I am not a creationist (per se). I am not religious, and I actually hold a strong detest of dogma of all forms, be it political propaganda/ideology, religious dogma, or even scientific establishment dogma, they are all forms of mental homogenization. It's worth noting that the vast majority of "science" has very little relevance, and is only incremental improvements on extant solid foundations, and that the major leaps are largely leaps of inspiration or personal eccentricity.
The origins of earth and species is rife with ambiguity, and a large amount of deduction is built on a small set of data points and measurements, and I wouldn't boast (scientists at least never should) too loudly about their conclusions.
I accept micro-evolution as a legitimate phenomenon, as it has been clearly observed and reproduced. I am not aware of any experiments so far (probably due to the geological time scales required) that have proven macro-evolution, that is evolving from one "type of thing" to an obviously distinct"type of thing" (and no, genetic variation and inability to breed, while convenient shorthand for a distinction in species, is not alone sufficient to me to distinguish "types of things" on a macroscopic scale - I want to see macro-evolution in action as predicted by theory).
I don't believe in God and I don't believe in some sort of magical creation where things just POOFed into existence by some guy in the sky. But there are fundamental observed inconsistencies in nature (randomness, quantum indeterminancy), that unless they can be explain, for now just have to be accepted. God is not an entity, but it might just be a phenomenon of nature.
I think it is extreme hubris to assume that what the scientific establishment accepts as true is and will always be considered true.
I agree. It is sickening the amount of cheating, even more disgusting in the more prestigious universities. But a SENIOR level course? These people are going on to become professional engineers and programmers?! That behavior is unnacceptable, and they should get a zero, end of story. They would be disbarred or their license revoked if they were lawyers or doctors. If this is not corrected American universities are just going to devolve (moreso) into degree mills.
The question is, I think, does CPU load for non-disk-IO related tasks tend to increase when disk IO tends to increase. Is there a correlation? I would argue against it. Typically programs fetch data, and THEN perform operations with it. IMHO, in order to derive a cpu load/disk load correlation, you would apparently have to be doing LOTS of SMALL disk IO while simultaneously using lots of CPU. I don't think many programs operate this way. Many programs access lots of disk in small pieces, and many programs are CPU-bottlenecks, but I don't think the intersection set is all that large (if you are reading tiny amounts of data, you can't possibly being doing THAT much processing on the data right?).
Furthermore, the question becomes "is the CPU usage amortized as filesystem functionality increases". I think this is EXACTLY what we are seeing. Logic is being offloaded from individual applications and bundled into the filesystem (at least with Reiser), as more applications require more sophisticated and database-like filesystems. I think this trend will increase, and we will see more "smart" filesystems being used as databases, and less "dumb-but-fast" filesystems. Sure, applications which don't specifically use the new sophisticated features of the filesystem will see the hit, but I'd wager applications that DO use the new features would actually see a net CPU usage drop, not increase. One immediate example I see is security/ACLs and how they can be embedded in Reiser.
Pretend I'm naive here and explain to me how it's an abuse of power. Is this just public info, or are they invading some sorts of "press" protection of sources rights? Does this apply in all cases?
Yeah, my screen resolution sure has a lot to do with my Do Not Call registration. Should I measure my private parts and send those numbers in too? Wouldn't want them to mess up my registration you know
That's preposterous. If you were defending your apartment from ninjas you would definately want a shotgun. Not enough range for a sniper rifle to be useful.
Video games are helpful. I mean, I used to be very awkward about beating a prostitute with a bat or shooting down a fleeing pedestrian, but now I can do it in my sleep.;)
"We are a likely target of pirates, both internal and external"
Well, it's a difficult situation. I suggest strong coastal fortress walls, and heavy shelling cannons. Also be sure to have your mates dig the hole before you bury the treasure. That way they will all be tired and you can shoot them and bury them with the treasure. I also suggest wearing a hook and eye patch. Some would argue that this is security through obscurity, but it does have a legitimate affect as a deterrent. Oh, and DON'T FORGET to draw a map with paces relative to everyday objects. This is sure to throw off that random bunch of happy go lucky teenagers in an 80s movie.
* I think XML has a purpose, but I think it is also gratuitously overused for things that map poorly onto its domain. And XSLT! The *concept* of a language to transform XML is a great one! But whoever thought that the transformation language should be written in the language it transforms needs to be clubbed! What, did they really think "hey, somebody might want to *transform* our transformation language, yippee!". The horrors, my eyes bleed.
