And that's another thing... There are statistically more brown-eyed people than blue, yet someone may complain that a workforce isn't composed of a 50/50 split.
But what if there actually is a genetic tendency for men to embrace IT? What about "social" diseases like aspergers which disproportionately affects males? Males which then go to IT due to the inherent lack of human interaction? Chromosomes discriminate! We can try to artificially inflate representation, but if women simply aren't interested, what else can we do?
We're ignoring our genetic traits and calling it discrimination in a lot of areas. More female elementary teachers and nurses. Is it because of their nurturing nature due to their ability to bear and rear children, or discrimination? Why not embrace our differences? Why do we always have to force a square peg into a round hole in the name of equality?
I don't have much trouble with Blue. It's actually a little too sensitive in my opinion. Sometimes I'll stumble and say part of the color, and correct myself, but it still doesn't get the clearly enunciated thing I said. It only works if you say the right color from the very beginning, which I guess is how it is supposed to work.
They did move the3 microphone, so maybe that has something to do with it.
Of course not the handheld market. Think about what Nintendo is currently doing, though: building momentum. The spectacular performance at E3, a game adults will want to play, a major upgrade to the DS, and in mere months, the Wii will beat the PS3 to market. God only knows what other bombs Nintendo is going to drop in the interim.
Considering my PS2 library greatly eclipses my Gamecube games, one might consider me a Sony/PS2 fanboy... but after seeing (and buying) the new DS, Nintendo has finally made me a believer. "Wii" may be a gay name, but in basically all other respects, they're making all the right moves with frightening relevance.
It's not just any remake, though. Like the PStwo, it is seriously a completely new piece of hardware with a cavalcade of major upgrades. I saw the original and shrugged, while the DS-lite, along with New Super Mario and Brain Age, made this a must-buy. Nintendo seems to have cracked some secret marketing code that lets them continuously unleash ferocious barrages of exciting and comprehensive products these days.
With this and the upcoming Wii, I'd say Nintendo is gearing up for a hilarious revenge to the beating they received from Sony during the PS1 and PS2 days. I say hilarious, because it's completely one-sided at this point; Sony is getting obliterated.
Really... I have an Ubuntu box in a 2U rack somewhere in Chicago, and so far the only time it's been down in the last six months was due to them switching out the UPS units on my rack. Even that was only two hours of downtime.
How can joe random-guy get better stats than their "trained" professionals? They do have trained professionals for all the systems they're testing, don't they?
Re:Why not lock, instead of unlock?
on
Just Let Me Play!
·
· Score: 1
Oddly enough, the Silent Hill games follow this model very closely. The guns don't get super powerful, and ammo is scarce. If you run out, all you're left with is a rusty pipe, a meat-cleaver, or something else equally useless. This is probably because as suspense/horror games, they need you to feel unsecure.
Of course, once you've beaten them, you unlock spoiler weapons like an unlimited uzi, lightsaber, or what not. I used these as an opportunity to get my revenge on all the things that scared me shitless through each game.
Dude... it's very rare a comment on Slashdot reduces me to tears from laughing, but you win. Now I'm trying to imagine a computer flipping over and catching fire, and how a five-cent connector could have caused it.
I paraphrase, you quote out of context; to each his own, I guess.
In either case, flying off the handle and jumping directly to expulsion doesn't even address the problem of an implied threat. At best, it removes the "problem", at worst, it exacerbates the issue. Maybe some counseling to make the kid think he's at least got the school's respect? Maybe they could pull the old, "Hey, we're just following the rules... we really are sorry. I'm sure there are more constructive ways to criticize the system. Would you like to attend a PTA meeting and see how this stuff works?"
There is such a thing as basic human decency. Yeah, the Columbine kids were dicks ot the highest order. Sure, this kid made a giant mistake in invoking their names. Think about his age, though. Was he even in elementary school when Columbine happened? Does he really understand the impact? Haven't you ever gotten so frustrated you just shouted out the most shocking thing you could remember in attempt to make an impact?
Here's an anecdote. Back in college, we got some new network administrators that were being asses about running services on the network, and were continuously port scanning to find offenders. I was on the college's webteam, so I had apache running, and got flagged. They told me to shut down. I told them, "How many people have to die before you notice I make the school's damn website, so I need a development system!?" Or something to that effect, I don't remember and it was quite a while ago. This was of course after they had taken away our keys to the lab we used to make the website, and imposed many other arbitrary elements that did not apply to previous years.
