at least if entered directly, a handfull of html entities for latin1 stuff work
The one that pisses me off most frequently is the ° entity. I really don't see how using these entities can constitute abuse, especially given the crap (e.g. GNAA) that Slashcode intentionally lets through.
I'm imagining something like this, except with somewhat tarnished silver trim and wood several shades darker, and maybe some nice black velvet accents on the keyboard to rest my wrists on.
Wow, that is one very pretty mod. Love it. Pity it's not a laptop though.:-)
Obviously you've never had to back up about 8TB of data, with about 200GB of incremental changes weekly.
This isn't difficult (or even very expensive) if you use a bank of big HDDs in external boxes. Just link them up via a SATA connection or something. Of course, there's also the USB option too, but that costs a few more $$.
Uh, because it's totally impractical to ship off a backup tape every hour?
Even back in the '70s we stored the previous day's backup tapes locally in a fireproof safe and sent out sets of tapes to be stored offsite every day if not every week.
It's not rocket science: every so often we actually had to use those backups, and that can be a very quick (not to mention salutary) way to find any weaknesses in the system.
Believe me, if you are the admin, you do NOT want to be the one who has to explain to the PHB why nobody on the planet has the last month's data.
because any factor that ruins that backup can ruin all copies of it. This is true for backup systems that use proprietary format...
That reminds me of something from the late '80s and early '90s:
At that time, I worked on a site in an insurance company where we had a number of PRIME (AKA Pr1me or Proneme) "minicomputers". Anybody here remember those guys? PRIMOS was in some ways a lookalike for the founder engineers' more familiar GCOS, known to the cognoscenti as God's Chosen Operating System.
Anyway, I digress. I used to get panicky calls about every 2 months from Prime's support crew, asking if I was using their "BRMS" (Backup and Recovery Management System), because they had discovered yet another bug in it. Fortunately, my (tape) backup strategy was very conservative and comprehensive, so it wasn't an issue, but it could have been bad...
... and probably a good thing too. Given how much mobile phone providers like to slug their customers for traffic, what possible advantage is there to using such a device as a server?
Maybe future historians will consider this a dark age, whose intellectual production was lost.
I've been saying this for 30 years, and not just because of the precarious nature of digital information. Actually, some of that might in its own way become somewhat durable. (The Project Gutenberg effect?) But the majority of text on paper produced since about 1830 is likely to be lost at some stage due to the corrosive action of acid in the paper.
Hell, I have books printed only 10 years ago which are already crumbling. If our species survives the effects of its own stupidity, it would be interesting to see how much of its written heritage is left a few hundred years down the track.
Actually, yes, I have, on four occasions. My experience is that ReiserFS (the "killer filesystem";-)) is very rugged, and I was able to recover with (AFAIK) zero data loss.
All that said, my condolences to the server admin / founder
He doesn't get mine. OK, none of this affects me in this case, but if I allowed 13 years' worth of data to be trashed like that, I would never be able to find a job again.
The admins' claim that they were backed up is nothing short of an outright lie. A dependency on rsync or any other mirroring technique alone is just plain negligent, when both servers are exposed to the world at large. As a bad analogy, it's like allowing someone to light two fuses with the same match.
The only way to do backups properly is to have a complete set, offline, in a separate location.
Nonsense. It takes lots of time to write a book, often years. If I made such an investment of my time, I would hope that it would generate some income for several years, rather than just get swiped off PirateBay by spotty-faced freeloaders.
You don't have to be a professional navigator to use a clock and sextant. In fact, years ago, I have been in a situation where salt and water worked their usual magic on a brand new LORAN system (this was 10 years before GPS became available), so I had to rely on them for most of the long trip. But doing it the old way is nearly as good.
It's not so much fun in bad weather, though, when you can't see the sun, stars or horizon. Dead-reckoning is sometimes little better than guessing.
Re:Flash memory has a limited number of writes.
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 1
In any case, how often do you really need to rebuild your kernel? I pretty much only do mine when it occurs to me these days (say every 3 months or so) unless I have a new device or I want to try a different filesystem.
It's not as if it really contains so many absolute howlers of bugs that we need to keep up with every patch for security.
Re:The Achilles heel of this...
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Someone still has to sit down and make the decision to write and test a new driver for a fast-fading piece of legacy hardware
Not necessarily. That depends on whether or not it's a good use of his time.
Developer time is probably better spent supporting current devices with decent specifications, which are more likely to be useful for a long time.
The only times I've had driver issues with Linux were back in the mid-'90s on a no-name-brand motherboard (SiS chipset), and with a parallel-port Umax scanner. No-name hardware is probably always going to be problematic, but I don't think it's really the Linux developers' job to compensate for people being too mean to buy proper hardware, however often they get lucky.
This aside, I am continually amazed at how well most distributions support all kinds of devices out of the box, with no user intervention required at all. I can't say that for any Windows version I have tried.
Re:The Achilles heel of this...
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have a mac and my peripherals all work great.
I also have a Mac, but it doesn't have any peripherals. Those are all attached to my Linux desktop machine. Which brings me to addressing the concern of the parent with his Canon scanner woes:
Why not try installing Sane (and xsane) to interface with the scanner?
Sane supports most of the more common brands of scanner, provided they don't rely on funky things like parallel ports.