* Struts. What a huge sinking feeling. You start off thinking you are going to do it "right" this time. You go in, do everything by the book, things get more complicated and confusing, you get stuck in a quagmire, you try to back out, you napalm and carpet bomb the jungle to clear the path and after a few thousand casualties in lines of code, you redo it the way you had it before and pretend the whole thing didn't happen. The *idea* of struts is just fine. It's just that it is overburdened with gratuitously complex and confusing and unnecessary configuration, and a meta-language of taglibs, that as the author suggests, is redundant and further confusing. I shudder to think how many lines of code are behind those tags that simply have the effect of changing <% %> syntax to < >. Struts can be much more easily implemented with a simple Servlet subclass which takes two init parameters, name, and form, and another Servlet which is a simple controller. I'll get right on implementing those few hundred lines once I get out of traction.
* Patterns. How sad the authors might be that their observations of good software practice is being used by a cargo cult of bad software writers to justify bad software.
Sure it's perception, but as a society we decide that the data generally percieved as "music", has a cultural and societal relavence that is distinct from other data perceptions.
I see no problem with fuzzily categorizing data (there is fuzziness and subjectiveness all over the law, and that is NOT necessarily a bad thing). No we are not going to fit everything into a single taxonomy 100% correctly, but the point is to make a *general* effect with policy.
It doesn't negate the fact that an embarrassing proportian of critical bugs, are due to very common mistakes which are well documented, and for which there are design practices to avoid them, and automated tools to detect them.
If I'm not mistaken there are also some recently released automated tools that can look at source and find things like double frees, and other "suspicous" code that usually indicates bugs.
Not that I am pro-spam in any way, but this type of thing is pretty much "campaign 101". Everybody does it. And the lists are all so polluted these days, nobody is sure (and the mailing companies are probably too corrupt) who is opt-in and who is not.
From the article you cite:
"WE RECENTLY CONTRACTED with two vendors who made assurances that their lists were opt-in only," the campaign said in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "On Tuesday, August 12th, Dean for America received notification from a supporter that spam was being sent. We terminated our relationship with both vendors immediately."
Clark has entered the race late and although he does have some nice qualifications he has been more or less presented himself as carboard cut out...I see no inspiration, no ideas, no passion, no indication that he really cares much. A Clark/Dean combo would be absolutely killer though, regardless of who's on top of the ticket.
Java/Servlets can absolutely handle the load. I sincerely question your suggestion to step DOWN to PHP. While PHP is great for small projects, it is pretty MISERABLE at scaling because it has a huge gaping hole of not supporting application persistence. The very thing you DO NOT want to do with PHP, is attach it to a database with lots of SIMULTANEOUS users, because PHP has little or no way of pooling resources (e.g. your database connections will scale in one to one ratio with your users == BAD THING).
See Ace's Hardware articles on how they converted from PHP to Java/Servlets/JSP, it is a blow-by-blow walkthrough that reads like a HOW-TO:
The move to a Java-based web application marks a giant step forward for our site software. While the "applications" we previously ran on Apache and PHP were little more than individual scripts interpreted by the webserver on request, the new site is in and of itself a complete, running, multithreaded application. When a request is made, the application starts a new thread to serve the request. Database connections are allocated as needed from a shared connection pool, maintained by the application.
In the case of the interpreted scripts of old, programs were compiled and executed on the fly in a stateless manner. The scripts only ran when they were requested, and so there was no communication between threads or components and no sharing of resources.
Our new software platform enables us to build true stateful applications that can create and share global resources. For instance, our message forums make use of a shared message index cache that, for all in intents and purposes, frees the database from nearly all read activity. The cache is shared in memory amongst all threads and it is only updated when a write operation is made to the database for a new posting, an edit, or a deletion. Such a cache would be very difficult to implement in something like PHP or PERL because its not possible to share persistent objects among different instances of an interpreted script.
Our old web application was written in PHP and ran on Apache, a "pre-fork" multiprocess HTTP server. Apache works by starting a parent process which then forks several child processes to listen and wait for HTTP connections. Since, each of these child processes serves one HTTP request at a time, Apache creates a pool of processes to handle connections in a timely fashion.