Did I have any intention of hurting anyone? No. Was I pissed and just as equally an ass for reacting to their prodding? Yes. Could both of us handled the situation in a better manner? Hell yes. The point here, is that had they respected the students that they depended on, and I respected their abilities as administrators, there would have been no cause for frustration, and nobody would have felt bullied or threatened.
People have their foibles, especially teenagers. I for one, am glad the admins and I later had a discussion and came to a mutual agreement, where I also apologized for blowing-up. Could they have expelled me instead? Maybe, but only if they were trying to prove some point.
I think you missed the entire point of his post. He basically said, "Look Mr. School District, it's not like I'm one of the columbine kids. I haven't threatened anyone, and you're still treating me like shit. WTF?!"
It takes a pretty drasticly slanted interpretation, diseased mind, or an obvious agenda to manipulate that into, "I'm not saying I'm one of the columbine kids, but..." The agenda here of course, is to find any excuse to expel a kid perceived as a troublemaker. Hence a whiny post becomes grounds for expulsion. It's magic!
Wifi is in the office. Microwaves are pretty well known for disrupting pretty much everything. I actually have a very new panasonic with all the bells and whistles; apparently the faraday cage for the heating frequencies doesn't block whatever fubars my wifi. Heh.
Why don't they just use the frequency 802.11a uses?
You're assuming that everyone is a hardcore gamer like you. They're not
Would someone please tell me where this keeps coming from? Does giving something a stupid name magically render naysayers as 'hardcore' in some way? How about this: everyone I know, all over the spectrum from avid gamers to people who haven't played a video game in years, and parents with children all think the name is stupid. Circumstantial evidence? Sure, but not even the iMac drew such venom when its name was revealed.
A few people in this thread have even posted that Japan itself is ripping on the name; not gamers, Japan, from tv spots to news articles.
Part of the problem with this name is that it requires a blurb explaining what it actually means, a good sign the name isn't self descriptive and has no meaning of its own. Without reading Nintendo's little flash intro on Wii, most people will just ascribe whatever meaning they wish, or is more familiar. In this case, for most of the English speaking world, it's a bunch of negative slang with the exception of the onomatopoeia: 'Wheee!'.
First impressions count for a lot, and the Wii doesn't make a good one.
No matter any upgrades this film may experience over the original, there is definitely one scene that will *not* make the cut: We've got bush! Imagine full frontal female nudity in any non x-rated film these days...
Yeah. Some tests were only won by a few percentage points. Others absolutely obliterated the 4200rpm drive by over 300%. Overall effect? Who knows... depends on how you use it. Either way, I'd say it's worth the price difference.
That's worldbench, one test out of the dozens they ran. If you go through all the metrics, some of those drives win by over 300% over the 4200rpm drive. To combat the price difference, I recently purchased a 60GB Travelstar 7K100 for $100, and it beat the Barracuda, a freaking desktop drive, in some of the tests. The drive seriously makes my old Dell Inspiron seem like a new computer in every way.
So yes, I'd say these tests prove the difference is worth the price premium.
Gotta love "tests" that provide completely artificial situations that would never occur, with actions you'd never perform, and supposedly gauge your personality or other metal capacity. It should go more like this:
Interviewer: You're currently raping a quadrapalegic twelve-year-old girl who's recently had her family murdered right in front of her, and... Me: I'm WHAT!? Interviewer: Please don't interrupt. This test is designed with situations which provoke an emotional response. These answers are very important to us! Me: You and your company are clearly insane. How's that for an emotional response?
Thank God my cobalt blue hair matched my collared shirt and tie with my last interview.;) I still have the hair, but I haven't worn the suit since. The trick is rejecting bad job matches; this may mean you get rejected, but who wants to work for such a reactionary company anyway?
Unfortunately I haven't had the pleasure of hacking PG code, so I'm just speculating.
