me I got everything correct.
Other ripping methods may give a bit-perfect rip. On a good cd with a good drive, dd might work just fine. But only with EAC and AccurateRip, in my experience, can I KNOW whether or not it was correct. The other methods may give me the same actual rip quality, but I have no way to be certain.
And as far as your other audiophile comments go... an awful lot of stuff in the audio world is snake oil. That said, computer people in general know *very* little about what good sound is or how to reproduce it. I have only recently been coming to realize just how ignorant I am, in fact. A ritzy computer sound setup is a $400 5.1 set of speakers. In the audio world, that's complete crap. It doesn't even qualify as mid-fi. (Mid-fi is where the value is, and it is head and shoulders above 99% of computer-reproduced sound.)
Just getting a bit-perfect reproduction of a WAV file can be really tough sometimes. Try downloading one of the DTS
If you're coming from the computer world into the audio world, the single most important thing to do is to drop the assumption of competence. If all you know is computer sound, then your ear and brain will both need a lot of training. Almost certainly, you will be completely incompetent without knowing it, which is the worst possible outcome. I've made the transition to KNOWING I'm an idiot, at least.
Well, they're not gonna have the AccurateRip database, which I personally find very useful, even though it's still a fairly 'young' project. It's a collection of md5sums for extracted tracks, and will tell you whether or not you got the rip right. I've found this to be extremely useful, even though it doesn't yet know some of my CDs.
cdparanoia et al may be just as good at extracting the bits, and you might possibly be able to hack the AR database to work with those.... if you could do that, your end result could well be just as good. I haven't used cdparanoia in a long, long time, so I can't guarantee that.
Truly accurate CD ripping is fairly hard, at least when the CD isn't factory fresh and totally perfect. A simple dd will indeed copy the image, but it's really designed for data, not audio. If your CD has any scratches, it is highly, highly likely that your copy will be imperfect. Audio CDs, unlike data discs, don't have much in the way of redundancy, and it's easy for errors to be missed by the OS.
EAC, on a good drive, will see problems that dd just doesn't catch. It knows how to talk to the better drives, like the Plextors, that will report C2 error information. When it finds a problem, it will retry numerous times at different speeds, trying like mad to get a solid copy. It's surprising just how good a job it does, even on rather questionable CDs. dd offers none of this. It's not an audio ripper, it's just a data copier.
EAC, combined with the AccurateRip database, is a way to be CERTAIN you got a perfect rip, or at least the exact same results that other people have gotten. You simply have no way to know if you extracted properly with dd.
And don't think that just because your CDs are unscratched that they will extract perfectly. I have a couple of CDs that report errors even though their surfaces are apparently perfect. My copy of the old Lost Boys soundtrack is particularly bad. I've run it through several polishing sessions, and there are no visible scratches of any kind, but EAC has a heck of a time with it. I assume that it must be a poor-quality pressing. A couple of tracks on the disk are damaged past EAC's ability to compensate, and I need to find new copies. Had I been using dd, I wouldn't have known.
Remember, I'm trying to archive here. I'm trying to get it PERFECT, so that I never, ever have to do it again. If you just want a casual rip to toss in your iPod, that's a rather different goal.
I invested in a good-sized array (5 250g drives in a RAID-5), and I'm in the middle of reripping my entire collection.
The format I am using is BIN/CUE... I'm trying to take a perfect copy of the actual CD, so that I can recreate it when I wish. My original goal was to copy every bit on the CD.
From what I have found, however, none of the CD image utilities out there make a bit-perfect copy of audio CDs. I have tried Alchohol, Blindwrite, and something else, and NONE of them result in bit-perfect rips with EAC from the image afterward.
The only way I found I could get bit-perfect copies of the music was to use EAC with its AccurateRip database. EAC won't copy anything but sound, so I'm losing the 'extra' content that comes on some CDs. However, what I really care about is the music, so if I have a bit-perfect copy of that, I'm happy.
There are two major ways to make BIN/CUES... separate wav files, or a single wav file. Both require a CUE sheet to reassemble into a CD image. I chose the single-wav format, because this makes tagging when I actually extract the data into whatever I want to use easier. The separate wav file approach would allow you to more easily access the individual files with a script. I suspect this may be a technically superior approach. But I'm using single WAVs anyway, even though it takes more work.
My actual rip process:
Buy a really good CD drive to rip with. I'm using a Plextor Premium.
Install CYGWIN or find some other way to script a quick 'diff'. (I'll put my tiny script at the end).
Install Daemon Tools to mount images.
Run EAC (I have installed the AccurateRip database as well)
Set EAC to rip to Track%N.wav when extracting.
Rip CD to individual WAVS on the C drive, ensure that everything is either bit perfect or the CD is unknown. AccurateRip only understands individual tracks, so this is the only way I've found to verify that my original CD is perfect.
Have EAC create a separate-files CUE sheet 'with leftout gaps'.
Edit CUE sheet to remove anything but INDEX 00 lines. Remove all PREGAP and INDEX 01 lines. (This was the only way I could get bit-perfect second-generation rips.)
