With the Beagle Bros' TimeOut series of add-ons, there was nothing AW couldn't handle!
To this day, I have never found a macro recording system for editing that I find as straightforward to use efficiently as the one that came with their Timeout products.
If you look at a sample configuration using EMC hardware, the main value they seem to be adding here are patches to work around some of the tricker parts of the integration job that goes into adding that class of storage array to a Linux server. For example, the "CFQ io scheduler" issue and the "e1000 flow control" problems they have workarounds for are the sort of thing you only see when running Linux on some pretty serious hardware, and they can be very tricky to resolve. Knowing that somebody has already done that work is very helpful in this sort of situation.
All the more reason why ALL plug-ins should be "user interaction required before use" BY DEFAULT.
You know what would be awesome? If they released a new version of Windows where everything that might possibly be dangerous was stopped and it told you "Windows needs your permission to continue" before letting it happen. That would totally fix all of Microsoft's security problems.
This sort of thing only reinforces the idea that adults are clueless and generally to be ignored. See also: public service announcements by MC Hammer or Flava Flave.
That's why those fools should leave the educational lessons to Mr. T!
Yes they caught 111 felons but that could be done without logging the innocent people.
What about the cases where the car passed by before it was in the database as stolen/owned by a felon? If you only stored the matches and threw away the rest of the data, you lose the ability to immediately act to capture someone the minute they enter the list. Think of the situation where someone commits a felony, then flees the area. By the time the crime is reported and they enter the database, they're long gone, but if you can then go back and see where they fled because you'd saved the data when they were "innocent" that's extremely valuable.
Most of them don't. I have one. 7-11 stores have a prepaid plan called Speakout Wireless ( http://www.cellguru.net/speakout.htm is a good intro) where any minutes you add to the card are good for a year--and if you add more minutes, even nearly year old ones that otherwise would have expired are brought back to current.
I can only comment on the Cingular-based version of the plan, but I've gotten two of those models with Nokia phones and been very happy. The coverage seems no crappier than what other Cingular subscribers in the area get, it's been basically reliable for me on the east coast (I'm at points from DC to Boston regularly), and I can easily hold my monthly expense to under $10 if I'm only using the phone occasionally.
Josh Berkus, the person whose blog was referenced here, is one of the PostgreSQL core developers, and he's currently employed by Sun to work on projects like this--which includes contributions back to the PostgreSQL development efforts. He's been doing a lot of work scaling performance upwards to larger capacity servers than the database has traditionally been deployed on.
Why this emaciated post made it while mine didn't I'll never know...here's how I submitted this story:
The current version of PostgreSQL now has its first real benchmark, a SPECjAppServer2004submission from Sun Microsystems. The results required substantial tuning of many performance-related PostgreSQL parameters, some of which are set to extremely low values in the default configuration — a known issue that contributes to why many untuned PostgreSQL installations appear sluggish compared to its rivals. The speed result is close but slightly faster than an earlier Sun submission using MySQL 5 (with enough hardware differences to make a direct comparison of those results unfair), and comes close to keeping up with Oracle on similarly priced hardware — but with a large software savings. Having a published result on the level playing field of an industry-standard benchmark like SPECjAppServer2004, with documentation on all the tuning required to reach that performance level, should make PostgreSQL an easier sell to corporate customers who are wary of adopting open-source applications for their critical databases.
It would be helpful were you to actually read all of the attached links completely instead of seeing some bogus reports in the Gentoo area and dismissing the whole thing based on that subset.
The 7-11s near me have been getting various levels of the Kwik-E-Mart treatment, so even if yours isn't on the list it's worth checking out what subset you might have. I was so psyched to be drinking of a real Squishee cup, with an Apu straw, while walking out of the store with a 6-pack of Buzz Cola and some Krusty-O's today.
While playing "Lemonade Stand" seems harmless for children, the friendly way it introduces computer-based sales entrepreneurship can serve as a gateway to a dangerous lifestyle. Child gamers in the 80's who become addicted to the rush of successful lemonade sales can find themselves playing games such as:
Elite: trading money is supplemented by violent piracy activity
M.U.L.E: forcing your fellow players into starvation is encouraged as a way to maximize profits
Taipan: selling weapons and Opium is the only path to success
If left unchecked, you can expect that these players will have moved onto a Dope Wars adulthood where they borrow money from shady lenders, sell drugs on the street, and shoot at law enforcement, all while holding onto just a slim dream of retiring to the Carribbean as their only possibility for redemption.
I've never dealt personally with Sony support, but like IBM, I suspect the quality is FAR above what you would get with brands like Toshiba and Acer.