Me too, so I guess it's fair.;)
I know, reference counting for a read on possibly millions of rows would be rather detrimental... But with mvcc, they wouldn't need to reference-count perse. PG already makes use of transactions to allow vacuum to operate; they'd just need to treat each update or delete as a mini-vacuum instead of forcing you to periodically launch it manually. Something like this would be very similar to a rollback segment without the necessity of moving all the rows around... Ah well, maybe someday.;)
Yes, but as mentioned before, only the act of updating or deleting a tuple causes a version conflict. If a read is executed and it touches a tuple that has been superceded by a new row version, the read still gets the old version, as it quallfies as a reference.
This is actually somewhat how PG's vacuum works. When a vacuum launches, it gets a transaction identifier, just like any other query. In effect, they're treating vacuum like any other read, so it only knows about tuples that are dead *now*, even if another process expires a tuple while the vacuum is running. So if 10,000 tuples get expired while the vacuum is running, it won't find them until the next vacuum.
Either way, when all these tuples are found, they're stored in a huge memory location that acts as an instant lookup for updates and inserts to reuse old tuples. Since they're already maintaining this in-memory list of dead tuples, why not make it more dynamic?
Actually, Oracle does its version tracking through Rollback segments. After writing to the data file, expired tuples get moved to the rollback segment, but only for the sake of currently running queries, or long tranactions. Once those tranactions release locks on those tuples, the rollback segment purges them.
This gives you the same effect of MVCC + frequent vacuums: stable growth that overwrites expired data, leaving you with a certain percentage of your table as empty, based on the turnover rate of that table. Though this is much more difficult to implement, it also self-maintains.
I personally don't understand Postgres's issue. If a row is updated or deleted, Postgres knows which tuples are affected; why not keep a running pointer count on these tuples, and when all other references go out of scope, automatically put it into the free-space-map? This would be very similar to name-space scoping rules in languages like PHP or Python; once something goes out of scope, deallocate the memory. In this case, instead of deallocating, you'd insert it into the list of known dead tuples. Ah well, there's probably some gotcha that prevents this solution...
I think he was referring to the max_fsm_pages setting for the free-space map. If you don't increase that to match the average data-turnover of your tables, Postgres will lose track of reusable expired tuples beyond the current setting. That would cause linear scaled bloating, making it look like a vacuum-full was required. In all reality, you almost never want to do a vacuum full, as the table is compacted so that all inserts/updates take place at the end of the file, instead of being spread around the entire table. Hotspot contention like that would dampen write performance.
The trick is to start with a vacuum full or fresh restore, and if the free space map is adequately large, all tables will expand to a function of their average turnover between non-full vacuums. Those kinds of vacuums can be run with relative frequency, as they do not require table locks, and they keep Postgres informed of reusable tuples. Once this happens, the tables will stabilize and only grow as new data is introduced; no more bloating. How do you set max_fsm_pages to achieve this? Do a "vacuum verbose analyze" and at the very bottom, it'll tell you the minimum setting it needs, so add 30% and change the value in postgresql.conf. The default setting of 20,000 really is not adequate for even moderate databases these days.
Really, you just have to keep an eye on the Postgres mailing lists, and don't be afraid to ask questions. Most of these "issues" have been fixed or have a solution, it's just that some work has to be done.
As a former Oracle DBA, I have to say: regardless of the inconvenience of properly researching and setting max_fsm_pages and other Postgres tweaks, nothing compares to the truly opressive task of administering an Oracle instance.
Actually, the real problem is that these draconian copy protections make it easier for a pirate to play a game, than the person who actually made a purchase. Why buy a game and jump through 1000 hoops, when you can just get a pirated copy with all that garbage removed? It's as if they're encouraging piracy at this point...
I'd say you're spot-on, there. I have several genetic defects, many of which would have lead easily to my death in lesser times. Thanks to heart surgery, the ventricle hole, atrial holes, and improperly closing aortal valve were all repaired; each a potentially deadly issue. I have roughly 20/2000 uncorrected vision which means I can barely see a few feet away; before corrective lenses, I would be simply SOL. I have a hyperactive metabolism which keeps me as the skinniest, weakest person I know regardless of how much I eat or exercise to stave off muscular atrophy; I'd never survive even mild famine.
If I reproduce (which seems likely within the next year or so), many of those genes will be propagated, though a mere 100 years previously, I would have simply died before the age of five. Ah, the wonders of modern medicine.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's another thing... There are statistically more brown-eyed people than blue, yet someone may complain that a workforce isn't composed of a 50/50 split.
