The thing I really like about LOTR is that while the advertising is guaranteed to be overwhelming as the first release aproaches, the plot can't be spoiled since I know it already!
Where with TPM I was waiting and hoping for a good movie with a good plot, I know there's already a good plot in this as long as they kept half of Tolkein's original works. Even that doesn't guarantee that they suceeded in making a good movie out of it, but at least it's already a step up from TPN.
My favorite is all the conservative websites out there that designate movies to be "good" and "bad" simply by counting all the times they have the word fuck....
There are a lot of tradeoffs in cbanging the standard timeslice...
Make it too small, and you are dominated by the overhead of switching between tasks (not a small amount of work... have to push all registers to the stack, swap stacks, and grab all old registers).
Make it too large and average response time is hurt.
My guess is that with your change things appear faster, but in the end you've actually hurt your overall throughput (the amount of computational work you actually get done in a given time).
I bet other people can give you a better explanation, the OS class here at the University of Arizona is shit....
While I hate microsoft with a passion, you have to remember the tremendous problem they are trying to solve.
They have to write an OS with the following criteria:
1) support for legacy apps (meaning old APIs and all of their little quirks)
2) support every conceivable combination of the bizarre and increasingly crappy pc architecture
3) eliminate all bugs from a 40 million line codebase
I don't care how many developers you throw at this problem, you'll never get it 100% right, and it's amazing Microsoft can do as well as they do.
I think a better analogy would be to hold the federal government responsible for all drugs shipped via interstate highways.
The illegal material was transferred along a pathway owned and operated by that entity, therefore that entity should be held responsible (according to the German court).
Interesting point, but here are two areas which I think negate it's imporance
1) the user links to rsh, not ssh. If ssh installed itself as rsh by default, then yes, that might be a problem (similar to if openSSH installed itself as openSSH, not ssh, so you were reminded every time you ran the program that it wasn't the official ssh).
2) I doubt Berkeley has a trademark on rsh... it's just a minor util after all, and not an entire product, as in the case of ssh. If they had (or could) trademark the name of every minor unix utility, it would be nearly impossible to create a unix clone.
This is exactly why Linus wants small patches. With a small patch, it is possible to quickly look at it, see what it's doing, and evaluate the patch on several levels:
clarity - is it clear what the patch fixes/adds (this tends to be a sign of well-written code)
correctness - a 300K patch would take days to go through and make sure that you aren't breaking something else by applying the patch. Small gotchas will stand out more in smaller patches.
If you apply a 300K patch, and something new breaks, what do you do now? Look through the code slowly and try to figure out what happened. With a small patch, there is a greater chance that you can back out exactly what change broke whatever function, making it easier to find where you broke it, if not why.
The problem is not that openSSH resembles the original SSH, it has to in order to do what it does. But when it looks like SSH, acts like SSH, and the name is similar besides, it definitely can cause confusion.
IIRC, debian installs openSSH (since it falls under it's definition of "free"), but the package itself is called ssh. A user may think they are getting the true "ssh," when they are actually getting openSSH. This is a definite example of trademark confusion.
What wouldn't be bad is if someone released a first person shooter like quake, calling it openSSH. No confusion could arise, the fps "openSSH" and the secure shell "SSH" would be completely different products.
Unless you are a college student who only makes less than $25,000 a year because research only pays minimum wage, and you can't take on a third job along with going to school full time...
Actual earnings are not a valid judge of a person's worth.
I'd argue that there's actually too much innovation in open source projects.
The design and initial development of a project is the most interesting, and most personally fulfilling. Debugging, hardening, and other tasks which are necessary for moving a project out of beta quality and into true stability are the least fun.
When you're getting paid to do these tasks, they get done, because you need to put food on the table. In an open source project, however, these tasks are only taken by those who are seriously committed to the project, while anyone who wants to ignore these tasks in favor of creating new features is free to do so.
Too bad it's still cheaper to do what Hitler did, which is make brothels for your SS troops.
Steps in cloning:
1) isolate a cell from the donor
2) remove the nucleus/genetic material from the cell
3) prepare a host egg by removing it's genetic material
4) insert the material from the first cell into the second
5) artificially inseminate the egg into a host mother or keep alive in a test tube
6) wait 9 months
The "old fashioned" method
1) find two members of the "superior" race of opposite
2) allow them to have some fun
3) while not pregnant goto 2
4) wait 9 months
It's certainly easier to obtain a new "genetically" superior human via the second method. Besides, either method requires that you wait at least 12-15 years before the new human is at all useful. You cannot out-populate other races using cloning... fools with these sorts of delusions will unfortunately turn to the methods which you were so kind to point out: genocide.
