Amen. I think the premature optimization bit is a phase that most good programmers grow out of sooner or later. I've grown tired, though, of having to explain the concept. "No, allocating twelve objects really won't impact performance that much. You're going to be hitting the database with a huge query anyway. The memory allocation won't matter next to that!"
Good question. The first step is to figure out where the slowness is coming from. Is the web server process waiting for database queries? Is the CPU pegged at 100%, or is the server waiting for disk IO?
I like to use atop to figure these things out. It breaks down system resource use into a couple of distinct categories, like mem, cpu, and swap, and visually indicates which one is the limiting factor at the moment. It'll also tell you which processes are allocating and deallocating memory. It's not particularly user-friendly, but it's a powerful tool.
Also, if it turns out that a process _is_ using a lot of CPU time, and you can't figure out why, strace and httpd -X (which forces Apache to run with one worker) are your friends.
Of course, I'd still prefer to have dtrace in the Linux kernel. Maybe someday...
What were you doing that took so much CPU time? Shouldn't all the heavy lifting have been done by the database anyway? IMHO, it's pretty bad design to put too much sorting, filtering, etc. logic in the client code anyway, regardless of whether that client code is written in C, PHP or INTERCAL.
That said, PHP is only a constant factor slower than C. A big constant factor, granted, but not 100,000. It appears that your perform improvement with the C rewrite came from algorithmic improvements, not a simple translation into machine code.
Your server is going to choke at some maximum number of clients anyway. You might as well configure it to handle what it can and gracefully reject the rest instead of letting everybody's requests wallow in a mire of thrashing.
Look, I lean pretty far to the left, but this list is bullshit. The MSM organizations are no angels, but I just don't see enough here to justify an allegation of censorship; the compilers of this list complaining about censorship are just as wrong as the intelligent design folk who do the same thing. As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence presented here simply does not make the cut.
Let's examine a few of the problems:
They took a few minor problems with a couple specific GM crops and took the unjustifiable leap of stating that "Several recent studies confirm fears that genetically modified (GM) foods damage human health." The actual evidence presented, even if true, does not justify sensational news coverage.
The statement "A group of scientists led by biochemist Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini from the University of Caen in France found that human placental cells are very sensitive to Roundup at concentrations lower than those currently used in agricultural application" does not support the statement that roundup in general is harmful to human health. Where's the connection between the concentration used in the field and the concentration in the finished food? They might not even be remotely related. Placental cells placed in a pure caffeine solution will die, yet we consider is safe to drink Coffee! Again, not newsworthy yet. Show me a peer-reviewed, published study that's been reproduced at least once that links roundup (as consumed by humans) to health problems and I'll change my mind. That would be newsworthy.
Haliburton is a wicked company, yes. But whether legitimately or not, it has grown to become one of the major suppliers of services to the US government. We must do something to curb its power, yes. However, simply because one of the hundreds of contracts given to Haliburton was not extensively covered is not a reason to think that the MSM is hiding that the sky is falling.
The OPEC article is fluff, yes. But do you expect the government to not have a plan about reconstructing the oil industry?
I don't have time to analyze the entire list. But given the obvious deficiencies in some of the listed entries, very good reasons for not covering them extensively in the media, why should I be convinced that the others were censored?
Come on, the MSM is no group of angels, and certainly has an agenda, but this article paints us lefties as a bunch of lunatics out of touch with reality, and so does more harm than good for our cause.
So why wouldn't exactly the same argument against federal copyrights apply to the states? That is, the work is funded by the public, and therefore ought to be owned by the public. The level of government doesn't apply. I wouldn't be surprised if several states waived copyright themselves.
Again, show me some, any, evidence that states can indeed hold copyright. I live in New York, and I've never seen a document copyrighted by the state of New York. Or New Jersey, for that matter.
Even accepting, for the sake of argument, that the video ought to be banned, abusing copyright law to do that hurts us all far more than the video would. You're basically arguing we should be free to abuse the law and ignore its purpose and spirit as long as that abuse is used to further your personal moral crusade. That provides precedent to abuse the law for other ends, which I'm sure you would not so wholeheartedly approve. If you really feel that everyone should have a right to be happy all the time, regardless of others' rights, then lobby your congresscritter to introduce a law making it illegal to show videos that might possibly have the potential to make somebody a little upset for a few minutes. See how far that gets you. People like you are the reason our country is slouching toward fascism.
Why use "utilize" instead of "use"? It adds nothing but pretention to whatever you're trying to say. Read George Orwell's short essay Politics and the English Language.
No. US copyright law provides that the US government cannot enforce its copyright on works created by US government employees as part of their duties. However, this applies only to the Federal government. State and local governments can and do own and enforce their copyrights. The United States is a _federation_, not a monolithic state.
I googled for a few minutes and couldn't find any supporting evidence, even on the US Copyright Office site. Do you have any sources that support this statement?
Even if it is true, it shouldn't be. One can apply exactly the same arguments used against federal copyright to state copyright with exactly the same result. It's still not in the public interest to allow the state to hold copyright.
