Yeah, let's not bother even talking about it, one should never try to work against intertia, even if it might do some good. After all, if it's got so much of it, and if so many people use it for everything, it must be the best way, right?
"if you'd like to access a database with compound primary keys, ActiveRecord won't support that"
It will, it just needs a plugin for the time being. And nothing's stopping you from using Og or some other ORM layer (or no ORM layer) if ActiveRecord's insufficient.
Er, right. Because if you walk in on me pointing what looks like a gun at someone, you're not going to pull out a real weapon, call armed police, or otherwise do anything which might endanger me, you, or anyone else nearby.
Quite; the look and feel is quite a bit less retarded too. Legacy feels more like a cut-down Armada (without the RTS bits) than the third-person Bridge Commander/Klingon Academy type simulator many previews liked to suggest. Instead of any semblance of control over a big capital ship, you're basically flying a slow fighter with minimal feedback, no real damage model, and in an environment who's scale is like something out of Alice in Wonderland (planets a couple of miles across, or ships a few thousand).
On the positive side, there's not much in the way of obnoxious copy protection.
"I have no idea how it would be harder to read sequentially than any other way. If flash truly had a problem with 'sequential' data, an obvious solution would be to, duh, not store the file sequentially. Space it out at whatever intervals flash wants. Or just don't load it sequentially...read the first meg, put it in place, read the tenth meg, put it place, read the second meg, put it in place..."
Heh, no; flash is fast at random access because there's no disk head to physically move around the media, so you've got pretty much constant time access to any address/block. The rate at which it can transfer data is what limits it for this kind of use; the fastest flash drives I've seen have transfer rates that are still about 1/4 what a HD can provide, with the majority being several times slower than that.
Flash sucks donkeys for sequential reads, though, which is mostly what you need for loading images. Even cheap desktop disks are pushing 70MB/s on their outer tracks, while flash is doing exceptionally well to manage even 1/10th of that.
Vista has something called ReadyBoost which uses flash drives to cache data; it takes the slow STR of flash into account and just uses it to serve the kind of random requests flash is good at.
I find XP refuses to hibernate with more than about 600MB of active memory; it makes an attempt, then returns you to the desktop with a popup bubble saying "Insufficient resources exist to complete the API". This necessitates me closing all my apps before each hibernation, and after a week or two even that won't work.
Anyway, I remember using something closer to what the story is talking about, on the Amiga of all places; FastBoot had you boot normally, then save a snapshot of the system at the end of the startup-sequence. Future boots would use this snapshot, which you generally didn't want to update at each shutdown -- you got 2-3s boot times, but each boot was clean. It worked surprisingly well for a scary hack:)
"So, how do you avoid the monthly mandatory "update" reboot?"
Turn off the Automatic Updates service when it starts bugging you to "please reboot or I'll do it for you".
"How do you monitor your uptime? Has Microsoft included an "uptime" utility yet?"
It's not part of a default install:
C:\Documents and Settings\freaky>uptime/?
UPTIME, Version 1.01 (C) Copyright 1999, Microsoft Corporation
Uptime [server] [/s ] [/a] [/d:mm/dd/yyyy |/p:n] [/heartbeat] [/? |/help]
server Name or IP address of remote server to process. /s Display key system events and statistics. /a Display application failure events (assumes/s). /d: Only calculate for events after mm/dd/yyyy. /p: Only calculate for events in the previous n days. /heartbeat Turn on/off the system's heartbeat /? Basic usage. /help Additional usage information.
You can get it off Microsoft's download site here.
"Finally, I envy the reliability of your power company. Mine can't keep things going more than 140 days and usually goes down once every two months on average."
That sucks; I think we've had maybe one blackout every two years or so, and I'm pretty sure they were all local. Then again I do live near a big industrial area and within spitting distance of a 1.3GW nuclear power station. So.. don't you have a UPS?
Well, yes, that's what's in it for desktop users; networks upstream can scale further.
And who says you have to connect it to PCI-(E|X)? Hook it up directly to a HyperTransport link and talk to other systems on the network at reasonable speeds.
Wait, so if one universe was made by an intelligence.. that means all universes must have been too? We can make diamond using industrial processes.. does that mean all diamond was made by intelligent beings with heavy industry?
Of course, we can predict and test for the differences between industrial and natural diamond. I'm sure we can do the same for at least some classes of artificially created/managed universes.. but there doesn't seem to be much of that in any of the ID "theory" I've seen. Almost as if those writing it have a different agenda, hm...
No. The type of packaging I'm thinking of has very thick plastic which doesn't cut or bend easily, and the scary bits aren't the edges you've just cut off, they're the sharp edges attached to the rest of the packaging; you need to cut off a lot of stuff before you get many bending options there. You seem to be thinking of less armoured packing systems which aren't designed to withstand nearby terrorist attacks.
