The submitted article is terrible. The full paper is much more informative. For example, the full paper gives the system specs (both systems at 3.0GHz) and shows that the Opteron system is much cheaper ($2800 vs. $4170 for 2GB configuration).
I did a document clustering calculation with 1.3 million small documents (average 2903 bytes each) stored on a Reiser3 partition. Mounting with noatime cut the time to read the documents from disk by 27%, and cut the time to read from cache by 52%.
64.8%+12%=74% seems to be a decline in calculator programs too. The 12% decline is a percentage decline in a number that happens to be a percentage, i.e. falling from 74 to 64.8 is a drop of:
(74 - 64.8) / 74 -> 12.4%
The last survey that popped up here said that if SMART says your drive will fail, it probably will, but if SMART doesn't say it will fail, it doesn't mean much.
Yes, that was the Google study. So, if SMART says there is a problem, you should pay attention to it. If SMART doesn't find a problem, that doesn't mean you are out of the woods.
TFA seems surprised by SATA drives lasting as long as Fibre...why one earth would your data interface have any consequences on the drive internals?
Because drive manufacturers claim they use different hardware for the drive based on the interface. For example, a SCSI drive supposedly contains a disk designed for heavier use than an ATA drive, they aren't just the same disk with different interfaces.
Slightly off-topic, but if you haven't checked the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) info provided by your drive to see if it is having errors, you probably should. You can download smartmontools, which works on Linux/Unix and Windows. Your Linux distro may have it included, but may not have the daemon running to automatically monitor the drive (smartd).
To view the SMART info for drive/dev/sda do: smartctl -a/dev/sda To do a full disk read check (can take hours) do: smartctl -t long/dev/sda
Sadly, I just found read errors on a 375-hour-old drive (manufacturer's software claimed that repair succeeded). Fortunately, they were on the Windows partition:-)
Fine, then select no OS, or get Linux and install over it. What is the problem here.
There is no problem with having Linux pre-installed, except that it might be hard to convince Dell to modify their manufacturing process to achieve it. My point is that, if most people are just going to wipe Dell's install and do their own, certification may be good enough, and much easier to convince Dell to do.
Having the box come with Linux on it *is* a guarantee that the hardware works with Linux. If I don't want RHEL, I can install the Linux I want. This way, I know that the hardware works, and there's no Microsoft tax. It's still better than buying Windows.
Actually, it is a guarantee that Dell got some sort of Linux to work on the hardware by some means (maybe involving the addition of proprietary drivers) -- it doesn't guarantee that your preferred distro will work when you install it, or perhaps it will work only after a lot of effort. Having Linux pre-installed is a good sign that the hardware is Linux-friendly, and I even mentioned it in another post, but it comes up short of being a guarantee that you'll be able to easily do what you want.
Anyway, my point was that if people are ultimately going to do their own install, rather than use Dell's, having Dell actually perform the install is an unnecessary step. It would probably be easier for Dell (therefore more likely to happen) to provide certification, and would be sufficient for the user to get what he/she wants.
As for the Microsoft tax, that's really a separate issue. Dell already sells computers without Microsoft Windows, and they don't have Linux installed (if my memory is correct, they throw a floppy with a DOS clone into the box to satisfy Microsoft that the machine is being shipped with an OS).
if I were buying a computer with Linux pre-installed it would just be as a sort of guarantee that there are Linux drivers available for the hardware
Exactly. I recently bought a workstation with Linux pre-installed, and told the vendor to put it on a very small partition and leave the rest of the disk blank. I did my own partitioning and install on the rest of the disk, and just used their install to verify that things worked before I started messing around.
I don't think I would want Dell, or anyone else, doing the install for me, since I want to handle partitioning and package selection myself. It would be nice if each model said something like "certified that all hardware works with Linux Distros X, Y, and Z out of the box" so that I wouldn't have to hunt that info down myself.
Maybe Google should just delink the sites altogether, that way the offended media organizations can watch their traffic plummet to zero?
From the article:
Google carries advertising on its general Belgian site, Google.be, but not in its news index. Links to the publications represented by Copiepresse have already been removed from both.
Suppose I have a client that always uses a subject line like "website" and I filter all of his emails in one folder. How do I distinguish his emails from each other? For example, I look at his folder and see this:
John Doe 2006-10-02 Website
John Doe 2006-10-14 Website
John Doe 2006-10-21 Website Or I could replace his worthless subject lines with something more descriptive and see:
John Doe 2006-10-02 Homepage specs
John Doe 2006-10-14 Replacement photo for About Us page
John Doe 2006-10-21 Contact Us form not working If you need to go back and find something, the latter is much more helpful.
Thanks for the info -- that's good to know. Even if a whitelist implementation isn't searchable, it would hopefully be sortable, if for no other reason than to make lookups faster, which would still be an improvement over browsing the whole list.