The disadvantage of this approach is that it can result in a great deal of overhead due to the 1:1 ratio between processes and requests. This can be particularly true in the case of HTTP keepalives, a feature designed to speed up web serving by handling multiple sequential requests from a client on the same connection, saving the time of having to build up a new connection for each request. The disadvantage comes into play when a child process is forced to wait a given amount of time on a client before accepting a connection from a different client. If the keepalive timeout is 15 seconds, then each Apache process will be unable to handle any other connections for 15 seconds following the final request from a client.
This means an Apache web server using keepalives will need to have more child processes running than connections. Depending upon the configuration and the amount of traffic, this can result in a process pool that is significantly larger than the total number of concurrent connections. In fact, many large sites even go so far as to disable keepalives on Apache simply because all the blocked processes consume too much memory.
Hm, I would like to like this label, but I've tried several shoutcast streams, and all these artists regardless of their genre all seem to be into a very art-house, industrial, "choppiness" in their music. For instance, 15 seconds of music, then an abrupt cut and 30 seconds of silence.
Just goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished by a Slashdotting.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I am not a creationist (per se). I am not religious, and I actually hold a strong detest of dogma of all forms, be it political propaganda/ideology, religious dogma, or even scientific establishment dogma, they are all forms of mental homogenization. It's worth noting that the vast majority of "science" has very little relevance, and is only incremental improvements on extant solid foundations, and that the major leaps are largely leaps of inspiration or personal eccentricity.
The origins of earth and species is rife with ambiguity, and a large amount of deduction is built on a small set of data points and measurements, and I wouldn't boast (scientists at least never should) too loudly about their conclusions.
I accept micro-evolution as a legitimate phenomenon, as it has been clearly observed and reproduced. I am not aware of any experiments so far (probably due to the geological time scales required) that have proven macro-evolution, that is evolving from one "type of thing" to an obviously distinct"type of thing" (and no, genetic variation and inability to breed, while convenient shorthand for a distinction in species, is not alone sufficient to me to distinguish "types of things" on a macroscopic scale - I want to see macro-evolution in action as predicted by theory).
I don't believe in God and I don't believe in some sort of magical creation where things just POOFed into existence by some guy in the sky. But there are fundamental observed inconsistencies in nature (randomness, quantum indeterminancy), that unless they can be explain, for now just have to be accepted. God is not an entity, but it might just be a phenomenon of nature.
I think it is extreme hubris to assume that what the scientific establishment accepts as true is and will always be considered true.
I agree. It is sickening the amount of cheating, even more disgusting in the more prestigious universities. But a SENIOR level course? These people are going on to become professional engineers and programmers?! That behavior is unnacceptable, and they should get a zero, end of story. They would be disbarred or their license revoked if they were lawyers or doctors. If this is not corrected American universities are just going to devolve (moreso) into degree mills.
The question is, I think, does CPU load for non-disk-IO related tasks tend to increase when disk IO tends to increase. Is there a correlation? I would argue against it. Typically programs fetch data, and THEN perform operations with it. IMHO, in order to derive a cpu load/disk load correlation, you would apparently have to be doing LOTS of SMALL disk IO while simultaneously using lots of CPU. I don't think many programs operate this way. Many programs access lots of disk in small pieces, and many programs are CPU-bottlenecks, but I don't think the intersection set is all that large (if you are reading tiny amounts of data, you can't possibly being doing THAT much processing on the data right?).
Furthermore, the question becomes "is the CPU usage amortized as filesystem functionality increases". I think this is EXACTLY what we are seeing. Logic is being offloaded from individual applications and bundled into the filesystem (at least with Reiser), as more applications require more sophisticated and database-like filesystems. I think this trend will increase, and we will see more "smart" filesystems being used as databases, and less "dumb-but-fast" filesystems. Sure, applications which don't specifically use the new sophisticated features of the filesystem will see the hit, but I'd wager applications that DO use the new features would actually see a net CPU usage drop, not increase. One immediate example I see is security/ACLs and how they can be embedded in Reiser.
Pretend I'm naive here and explain to me how it's an abuse of power. Is this just public info, or are they invading some sorts of "press" protection of sources rights? Does this apply in all cases?
Yeah, my screen resolution sure has a lot to do with my Do Not Call registration. Should I measure my private parts and send those numbers in too? Wouldn't want them to mess up my registration you know
That's preposterous. If you were defending your apartment from ninjas you would definately want a shotgun. Not enough range for a sniper rifle to be useful.