I think the real problem is that people associate cloning with genetic engineering, and have been watching too many movies where the evil scientist creates a race of super whatevers that wipe out all of us puny humans.
I always find it hilarious when movies create clones who are already 30 years old and share memories with their genetic twin. The actual act of cloning is rather dull compared with hollywood's take on the subject.
Cloning is really only slightly different from normal reproduction: all chromosomes are taken from one individual, rather than mixed from two.
Some unethical things can be done with cloned humans, like harvesting their organs, but then laws that prevent you from enslaving your neighbor's child and doing the same thing will apply.
Re:People are missing the point.
on
MySQL FS
·
· Score: 1
Correct, I didn't mean to imply that this only benefits accessing BLOB fields, but I would note that accessing integers and strings is far more common, and is usually better supported in database libraries.
Doug
Re:People are missing the point.
on
MySQL FS
·
· Score: 2
You can almost always access BLOBS (or equivilent fields) from different languages and environments, the problem is that they're all different. DBI, JDBC, ODBC, etc... each one has it's own gotchas. Being able to access these fields as a part of a filesystem gives it the ultimate portability. Even shell scripts can quickly and easily access the database!
Good question.. this is what the SETI program is trying to find out. That question is like asking "can we go to the moon" around 1930. Many people seem to think it's possible, and have theories to support them. Many don't, and have theories to support their positions as well. Obviously in the 1950's it was pretty clear that we could, even without actually accomplishing the feat, changing the problem from one of theory, to one of engineering.
I really don't think that SETI will find any signals (note, this is a nearly completely groundless position, based solely on gut feeling). I also think that it would be criminal to miss a chance to communicate with another intelligent civilization, simply by not listening.
Mosix does this I believe... clustering can work really well if you have an abundance of independant processes... like a multiuser system, where the user doesn't really know where their processes are actually being executed.
My point was that the typical processes running on a desktop machine are unsuitable for this type of farming out to a cluster.
Absolutely wrong...one of the biggest problems with overall system performance today is latency. Latency between chip and cache, chip and ram, and between chip and hard drive (*shudder*). The latencies on a ethernet network are FAR too high to be used to connect multiple CPU's, except for very specialized problems.
The key is to have a very high computation time (the time a processor can keep working by itself, without having to communicate with other processors) to latency ratio. Unfortunately, for most tasks performed on a desktop machine, lots of data must be accessible at all times.
Take a GUI for example. Most tasks involving windows and other on-screen objects are very short, and they require up-to-date information about where the window is, what events have occurred, etc. Trying to farm any of those calculations to other machines would actually make your GUI appear slower to the user, by adding 2x the network latency to every event that occurs.
SMP, of course, is another matter. Shared memory eliminates the incredibly high cost of going to a network subsystem. Syncronization and locking become an issue however, and you never get a factor N speed up for N processors.
You're absolutely right about the fact that no stars collide when galaxies merge. The distances are so large, the probabilities are very low.
Galaxies do merge, however. There are certain theories that the spiral instabilities in galaxies similar to our own can be triggered by mergers.
There are two interesting point about our largest galactic neighbor, Andromeda. Not only is it on a collision course with the Milky Way (~1 Gyr if I remember correctly), but it has an interesting "double core" feature, which some have speculated is the result of a merger.
I'm just starting to study such mergers in computer simulations, but I'm still catching up on the math and the theory.
This is a cool animated gif showing the expansion of the nebula, and here are some nice hubble images.
Doug
Re:.. as humans move out in the solar system. Sigh
on
Robotic Ants In Space
·
· Score: 1
Right now the human race is incredibly vulnerable to any number of possible extinction scenarios.
1) polluting our planet to the point of drastically changing the global climate (note, some would likely survive in artificial shelters, but on the order of millions, not billions)
2) large asteroid or comet impact (the likelihood of this happening within the next 2 centuries is higher than you think!)
3) plague - with a global economy, viruses can be spread on the order of hours, not months. Even something that kills in a few days can be spread around the globe.
4) nuclear holocaust - we have the power to completely wipe clean the surface of the planet.
Who knows what other things I can't think up on a Monday morning after partying last night:)
Just remember, even a very small group of humans in one other place drastically reduces our risk of total annihilation.
Yeah I should have... but when getting that A+ takes 5x the effort, and has little reward associated with it (other than the joy of social ostracism), it's very difficult to be motivated enough to do that extra work.
The crucial thing is to make it fun, or at least give a large bonus upon success, otherwise it is just wasted time.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing I really like about LOTR is that while the advertising is guaranteed to be overwhelming as the first release aproaches, the plot can't be spoiled since I know it already!