Mount CD image. Rip again to a single-file BIN/CUE image. (this is very fast, 30 seconds to 1 minute on my system) (this will be what you keep)
Mount new image. Rip AGAIN to individual files in a separate directory. (again very fast)
Run a 'diff' between the first generation rips and the final generation. If they're exact copies, then you have a bit-perfect BIN/CUE.
Copy BIN/CUE to server.
Delete everything and start on the next CD.
It would be perfectly possible to skip the second and third-generation rips, since you know you got a good copy the first time, but I prefer the single-file approach... I don't want to work with the wav files directly because I don't have tag info for them in that format. And it doesn't take very long to create the single-file image, so I go ahead and do it that way.
Then the next step is to mount the images and rip with whatever software you want to use. I'm using iTunes. I just mount the images with Daemon Tools off the server and rip with iTunes, which always seems to recognize the CDs. I also found that if I bump iTunes' priority down to Below Normal, my rips go ENORMOUSLY faster... they jump from about 8x (dismal) to about 45x. I assume Daemon Tools isn't running at very high priority and iTunes interferes with it... by bumping iTunes down, it doesn't interfere as much and rips faster.
Oh, iTunes also didn't like the 'Generic' label that Daemon Tools uses by default, it seems to be coded to explicitly not recognize a drive with that label. I changed mine to be a 'Pioneer' 'DVR-1X' during the Daemon Tools install, and then iTunes used it fine.
Once you're done ripping, then script something on your server to compress your WAVs with whatever compressor you want. You won't be able to mount them without uncompressing them again, but you'll save a lot
I don't think there's a whole lot to get wrong here. I was running the most current firmware and most current utilities, and I manually patched the most recent driver into the 2.4 kernel. (at the time, the 2.6 kernel wasn't supported by the monitoring utilities, so I stayed on 2.4). I was probably using ReiserFS, though I don't remember for sure. I didn't start using XFS until later.
All I had to do to make interactive use of the machine exceedingly painful was to start dumping a big file from my Windows box onto the RAID. Everything would come to a near-halt, stuck on I/O... the CPU wasn't loaded, but good luck running any new programs or doing much of anything with the disk. This was on an Athlon 1900, I believe with a KT333 chipset.
I had the same results on a server machine at work. That one was on a gigahertz P3 with an Intel chipset... very similar results/symptoms. RAID-10 was okay on both machines, but didn't come anywhere near the speed I was expecting. hdparm reported about 30mb/second, instead of the 60 or so I was expecting off a four-drive RAID-10. It didn't get bogged down or give me problems in RAID-10 mode, but it wasn't fast.
I don't think it was the chipsets, since both the Intel and the VIA failed to perform well. And I had all the most recent code for everything. It just sucked terribly at writing.
I've read multiple reviews that seemed to support this view... they certainly didn't shake it any. RAID-5 on the 8500s and earlier is fine for reading... if that's mostly what you'll be doing, it's okay. (I see, for instance, that your described system load is mostly reading.)
I get much better performance on both reads AND writes using the md driver. I'm very happy with the machine's performance now. It feels very snappy, even under a substantial load.
And, of course, the ICP Vortex absolutely kicks ass and takes names.. and you can get those used for not too much money. The disk space is still relatively expensive, but if you want it to run really fast, SCSI is still the way to go, and will be for awhile longer yet. You can get reasonably priced enclosures from Cremax that fit into open drive bays on your existing computer... you can get 3-in-2 and 4-in-3, among others, with supplemental fans and failure alarms on both the fans and on temperature. They're quite noisy, so not good for a desktop, but they're a great way to build a solid SCSI server, including hotswap capability, without spending much money at all.
If, however, you need it both big and cheap, then software RAID over either SATA or PATA seems to be where it's at.
Your own arguments aren't self-supporting. You talk about how nasty that war was before we dropped the atomic bombs, how much damage we were doing to the Japanese and how many people were dying. There would have been more of that without Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm not sure any of us can intelligently estimate, anymore, how long an invasion would have taken -- most of the people who really knew have died. But I saw estimates that the war, prosecuted by conventional means, would have taken another year and at least a million Japanese lives... as well as a very large number of our own.
In war, the first duty is to protect one's own country and one's own citizens... if a thousand enemies have to die to save one of yours, then you DO that. We should, as a country, avoid war at all costs... Iraq is an incredible blunder. But once you are in a war, you fight to WIN. Fighting to be nice is fighting to lose. We did NOT start that war, it was inflicted upon us, and we did exactly what we should have.
And peace negotiations aren't something you get into with someone who deliberately and sneakily attacked you as the Japanese did. What we wanted (and got) was a total, unconditional surrender. And I would argue that the world has benefited enormously from doing so... had we been 'merciful' and hoped like heck for peace negotiations, we'd have been pinning our hopes on maybes instead of reality. And it's entirely posssible that Japan's old government and old, nasty way of doing business would have survived a peace negotiation. By forcing an unconditional surrender, we got the foundation laid for Japan to make itself into what it is now... an economic powerhouse with the most advanced technology on the planet. And no military or aspirations to invade anyone.
