"I had to stop using it after 9.0 because switching between tabs was incredibly laggy. With more than a couple tabs open, there would be a very noticeable pause switching between them"
The laws in Washington DC may be "restrictive", but there are still a fucktonne of guns there; 3.8% of its nearly 600,000 residents have one, not to mention being surrounded by other states with (presumably) laxer gun laws, and little in the way of customs between states.
There are about 100,000 people in the UK with a (hand)gun license, so a population roughly 1% the size of the UK would seem to have just 1/5th the number of firearms.
I'd be more inclined to point to the high rate of gun crime in DC to the high population density though.
I found with Manhunt there was a significant sense that you were "forced" to do this -- you are, after all, basically a prisoner of a sadistic movie maker who makes it quite clear that it's basically, kill or be killed, and if you're not entertaining him enough, kill *and* be killed. Also, given that you're not generally being asked to kill innocent civilians but other sadistic assholes, I didn't really find it all that abhorrent.
What I do find abhorrent is that there's a bunch of guys who get to say "no, that's not ethically acceptable for any adult to see or interact with", as though I need to be protected by force of law with the moral compass of someone else. People like this should be all about *labeling* and restricting sales to minors, not deciding outright what I get to see.
But hey, could be worse. At least we're not Germany.
Well, sure, but "friendly" means different things to different people. Personally I often find "do-everything" systems to be highly unfriendly, since today's flavour of the month GUI dialogs for configuring various things (often quite badly) are not what I'm used to. Adding a couple of lines to rc.conf and calling/etc/rc.d/something restart is very often *more* user friendly for me than hunting through menus and fighting some anonymous config tool.
Of course, even with me I'm sure there's room for making certain things "just work", without turning the whole thing into Mac OS. The level to which that's done which suits me probably won't suit your mother, so, yay choice!
"I remember that the GENERIC kernel on FreeBSD was horrendously slow because almost every driver was statically linked"
Yeah, all that unused code increases the drag coeffecient of the kernel. And you're wasting several Megabytes of memory!!1!
It's a shame commenting out half a dozen obviously unnecessary lines is such a pain, especially when you don't have to touch it for a year or two after you've done it. And adding a few "NO_{KERBEROS,SENDMAIL}=yup" lines to make.conf to rescue a couple of MB of disk space is just exhausting:(
TDP between Core 2 and AMD's current chips are about the same anyway; 65W. And AMD *still* have lower idle power use and less power hungry northbridges (because of the on-die memory controller).
Of course the highest end parts all have higher TDP's, but if you're going for raw performance and don't care about price, you'll be getting a high end Core 2 anyway, at least for the time being.
Wha? There's Rails, Nitro, Iowa, and a bunch of smaller ones like Merb and.. meh, I forget the names. Just because we've been taken over by <troll>kiddies who love one in particular and barely even notice the rest of the community</troll> doesn't mean that's all there is.
Perl has quite a few frameworks too, I'm sure. PHP clearly isn't one, since it's nothing to do with Perl, aside from some ancient history when it wasn't even called PHP. PHP's a language, not a framework, not even to itself. If you do count PHP as a framework, the list of ones Ruby and Perl have just went up by an order of magnitude.
fb2k has plenty of management capabilities (bundled, not just third party plugins); it maintains a fully searchable database ("Media Library") of your music and can generate and juggle playlists with tens of thousands of entries in its sleep, it has extensive tagging and renaming capabilities, format conversion, and all that other stuff which I associate with managing a collection of music. Music management is *precisely* what fb2k is for. For that matter I'm pretty sure WinAMP has been spending the past half a decade moving in that direction too.
So what do you define as "music management"? About the only significant feature I can see that's missing by default is a DAP syncing plugin, though I think many would appreciate a default UI config which didn't hark back to 1992.
I never suggested turning off anything, I just demonstrated it was possible, and then suggested it was pointless to do so.