Two examples that come to mind from the past year or so are an X-Box 360 Controller and a pair of Technics headphones; I really wished for a long pair of tin snips (or some C4) to get into them, not a pair of mere scissors.
Right, scissors get there eventually, but unless they're 3ft long your hand's going to end up right next to the razor sharp edges of the packaging while you're having to apply a few metric tonnes of force to slice through the armoured plastic. Doesn't take much of a slip to put a nasty gash in your hand.
FreeSBIE 2.0 based on FreeBSD 6.2 just went RC1, and you can make your own using the sysutils/freesbie port. Maybe not your first choice, but a good range of systems is handy for fussy machines.
Um, why? Even if I had a 10Gbit uplink I'd still want plenty of local storage; it's not going to slow down or die because of network/reception problems, it's not going to disappear because my credit card expired or the company hosting it went bankrupt, and it's probably going to be faster because I'm not sharing it with lots of other people across many disparate networks. Doubly so for a portable device, unless you're expecting to see Ansibles within the next decade.
An installer is an application like any other; if the user's willing to give it permission to, you know, install something, why shouldn't it be allowed to grab data from the network?
My big beef with OS X atm is the keyboard support. It goes something like this:
"Oh, I see you plugged in a keyboard. Can you press the key to the right of the left shift key? Err, ok, now the key to the left of the right shift key? Um.. ok, I don't know that one, can you pick a keyboard from one of these three options, none of which will do what you want? k tnx".
This is a UK Mac Mini, using a pretty bog standard GB keyboard. To get some keys working I seem to need to hunt down a third party keyboard mapping, and even that only works for some of them.
Note this is the reason for those swappable "Single Graphics Card/SLI Mode" PCB's on many SLI motherboards; when the chipset can only allocate 16 lanes to graphics, one mode sets all 16x to one slot and the other splits it into 2 8x slots. It's nothing new, and though there are motherboards these days which can drive 2 full 16x slots, I don't think they differentiate themselves much in performance from 8x just yet.
That's what ipfw and dummynet(4) are for; while it's more typically used for rate limiting, it can also be used for randomly delaying (and thus reordering)/dropping packets. You can also filter packets through userspace daemons using divert sockets, which is how natd works; you can munge a packet pretty much however you want from there.
There's also netgraph(4) which is quite flexible aiui.
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Yeah, let's not bother even talking about it, one should never try to work against intertia, even if it might do some good. After all, if it's got so much of it, and if so many people use it for everything, it must be the best way, right?
"if you'd like to access a database with compound primary keys, ActiveRecord won't support that"
It will, it just needs a plugin for the time being. And nothing's stopping you from using Og or some other ORM layer (or no ORM layer) if ActiveRecord's insufficient.
Er, right. Because if you walk in on me pointing what looks like a gun at someone, you're not going to pull out a real weapon, call armed police, or otherwise do anything which might endanger me, you, or anyone else nearby.
Quite; the look and feel is quite a bit less retarded too. Legacy feels more like a cut-down Armada (without the RTS bits) than the third-person Bridge Commander/Klingon Academy type simulator many previews liked to suggest. Instead of any semblance of control over a big capital ship, you're basically flying a slow fighter with minimal feedback, no real damage model, and in an environment who's scale is like something out of Alice in Wonderland (planets a couple of miles across, or ships a few thousand).
On the positive side, there's not much in the way of obnoxious copy protection.
"I have no idea how it would be harder to read sequentially than any other way. If flash truly had a problem with 'sequential' data, an obvious solution would be to, duh, not store the file sequentially. Space it out at whatever intervals flash wants. Or just don't load it sequentially...read the first meg, put it in place, read the tenth meg, put it place, read the second meg, put it in place..."
Heh, no; flash is fast at random access because there's no disk head to physically move around the media, so you've got pretty much constant time access to any address/block. The rate at which it can transfer data is what limits it for this kind of use; the fastest flash drives I've seen have transfer rates that are still about 1/4 what a HD can provide, with the majority being several times slower than that.
Ooh, thanks; I actually had that locally, but I seem to have neglected to install it. istr the article having more warnings in it :)
Flash sucks donkeys for sequential reads, though, which is mostly what you need for loading images. Even cheap desktop disks are pushing 70MB/s on their outer tracks, while flash is doing exceptionally well to manage even 1/10th of that.
Vista has something called ReadyBoost which uses flash drives to cache data; it takes the slow STR of flash into account and just uses it to serve the kind of random requests flash is good at.
I find XP refuses to hibernate with more than about 600MB of active memory; it makes an attempt, then returns you to the desktop with a popup bubble saying "Insufficient resources exist to complete the API". This necessitates me closing all my apps before each hibernation, and after a week or two even that won't work.