I dunno about what they added in 2.0, but in 1.5, you can set up a filter that makes the message Not Junk, effectively creating your own whitelist.
That sounds similar to what I do with Netscape Communicator, but it is a huge pain to maintain. Each mail rule in Communicator is limited to 5 parts, so I can whitelist 5 addresses by OR'ing 5 "sender contains" pieces that move the message to my "Good" folder. But I've got dozens of these rules to cover all of the addresses of clients, and it is very clumsy to check and make sure I haven't missed one -- manual searching of the rule set is too tedious, so I have to find the rule file on disk and grep on it. Mail rules are OK if you don't have to add a lot of them, but whitelisting really needs to be more convenient than that.
4) Ability to add an arbitrary address/domain to the whitelist directly, without adding to address book, before receiving or replying to any email from the domain. This would be used when you know ahead of time that someone is going to send you something and you don't want to dig through the spam to find it.
I would simply like the ability to edit the subject line of messages I receive for organizational purposes.
I just want to follow up on how this might be implemented, since I think it's a great idea. Thunderbird could allow you to insert an additional header, perhaps called X-ModifiedSubject, where you would enter your modified version of the subject line. When the messages are listed, the X-ModifiedSubject would be displayed as the subject if it existed. If there was no X-ModifiedSubject line, the normal Subject would be displayed, but in a different color from the X-ModifiedSubject, so you can easily distinguish the ones you changed from the ones you didn't, and not confuse anybody when talking about the email on the phone (since the sender won't know you've made the change). When you reply to an email containing a X-ModifiedSubject, Thunderbird should have you choose between the new subject (more descriptive) and the original subject (vague, but more recognizable to the recipient) when generating the subject line of the reply. I suppose any searches you do on the "Subject" field should search both the Subject and the X-ModifiedSubject.
For example, your mail headers might contain: Subject: WebSite X-ModifiedSubject: Need to update copyright date on website
That way, when you browse your mail listings you see "Need to update copyright date on website" instead of just "Website," and you can easily tell what the message is about without clicking into it and reading the whole thing.
Would this not be the same as tagging an email? I don't think so. As I understand it, tagging is like folders, except that an email can have more than one tag, so it's really a way to categorize messages (e.g. "work", "football", "consulting", "purchase_order", "receipt"). What I think the poster is looking for is a way to provide a longer description of the email, similar to a subject line, for human reading rather than categorizing (e.g. "Meeting on January 10 to discuss installation problems"). When you list your messages, you want to see something that really describes the message instead of a generic subject like "website" or "hello."
I agree. If you could tell it had been changed, and see both the original and the changed version, that would be great. I get emails from clients all the time with non-descript subject lines, and it would be a lot easier to understand what the email is about when viewing the mail listing if I could view my own description instead of the sender's subject line.
From what I've read about Thunderbird, the only options for whitelisting (passing to inbox without spam filtering) are your whole address book, or everyone that you've ever sent email to. Are there any plans to make it more flexible than that? Here are some things that I can think of that would be handy. Sorry if any are already included -- I can't play with Thunderbird until I upgrade to GTK2 (soon):
1) Ability to easily whitelist all email coming from a particular domain. This would ensure that you get all emails from a client company, not just one individual. Perhaps there could be a preferences setting that allows you to indicate that you want to be prompted each time you send an email to a new domain to see whether the whole domain should be whitelisted or just the recipient. I assume I could create a mail rule to filter a domain, as I currently do with Netscape Communicator, but that is pretty inconvenient.
2) Ability to easily whitelist an address without putting it in your address book or sending mail to it, e.g. by simply clicking a button while viewing a message from the address. For example, if I receive an emailed newsletter that I requested, it would be nice to whitelist it without cluttering my address book.
3) Are emails sent by someone on the whitelist visually differentiated from other emails in some way, such as coloring the sender name differently? That could make it easier to differentiate between valid emails and any spams that slip through the filter.
I hope the changes mean that they will start listing to their site users. They mangled tv.yahoo.com recently, and received plenty of feedback about it. I wrote to them years ago pointing out that their finance section really needs to have an option for graphing "adjusted price" (which they do list in their historic table, so they clearly have the data) or "growth of a $1000 investment" to smooth out the jumps from dividends and capital gains distributions that have no economic meaning, but nothing ever happened. Comparing a graph of a mutual fund to an index like the S&P 500 isn't very easy when the mutual fund price drops by 10% in December because it paid out a capital gains distribution (no money was lost -- they just gave 10% of it back to the investor).
Slashdot Mirror
The submitted article is terrible. The full paper is much more informative. For example, the full paper gives the system specs (both systems at 3.0GHz) and shows that the Opteron system is much cheaper ($2800 vs. $4170 for 2GB configuration).