Good point on IO bandwidth; ZFS does seem to be more aimed at heavier randomized IO as opposed to individual serial access, thus the reduced emphesis on trying to keep blocks together. It should still do pretty well with writes, since it's not trying to seek to "optimal" positions on the disk to do so, and of course it's much easier to just throw more platters at it.
Also, note you can put other filesystems on top of zpool; about a week into the FreeBSD ZFS porting effort you could put a UFS filesystem on top of zpool to benefit from the volume management features. The VFS bits are by far the trickiest bits of ZFS to integrate.
"The disadvantage is... the data integrity. Every byte of data gets checksummed."
zfs set checksum=off tank
Happy now?... What do you mean you didn't notice a difference?
"Sun doesn't have so much of a problem with this, as their machines have enough CPUs, and enough bus, to effectively dedicate a CPU to the filesystem"
You overestimate the expense of IO. Even fairly high end RAID cards usually rely on some crappy 300MHz Intel RISC chip or so. If anything, memory is more the resource ZFS likes to suck down, and this can be a significant problem on 32bit systems (the lack of VM space makes it tricky to fit the ZFS buffer cache in kernel memory along with everything else).
No, you completely missed what I was saying; *both* Sound Check AND Replay Gain require you to analyze the audio directly, if the tags do not exist. They function *identically* in that regard, it's just the precise algorithm used when scanning the files and determining the gain which differs. Apple could have supported Replay Gain *exactly* how they support Sound Check, as far as users are concerned (with some additional logic if they wanted to support album mode).
The algorithm is described here. Whatever Sound Check uses doesn't appear to be documented, and it seems to lack the "Audiophile" (Album) version described here. Either way, both involve a one-time analysis of the audio (which can and often is done by encoders like LAME, just as Sound Check is likely done by Apple's encoders, but this is by no means necessary; it just saves work for the player), and the use of tags to store the result, and both *attempt* to do the same sort of thing.
Going by what you're saying about Sound Check, Apple didn't bother with some of the more subtle aspects of determining a suitable gain (that, or album mode makes a real difference; I never really tried Replay Gain in single track "Radio" mode). This makes the comparison with ALAC more apt, really; ALAC's somewhat similar to FLAC in design, but misses some details which result in it having both lower compression ratio and higher decode complexity.
-% lame --longhelp |grep replay
--replaygain-fast compute RG fast but slightly inaccurately (default)
--replaygain-accurate compute RG more accurately and find the peak sample
--noreplaygain disable ReplayGain analysis -% flac --help |grep replay
--replay-gain Calculate ReplayGain & store in Vorbis comments
--no-replay-gain
Hm, don't see it in oggenc, but still, lame, probably the most popular lossy audio encoder around appears to calculate it by default, and it's trivial for a player to calculate it on first play or on import, which is precisely what Apple will do with Sound Check, because that's how these things work if they're not already there.
It's an *algorithm* with some standard named tags, not an application; the point being Apple did their Not Invented Here thing like they did with ALAC, and came up with something not quite as good as what thousands of people were already using happily.
Now, err, what were we supposed to be talking about again?;)
Well, it's supported by most things not iTunes, so yes, "the rest of the world". FLAC, LAME, WavPack, MPC, Vorbis etc all support it natively, and WinAMP, fb2k, xmms, amarok and plenty of other players will make use of it if configured to do so, as will many portable DAP's. Even my iPod supports it (with Rockbox, which also supports about 10x as many music formats).
"Sound Check, on the other hand, works by actually measuring the loudness of the audio and then adjusting things based on the actual measurements"
Err, yes, htf do you think Replay Gain works? You scan each track and the entire album, find the peak loudness and store them in a pair of tags which are used by the player to renormalize. Sound Check appears to be very similar, but only works on individual tracks, and only in iTunes.
- Limited supplies, high profit margins and criminal suppliers lead to massive variations in strength (making overdoses more likely, since doses can't be easily controlled) and use of cutting agents which are sometimes significantly more dangerous than the drugs themselves.
But it only affects bad people, so that's ok. Just like prison rape (but not quite as funny).