Your second statement actually implies the first; if you believe Sony's support is of good quality, it must be the case that you've never dealt personally with them.
The standard situation many unfortunate Vaio buyers find themselves in when they call support for a real problem is that a) it's a known flaw in the amazingly crappy parts that go into the units relative to their price, b) many, many other units suffers from the same issue, and c) because of the first two things, the part needed to fix the laptop is back-ordered for months and your laptop is basically a paperweight until then.
One of the things I suggest people do before buying a new laptop is to take a look at how easy it is to get replacement parts for similar units that are, say, 2 years old. If the answer is anything other than "I can easily get whatever I need to rebuild the system on ebay", don't buy it.
I own a Thinkpad. Even though it's several years old, I can strip the entire machine and replace any part it in with an easy to obtain replacement. I agree with your statement that IBM's support is far superior to Toshiba/Acer, but from what I've seen Sony is an awfully supported brand that's priced like a premium one.
Discounts for cash vs credit card are a violation of the merchant's agreement with the credit card company. I prefer not doing business with retailers who can't keep their written promises.
And I prefer to listen to advice from people who know what they're talking about.
All Visa/MC agreements strictly prohibit advertising a price that reflects a cash discount, and then charging a credit card surcharge on top of it. While I can't prove that this is the case for all agreement, there is nothing in some agreements to prevent offering a cash discount, which was the case with the giant-mega-corp I bought my laptop from. Here are three article on this subject I found in only minutes of searching:
If he didn't pay with a credit card, he's an idiot for that.
There are people who buy things that don't have a credit card. I know a few who aren't idiots; in fact, some of them are clearly smarter than you, because they'd never make a ridiculous statement like this.
I've even purchased a computer in cash myself, because there was a 2% discount for doing so--credit cards aren't free for the vendor. On a $3K sale, I saved $60.
I had a similar issues with my own CentOS 5 install this morning. The very first time I let the package updater loose, the logs were filled with this type of message for several packages that were updated:
setroubleshoot SELinux is preventing usr sbin groupadd (groupadd t) "read write" to socket 21434 (rpm t). For complete SELinux messages. run sealert -l d4c6570d-30ba-4e9f-898c-e7bb3fb6435f
setroubleshoot SELinux is preventing/usr/sbin/useradd (useradd t) "read write" to socket 21434 (rpm t). For complete SELinux messages. run sealert -l ac582882-8aa9-45dc-a98d-1d8be86e3d52
Now, maybe this is a CentOS packaging issue, but I kind of doubt it. The information provided by the new RHEL is much, much better than the previous versions--before I would have just gotten the "avc: denied" line and been stuck on a research adventure just to figure out what direction to go in, the sealert tool gave a lot more helpful error messages. But the default policy is still unpredictably broken in ways that are trivial to encounter.
(But at least it doesn't suck as badly as the lameness filter, which refused to let me me post any more details of what I ran into without complaining about junk characters. I got a junk for you right here, Mr. Filter)
If Linux ran on one type of processor architecture, a stable binary API might be possible. That's the reason Windows has been able to provide one for so long; there were/are discontinuities at major bit-width shifts (right now some people are struggling to get 32-bit drivers working on their new 64-bit Windows), but since the underlying hardware is basically always x86 things chug on with a simple driver model.
The fact that this is completely untrue for Linux makes a binary API impossible. Please read The Linux Kernel Driver Interface for more information; the "Binary Kernel Interface" section explains exactly why what you think should happen can't.
This isn't a political argument, it's a technical one. The only way to get a "stable binary API" into Linux would be to put a virtual machine-like interface on top of the kernel that drivers could talk to while being completely insulated from platform issues. While possible, the performance would be bad, and building/supporting that mess would turn into a political problem with the kernel developers.
One of those is Quicken. I know there is GnuCash and others, but when I started using them I found them to be cumbersome, and for some reason it wasn't able to import any of my bank statements. Finally got fed up with it...
Completely understandable, expecially if this was any time ago. Even if you look at the current best documentation on OFX importing you'll see the whole thing is a still a gigantic user interface disaster, and that page only goes back to September 2006--before then figuring out what to do was near impossible. At this point, enough people have mapped out the bank server info that the setup is getting easier to cope with every month.
The latest betas of gnucash now run on Windows, which means that it's far easier for people to run it in parallel with Quicken to work out the remaining kinks. Once it's past both those barriers--low risk transition from Quicken on Windows and less work to get OFX working--Gnucash will for the first time ever be in a position where it might get some momentum going for real users, instead of just being suitable for hackers. The next six months should be very interesting for this project.