Only property can be stolen, and information is not property. You can steal a physical tape, but you're only liable for the tape itself, not the video on it. You can infringe on copyright (as you normally would by copying a stolen tape), but as a government work (even indirectly) the video should not have a copyright. Governments can make certain pieces of information secret, but this video is not classified, and there would have been no reason to make it classified.
The NFL is different. It's a private organization. If you treat the government as if it were a private entity, it will screw you over like one.
That's not a good enough reason for censorship. If you personally don't like the video, don't watch it. I don't particularly like it myself. But who are you and I to force our views on other people? It happened in a public place; should we scrub the memories of the people who were there, lest they tell prurient stories to their friends?
As for the Turnpike Authority -- the name should give you a hint. It's a Public Authority of the same kind famously employed by Robert Moses. The main benefit of an authority over a typical organ of government is that an authority can issue bonds to raise money. Fine. But that it takes on any other corporate-like powers, like being able to hold copyright, while simultaneously being owned by the government is outrageous.
You're right (aside from the malapropism) in that the crash was probably fatal, and I'd be a little leery of anyone taking a great deal of pleasure from it. Part of living in a free society is allowing others to do things you personally disagree with. That some people might take pleasure in watching somebody die is not a good enough reason for you to support banning the video, or to support the Turkpike Authority's actions, which amount to the same thing.
There's no expectation of privacy on a highway anyway, but you'd have every right to expect that your library records and medical history would remain private. Copyright is about keeping others from copying what you would make public, while privacy protection is about keeping others from accessing what you would keep secret.
Not if it's the obvious way of doing something. See Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, which held that no, Virginia, you don't obtain copyright protection just because you put some effort into something.
This is an abuse of the concept of copyright by the turkpike authority; they're simply trying to censor unpleasant material. That we even entertain this idea is insanity, and is a testament to this idea that everything needs to be fenced off and owned. The turnpike organization is a public authority, and even if it weren't, you can't claim copyright on an automated recording of a public place! There's no creative element, no promotion of the arts, nothing other than a senseless and greedy enclosure of what ought to be common.
Have you considered that Y2K problems were only averted because we recongized the problem beforehand and took steps to correct it? Y2K was a success, not a poster-boy for scare-mongering.
I've been saying this for years. My school recently throttled all P2P traffic on its VPN setup. According to insiders, the reason they didn't use the variable-priority approach was that the software they used for throttling, packeteer, was cheaper than the priority package.
Actually, property does serve the public good: to ensure that scarce land is used efficiently, we allow people to own parts of it. By making ownership perpetual, we give owners an incentive to use their land sustainably. We call this notion "property."
Ideas are not property: any number of people can use the same idea without diminishing it, forever. An idea can grow from another idea. An idea is most valuable to society when it is widely and freely disseminated so that the greatest number can benefit from it.
Copyright is supposed to be a bargain between creators and society, not a way of turning ideas into property. Insanely long copyright terms are a bad bargain for society because ideas become less useful forever, while the all-but-eternal protection terms do not encourage people to create more than short ones would. Does anyone really believe that Sylvia Plath would have written more if her work would have been encumbered for a thousand years instead of 20?
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Amen. I think the premature optimization bit is a phase that most good programmers grow out of sooner or later. I've grown tired, though, of having to explain the concept. "No, allocating twelve objects really won't impact performance that much. You're going to be hitting the database with a huge query anyway. The memory allocation won't matter next to that!"
Good question. The first step is to figure out where the slowness is coming from. Is the web server process waiting for database queries? Is the CPU pegged at 100%, or is the server waiting for disk IO?
I like to use atop to figure these things out. It breaks down system resource use into a couple of distinct categories, like mem, cpu, and swap, and visually indicates which one is the limiting factor at the moment. It'll also tell you which processes are allocating and deallocating memory. It's not particularly user-friendly, but it's a powerful tool.
Also, if it turns out that a process _is_ using a lot of CPU time, and you can't figure out why, strace and httpd -X (which forces Apache to run with one worker) are your friends.
Of course, I'd still prefer to have dtrace in the Linux kernel. Maybe someday...
What were you doing that took so much CPU time? Shouldn't all the heavy lifting have been done by the database anyway? IMHO, it's pretty bad design to put too much sorting, filtering, etc. logic in the client code anyway, regardless of whether that client code is written in C, PHP or INTERCAL.
That said, PHP is only a constant factor slower than C. A big constant factor, granted, but not 100,000. It appears that your perform improvement with the C rewrite came from algorithmic improvements, not a simple translation into machine code.
Grow up. What, am I supposed to like Java because it's named after my favorite drink?
Your server is going to choke at some maximum number of clients anyway. You might as well configure it to handle what it can and gracefully reject the rest instead of letting everybody's requests wallow in a mire of thrashing.
Conceded.
Let's examine a few of the problems:
I don't have time to analyze the entire list. But given the obvious deficiencies in some of the listed entries, very good reasons for not covering them extensively in the media, why should I be convinced that the others were censored?
Come on, the MSM is no group of angels, and certainly has an agenda, but this article paints us lefties as a bunch of lunatics out of touch with reality, and so does more harm than good for our cause.