"Yes, I'm aware of the "Sound Check" feature in iTunes, but that's just a lousy attempt to solve the problem with technology" The rest of the world uses Replay Gain, which I find works pretty well, especially in Album mode. Trust Apple to come up with their own stupid proprietary and probably inferior version nobody else on the planet supports. Again.
It may still be "lousy", but it's a *lot* less lousy than constantly reaching for the volume control.
On *ix, most "IPv4" apps should also support IPv6, and normally try using that first if it's available. It's fairly easy to see how some crappy printer drivers could have this behavior hacked into them and screw up because nobody tested it. Maybe they're freeing memory after an attempt and sending garbage to the printer when falling back to IPv4, or something similarly silly.
In this case, the vast majority of "Inact" is made up of cached file data, but such cache will also be spread around "Active" (can be swapped, but would likely to be swapped back in soon after) and "Cache" (rarely used pages which can be freed quickly because they aren't "dirty"). Depending on how you define "memory use" you could say I'm using anywhere from 2.3 to 7.5G. Even these are rather blurry since the lack of memory pressure means the various lists aren't being cycled very aggressively.
Quite; you can easily use FastCGI with Apache too (though lighttpd's built-in load balancing sounds nice; hopefully mod_proxy{,_balancer} will one day grow useful FastCGI support). Do that and watch as Apache sits using about 1000x less CPU than your backend PHP's.
lighttpd and friends are generally better if you're serving static content, but it's doubtful you'll notice unless you're talking in terms of many thousands of requests per second to a single server. That's not to say there aren't other reasons you might want to use lighttpd, but performance isn't really one of the interesting ones.
"Not content with the fact we will die in less than ten billionths of the time interval discussed in this story"
Not set in stone. There are plenty of people who have good reason to believe that we may achieve technological singularity or something like it and maybe make ourselves or our descendents effectively immortal at some point in the future, maybe even within the century.
Either way they have better reasons to believe this than any religion has that their particular God/afterlife/creation story is anything other than occasionally-useful-to-some complete fiction.
"some of us still obsess with thinking we know the answers to the universe."
Some of us accept that they don't know, and so work to try to find out using methods proven to work effectively.
Some of us think they merely know who made it all (often because a book and a few self-appointed authorities said so, possibly interacting with some of those "religious feelings" people get when our notoriously unstable temporal lobe goes all wobbly), and even feel they have a personal relationship with this entity.
Hmm...
"Seriously.. can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Religions?"
Seriously.. you think we get better answers out of them? Relativity, quantum physics, genetic engineering.. these have given us some very important advances we increasingly encounter day-to-day, with no end in sight. What has "God made the world in 6 days so you'll rest on the 7th like him, or else" given us?
The US Military's record when it comes to fighting against guerrilla forces in foreign countries is abysmal. Remember Vietnam, the current Iraq war, even Afghanistan could be going better
Hey, that's just practice so they're actually good at it by the time teh terrorists (i.e. you) rise up;)
Thing is, the very nature of this sort of thing means it's going to need to get really, really, really bad to have more than a handful actually stand up and be prepared to start shooting -- I see it as more likely that it's just going to get bad enough to be merely really, really bad -- thus most of those millions of guns will likely remain on the side of people who will think you're either terrorist scum or hopelessly misguided. And, ultimately, while you might do plenty of damage, I have difficulty seeing it going far enough and in the right direction to avoid just making things even worse.
(and yes, I clearly haven't been exposed to the weird gun culture of the US, er, "sufficiently")
Shame the government has a few million times more of them than you do. And rather a lot more people experienced in using them (and willing to do so), and better equipment to fire them and defend against them. And lots of pieces of paper which the majority of people think grants them more right to use their ammo against you than vice versa.
So, uhm, what are you going to use that ammo for? Are you going to make like a slave uprising, kill a few people and then get put down and made out to be utterly crazy? Yes, I can really see that helping make an oppressive, paranoid government less so:/
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"I had to stop using it after 9.0 because switching between tabs was incredibly laggy. With more than a couple tabs open, there would be a very noticeable pause switching between them"
*glances at his list of 90 tabs*
*flicks between half a dozen*
Nope. Tried turning off plugins?