Your argument that 'war is only as hellish as you make it' is the argument of someone who's likely to lose. You fight to WIN. Don't pick fights, avoid them when you can... go FAR out of your way to avoid them if possible... but if forced to fight, WIN. Win so thoroughly that you'll never have to fight that opponent again.
You must know, on some level, that what you are arguing is specious, since you won't sign your name to it.
Expecting an apology from the US is foolish historical revisionism. Not sure the variation you learned in school, but they attacked us first. We lost a good chunk of our Pacific fleet, and it was only by the grace of God that they didn't hit the fuel dumps in Pearl Harbor. Had that happened, the war would have taken at least another year, possibly two.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible events, but war IS terrible. By concentrating all the awfulness into just two events, overall many lives were probably saved. Particularly ours, which must be our primary consideration in war.
In my opinion, the deliberately-induced firestorm in Dresden was at least as great a crime. What is it about people's thinking.... a whole bunch of small explosions that kill tens of thousands of people are okay, but a single BIG explosion that kills fewer people is a crime against humanity?
Remember, Dresden was a follow-on to Hamburg. We knew what was likely to happen and we deliberately induced the exact same effect. By dropping incendiary bombs over several days, they started a raging fire that engulfed more than eight square miles. It generated so much heat that it became its own weather system, creating hurricane-force winds that literally sucked everyone and everything around to their destruction. More than 200,000 bodies were recovered, and the total death toll is believed to exceed 250,000.
Between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, about 120,000 died... less than half.
Your bleating about an apology from the US is just emotional handwringing with no basis in reality. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were humane by the standards of WW2... they did, after all, end the war.
(and to those who start bitching about radiation effects... we didn't KNOW very much about radiation effects at the time. In the middle of a war, where the enemy is trying desperately to kill you and those you love, you don't worry a lot about long-term consequences. You ask, "will using this weapon hurt our people in any way?" If the answer is no, and the weapon is a good one, it's going to get used.)
Wars are very easy to start, but very hard to stop. We stopped a war in its tracks by killing 120,000 people with two planes and two big bombs. It was the right decision, and no apology should ever be expected.
The 3ware cards are well-supported, but they're SLOW. I have an older generation 8500, one that is supposedly 'optimized' for RAID-5. When under a heavy write load, the machine essentially grinds to a near-halt, making interactive use of the system very painful. Just abysmal performance. RAID-10 was reasonably snappy, but no speed demon. They make big speed claims, but they just don't deliver on them, in my experience.
It works great, however, in JBOD mode (Just a Bunch of Disks), running software RAID on my Athlon 1900+. I get good throughput, even on writes (25 megs/second or thereabouts, maybe faster... I'd have to look at my bonnie numbers, which I don't have right now). And the interactive response stays excellent, even when stressing the system. But there are far, far cheaper ways to get 4 SATA ports.
Just as an aside, I do know what a RAID card should look like. I have an ICP Vortex SCSI RAID Controller that kicks ass and takes names, relatively speaking. I believe the write performance was around 40 megabytes/second on six 10KRPM SCSI drives, and read performance was on the order of 80 megs/second. For a PCI controller, that's exellent, and THAT is what a good RAID controller should look like.
The 3Ware card, on the other hand, was probably giving me 6-8 megs/second on writes, and rendering the system unusable to do it. The 8000 generation is woefully underpowered. Hardware RAID is really nice when it works, because you can hide the details from the OS, but the 3Ware implementation is so bad that you're far better off with JBOD mode and software RAID. $400 will buy you a motherboard with 4 SATA ports, possibly 8... along with a new CPU and RAM to boot!
The 9000 series may be better, but they look to have pretty similar specs. The 8500 was bad enough that I'm not likely to buy 3Ware again until I KNOW they're delivering on their performance claims. I love their Linux support, but earlier generations of their cards didn't come CLOSE to delivering what they promised.
1. Give popular agency completely unrealistic goal;
2. Underfund agency;
3. Destroy all real science coming out of agency;
4. When unrealistic goal fails, blame agency for not even producing any science;
5. Dissolve agency and let 'private sector' take over.
The Bushies don't debate and they don't compromise, they just hijack and destroy. This is probably their way to get rid of NASA.
$0 down and 10 payments of $100 is usually better. That is because you can use the asset you bought to help generate the money to pay for itself. And you can use the $500 you DIDN'T spend today to buy something else to help you make money even faster.
It is also better even for a consumption item, because money later is always worth less than money today. You can make interest on the money you didn't pay upfront, so $0 down and 10 payments of $100 will leave a few more bucks in your pocket than will $500 down and 10 payments of $50. Additionally, because of inflation, the money in later periods will be worth a little less than it is now.
It gets much more complex if you are taking out a loan, but on a purely cash basis, no money today is almost always better.