One of the reasons I was originally interested in this product is that I wanted a relatively flat keyboard that had a good typing feel to it while requiring minimal key impact. While I love my Model Ms, I'm finding the amount of wear and tear on my hands typing on it leaves behind exceeds my tolerance nowadays.
Unfortunately for Optimus, they've now taken so long that I have a solution I'm perfectly happy with that I'm already typing on. I picked up a Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard recently. Great typing feel, much less hand movement to type and less resulting pain than any keyboard I've ever owned. Despite the label it works fine across lots of operating systems without even installing their crappy software; only some of the useless keys aren't supported with the generic keyboard drivers in Linux and Windows 2000. It has a decent trackpad mouse as well, and it's wireless.
Retail is $200, but considering how well it works and the fact that's it's pretty sexy as such things go I feel it's fairly priced. Optimus, not so much
The main things missing are generate_series, current_setting, and set_config. There are also several new system information functions in PostgreSQL 8.2; see the documentation at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/function s-info.html for a list.
Simplifying the hardware saves you real dollars per device. But tricky, touchy drivers and firmware costs you in support, debugging and developer training.
It's really not fair to evaluate the design using modern standards like that. Back in the era where individual chips cost real money, being able to pull down the hardware costs by cutting them made the difference between a computer that people could afford and fit in their home and one that was priced or sized out of reach.
As far as the complexity introduced, there was a point in my life where I had a good working knowledge of the entire ROM of the Apple II at the source code level. When it's possible to fit the whole software design of the machine in your head, whether the approach used makes for tricky drivers isn't so relevant.
By the way: if you think needing to page align data such that there's no byte rollover makes for difficult to write code, you should take a look at Atari 2600 programming. What you have to do in software to work around the hardware constraints of that clever-so-it-can-be-cheap 6502 design make Woz's Apple design look downright elegant and user-friendly.
Slashdot Mirror
With the Beagle Bros' TimeOut series of add-ons, there was nothing AW couldn't handle!
To this day, I have never found a macro recording system for editing that I find as straightforward to use efficiently as the one that came with their Timeout products.
If you look at a sample configuration using EMC hardware, the main value they seem to be adding here are patches to work around some of the tricker parts of the integration job that goes into adding that class of storage array to a Linux server. For example, the "CFQ io scheduler" issue and the "e1000 flow control" problems they have workarounds for are the sort of thing you only see when running Linux on some pretty serious hardware, and they can be very tricky to resolve. Knowing that somebody has already done that work is very helpful in this sort of situation.
All the more reason why ALL plug-ins should be "user interaction required before use" BY DEFAULT.
You know what would be awesome? If they released a new version of Windows where everything that might possibly be dangerous was stopped and it told you "Windows needs your permission to continue" before letting it happen. That would totally fix all of Microsoft's security problems.
This sort of thing only reinforces the idea that adults are clueless and generally to be ignored. See also: public service announcements by MC Hammer or Flava Flave.
That's why those fools should leave the educational lessons to Mr. T!
Yes they caught 111 felons but that could be done without logging the innocent people.
What about the cases where the car passed by before it was in the database as stolen/owned by a felon? If you only stored the matches and threw away the rest of the data, you lose the ability to immediately act to capture someone the minute they enter the list. Think of the situation where someone commits a felony, then flees the area. By the time the crime is reported and they enter the database, they're long gone, but if you can then go back and see where they fled because you'd saved the data when they were "innocent" that's extremely valuable.
Prepaid phones don't allow rollover minutes
Most of them don't. I have one. 7-11 stores have a prepaid plan called Speakout Wireless ( http://www.cellguru.net/speakout.htm is a good intro) where any minutes you add to the card are good for a year--and if you add more minutes, even nearly year old ones that otherwise would have expired are brought back to current.
I can only comment on the Cingular-based version of the plan, but I've gotten two of those models with Nokia phones and been very happy. The coverage seems no crappier than what other Cingular subscribers in the area get, it's been basically reliable for me on the east coast (I'm at points from DC to Boston regularly), and I can easily hold my monthly expense to under $10 if I'm only using the phone occasionally.
There is actually a copy of the GPL in that archive, he just compressed it into a few characters and you may not have noticed it.
http://www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/postgresql/ has what you're looking for--"5-Minute Introduction to PostgreSQL Performance"--and points you in the right direction to dig deeper from there.
Josh Berkus, the person whose blog was referenced here, is one of the PostgreSQL core developers, and he's currently employed by Sun to work on projects like this--which includes contributions back to the PostgreSQL development efforts. He's been doing a lot of work scaling performance upwards to larger capacity servers than the database has traditionally been deployed on.