The laws in Washington DC may be "restrictive", but there are still a fucktonne of guns there; 3.8% of its nearly 600,000 residents have one, not to mention being surrounded by other states with (presumably) laxer gun laws, and little in the way of customs between states.
There are about 100,000 people in the UK with a (hand)gun license, so a population roughly 1% the size of the UK would seem to have just 1/5th the number of firearms.
I'd be more inclined to point to the high rate of gun crime in DC to the high population density though.
Don't be a retard.
It's 10,000,000 cameras. 100,000 is just how many we need with speakers.
I found with Manhunt there was a significant sense that you were "forced" to do this -- you are, after all, basically a prisoner of a sadistic movie maker who makes it quite clear that it's basically, kill or be killed, and if you're not entertaining him enough, kill *and* be killed. Also, given that you're not generally being asked to kill innocent civilians but other sadistic assholes, I didn't really find it all that abhorrent.
What I do find abhorrent is that there's a bunch of guys who get to say "no, that's not ethically acceptable for any adult to see or interact with", as though I need to be protected by force of law with the moral compass of someone else. People like this should be all about *labeling* and restricting sales to minors, not deciding outright what I get to see.
But hey, could be worse. At least we're not Germany.
Well, sure, but "friendly" means different things to different people. Personally I often find "do-everything" systems to be highly unfriendly, since today's flavour of the month GUI dialogs for configuring various things (often quite badly) are not what I'm used to. Adding a couple of lines to rc.conf and calling /etc/rc.d/something restart is very often *more* user friendly for me than hunting through menus and fighting some anonymous config tool.
Of course, even with me I'm sure there's room for making certain things "just work", without turning the whole thing into Mac OS. The level to which that's done which suits me probably won't suit your mother, so, yay choice!
"I remember that the GENERIC kernel on FreeBSD was horrendously slow because almost every driver was statically linked"
:(
Yeah, all that unused code increases the drag coeffecient of the kernel. And you're wasting several Megabytes of memory!!1!
It's a shame commenting out half a dozen obviously unnecessary lines is such a pain, especially when you don't have to touch it for a year or two after you've done it. And adding a few "NO_{KERBEROS,SENDMAIL}=yup" lines to make.conf to rescue a couple of MB of disk space is just exhausting
TDP between Core 2 and AMD's current chips are about the same anyway; 65W. And AMD *still* have lower idle power use and less power hungry northbridges (because of the on-die memory controller).
Of course the highest end parts all have higher TDP's, but if you're going for raw performance and don't care about price, you'll be getting a high end Core 2 anyway, at least for the time being.
"Ruby has one web framework"
Wha? There's Rails, Nitro, Iowa, and a bunch of smaller ones like Merb and.. meh, I forget the names. Just because we've been taken over by <troll>kiddies who love one in particular and barely even notice the rest of the community</troll> doesn't mean that's all there is.
Perl has quite a few frameworks too, I'm sure. PHP clearly isn't one, since it's nothing to do with Perl, aside from some ancient history when it wasn't even called PHP. PHP's a language, not a framework, not even to itself. If you do count PHP as a framework, the list of ones Ruby and Perl have just went up by an order of magnitude.
What?
fb2k has plenty of management capabilities (bundled, not just third party plugins); it maintains a fully searchable database ("Media Library") of your music and can generate and juggle playlists with tens of thousands of entries in its sleep, it has extensive tagging and renaming capabilities, format conversion, and all that other stuff which I associate with managing a collection of music. Music management is *precisely* what fb2k is for. For that matter I'm pretty sure WinAMP has been spending the past half a decade moving in that direction too.
So what do you define as "music management"? About the only significant feature I can see that's missing by default is a DAP syncing plugin, though I think many would appreciate a default UI config which didn't hark back to 1992.
I never suggested turning off anything, I just demonstrated it was possible, and then suggested it was pointless to do so.
