Do we really need a law against every obnoxious behaviour? Or is it possible for people just not to cross reasonable lines? Well, it might be possible if everyone could agree on what's reasonable.
There's a guy around here who owns an ice cream van. He drives past my house every single day, playing his very loud advertising jingle; I've lost count of how many times I've had to pause a track I'm listening to because he's drowning out the music from my headphones, or been interrupted reading or coding. I consider his business model entirely unreasonable; driving around residential areas playing annoying jingles at 120dB, who the fuck else could get away with that? And yet he does, for months on end, hours a day; clearly plenty of people do find it reasonable.
I suspect that will be the case with this sort of thing too. Most people will just shrug, maybe even think it's cool; never mind the small percentage of overly sensitive freaks who don't like it. They probably weren't a significant part of your customer base anyway.
Solaris (whose default setting is to decache between write and read operations, so that the read is served from disk and not cache.) Er, you have a source for that? Our Solaris MySQL db's seem to run pretty much as well as if not better than our Linux ones. Mind you, we are using ZFS, and ARC isn't the same cache UFS uses.
Sure you're not taking about them disabling write cache on certain disks in certain configurations? That has nothing to do with write-through in the system buffer cache.
Go read Storage Review. They have performance and reliability databases.
Last I looked, Seagate were doing pretty well reliability wise, and their latest ES.2/7200.11's were doing amazingly well with NCQ/multi-user IO and STR. Hitachi (IBM) do pretty well for single user performance, and er, a quick glance at a pricelist shows they're in no way overpriced. ISTR a spate of WD failures being reported in forums which put a few people off them, along with a few 5-percentile entries in the reliability db (i.e. less reliabile than 95% of the drives in the db), but take that with a grain of salt.
Personally I just buy Seagates. Never had a problem with their internal drives. The external "OneTouch" 750G Seagate I've got is passable, but I don't really like USB or Firewire (does USB Mass Storage really have power management control? The drive spins down every 10 minutes or so and it'd be nice to stop it without hacking something to write to it when it's there, or opening it so I can use ataidle(8) on it).
Space-guns that make laser sounds, but look exactly like period Western firearms? They didn't make me think "laser", they made me think "guns in the future use a different mechanism to propel their bullets". *shrug*.
Every space hooker has a heart of gold Hm? There are maybe 4 fleshed out enough to make a vague assessment; two of them are trained "Companions" and not exactly hookers, one's a double-crossing bitch and one shoots the father of her child in the face at point blank range in front of him.
"Am I a lion"? What? He's a nutcase. Like many nutcases he probably has some sort of auditory processing or sensory integration disorder (which would explain much of his other odd behavior). He mishears Simon and thus a non sequitur is born when he repeats what he thought he heard back. This isn't uncommon in real life.
Interesting characters like this was the entire point of Firefly for me. If you wanted a western, I can perhaps see why you were disappointed; I've never liked westerns.
Much of what keeps me away from Ruby, in fact, is the Perl resemblance. foo =~/bar/ and $1 etc are probably the most used Perlish feature in Ruby. While I've never been a fan of Perl, I do appreciate the odd little shortcut like this. Where it's not suitable, there's always md =/bar/.match(foo), md[1], or indeed Regexp.new("bar").
Sigils like @ and $ have only a passing resemblence to Perl; they define scope, and can often be considered a warning sign ($foo -- zomg you're using a global you idiot! @foo -- hey, maybe you'd be better off using the accessor methods?), but they don't require additional thought because they don't change how it behaves; no hashrefs (almost everything's a reference; if you want a copy you.dup it), no scalar/list/hash context and annoying rules about how you get slices or individual elements; it's just an object like any other.
Hmm, what else? There are other magic variables like $: ($LOAD_PATH) and $$ (Process.pid), and the very rarely used $_, which matz has mentioned were probably a mistake, but they're not used much other than the aforementioned regexp ones.
Other unfamiliar syntax probably looks more scary when you see code abusing the Perlishness. Some ugly example code written by an inexperienced newbie certainly put me off trying Ruby for several months.
People have false positives too. If your legitimate mail is hiding in the middle of today's 1,500 spams, you're rather more likely to dismiss it as spam than a decent filter is.
Who's selling anything? Most IRC networks are free services, and they and the people on them don't owe you shit, least of all 24/7 support. If you want otherwise, go get a support contract with an expensive SLA.