Video games are helpful. I mean, I used to be very awkward about beating a prostitute with a bat or shooting down a fleeing pedestrian, but now I can do it in my sleep. ;)
"We are a likely target of pirates, both internal and external"
Well, it's a difficult situation. I suggest strong coastal fortress walls, and heavy shelling cannons. Also be sure to have your mates dig the hole before you bury the treasure. That way they will all be tired and you can shoot them and bury them with the treasure. I also suggest wearing a hook and eye patch. Some would argue that this is security through obscurity, but it does have a legitimate affect as a deterrent. Oh, and DON'T FORGET to draw a map with paces relative to everyday objects. This is sure to throw off that random bunch of happy go lucky teenagers in an 80s movie.
This is not the project you are looking for.
Y: A Successor to the X Window System is.
Now move along.
Amen, great article.
* I think XML has a purpose, but I think it is also gratuitously overused for things that map poorly onto its domain. And XSLT! The *concept* of a language to transform XML is a great one! But whoever thought that the transformation language should be written in the language it transforms needs to be clubbed! What, did they really think "hey, somebody might want to *transform* our transformation language, yippee!". The horrors, my eyes bleed.
* Struts. What a huge sinking feeling. You start off thinking you are going to do it "right" this time. You go in, do everything by the book, things get more complicated and confusing, you get stuck in a quagmire, you try to back out, you napalm and carpet bomb the jungle to clear the path and after a few thousand casualties in lines of code, you redo it the way you had it before and pretend the whole thing didn't happen. The *idea* of struts is just fine. It's just that it is overburdened with gratuitously complex and confusing and unnecessary configuration, and a meta-language of taglibs, that as the author suggests, is redundant and further confusing. I shudder to think how many lines of code are behind those tags that simply have the effect of changing <% %> syntax to < >. Struts can be much more easily implemented with a simple Servlet subclass which takes two init parameters, name, and form, and another Servlet which is a simple controller. I'll get right on implementing those few hundred lines once I get out of traction.
* Patterns. How sad the authors might be that their observations of good software practice is being used by a cargo cult of bad software writers to justify bad software.
Crap, does that mean I have to replace my honda HRE464?
"This language was removed from earlier versions to make the document more palatable for business and commercial interests."
Hmm, business and commercial interest bloc in the UN? It's still called the United Nations not United Businesses right?
Sure it's perception, but as a society we decide that the data generally percieved as "music", has a cultural and societal relavence that is distinct from other data perceptions.
I see no problem with fuzzily categorizing data (there is fuzziness and subjectiveness all over the law, and that is NOT necessarily a bad thing). No we are not going to fit everything into a single taxonomy 100% correctly, but the point is to make a *general* effect with policy.
Damn, i visited your site expecting to see photoshopped images of Justice Rhenquist flying around. Ah well.
And furthermore, how would talk without a jaw...
It doesn't negate the fact that an embarrassing proportian of critical bugs, are due to very common mistakes which are well documented, and for which there are design practices to avoid them, and automated tools to detect them.
What about Cyclone?
It seems like a good step forward.
If I'm not mistaken there are also some recently released automated tools that can look at source and find things like double frees, and other "suspicous" code that usually indicates bugs.
Believing something to be possible but fatal to humans is an entirely different thing from believing it to be impossible in the first place.
It helps that he has Lawrence Lessig on his internet advisory committee.
From the article you cite:
Clark has entered the race late and although he does have some nice qualifications he has been more or less presented himself as carboard cut out...I see no inspiration, no ideas, no passion, no indication that he really cares much. A Clark/Dean combo would be absolutely killer though, regardless of who's on top of the ticket.
See Ace's Hardware articles on how they converted from PHP to Java/Servlets/JSP, it is a blow-by-blow walkthrough that reads like a HOW-TO:
Building a Better Webserver in the 21st Century
SPECmine - A Case Study on Optimization
Scaling Server Performance
Why would God give you a computer spawned by Satan? Geez, get with it.
Hm, I would like to like this label, but I've tried several shoutcast streams, and all these artists regardless of their genre all seem to be into a very art-house, industrial, "choppiness" in their music. For instance, 15 seconds of music, then an abrupt cut and 30 seconds of silence.
;)
Just goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished by a Slashdotting.
"I can can"
If you can can, sir, I suggest you look for a dance troupe.