Good point on IO bandwidth; ZFS does seem to be more aimed at heavier randomized IO as opposed to individual serial access, thus the reduced emphesis on trying to keep blocks together. It should still do pretty well with writes, since it's not trying to seek to "optimal" positions on the disk to do so, and of course it's much easier to just throw more platters at it.
Also, note you can put other filesystems on top of zpool; about a week into the FreeBSD ZFS porting effort you could put a UFS filesystem on top of zpool to benefit from the volume management features. The VFS bits are by far the trickiest bits of ZFS to integrate.
"The disadvantage is... the data integrity. Every byte of data gets checksummed."
... What do you mean you didn't notice a difference?
zfs set checksum=off tank
Happy now?
"Sun doesn't have so much of a problem with this, as their machines have enough CPUs, and enough bus, to effectively dedicate a CPU to the filesystem"
You overestimate the expense of IO. Even fairly high end RAID cards usually rely on some crappy 300MHz Intel RISC chip or so. If anything, memory is more the resource ZFS likes to suck down, and this can be a significant problem on 32bit systems (the lack of VM space makes it tricky to fit the ZFS buffer cache in kernel memory along with everything else).
Opera supports this out of the box (Preferences -> Search), and IE supports this with.. erm.. registry hacking.
Ah, found it: address bar search for IE, and you can now use TweakUI to do it. Wonder why they never hooked it up to Internet Options.
No, you completely missed what I was saying; *both* Sound Check AND Replay Gain require you to analyze the audio directly, if the tags do not exist. They function *identically* in that regard, it's just the precise algorithm used when scanning the files and determining the gain which differs. Apple could have supported Replay Gain *exactly* how they support Sound Check, as far as users are concerned (with some additional logic if they wanted to support album mode).
The algorithm is described here. Whatever Sound Check uses doesn't appear to be documented, and it seems to lack the "Audiophile" (Album) version described here. Either way, both involve a one-time analysis of the audio (which can and often is done by encoders like LAME, just as Sound Check is likely done by Apple's encoders, but this is by no means necessary; it just saves work for the player), and the use of tags to store the result, and both *attempt* to do the same sort of thing.
Going by what you're saying about Sound Check, Apple didn't bother with some of the more subtle aspects of determining a suitable gain (that, or album mode makes a real difference; I never really tried Replay Gain in single track "Radio" mode). This makes the comparison with ALAC more apt, really; ALAC's somewhat similar to FLAC in design, but misses some details which result in it having both lower compression ratio and higher decode complexity.
Most of what I mentioned are *encoders*: Hm, don't see it in oggenc, but still, lame, probably the most popular lossy audio encoder around appears to calculate it by default, and it's trivial for a player to calculate it on first play or on import, which is precisely what Apple will do with Sound Check, because that's how these things work if they're not already there.
It's an *algorithm* with some standard named tags, not an application; the point being Apple did their Not Invented Here thing like they did with ALAC, and came up with something not quite as good as what thousands of people were already using happily.
Now, err, what were we supposed to be talking about again?
Well, it's supported by most things not iTunes, so yes, "the rest of the world". FLAC, LAME, WavPack, MPC, Vorbis etc all support it natively, and WinAMP, fb2k, xmms, amarok and plenty of other players will make use of it if configured to do so, as will many portable DAP's. Even my iPod supports it (with Rockbox, which also supports about 10x as many music formats).
"Sound Check, on the other hand, works by actually measuring the loudness of the audio and then adjusting things based on the actual measurements"
Err, yes, htf do you think Replay Gain works? You scan each track and the entire album, find the peak loudness and store them in a pair of tags which are used by the player to renormalize. Sound Check appears to be very similar, but only works on individual tracks, and only in iTunes.
Don't forget:
- Limited supplies, high profit margins and criminal suppliers lead to massive variations in strength (making overdoses more likely, since doses can't be easily controlled) and use of cutting agents which are sometimes significantly more dangerous than the drugs themselves.
But it only affects bad people, so that's ok. Just like prison rape (but not quite as funny).