Why this emaciated post made it while mine didn't I'll never know...here's how I submitted this story:
The current version of PostgreSQL now has its first real benchmark, a SPECjAppServer2004 submission from Sun Microsystems. The results required substantial tuning of many performance-related PostgreSQL parameters, some of which are set to extremely low values in the default configuration — a known issue that contributes to why many untuned PostgreSQL installations appear sluggish compared to its rivals. The speed result is close but slightly faster than an earlier Sun submission using MySQL 5 (with enough hardware differences to make a direct comparison of those results unfair), and comes close to keeping up with Oracle on similarly priced hardware — but with a large software savings. Having a published result on the level playing field of an industry-standard benchmark like SPECjAppServer2004, with documentation on all the tuning required to reach that performance level, should make PostgreSQL an easier sell to corporate customers who are wary of adopting open-source applications for their critical databases.
It would be helpful were you to actually read all of the attached links completely instead of seeing some bogus reports in the Gentoo area and dismissing the whole thing based on that subset.
1 08 and http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7372#c1 12 as the best summary of the kind of problem people are running into. There are no optical devices involved.
I'd suggest http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7372#c
Sorry, wrong franchise. If you want Romulan ale, you need to visit Quark's Bar at "The Star Trek Experience" in the Las Vegas Hilton.
The 7-11s near me have been getting various levels of the Kwik-E-Mart treatment, so even if yours isn't on the list it's worth checking out what subset you might have. I was so psyched to be drinking of a real Squishee cup, with an Apu straw, while walking out of the store with a 6-pack of Buzz Cola and some Krusty-O's today.
If left unchecked, you can expect that these players will have moved onto a Dope Wars adulthood where they borrow money from shady lenders, sell drugs on the street, and shoot at law enforcement, all while holding onto just a slim dream of retiring to the Carribbean as their only possibility for redemption.
I'd like to see some of the RIAA rent-a-cops and tossers get their asses shot up one day for busting into some Illinois Nazi's place.
Use of unnecessary violence in the apprehension of the counterfitters has been approved.
I've never dealt personally with Sony support, but like IBM, I suspect the quality is FAR above what you would get with brands like Toshiba and Acer.
Your second statement actually implies the first; if you believe Sony's support is of good quality, it must be the case that you've never dealt personally with them.
The standard situation many unfortunate Vaio buyers find themselves in when they call support for a real problem is that a) it's a known flaw in the amazingly crappy parts that go into the units relative to their price, b) many, many other units suffers from the same issue, and c) because of the first two things, the part needed to fix the laptop is back-ordered for months and your laptop is basically a paperweight until then.
One of the things I suggest people do before buying a new laptop is to take a look at how easy it is to get replacement parts for similar units that are, say, 2 years old. If the answer is anything other than "I can easily get whatever I need to rebuild the system on ebay", don't buy it.
I own a Thinkpad. Even though it's several years old, I can strip the entire machine and replace any part it in with an easy to obtain replacement. I agree with your statement that IBM's support is far superior to Toshiba/Acer, but from what I've seen Sony is an awfully supported brand that's priced like a premium one.
Discounts for cash vs credit card are a violation of the merchant's agreement with the credit card company. I prefer not doing business with retailers who can't keep their written promises.
t mlE 2111,00.html3 22415
And I prefer to listen to advice from people who know what they're talking about.
All Visa/MC agreements strictly prohibit advertising a price that reflects a cash discount, and then charging a credit card surcharge on top of it. While I can't prove that this is the case for all agreement, there is nothing in some agreements to prevent offering a cash discount, which was the case with the giant-mega-corp I bought my laptop from. Here are three article on this subject I found in only minutes of searching:
http://www.creditinfocenter.com/cards/crcd_buy.sh
http://www.wachovia.com/corp_inst/page/0,,44_45%5
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=
If he didn't pay with a credit card, he's an idiot for that.
There are people who buy things that don't have a credit card. I know a few who aren't idiots; in fact, some of them are clearly smarter than you, because they'd never make a ridiculous statement like this.
I've even purchased a computer in cash myself, because there was a 2% discount for doing so--credit cards aren't free for the vendor. On a $3K sale, I saved $60.
Anyone who doesn't know who Jeremy Allison is by name doesn't deserve to have news for nerds spoon-fed to them.