Yes, you might not magically understand the dynamics of IRC, but it's the same with anything; mailing lists, for instance, what do you do there? You read archives or subscribe and lurk for a while so you pick up on what's expected, who people are, how active it is, etc. You don't subscribe, demand immediate assistance, and 5 minutes later complain that nobody's responding and unsubscribe. At least, I hope not.
Many, many people idle on IRC; logging out means ^A-d in screen or disconnecting from their bouncer, especially the geekier people you probably want to talk to. Barring network hiccups and reboots I've been connected to FreeNode pretty much 24/7 for the past 3 years. I do speak on the channels I'm on, but your chances of having me respond to your particular query (assuming I want to and know how to help you) in the space of 5 minutes are pretty slim, especially if you're on the other side of the globe from me.
50 people's a pretty small channel; at any one time you've probably got half or more of them asleep, and even more out, or off working in another window, or chatting in a different channel.
I see it all the time; people pop onto a channel, ask their question, and after seeing no reply for 2-10 minutes they get arsey and leave. This is roughly equivilent to joining a mailing list, sending a message, then unsubscribing because you didn't get a reply within 45 minute.
Variable RPM during usage would be tricky; head flight height would be all over the place. Everything I've seen suggests it's fixed somewhere around 5400RPM, but is capable of throttling down when not in use so when it wakes up it doesn't have to spin up from 0RPM.
I wonder why WD don't seem to publish a read bit error rate for these drives. Seagate's 7200.11's rate 1 sector per 1^14, or 1^15 for the ES.2; neither of which are particularly wonderful (what's that, 1 error per 10-100TB read?), but you'd hope WD are closer to the latter than the former if they're touting these for enterprisey usage.
All the music I've bought recently has been from Magnatune and Boomkat. The selection's limited, and Boomkat is uncomfortably overpriced, but at least they're trying; not only do both lack DRM, but both sell FLAC too.
From what I've seen even the better ones tend to be a bit crap, struggling to saturate half of a low end consumer disk (~30MB/s if you're lucky, by comparison the latest Seagates push 100MB/s) even on simple protocols like FTP. Bit of an insult to a single drive, never mind a 4 disk RAID-10 or whatever.
If only Rockbox got half-decent battery life, it would be the perfect replacement for Apple's firmware Erm, it's pretty half-decent right now. From an old commit message:
"6 Aug 17:26 - Jens Arnold - firmware/target/arm/system-pp5002.c - Reduced battery consumption on PP5002 targets (iPod 1st/2nd gen and 3rd gen). Now rockbox battery runtime is better than OF, verified on 2nd gen:-)"
Even on targets where it's not quite so optimized, it's typically reasonably comparable.
I downloaded it for free because there was no sample. One of the tracks was posted to The Pirate Bay, allegedly by Trent himself, prior to the release.
I wasn't inclined to pay for it because it wasn't made clear what the fuck it was I was buying. What I'm willing to pay for FLAC differs greatly from what I'm willing to pay for some MP3's. Was I going go get a choice? Was I going to get some 128kbps MP3's transcoded with Xing from WMV? It felt more like I was making a bet than buying a music album. That, and the whole website was slow as shit and badly designed, so ultimately I gave up.
The latest Saul Williams release got my money in a heartbeat because it was simple to get, I got a sample, and I got told exactly what I was getting (FLAC + album art). I don't even like hip-hop, but maybe I can look forward to NiN releases like that in future.
Seagate apparantly did a good job with the firmware on their new 7200.11's with NCQ; there's at least one benchmark on Storage Review forums, showing serial transfer performance of 9 seperate reads running upwards of 80MB/s, while every other tested drive struggles to get past 20.
Might be a useful excuse to upgrade to a 1TB drive if it helps more common use-cases.
Here's another thought-experiment: How do you stop a root process from modifying the firewall on any unix box ? You set kern.securelevel=3:
3 Network secure mode - same as highly secure mode, plus IP packet
filter rules (see ipfw(8), ipfirewall(4) and pfctl(8)) cannot be
changed and dummynet(4) or pf(4) configuration cannot be adjusted.
Ok, not "any unix box", but should work on OS X since that's using ipfw. At least I assume they're still using it, anyone running the Leopard firewall fancy showing us what ipfw show looks like?
XFX make passively cooled 7950GT's, and they seem to trounce the 8600GTS in many cases (a quick glance at a few charts like this show the 7950GT sometimes leading 2-3x, especially at higher resolutions and sometimes trailing to maybe 0.8x).