It may still be "lousy", but it's a *lot* less lousy than constantly reaching for the volume control.
On *ix, most "IPv4" apps should also support IPv6, and normally try using that first if it's available. It's fairly easy to see how some crappy printer drivers could have this behavior hacked into them and screw up because nobody tested it. Maybe they're freeing memory after an attempt and sending garbage to the printer when falling back to IPv4, or something similarly silly.
"On a case-insensitive filesystem, your done if you're lucky. If not lucky, you need to do a linear scan of the whole damn directory."
Er, why? If you're case-insensitive, you use a casefolded index for lookups, surely?
Monad -> Windows PowerShell, and has been available for ages.
Maybe Vista now has a unified buffer cache, which makes the whole idea of "cache" rather blurry. Take this FreeBSD system for example:
Mem: 1891M Active, 5131M Inact, 240M Wired, 257M Cache, 214M Buf, 243M Free
In this case, the vast majority of "Inact" is made up of cached file data, but such cache will also be spread around "Active" (can be swapped, but would likely to be swapped back in soon after) and "Cache" (rarely used pages which can be freed quickly because they aren't "dirty"). Depending on how you define "memory use" you could say I'm using anywhere from 2.3 to 7.5G. Even these are rather blurry since the lack of memory pressure means the various lists aren't being cycled very aggressively.
Quite; you can easily use FastCGI with Apache too (though lighttpd's built-in load balancing sounds nice; hopefully mod_proxy{,_balancer} will one day grow useful FastCGI support). Do that and watch as Apache sits using about 1000x less CPU than your backend PHP's.
lighttpd and friends are generally better if you're serving static content, but it's doubtful you'll notice unless you're talking in terms of many thousands of requests per second to a single server. That's not to say there aren't other reasons you might want to use lighttpd, but performance isn't really one of the interesting ones.
"Not content with the fact we will die in less than ten billionths of the time interval discussed in this story"
Not set in stone. There are plenty of people who have good reason to believe that we may achieve technological singularity or something like it and maybe make ourselves or our descendents effectively immortal at some point in the future, maybe even within the century.
Either way they have better reasons to believe this than any religion has that their particular God/afterlife/creation story is anything other than occasionally-useful-to-some complete fiction.
"some of us still obsess with thinking we know the answers to the universe."
Some of us accept that they don't know, and so work to try to find out using methods proven to work effectively.
Some of us think they merely know who made it all (often because a book and a few self-appointed authorities said so, possibly interacting with some of those "religious feelings" people get when our notoriously unstable temporal lobe goes all wobbly), and even feel they have a personal relationship with this entity.
Hmm...
"Seriously.. can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Religions?"
Seriously.. you think we get better answers out of them? Relativity, quantum physics, genetic engineering.. these have given us some very important advances we increasingly encounter day-to-day, with no end in sight. What has "God made the world in 6 days so you'll rest on the 7th like him, or else" given us?
Hey, that's just practice so they're actually good at it by the time teh terrorists (i.e. you) rise up
Thing is, the very nature of this sort of thing means it's going to need to get really, really, really bad to have more than a handful actually stand up and be prepared to start shooting -- I see it as more likely that it's just going to get bad enough to be merely really, really bad -- thus most of those millions of guns will likely remain on the side of people who will think you're either terrorist scum or hopelessly misguided. And, ultimately, while you might do plenty of damage, I have difficulty seeing it going far enough and in the right direction to avoid just making things even worse.
(and yes, I clearly haven't been exposed to the weird gun culture of the US, er, "sufficiently")
Shame the government has a few million times more of them than you do. And rather a lot more people experienced in using them (and willing to do so), and better equipment to fire them and defend against them. And lots of pieces of paper which the majority of people think grants them more right to use their ammo against you than vice versa.
:/
So, uhm, what are you going to use that ammo for? Are you going to make like a slave uprising, kill a few people and then get put down and made out to be utterly crazy? Yes, I can really see that helping make an oppressive, paranoid government less so