But what if there actually is a genetic tendency for men to embrace IT? What about "social" diseases like aspergers which disproportionately affects males? Males which then go to IT due to the inherent lack of human interaction? Chromosomes discriminate! We can try to artificially inflate representation, but if women simply aren't interested, what else can we do?
We're ignoring our genetic traits and calling it discrimination in a lot of areas. More female elementary teachers and nurses. Is it because of their nurturing nature due to their ability to bear and rear children, or discrimination? Why not embrace our differences? Why do we always have to force a square peg into a round hole in the name of equality?
I don't have much trouble with Blue. It's actually a little too sensitive in my opinion. Sometimes I'll stumble and say part of the color, and correct myself, but it still doesn't get the clearly enunciated thing I said. It only works if you say the right color from the very beginning, which I guess is how it is supposed to work.
They did move the3 microphone, so maybe that has something to do with it.
Of course not the handheld market. Think about what Nintendo is currently doing, though: building momentum. The spectacular performance at E3, a game adults will want to play, a major upgrade to the DS, and in mere months, the Wii will beat the PS3 to market. God only knows what other bombs Nintendo is going to drop in the interim.
Considering my PS2 library greatly eclipses my Gamecube games, one might consider me a Sony/PS2 fanboy... but after seeing (and buying) the new DS, Nintendo has finally made me a believer. "Wii" may be a gay name, but in basically all other respects, they're making all the right moves with frightening relevance.
It's not just any remake, though. Like the PStwo, it is seriously a completely new piece of hardware with a cavalcade of major upgrades. I saw the original and shrugged, while the DS-lite, along with New Super Mario and Brain Age, made this a must-buy. Nintendo seems to have cracked some secret marketing code that lets them continuously unleash ferocious barrages of exciting and comprehensive products these days.
With this and the upcoming Wii, I'd say Nintendo is gearing up for a hilarious revenge to the beating they received from Sony during the PS1 and PS2 days. I say hilarious, because it's completely one-sided at this point; Sony is getting obliterated.
Really... I have an Ubuntu box in a 2U rack somewhere in Chicago, and so far the only time it's been down in the last six months was due to them switching out the UPS units on my rack. Even that was only two hours of downtime.
How can joe random-guy get better stats than their "trained" professionals? They do have trained professionals for all the systems they're testing, don't they?
Oddly enough, the Silent Hill games follow this model very closely. The guns don't get super powerful, and ammo is scarce. If you run out, all you're left with is a rusty pipe, a meat-cleaver, or something else equally useless. This is probably because as suspense/horror games, they need you to feel unsecure.
Of course, once you've beaten them, you unlock spoiler weapons like an unlimited uzi, lightsaber, or what not. I used these as an opportunity to get my revenge on all the things that scared me shitless through each game.
Dude... it's very rare a comment on Slashdot reduces me to tears from laughing, but you win. Now I'm trying to imagine a computer flipping over and catching fire, and how a five-cent connector could have caused it.
Ford makes it look so easy.
I paraphrase, you quote out of context; to each his own, I guess.
In either case, flying off the handle and jumping directly to expulsion doesn't even address the problem of an implied threat. At best, it removes the "problem", at worst, it exacerbates the issue. Maybe some counseling to make the kid think he's at least got the school's respect? Maybe they could pull the old, "Hey, we're just following the rules... we really are sorry. I'm sure there are more constructive ways to criticize the system. Would you like to attend a PTA meeting and see how this stuff works?"
There is such a thing as basic human decency. Yeah, the Columbine kids were dicks ot the highest order. Sure, this kid made a giant mistake in invoking their names. Think about his age, though. Was he even in elementary school when Columbine happened? Does he really understand the impact? Haven't you ever gotten so frustrated you just shouted out the most shocking thing you could remember in attempt to make an impact?
Here's an anecdote. Back in college, we got some new network administrators that were being asses about running services on the network, and were continuously port scanning to find offenders. I was on the college's webteam, so I had apache running, and got flagged. They told me to shut down. I told them, "How many people have to die before you notice I make the school's damn website, so I need a development system!?" Or something to that effect, I don't remember and it was quite a while ago. This was of course after they had taken away our keys to the lab we used to make the website, and imposed many other arbitrary elements that did not apply to previous years.
