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User: Xeriar

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Comments · 152

  1. Re:File system? on Cassandra and Voldemort Benchmarked · · Score: 1

    Not a particularly useful use of the inode table. The filesystem is great for a few hundred or even a few thousand records, but when you're dealing with billions of records, that adds up to a lot of wasted space.

  2. I'm not pro-paperless for the environment on Paper Manufacturer Launches "Print More" Campaign · · Score: 1

    I'm pro-paperless because it's a blasted mess.

  3. ...someone's sarcasm detector is off today. on WhiteHouse.gov Releases Open Source Code · · Score: 1

    Burning my karma kandle at both ends.

  4. Obviously more evidence on WhiteHouse.gov Releases Open Source Code · · Score: 5, Funny

    that our government is sliding towards communism!

  5. Re:Micropayments again on By Latest Count, 95% of Email Is Spam · · Score: 1

    ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

    Pray tell, what level of vigilante justice would you consider to be slow and painful enough?

  6. Re:Logic? on By Latest Count, 95% of Email Is Spam · · Score: 1

    Right. They are ignoring the huge volume of legitimate mail that hotmail/msn silently deletes in violation of the RFCs.

    Hotmail doesn't represent the majority of e-mail accounts, and usually it seems to be down solely to the incompetence of whoever is administering hotmail, rather than intentionally violating RFC. Same difference, I suppose, but it's certainly not a majority of the legitimate e-mail they get to them, anyway.

  7. Re:Auto-update feature in Drupal 7 on Drupal's Dries Buytaert On Drupal 7 · · Score: 1

    Wrong - the auto-update feature is new to 7.x, so actual sites running 6.x (or earlier) doesn't benefit from it. Also, the new feature will only install and update modules and themes, not 'core', so I'm guessing updating core from 7.0 to 7.1 is probably going to require about as many manipulation steps as you need to go from 6.14 to 6.15. I don't have a lot of experience, but I would not say it's "extremely easy": the stable 6.x version requires you to do a lot of file and configuration manipulation just to go from 6.14 to 6.15 (if you follow all the recommended steps, which I did for my test site recently). It's not hard, it's just not automated.

    If you set everything up properly, you just overwrite everything not in the sites directory with the new files, and then possibly run the database update script. Quite trivial.

    I actually set up Drupal sites by symlinking to a main drupal installation for files and common modules. All the benefit of the /sites directory without having to use a single root favicon, deal with script-loaded sitemaps, etc.

  8. Over three quarters of web spam attacks on Firefox 3.5 Now the Most Popular Browser Worldwide · · Score: 1

    ...on my servers come from hijacked IE6 machines or bots claiming to be IE6.

    Nail cannot come too soon.

  9. Re:10:1... Really? on The Environmental Impact of PHP Compared To C++ On Facebook · · Score: 2, Informative

    PHP's primary issue in the database department is it doesn't have a clean way of say, maintaining prepared statement declarations across connection instances. Which is frustrating. APC's handling of shared memory is not the best, either, and the memcached extensions for it need polish. Don't get me started on how PHP treats constants.

    Where PHP really fails, however, is in memory usage. It takes up dozens of times as much RAM as a well-built C program would. Facebook would not reduce their computer count by a factor of ten because PHP is that much less efficient at its job, but because more memory would be available in a given machine to handle more instances at once.

    Note: PHP 5.3 addresses a lot of this, but though I haven't tested it, I doubt the memory efficiency of PHP is going to get far into the double-digit percentiles of C++ in one shot.

  10. Re:laughable on Eolas Sues World + Dog For AJAX Patent · · Score: 1

    You could even consider such basic human decency to be an investment. If you give the guy without a coat one, he'll be a more productive worker in turn. And if he like you is not an asshole, you may get something out of it.

    Health care is a particularly blatant example: we could insure every uninsured for the cost of denying insurance, several times over. The rest of the money would be sufficient to pull the US out of recession, merely through having enough of an edge in labor efficiency to eliminate our trade deficit.

    None of those calculations make any assumption about having a more efficient work force along with a healthier work force. Every hour a poor person spends in agony is an hour they are not working to their fullest potential.

  11. Re:he said on Spain's Proposed Internet Law Sparks Protest, Change · · Score: 3, Insightful

    i know that i matter. that you believe you don't matter is your own intellectual failure, not mine, and your resignation to your self-imposed helplessness is a resignation that only affects your sorry ass, and has no bearing on my rights and abilities as a free man of a liberal western democracy, which i fully comprehend, appreciate, enjoy, and practice. if my society fails into fascism, it will be no fault of mine, but by the unfortunate proliferation of weak spineless pessimistic fools like yourself who have already given up before any battle has even been fought

    I would offer a correction. -You- don't matter. Your friends, connections, and the relationships you have built matters quite a lot. The article demonstrates that rather well - a lot of attention was generated very quickly. Never fight alone. More of the world is with you than you think.