:)
Anyway, I remember using something closer to what the story is talking about, on the Amiga of all places; FastBoot had you boot normally, then save a snapshot of the system at the end of the startup-sequence. Future boots would use this snapshot, which you generally didn't want to update at each shutdown -- you got 2-3s boot times, but each boot was clean. It worked surprisingly well for a scary hack
Turn off the Automatic Updates service when it starts bugging you to "please reboot or I'll do it for you".
"How do you monitor your uptime? Has Microsoft included an "uptime" utility yet?"
It's not part of a default install: You can get it off Microsoft's download site here.
"Finally, I envy the reliability of your power company. Mine can't keep things going more than 140 days and usually goes down once every two months on average."
That sucks; I think we've had maybe one blackout every two years or so, and I'm pretty sure they were all local. Then again I do live near a big industrial area and within spitting distance of a 1.3GW nuclear power station. So.. don't you have a UPS?
Well, yes, that's what's in it for desktop users; networks upstream can scale further.
And who says you have to connect it to PCI-(E|X)? Hook it up directly to a HyperTransport link and talk to other systems on the network at reasonable speeds.
Wait, so if one universe was made by an intelligence.. that means all universes must have been too? We can make diamond using industrial processes.. does that mean all diamond was made by intelligent beings with heavy industry?
Of course, we can predict and test for the differences between industrial and natural diamond. I'm sure we can do the same for at least some classes of artificially created/managed universes.. but there doesn't seem to be much of that in any of the ID "theory" I've seen. Almost as if those writing it have a different agenda, hm...
No. The type of packaging I'm thinking of has very thick plastic which doesn't cut or bend easily, and the scary bits aren't the edges you've just cut off, they're the sharp edges attached to the rest of the packaging; you need to cut off a lot of stuff before you get many bending options there. You seem to be thinking of less armoured packing systems which aren't designed to withstand nearby terrorist attacks.
Two examples that come to mind from the past year or so are an X-Box 360 Controller and a pair of Technics headphones; I really wished for a long pair of tin snips (or some C4) to get into them, not a pair of mere scissors.
Right, scissors get there eventually, but unless they're 3ft long your hand's going to end up right next to the razor sharp edges of the packaging while you're having to apply a few metric tonnes of force to slice through the armoured plastic. Doesn't take much of a slip to put a nasty gash in your hand.
FreeSBIE 2.0 based on FreeBSD 6.2 just went RC1, and you can make your own using the sysutils/freesbie port. Maybe not your first choice, but a good range of systems is handy for fussy machines.
Um, why? Even if I had a 10Gbit uplink I'd still want plenty of local storage; it's not going to slow down or die because of network/reception problems, it's not going to disappear because my credit card expired or the company hosting it went bankrupt, and it's probably going to be faster because I'm not sharing it with lots of other people across many disparate networks. Doubly so for a portable device, unless you're expecting to see Ansibles within the next decade.
An installer is an application like any other; if the user's willing to give it permission to, you know, install something, why shouldn't it be allowed to grab data from the network?
Try Queen of Angels and Slant ("/"); both part of the same series as Moving Mars, though set a fair bit earlier.
Of course just because you can doesn't mean you should.
"It would be nice if there was a way to mount one of these drives by giving it a password over a secure networked connection"
Sure, the same way you talk to the BIOS or boot loader; serial console or LOM with console/VGA redirection.
If update-manager -c doesn't offer it, try update-manager -dc
"MDI is very unintuitive on its own - tabs make it much better by putting, well, a tab on the page so you know it's there."
;)
Tabs being in such a case buttons linking to the child windows. Hmm, I'm pretty sure Win 3.1 supported buttons
My big beef with OS X atm is the keyboard support. It goes something like this:
"Oh, I see you plugged in a keyboard. Can you press the key to the right of the left shift key? Err, ok, now the key to the left of the right shift key? Um.. ok, I don't know that one, can you pick a keyboard from one of these three options, none of which will do what you want? k tnx".
This is a UK Mac Mini, using a pretty bog standard GB keyboard. To get some keys working I seem to need to hunt down a third party keyboard mapping, and even that only works for some of them.
Maybe Apple could make a phone with an interface that doesn't make me want to smash it into the nearest wall whenever I use it.
Note this is the reason for those swappable "Single Graphics Card/SLI Mode" PCB's on many SLI motherboards; when the chipset can only allocate 16 lanes to graphics, one mode sets all 16x to one slot and the other splits it into 2 8x slots. It's nothing new, and though there are motherboards these days which can drive 2 full 16x slots, I don't think they differentiate themselves much in performance from 8x just yet.
That's what ipfw and dummynet(4) are for; while it's more typically used for rate limiting, it can also be used for randomly delaying (and thus reordering)/dropping packets. You can also filter packets through userspace daemons using divert sockets, which is how natd works; you can munge a packet pretty much however you want from there.
There's also netgraph(4) which is quite flexible aiui.