Where with TPM I was waiting and hoping for a good movie with a good plot, I know there's already a good plot in this as long as they kept half of Tolkein's original works. Even that doesn't guarantee that they suceeded in making a good movie out of it, but at least it's already a step up from TPN.
Doug
Woops.. I think you're right...
They're the same voice actor, and I was
just going off of what I remembered
(I have a very audio oriented memory).
Thanks for the catch...
Doug
Ralph: "My freakin ears!"
My favorite is all the conservative websites out there that designate movies to be "good" and "bad" simply by counting all the times they have the word fuck....
just a little fucking rediculous if you ask me...
Doug
There are a lot of tradeoffs in cbanging the standard timeslice...
Make it too small, and you are dominated by the overhead of switching between tasks (not a small amount of work... have to push all registers to the stack, swap stacks, and grab all old registers).
Make it too large and average response time is hurt.
My guess is that with your change things appear faster, but in the end you've actually hurt your overall throughput (the amount of computational work you actually get done in a given time).
I bet other people can give you a better explanation, the OS class here at the University of Arizona is shit....
Doug
While I hate microsoft with a passion, you have to remember the tremendous problem they are trying to solve.
They have to write an OS with the following criteria:
1) support for legacy apps (meaning old APIs and all of their little quirks)
2) support every conceivable combination of the bizarre and increasingly crappy pc architecture
3) eliminate all bugs from a 40 million line codebase
I don't care how many developers you throw at this problem, you'll never get it 100% right, and it's amazing Microsoft can do as well as they do.
Doug
I think a better analogy would be to hold the federal government responsible for all drugs shipped via interstate highways.
The illegal material was transferred along a pathway owned and operated by that entity, therefore that entity should be held responsible (according to the German court).
Doug
Interesting point, but here are two areas which I think negate it's imporance
1) the user links to rsh, not ssh. If ssh installed itself as rsh by default, then yes, that might be a problem (similar to if openSSH installed itself as openSSH, not ssh, so you were reminded every time you ran the program that it wasn't the official ssh).
2) I doubt Berkeley has a trademark on rsh... it's just a minor util after all, and not an entire product, as in the case of ssh. If they had (or could) trademark the name of every minor unix utility, it would be nearly impossible to create a unix clone.
Doug
This is exactly why Linus wants small patches. With a small patch, it is possible to quickly look at it, see what it's doing, and evaluate the patch on several levels:
clarity - is it clear what the patch fixes/adds (this tends to be a sign of well-written code)
correctness - a 300K patch would take days to go through and make sure that you aren't breaking something else by applying the patch. Small gotchas will stand out more in smaller patches.
If you apply a 300K patch, and something new breaks, what do you do now? Look through the code slowly and try to figure out what happened. With a small patch, there is a greater chance that you can back out exactly what change broke whatever function, making it easier to find where you broke it, if not why.
Doug
You're missing the point...
The problem is not that openSSH resembles the original SSH, it has to in order to do what it does. But when it looks like SSH, acts like SSH, and the name is similar besides, it definitely can cause confusion.
IIRC, debian installs openSSH (since it falls under it's definition of "free"), but the package itself is called ssh. A user may think they are getting the true "ssh," when they are actually getting openSSH. This is a definite example of trademark confusion.
What wouldn't be bad is if someone released a first person shooter like quake, calling it openSSH. No confusion could arise, the fps "openSSH" and the secure shell "SSH" would be completely different products.
Doug
Unless you are a college student who only makes less than $25,000 a year because research only pays minimum wage, and you can't take on a third job along with going to school full time...
Actual earnings are not a valid judge of a person's worth.
Doug
Wow, that really explains some things...
like how I spend half my waking hours programming...
Doug
I'd argue that there's actually too much innovation in open source projects.
The design and initial development of a project is the most interesting, and most personally fulfilling. Debugging, hardening, and other tasks which are necessary for moving a project out of beta quality and into true stability are the least fun.
When you're getting paid to do these tasks, they get done, because you need to put food on the table. In an open source project, however, these tasks are only taken by those who are seriously committed to the project, while anyone who wants to ignore these tasks in favor of creating new features is free to do so.
Doug
Too bad it's still cheaper to do what Hitler did, which is make brothels for your SS troops.
Steps in cloning:
1) isolate a cell from the donor
2) remove the nucleus/genetic material from the cell
3) prepare a host egg by removing it's genetic material
4) insert the material from the first cell into the second
5) artificially inseminate the egg into a host mother or keep alive in a test tube
6) wait 9 months
The "old fashioned" method
1) find two members of the "superior" race of opposite
2) allow them to have some fun
3) while not pregnant goto 2
4) wait 9 months
It's certainly easier to obtain a new "genetically" superior human via the second method. Besides, either method requires that you wait at least 12-15 years before the new human is at all useful. You cannot out-populate other races using cloning... fools with these sorts of delusions will unfortunately turn to the methods which you were so kind to point out: genocide.