I had a similar issues with my own CentOS 5 install this morning. The very first time I let the package updater loose, the logs were filled with this type of message for several packages that were updated:
/usr/sbin/useradd (useradd t) "read write" to socket 21434 (rpm t). For complete SELinux messages. run sealert -l ac582882-8aa9-45dc-a98d-1d8be86e3d52
setroubleshoot SELinux is preventing usr sbin groupadd (groupadd t) "read write" to socket 21434 (rpm t). For complete SELinux messages. run sealert -l d4c6570d-30ba-4e9f-898c-e7bb3fb6435f
setroubleshoot SELinux is preventing
Now, maybe this is a CentOS packaging issue, but I kind of doubt it. The information provided by the new RHEL is much, much better than the previous versions--before I would have just gotten the "avc: denied" line and been stuck on a research adventure just to figure out what direction to go in, the sealert tool gave a lot more helpful error messages. But the default policy is still unpredictably broken in ways that are trivial to encounter.
(But at least it doesn't suck as badly as the lameness filter, which refused to let me me post any more details of what I ran into without complaining about junk characters. I got a junk for you right here, Mr. Filter)
If Linux ran on one type of processor architecture, a stable binary API might be possible. That's the reason Windows has been able to provide one for so long; there were/are discontinuities at major bit-width shifts (right now some people are struggling to get 32-bit drivers working on their new 64-bit Windows), but since the underlying hardware is basically always x86 things chug on with a simple driver model.
The fact that this is completely untrue for Linux makes a binary API impossible. Please read The Linux Kernel Driver Interface for more information; the "Binary Kernel Interface" section explains exactly why what you think should happen can't.
This isn't a political argument, it's a technical one. The only way to get a "stable binary API" into Linux would be to put a virtual machine-like interface on top of the kernel that drivers could talk to while being completely insulated from platform issues. While possible, the performance would be bad, and building/supporting that mess would turn into a political problem with the kernel developers.
One of those is Quicken. I know there is GnuCash and others, but when I started using them I found them to be cumbersome, and for some reason it wasn't able to import any of my bank statements. Finally got fed up with it...
Completely understandable, expecially if this was any time ago. Even if you look at the current best documentation on OFX importing you'll see the whole thing is a still a gigantic user interface disaster, and that page only goes back to September 2006--before then figuring out what to do was near impossible. At this point, enough people have mapped out the bank server info that the setup is getting easier to cope with every month.
The latest betas of gnucash now run on Windows, which means that it's far easier for people to run it in parallel with Quicken to work out the remaining kinks. Once it's past both those barriers--low risk transition from Quicken on Windows and less work to get OFX working--Gnucash will for the first time ever be in a position where it might get some momentum going for real users, instead of just being suitable for hackers. The next six months should be very interesting for this project.
One of the reasons I was originally interested in this product is that I wanted a relatively flat keyboard that had a good typing feel to it while requiring minimal key impact. While I love my Model Ms, I'm finding the amount of wear and tear on my hands typing on it leaves behind exceeds my tolerance nowadays.
Unfortunately for Optimus, they've now taken so long that I have a solution I'm perfectly happy with that I'm already typing on. I picked up a Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard recently. Great typing feel, much less hand movement to type and less resulting pain than any keyboard I've ever owned. Despite the label it works fine across lots of operating systems without even installing their crappy software; only some of the useless keys aren't supported with the generic keyboard drivers in Linux and Windows 2000. It has a decent trackpad mouse as well, and it's wireless.
Retail is $200, but considering how well it works and the fact that's it's pretty sexy as such things go I feel it's fairly priced. Optimus, not so much
While it doesn't address standard SQL structures, I find most of the PostgreSQL specific information I need on the free cheat sheet at http://www.alberton.info/postgresql_cheat_sheet.ht ml
n s-info.html for a list.
The main things missing are generate_series, current_setting, and set_config. There are also several new system information functions in PostgreSQL 8.2; see the documentation at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/functio
Simplifying the hardware saves you real dollars per device. But tricky, touchy drivers and firmware costs you in support, debugging and developer training.
It's really not fair to evaluate the design using modern standards like that. Back in the era where individual chips cost real money, being able to pull down the hardware costs by cutting them made the difference between a computer that people could afford and fit in their home and one that was priced or sized out of reach.
As far as the complexity introduced, there was a point in my life where I had a good working knowledge of the entire ROM of the Apple II at the source code level. When it's possible to fit the whole software design of the machine in your head, whether the approach used makes for tricky drivers isn't so relevant.
By the way: if you think needing to page align data such that there's no byte rollover makes for difficult to write code, you should take a look at Atari 2600 programming. What you have to do in software to work around the hardware constraints of that clever-so-it-can-be-cheap 6502 design make Woz's Apple design look downright elegant and user-friendly.