So why wouldn't exactly the same argument against federal copyrights apply to the states? That is, the work is funded by the public, and therefore ought to be owned by the public. The level of government doesn't apply. I wouldn't be surprised if several states waived copyright themselves.
Again, show me some, any, evidence that states can indeed hold copyright. I live in New York, and I've never seen a document copyrighted by the state of New York. Or New Jersey, for that matter.
It's the highway of the people of the state of New Jersey, not the Authority's highway.
Even accepting, for the sake of argument, that the video ought to be banned, abusing copyright law to do that hurts us all far more than the video would. You're basically arguing we should be free to abuse the law and ignore its purpose and spirit as long as that abuse is used to further your personal moral crusade. That provides precedent to abuse the law for other ends, which I'm sure you would not so wholeheartedly approve. If you really feel that everyone should have a right to be happy all the time, regardless of others' rights, then lobby your congresscritter to introduce a law making it illegal to show videos that might possibly have the potential to make somebody a little upset for a few minutes. See how far that gets you. People like you are the reason our country is slouching toward fascism.
Why use "utilize" instead of "use"? It adds nothing but pretention to whatever you're trying to say. Read George Orwell's short essay Politics and the English Language.
I googled for a few minutes and couldn't find any supporting evidence, even on the US Copyright Office site. Do you have any sources that support this statement?
Even if it is true, it shouldn't be. One can apply exactly the same arguments used against federal copyright to state copyright with exactly the same result. It's still not in the public interest to allow the state to hold copyright.
Only property can be stolen, and information is not property. You can steal a physical tape, but you're only liable for the tape itself, not the video on it. You can infringe on copyright (as you normally would by copying a stolen tape), but as a government work (even indirectly) the video should not have a copyright. Governments can make certain pieces of information secret, but this video is not classified, and there would have been no reason to make it classified.
The NFL is different. It's a private organization. If you treat the government as if it were a private entity, it will screw you over like one.
That's not a good enough reason for censorship. If you personally don't like the video, don't watch it. I don't particularly like it myself. But who are you and I to force our views on other people? It happened in a public place; should we scrub the memories of the people who were there, lest they tell prurient stories to their friends?
As for the Turnpike Authority -- the name should give you a hint. It's a Public Authority of the same kind famously employed by Robert Moses. The main benefit of an authority over a typical organ of government is that an authority can issue bonds to raise money. Fine. But that it takes on any other corporate-like powers, like being able to hold copyright, while simultaneously being owned by the government is outrageous.
You're right (aside from the malapropism) in that the crash was probably fatal, and I'd be a little leery of anyone taking a great deal of pleasure from it. Part of living in a free society is allowing others to do things you personally disagree with. That some people might take pleasure in watching somebody die is not a good enough reason for you to support banning the video, or to support the Turkpike Authority's actions, which amount to the same thing.
There's no expectation of privacy on a highway anyway, but you'd have every right to expect that your library records and medical history would remain private. Copyright is about keeping others from copying what you would make public, while privacy protection is about keeping others from accessing what you would keep secret.
Not if it's the obvious way of doing something. See Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, which held that no, Virginia, you don't obtain copyright protection just because you put some effort into something.
This is an abuse of the concept of copyright by the turkpike authority; they're simply trying to censor unpleasant material. That we even entertain this idea is insanity, and is a testament to this idea that everything needs to be fenced off and owned. The turnpike organization is a public authority, and even if it weren't, you can't claim copyright on an automated recording of a public place! There's no creative element, no promotion of the arts, nothing other than a senseless and greedy enclosure of what ought to be common.
Isn't that the essence of democracy?
Now that article is pure scare-mongering fluff --- but then again, what from Forbes isn't fluff?
Have you considered that Y2K problems were only averted because we recongized the problem beforehand and took steps to correct it? Y2K was a success, not a poster-boy for scare-mongering.
I've been saying this for years. My school recently throttled all P2P traffic on its VPN setup. According to insiders, the reason they didn't use the variable-priority approach was that the software they used for throttling, packeteer, was cheaper than the priority package.
Ugh.
They could have just used free software.
Lisp is actually doing quite well -- check out cliki.org, as well as the SBCL project.
It's not so obsolete a language as you seem to imply.
Rude assholes deserve protection of the law as much as anyone else.
Actually, property does serve the public good: to ensure that scarce land is used efficiently, we allow people to own parts of it. By making ownership perpetual, we give owners an incentive to use their land sustainably. We call this notion "property."
Ideas are not property: any number of people can use the same idea without diminishing it, forever. An idea can grow from another idea. An idea is most valuable to society when it is widely and freely disseminated so that the greatest number can benefit from it.
Copyright is supposed to be a bargain between creators and society, not a way of turning ideas into property. Insanely long copyright terms are a bad bargain for society because ideas become less useful forever, while the all-but-eternal protection terms do not encourage people to create more than short ones would. Does anyone really believe that Sylvia Plath would have written more if her work would have been encumbered for a thousand years instead of 20?