Doug
Thank you for making my point perfectly. The normal way of obtaining new human beings is infinitely easier, cheaper, and generally more pleasant.
Doug
I think the real problem is that people associate cloning with genetic engineering, and have been watching too many movies where the evil scientist creates a race of super whatevers that wipe out all of us puny humans.
I always find it hilarious when movies create clones who are already 30 years old and share memories with their genetic twin. The actual act of cloning is rather dull compared with hollywood's take on the subject.
Cloning is really only slightly different from normal reproduction: all chromosomes are taken from one individual, rather than mixed from two.
Some unethical things can be done with cloned humans, like harvesting their organs, but then laws that prevent you from enslaving your neighbor's child and doing the same thing will apply.
Doug
Too bad there's no 1.2 jre for mac's though...
Doug
Correct, I didn't mean to imply that this only benefits accessing BLOB fields, but I would note that accessing integers and strings is far more common, and is usually better supported in database libraries.
Doug
You can almost always access BLOBS (or equivilent fields) from different languages and environments, the problem is that they're all different. DBI, JDBC, ODBC, etc... each one has it's own gotchas. Being able to access these fields as a part of a filesystem gives it the ultimate portability. Even shell scripts can quickly and easily access the database!
Doug
Good question.. this is what the SETI program is trying to find out. That question is like asking "can we go to the moon" around 1930. Many people seem to think it's possible, and have theories to support them. Many don't, and have theories to support their positions as well. Obviously in the 1950's it was pretty clear that we could, even without actually accomplishing the feat, changing the problem from one of theory, to one of engineering.
I really don't think that SETI will find any signals (note, this is a nearly completely groundless position, based solely on gut feeling). I also think that it would be criminal to miss a chance to communicate with another intelligent civilization, simply by not listening.
Doug
Mosix does this I believe... clustering can work really well if you have an abundance of independant processes... like a multiuser system, where the user doesn't really know where their processes are actually being executed.
My point was that the typical processes running on a desktop machine are unsuitable for this type of farming out to a cluster.
Doug
Absolutely wrong...one of the biggest problems with overall system performance today is latency. Latency between chip and cache, chip and ram, and between chip and hard drive (*shudder*). The latencies on a ethernet network are FAR too high to be used to connect multiple CPU's, except for very specialized problems.
The key is to have a very high computation time (the time a processor can keep working by itself, without having to communicate with other processors) to latency ratio. Unfortunately, for most tasks performed on a desktop machine, lots of data must be accessible at all times.
Take a GUI for example. Most tasks involving windows and other on-screen objects are very short, and they require up-to-date information about where the window is, what events have occurred, etc. Trying to farm any of those calculations to other machines would actually make your GUI appear slower to the user, by adding 2x the network latency to every event that occurs.
SMP, of course, is another matter. Shared memory eliminates the incredibly high cost of going to a network subsystem. Syncronization and locking become an issue however, and you never get a factor N speed up for N processors.
Doug
You're absolutely right about the fact that no stars collide when galaxies merge. The distances are so large, the probabilities are very low.
Galaxies do merge, however. There are certain theories that the spiral instabilities in galaxies similar to our own can be triggered by mergers.
There are two interesting point about our largest galactic neighbor, Andromeda. Not only is it on a collision course with the Milky Way (~1 Gyr if I remember correctly), but it has an interesting "double core" feature, which some have speculated is the result of a merger.
I'm just starting to study such mergers in computer simulations, but I'm still catching up on the math and the theory.
Doug
This is a cool animated gif showing the expansion of the nebula, and here are some nice hubble images.
Doug
Right now the human race is incredibly vulnerable to any number of possible extinction scenarios.
:)
1) polluting our planet to the point of drastically changing the global climate (note, some would likely survive in artificial shelters, but on the order of millions, not billions)
2) large asteroid or comet impact (the likelihood of this happening within the next 2 centuries is higher than you think!)
3) plague - with a global economy, viruses can be spread on the order of hours, not months. Even something that kills in a few days can be spread around the globe.
4) nuclear holocaust - we have the power to completely wipe clean the surface of the planet.
Who knows what other things I can't think up on a Monday morning after partying last night
Just remember, even a very small group of humans in one other place drastically reduces our risk of total annihilation.
Doug
Yeah I should have... but when getting that A+ takes 5x the effort, and has little reward associated with it (other than the joy of social ostracism), it's very difficult to be motivated enough to do that extra work.
The crucial thing is to make it fun, or at least give a large bonus upon success, otherwise it is just wasted time.
Doug