They're a bit chunky though (I have to run mine in the secondary PCI-E slot since the GPU and CPU heatsinks intersect), and obviously need a reasonable amount of case ventilation.
Don't forget to add about £5 for VAT, which is included in the retail prices you're quoting. About the only reason it's not that bad atm is the dollar is practically worthless.
They're not as bad as EA, though. Here in Europe, Crysis (download) is 54.95 EUR, or ~£38.50. Price from Amazon? £24.98. Of course, the US store says $49.95, but also reminds you that it's only valid in the US. You also get to pay an extra £3 or so to be able to redownload it for longer than 6 months. Mmm, tempting...
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Or maybe the base system should just not come with an MTA. Keep that stuff in ports where it belongs.
There's a guy around here who owns an ice cream van. He drives past my house every single day, playing his very loud advertising jingle; I've lost count of how many times I've had to pause a track I'm listening to because he's drowning out the music from my headphones, or been interrupted reading or coding. I consider his business model entirely unreasonable; driving around residential areas playing annoying jingles at 120dB, who the fuck else could get away with that? And yet he does, for months on end, hours a day; clearly plenty of people do find it reasonable.
I suspect that will be the case with this sort of thing too. Most people will just shrug, maybe even think it's cool; never mind the small percentage of overly sensitive freaks who don't like it. They probably weren't a significant part of your customer base anyway.
Sure you're not taking about them disabling write cache on certain disks in certain configurations? That has nothing to do with write-through in the system buffer cache.
Go read Storage Review. They have performance and reliability databases.
Last I looked, Seagate were doing pretty well reliability wise, and their latest ES.2/7200.11's were doing amazingly well with NCQ/multi-user IO and STR. Hitachi (IBM) do pretty well for single user performance, and er, a quick glance at a pricelist shows they're in no way overpriced. ISTR a spate of WD failures being reported in forums which put a few people off them, along with a few 5-percentile entries in the reliability db (i.e. less reliabile than 95% of the drives in the db), but take that with a grain of salt.
Personally I just buy Seagates. Never had a problem with their internal drives. The external "OneTouch" 750G Seagate I've got is passable, but I don't really like USB or Firewire (does USB Mass Storage really have power management control? The drive spins down every 10 minutes or so and it'd be nice to stop it without hacking something to write to it when it's there, or opening it so I can use ataidle(8) on it).
Interesting characters like this was the entire point of Firefly for me. If you wanted a western, I can perhaps see why you were disappointed; I've never liked westerns.
Sigils like @ and $ have only a passing resemblence to Perl; they define scope, and can often be considered a warning sign ($foo -- zomg you're using a global you idiot! @foo -- hey, maybe you'd be better off using the accessor methods?), but they don't require additional thought because they don't change how it behaves; no hashrefs (almost everything's a reference; if you want a copy you
Hmm, what else? There are other magic variables like $: ($LOAD_PATH) and $$ (Process.pid), and the very rarely used $_, which matz has mentioned were probably a mistake, but they're not used much other than the aforementioned regexp ones.
Other unfamiliar syntax probably looks more scary when you see code abusing the Perlishness. Some ugly example code written by an inexperienced newbie certainly put me off trying Ruby for several months.
People have false positives too. If your legitimate mail is hiding in the middle of today's 1,500 spams, you're rather more likely to dismiss it as spam than a decent filter is.
Who's selling anything? Most IRC networks are free services, and they and the people on them don't owe you shit, least of all 24/7 support. If you want otherwise, go get a support contract with an expensive SLA.
Yes, you might not magically understand the dynamics of IRC, but it's the same with anything; mailing lists, for instance, what do you do there? You read archives or subscribe and lurk for a while so you pick up on what's expected, who people are, how active it is, etc. You don't subscribe, demand immediate assistance, and 5 minutes later complain that nobody's responding and unsubscribe. At least, I hope not.
Many, many people idle on IRC; logging out means ^A-d in screen or disconnecting from their bouncer, especially the geekier people you probably want to talk to. Barring network hiccups and reboots I've been connected to FreeNode pretty much 24/7 for the past 3 years. I do speak on the channels I'm on, but your chances of having me respond to your particular query (assuming I want to and know how to help you) in the space of 5 minutes are pretty slim, especially if you're on the other side of the globe from me.
50 people's a pretty small channel; at any one time you've probably got half or more of them asleep, and even more out, or off working in another window, or chatting in a different channel.