Did I have any intention of hurting anyone? No. Was I pissed and just as equally an ass for reacting to their prodding? Yes. Could both of us handled the situation in a better manner? Hell yes. The point here, is that had they respected the students that they depended on, and I respected their abilities as administrators, there would have been no cause for frustration, and nobody would have felt bullied or threatened.
People have their foibles, especially teenagers. I for one, am glad the admins and I later had a discussion and came to a mutual agreement, where I also apologized for blowing-up. Could they have expelled me instead? Maybe, but only if they were trying to prove some point.
I think you missed the entire point of his post. He basically said, "Look Mr. School District, it's not like I'm one of the columbine kids. I haven't threatened anyone, and you're still treating me like shit. WTF?!"
It takes a pretty drasticly slanted interpretation, diseased mind, or an obvious agenda to manipulate that into, "I'm not saying I'm one of the columbine kids, but..." The agenda here of course, is to find any excuse to expel a kid perceived as a troublemaker. Hence a whiny post becomes grounds for expulsion. It's magic!
Unfortunately how my apartment works is:
Front room -> kitchen -> Office.
Wifi is in the office. Microwaves are pretty well known for disrupting pretty much everything. I actually have a very new panasonic with all the bells and whistles; apparently the faraday cage for the heating frequencies doesn't block whatever fubars my wifi. Heh.
Why don't they just use the frequency 802.11a uses?
Can we please, PLEASE make the next spec. avoid the overcrowded 2.4Ghz range? Every time I use my microwave, my connection becomes unusable.
Would someone please tell me where this keeps coming from? Does giving something a stupid name magically render naysayers as 'hardcore' in some way? How about this: everyone I know, all over the spectrum from avid gamers to people who haven't played a video game in years, and parents with children all think the name is stupid. Circumstantial evidence? Sure, but not even the iMac drew such venom when its name was revealed.
A few people in this thread have even posted that Japan itself is ripping on the name; not gamers, Japan, from tv spots to news articles.
Part of the problem with this name is that it requires a blurb explaining what it actually means, a good sign the name isn't self descriptive and has no meaning of its own. Without reading Nintendo's little flash intro on Wii, most people will just ascribe whatever meaning they wish, or is more familiar. In this case, for most of the English speaking world, it's a bunch of negative slang with the exception of the onomatopoeia: 'Wheee!'.
First impressions count for a lot, and the Wii doesn't make a good one.
No matter any upgrades this film may experience over the original, there is definitely one scene that will *not* make the cut: We've got bush! Imagine full frontal female nudity in any non x-rated film these days...
This sure is the strangest 10-30% I've ever seen.
Yeah. Some tests were only won by a few percentage points. Others absolutely obliterated the 4200rpm drive by over 300%. Overall effect? Who knows... depends on how you use it. Either way, I'd say it's worth the price difference.
That's worldbench, one test out of the dozens they ran. If you go through all the metrics, some of those drives win by over 300% over the 4200rpm drive. To combat the price difference, I recently purchased a 60GB Travelstar 7K100 for $100, and it beat the Barracuda, a freaking desktop drive, in some of the tests. The drive seriously makes my old Dell Inspiron seem like a new computer in every way.
So yes, I'd say these tests prove the difference is worth the price premium.
Maybe, but other people don't, and I haven't had a +5 funny in a while. ;)
Gotta love "tests" that provide completely artificial situations that would never occur, with actions you'd never perform, and supposedly gauge your personality or other metal capacity. It should go more like this:
Thank God my cobalt blue hair matched my collared shirt and tie with my last interview. ;) I still have the hair, but I haven't worn the suit since. The trick is rejecting bad job matches; this may mean you get rejected, but who wants to work for such a reactionary company anyway?
And no, I don't live in California. Heh.
Unfortunately I haven't had the pleasure of hacking PG code, so I'm just speculating.
;)
;)
Me too, so I guess it's fair.
I know, reference counting for a read on possibly millions of rows would be rather detrimental... But with mvcc, they wouldn't need to reference-count perse. PG already makes use of transactions to allow vacuum to operate; they'd just need to treat each update or delete as a mini-vacuum instead of forcing you to periodically launch it manually. Something like this would be very similar to a rollback segment without the necessity of moving all the rows around... Ah well, maybe someday.