I did a document clustering calculation with 1.3 million small documents (average 2903 bytes each) stored on a Reiser3 partition. Mounting with noatime cut the time to read the documents from disk by 27%, and cut the time to read from cache by 52%.
(74 - 64.8) / 74 -> 12.4%
The last survey that popped up here said that if SMART says your drive will fail, it probably will, but if SMART doesn't say it will fail, it doesn't mean much.
Yes, that was the Google study. So, if SMART says there is a problem, you should pay attention to it. If SMART doesn't find a problem, that doesn't mean you are out of the woods.
TFA seems surprised by SATA drives lasting as long as Fibre...why one earth would your data interface have any consequences on the drive internals?
Because drive manufacturers claim they use different hardware for the drive based on the interface. For example, a SCSI drive supposedly contains a disk designed for heavier use than an ATA drive, they aren't just the same disk with different interfaces.
Slightly off-topic, but if you haven't checked the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) info provided by your drive to see if it is having errors, you probably should. You can download smartmontools, which works on Linux/Unix and Windows. Your Linux distro may have it included, but may not have the daemon running to automatically monitor the drive (smartd).
/dev/sda do: /dev/sda /dev/sda
:-)
To view the SMART info for drive
smartctl -a
To do a full disk read check (can take hours) do:
smartctl -t long
Sadly, I just found read errors on a 375-hour-old drive (manufacturer's software claimed that repair succeeded). Fortunately, they were on the Windows partition
In the full announcement they also mention new 45W single-core desktop processors: Athlon 64 3500+ for $88, and 3800+ for $93.
Fine, then select no OS, or get Linux and install over it. What is the problem here.
There is no problem with having Linux pre-installed, except that it might be hard to convince Dell to modify their manufacturing process to achieve it. My point is that, if most people are just going to wipe Dell's install and do their own, certification may be good enough, and much easier to convince Dell to do.
Just FYI, OpenSUSE 10.2 worked well for me out-of-the-box on the D620 (OpenSUSE 10.1 did NOT). Mine has a Core 2 Duo and Intel 3945 802.11a/g.
Having the box come with Linux on it *is* a guarantee that the hardware works with Linux. If I don't want RHEL, I can install the Linux I want. This way, I know that the hardware works, and there's no Microsoft tax. It's still better than buying Windows.
Actually, it is a guarantee that Dell got some sort of Linux to work on the hardware by some means (maybe involving the addition of proprietary drivers) -- it doesn't guarantee that your preferred distro will work when you install it, or perhaps it will work only after a lot of effort. Having Linux pre-installed is a good sign that the hardware is Linux-friendly, and I even mentioned it in another post, but it comes up short of being a guarantee that you'll be able to easily do what you want.
Anyway, my point was that if people are ultimately going to do their own install, rather than use Dell's, having Dell actually perform the install is an unnecessary step. It would probably be easier for Dell (therefore more likely to happen) to provide certification, and would be sufficient for the user to get what he/she wants.
As for the Microsoft tax, that's really a separate issue. Dell already sells computers without Microsoft Windows, and they don't have Linux installed (if my memory is correct, they throw a floppy with a DOS clone into the box to satisfy Microsoft that the machine is being shipped with an OS).
if I were buying a computer with Linux pre-installed it would just be as a sort of guarantee that there are Linux drivers available for the hardware
Exactly. I recently bought a workstation with Linux pre-installed, and told the vendor to put it on a very small partition and leave the rest of the disk blank. I did my own partitioning and install on the rest of the disk, and just used their install to verify that things worked before I started messing around.
I don't think I would want Dell, or anyone else, doing the install for me, since I want to handle partitioning and package selection myself. It would be nice if each model said something like "certified that all hardware works with Linux Distros X, Y, and Z out of the box" so that I wouldn't have to hunt that info down myself.
From the article:
maybe you pissed off your mailman....
I think you meant to reply to the parent post. I got 1 cracked DVD out of 100+, so I have no complaints about my mailman.
Most DVD's are damaged pretty badly because if the crappy mailing system. I recieve on average 2-3 cracked DVD's a month.
Odd. I've been with Netflix for over a year, get 2 movies per week, and I've only had 1 cracked one.
Suppose I have a client that always uses a subject line like "website" and I filter all of his emails in one folder. How do I distinguish his emails from each other? For example, I look at his folder and see this:
John Doe 2006-10-02 Website
John Doe 2006-10-14 Website
John Doe 2006-10-21 Website
Or I could replace his worthless subject lines with something more descriptive and see:
John Doe 2006-10-02 Homepage specs
John Doe 2006-10-14 Replacement photo for About Us page
John Doe 2006-10-21 Contact Us form not working
If you need to go back and find something, the latter is much more helpful.