I see it all the time; people pop onto a channel, ask their question, and after seeing no reply for 2-10 minutes they get arsey and leave. This is roughly equivilent to joining a mailing list, sending a message, then unsubscribing because you didn't get a reply within 45 minute.
Variable RPM during usage would be tricky; head flight height would be all over the place. Everything I've seen suggests it's fixed somewhere around 5400RPM, but is capable of throttling down when not in use so when it wakes up it doesn't have to spin up from 0RPM.
I wonder why WD don't seem to publish a read bit error rate for these drives. Seagate's 7200.11's rate 1 sector per 1^14, or 1^15 for the ES.2; neither of which are particularly wonderful (what's that, 1 error per 10-100TB read?), but you'd hope WD are closer to the latter than the former if they're touting these for enterprisey usage.
All the music I've bought recently has been from Magnatune and Boomkat. The selection's limited, and Boomkat is uncomfortably overpriced, but at least they're trying; not only do both lack DRM, but both sell FLAC too.
From what I've seen even the better ones tend to be a bit crap, struggling to saturate half of a low end consumer disk (~30MB/s if you're lucky, by comparison the latest Seagates push 100MB/s) even on simple protocols like FTP. Bit of an insult to a single drive, never mind a 4 disk RAID-10 or whatever.
Do these components support metadata yet? Last I heard, Apple made it pretty much impossible.
I dread to think what sort of a mess their plugin architecture is like..
"6 Aug 17:26 - Jens Arnold - firmware/target/arm/system-pp5002.c - Reduced battery consumption on PP5002 targets (iPod 1st/2nd gen and 3rd gen). Now rockbox battery runtime is better than OF, verified on 2nd gen
Even on targets where it's not quite so optimized, it's typically reasonably comparable.
Or configure Preferences -> Advanced -> Content -> JavaScript Options -> User JavaScript files (or the appropriate opera:config page I hopefully just linked to; opera:config#UserPrefs|UserJavaScriptFile), and drop hide-objects.js in the folder you configured; flash will then be blocked until you double-click to load them.
I wasn't inclined to pay for it because it wasn't made clear what the fuck it was I was buying. What I'm willing to pay for FLAC differs greatly from what I'm willing to pay for some MP3's. Was I going go get a choice? Was I going to get some 128kbps MP3's transcoded with Xing from WMV? It felt more like I was making a bet than buying a music album. That, and the whole website was slow as shit and badly designed, so ultimately I gave up.
The latest Saul Williams release got my money in a heartbeat because it was simple to get, I got a sample, and I got told exactly what I was getting (FLAC + album art). I don't even like hip-hop, but maybe I can look forward to NiN releases like that in future.
Seagate apparantly did a good job with the firmware on their new 7200.11's with NCQ; there's at least one benchmark on Storage Review forums, showing serial transfer performance of 9 seperate reads running upwards of 80MB/s, while every other tested drive struggles to get past 20.
Might be a useful excuse to upgrade to a 1TB drive if it helps more common use-cases.
NTFS has atime too.
3 Network secure mode - same as highly secure mode, plus IP packet
filter rules (see ipfw(8), ipfirewall(4) and pfctl(8)) cannot be
changed and dummynet(4) or pf(4) configuration cannot be adjusted.
Ok, not "any unix box", but should work on OS X since that's using ipfw. At least I assume they're still using it, anyone running the Leopard firewall fancy showing us what ipfw show looks like?
XFX make passively cooled 7950GT's, and they seem to trounce the 8600GTS in many cases (a quick glance at a few charts like this show the 7950GT sometimes leading 2-3x, especially at higher resolutions and sometimes trailing to maybe 0.8x).
They're a bit chunky though (I have to run mine in the secondary PCI-E slot since the GPU and CPU heatsinks intersect), and obviously need a reasonable amount of case ventilation.
You can avoid using globals by making an object to handle the replacements, like this example I hacked together a while back.
Don't forget to add about £5 for VAT, which is included in the retail prices you're quoting. About the only reason it's not that bad atm is the dollar is practically worthless.
They're not as bad as EA, though. Here in Europe, Crysis (download) is 54.95 EUR, or ~£38.50. Price from Amazon? £24.98. Of course, the US store says $49.95, but also reminds you that it's only valid in the US. You also get to pay an extra £3 or so to be able to redownload it for longer than 6 months. Mmm, tempting...