All I have to say about any of this:
https://www.optoutprescreen.com/
Seriously, go there right now. I haven't received a pre-approved card mailing from anyone other than my current card company for the last 2 years.
Yes, but as mentioned before, only the act of updating or deleting a tuple causes a version conflict. If a read is executed and it touches a tuple that has been superceded by a new row version, the read still gets the old version, as it quallfies as a reference.
This is actually somewhat how PG's vacuum works. When a vacuum launches, it gets a transaction identifier, just like any other query. In effect, they're treating vacuum like any other read, so it only knows about tuples that are dead *now*, even if another process expires a tuple while the vacuum is running. So if 10,000 tuples get expired while the vacuum is running, it won't find them until the next vacuum.
Either way, when all these tuples are found, they're stored in a huge memory location that acts as an instant lookup for updates and inserts to reuse old tuples. Since they're already maintaining this in-memory list of dead tuples, why not make it more dynamic?
Actually, Oracle does its version tracking through Rollback segments. After writing to the data file, expired tuples get moved to the rollback segment, but only for the sake of currently running queries, or long tranactions. Once those tranactions release locks on those tuples, the rollback segment purges them.
This gives you the same effect of MVCC + frequent vacuums: stable growth that overwrites expired data, leaving you with a certain percentage of your table as empty, based on the turnover rate of that table. Though this is much more difficult to implement, it also self-maintains.
I personally don't understand Postgres's issue. If a row is updated or deleted, Postgres knows which tuples are affected; why not keep a running pointer count on these tuples, and when all other references go out of scope, automatically put it into the free-space-map? This would be very similar to name-space scoping rules in languages like PHP or Python; once something goes out of scope, deallocate the memory. In this case, instead of deallocating, you'd insert it into the list of known dead tuples. Ah well, there's probably some gotcha that prevents this solution...
I think he was referring to the max_fsm_pages setting for the free-space map. If you don't increase that to match the average data-turnover of your tables, Postgres will lose track of reusable expired tuples beyond the current setting. That would cause linear scaled bloating, making it look like a vacuum-full was required. In all reality, you almost never want to do a vacuum full, as the table is compacted so that all inserts/updates take place at the end of the file, instead of being spread around the entire table. Hotspot contention like that would dampen write performance.
The trick is to start with a vacuum full or fresh restore, and if the free space map is adequately large, all tables will expand to a function of their average turnover between non-full vacuums. Those kinds of vacuums can be run with relative frequency, as they do not require table locks, and they keep Postgres informed of reusable tuples. Once this happens, the tables will stabilize and only grow as new data is introduced; no more bloating. How do you set max_fsm_pages to achieve this? Do a "vacuum verbose analyze" and at the very bottom, it'll tell you the minimum setting it needs, so add 30% and change the value in postgresql.conf. The default setting of 20,000 really is not adequate for even moderate databases these days.
Really, you just have to keep an eye on the Postgres mailing lists, and don't be afraid to ask questions. Most of these "issues" have been fixed or have a solution, it's just that some work has to be done.
As a former Oracle DBA, I have to say: regardless of the inconvenience of properly researching and setting max_fsm_pages and other Postgres tweaks, nothing compares to the truly opressive task of administering an Oracle instance.
Actually, the real problem is that these draconian copy protections make it easier for a pirate to play a game, than the person who actually made a purchase. Why buy a game and jump through 1000 hoops, when you can just get a pirated copy with all that garbage removed? It's as if they're encouraging piracy at this point...
I'd say you're spot-on, there. I have several genetic defects, many of which would have lead easily to my death in lesser times. Thanks to heart surgery, the ventricle hole, atrial holes, and improperly closing aortal valve were all repaired; each a potentially deadly issue. I have roughly 20/2000 uncorrected vision which means I can barely see a few feet away; before corrective lenses, I would be simply SOL. I have a hyperactive metabolism which keeps me as the skinniest, weakest person I know regardless of how much I eat or exercise to stave off muscular atrophy; I'd never survive even mild famine.
If I reproduce (which seems likely within the next year or so), many of those genes will be propagated, though a mere 100 years previously, I would have simply died before the age of five. Ah, the wonders of modern medicine.