Thanks for the info -- that's good to know. Even if a whitelist implementation isn't searchable, it would hopefully be sortable, if for no other reason than to make lookups faster, which would still be an improvement over browsing the whole list.
I dunno about what they added in 2.0, but in 1.5, you can set up a filter that makes the message Not Junk, effectively creating your own whitelist.
That sounds similar to what I do with Netscape Communicator, but it is a huge pain to maintain. Each mail rule in Communicator is limited to 5 parts, so I can whitelist 5 addresses by OR'ing 5 "sender contains" pieces that move the message to my "Good" folder. But I've got dozens of these rules to cover all of the addresses of clients, and it is very clumsy to check and make sure I haven't missed one -- manual searching of the rule set is too tedious, so I have to find the rule file on disk and grep on it. Mail rules are OK if you don't have to add a lot of them, but whitelisting really needs to be more convenient than that.
One more:
4) Ability to add an arbitrary address/domain to the whitelist directly, without adding to address book, before receiving or replying to any email from the domain. This would be used when you know ahead of time that someone is going to send you something and you don't want to dig through the spam to find it.
I would simply like the ability to edit the subject line of messages I receive for organizational purposes.
I just want to follow up on how this might be implemented, since I think it's a great idea. Thunderbird could allow you to insert an additional header, perhaps called X-ModifiedSubject, where you would enter your modified version of the subject line. When the messages are listed, the X-ModifiedSubject would be displayed as the subject if it existed. If there was no X-ModifiedSubject line, the normal Subject would be displayed, but in a different color from the X-ModifiedSubject, so you can easily distinguish the ones you changed from the ones you didn't, and not confuse anybody when talking about the email on the phone (since the sender won't know you've made the change). When you reply to an email containing a X-ModifiedSubject, Thunderbird should have you choose between the new subject (more descriptive) and the original subject (vague, but more recognizable to the recipient) when generating the subject line of the reply. I suppose any searches you do on the "Subject" field should search both the Subject and the X-ModifiedSubject.
For example, your mail headers might contain:
Subject: WebSite
X-ModifiedSubject: Need to update copyright date on website
That way, when you browse your mail listings you see "Need to update copyright date on website" instead of just "Website," and you can easily tell what the message is about without clicking into it and reading the whole thing.
Would this not be the same as tagging an email?
I don't think so. As I understand it, tagging is like folders, except that an email can have more than one tag, so it's really a way to categorize messages (e.g. "work", "football", "consulting", "purchase_order", "receipt"). What I think the poster is looking for is a way to provide a longer description of the email, similar to a subject line, for human reading rather than categorizing (e.g. "Meeting on January 10 to discuss installation problems"). When you list your messages, you want to see something that really describes the message instead of a generic subject like "website" or "hello."
I agree. If you could tell it had been changed, and see both the original and the changed version, that would be great. I get emails from clients all the time with non-descript subject lines, and it would be a lot easier to understand what the email is about when viewing the mail listing if I could view my own description instead of the sender's subject line.
From what I've read about Thunderbird, the only options for whitelisting (passing to inbox without spam filtering) are your whole address book, or everyone that you've ever sent email to. Are there any plans to make it more flexible than that? Here are some things that I can think of that would be handy. Sorry if any are already included -- I can't play with Thunderbird until I upgrade to GTK2 (soon):
1) Ability to easily whitelist all email coming from a particular domain. This would ensure that you get all emails from a client company, not just one individual. Perhaps there could be a preferences setting that allows you to indicate that you want to be prompted each time you send an email to a new domain to see whether the whole domain should be whitelisted or just the recipient. I assume I could create a mail rule to filter a domain, as I currently do with Netscape Communicator, but that is pretty inconvenient.
2) Ability to easily whitelist an address without putting it in your address book or sending mail to it, e.g. by simply clicking a button while viewing a message from the address. For example, if I receive an emailed newsletter that I requested, it would be nice to whitelist it without cluttering my address book.
3) Are emails sent by someone on the whitelist visually differentiated from other emails in some way, such as coloring the sender name differently? That could make it easier to differentiate between valid emails and any spams that slip through the filter.
I hope the changes mean that they will start listing to their site users. They mangled tv.yahoo.com recently, and received plenty of feedback about it. I wrote to them years ago pointing out that their finance section really needs to have an option for graphing "adjusted price" (which they do list in their historic table, so they clearly have the data) or "growth of a $1000 investment" to smooth out the jumps from dividends and capital gains distributions that have no economic meaning, but nothing ever happened. Comparing a graph of a mutual fund to an index like the S&P 500 isn't very easy when the mutual fund price drops by 10% in December because it paid out a capital gains distribution (no money was lost -- they just gave 10% of it back to the investor).
Yeah, and they've gotten tons of feedback on it in their own blog. I gave up on them and switched to AOL TV too. I've never used AOL for anything before. Go figure.