  12. Re:Tor on UK Judge Orders Wikipedia To Reveal User's Identity · · Score: 3, Informative

    Tor exit nodes have a hostname that begins with tor-exit - and Wikipedia blocks on that. Most open proxies can feasibly be detected.

  13. There's a nice formula to show the world won't end on LHC Has First Collisions After Years of Waiting · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The formula: N(>E) = k(E + 1)^-a

    N is impacts per second
    E is the impact energy in in GeV
    k is ~5,000 particles per steradian per square meter per second
    a is about 1.6.

    So the ground your feet occupy get a dozen or so such collisions per day, and so on.

  14. By Guaranteeing their pay on Landmark Health Insurance Bill Passes House · · Score: 1

    The reason that deciding who gets healthcare on the basis of ability to pay is that what when demand for medical services goes up, the best way to get more providers of medical services is to increase what they get paid. Under this law, how will they increase the number of medical providers?

    Nothing about public insurance prevents private operators - we don't want Canada's system after all - but there are real economic benefits to cutting people who do nothing but run interference against our own productivity out of the economy. Basic math: A rescission worker uses her own labor to interfere with the labor of both the doctor and the patient. Even ignoring the loss of efficiency due to ill laborers, and even assuming the doctor is not spending any time on hold (ha!), every unit of work you pay the person authorizing care interferes with a minimum of two people, for effectively no gain.

    This ignores the moral problems involved in paying companies to deny care - denying a straight A surgical student preventative care for cancer, for example (a friend of mine). That only makes sense if you intend to restrict care to society.

    Plenty of money available for health providers after we slaughter the hogs in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. There could easily be a 15% gain in efficiency and a 15% gain in efficiency turns America into a net exporter again.

  15. Re:High profile target and popular CMS' on White House Website Switches To Open Source · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They picked Drupal, not Joomla or Wordpress

  16. Re:Theory? No. Hypothesis. on A Step Closer To Cheap Nuclear Fusion · · Score: 1

    More specifically, a good hypothesis explains all previous data. It becomes an accepted theory when it predicts new data.

  17. Re:Random or planned? on Andromeda Devouring Neighbor Galaxy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is just a model for one galaxy nomming another. God - whether such an entity exists or not - has nothing to do with it, it's an entirely natural motion, predicted, expected, and surprising no one with sufficient education.

  18. WTF on Placebos Are Getting More Effective · · Score: 4, Informative

    You keep saying that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

    There are plenty of other reasons for this to be occurring. Better testing procedures among them.

  19. Re:Getting the protection you need? on Symantec Exec Warns Against Relying On Free Antivirus · · Score: 1

    Now be fair, many users get messed up because they install McAfee instead.

  20. Well this is a surprise... on XHTML 2 Cancelled · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Much like the sun rising in the east tomorrow. I never quite understood what w3c thought it was doing trying to override browser developers.

  21. Re:Expensive software? on US Military Blocks Data On Incoming Meteors · · Score: 1

    A meteor will not have a speed less than 11 kps outside of a capture orbit (not likely). No terrestrial-sourced object is going to reach that sort of speed with the expectation that it is going to land again.

  22. Re:WTH? This is an absolutely trivial attack on Attack On a Significant Flaw In Apache Released · · Score: 3, Informative

    A simple connlimit declaration in IPTables shuts this down fairly easily...

  23. If they worked maybe more people would use them on Comcast Intercepts and Redirects Port 53 Traffic · · Score: 1

    Was mostly a couple years ago, but even still, I had to keep a note of alternative DNS servers just in case Comcast's went on a fritz. Crazy annoying, and try explaining it to laymen!

  24. Re:Protect the innocent! on Japanese ESRB Bans Rape Depiction In Games · · Score: 5, Funny

    Evidence? We live in a democracy good sir, we have to think of the children! ;)

    Can't stop thinking of the children, can you?

  25. Re:could someone please explain on Black Hole Swallows Star · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm not educated in astrophysics and everytime I read something like this I wonder, how does anything manage to get "blasted away" from a black hole? I was under the impression anything that got close to it was absorbed?

    Simple, black holes are very messy eaters - they radiate a significant fraction of their food as photons. Keep in mind you are accelerating much of the star to a significant fraction of c, letting it collide with itself. This goes double for stellar mass black holes - you have a million+ kilometer star getting 'swallowed' by a twenty kilometer black hole. Even a perfect landing is going to result in most of the star's mass getting flung back out into space if only because the hole is smaller than the core of the star.