Hey, I forsee a time when HTML will be regarded as a "legacy" markup, only to be accessed by a special extension.
We're almost at that stage now. It often seems to me that the only real reason for all that dynamic and so-called "Web 2.0" content is to deliver more bandwidth-intensive advertising. Maybe it's time to take a step back and have a Campaign For Real HTML.
In the article (someone has to read it, but what the hell, this is/.), the subject of piracy is not an issue.
The point you're all missing is that any legally downloaded copy of a book can be prevented from being accessed via TTS by a customer with some form of reading disability.
I have no axe to grind regarding the merits (or otherwise) of the technology, but the point is that if you have paid for the content, you should be allowed to access it however you want. Deliberately locking out legitimate users with disabilities is seriously bad medicine, and anyone who does so deserves all the bad karma he'll get.
This is such a cop-out, it makes me tired. You could substitute "wilful stupidity", and it would mean the same thing. A god that demands that you suspend your capability to reason when it suits him is not much of a god.
No. A trilemma can have several definitions, depending on who you talk to. Sometimes it's applied as "out of [A B C] you can have two, but not all three" (e.g. [A + B] but not C).
In this case, it's obviously applied as "take your pick": you can have A or B or C.
I'd like a way to switch off this "focused laser" approach
Easy. Just lose those persistent cookies. My cookies file is just a symlink to/dev/null (a hangover from days when the preference setting wasn't there, but my own paranoia remains), so the cookies disappear whenever I close the browser.
In any case, I find it fairly easy to pull up earlier search results when I want them, because I always use Google's advanced search page.
That's the number we used to represent just-short-of-infinity when having nerd arguments as kids in the 80s.
Hmmm. I remember people using the word back in the '60s. But given that the word googol (10^10^100) itself goes back to 1939, I guess the term is even older (!) than I am.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
at least if entered directly, a handfull of html entities for latin1 stuff work
The one that pisses me off most frequently is the ° entity. I really don't see how using these entities can constitute abuse, especially given the crap (e.g. GNAA) that Slashcode intentionally lets through.
I'm imagining something like this, except with somewhat tarnished silver trim and wood several shades darker, and maybe some nice black velvet accents on the keyboard to rest my wrists on.
:-)
Wow, that is one very pretty mod. Love it. Pity it's not a laptop though.
Obviously you've never had to back up about 8TB of data, with about 200GB of incremental changes weekly.
This isn't difficult (or even very expensive) if you use a bank of big HDDs in external boxes. Just link them up via a SATA connection or something. Of course, there's also the USB option too, but that costs a few more $$.
Uh, because it's totally impractical to ship off a backup tape every hour?
Even back in the '70s we stored the previous day's backup tapes locally in a fireproof safe and sent out sets of tapes to be stored offsite every day if not every week.
It's not rocket science: every so often we actually had to use those backups, and that can be a very quick (not to mention salutary) way to find any weaknesses in the system.
Believe me, if you are the admin, you do NOT want to be the one who has to explain to the PHB why nobody on the planet has the last month's data.
because any factor that ruins that backup can ruin all copies of it. This is true for backup systems that use proprietary format...
That reminds me of something from the late '80s and early '90s:
At that time, I worked on a site in an insurance company where we had a number of PRIME (AKA Pr1me or Proneme) "minicomputers". Anybody here remember those guys? PRIMOS was in some ways a lookalike for the founder engineers' more familiar GCOS, known to the cognoscenti as God's Chosen Operating System.
Anyway, I digress. I used to get panicky calls about every 2 months from Prime's support crew, asking if I was using their "BRMS" (Backup and Recovery Management System), because they had discovered yet another bug in it. Fortunately, my (tape) backup strategy was very conservative and comprehensive, so it wasn't an issue, but it could have been bad...
... and probably a good thing too. Given how much mobile phone providers like to slug their customers for traffic, what possible advantage is there to using such a device as a server?
Maybe future historians will consider this a dark age, whose intellectual production was lost.
I've been saying this for 30 years, and not just because of the precarious nature of digital information. Actually, some of that might in its own way become somewhat durable. (The Project Gutenberg effect?) But the majority of text on paper produced since about 1830 is likely to be lost at some stage due to the corrosive action of acid in the paper.
Hell, I have books printed only 10 years ago which are already crumbling. If our species survives the effects of its own stupidity, it would be interesting to see how much of its written heritage is left a few hundred years down the track.
Ever tried rebuilding a corrupted ReiserFS tree?
;-)) is very rugged, and I was able to recover with (AFAIK) zero data loss.
Actually, yes, I have, on four occasions. My experience is that ReiserFS (the "killer filesystem"
All that said, my condolences to the server admin / founder
He doesn't get mine. OK, none of this affects me in this case, but if I allowed 13 years' worth of data to be trashed like that, I would never be able to find a job again.
The admins' claim that they were backed up is nothing short of an outright lie. A dependency on rsync or any other mirroring technique alone is just plain negligent, when both servers are exposed to the world at large. As a bad analogy, it's like allowing someone to light two fuses with the same match.
The only way to do backups properly is to have a complete set, offline, in a separate location.
Sheesh. When will people learn?
Nonsense. It takes lots of time to write a book, often years. If I made such an investment of my time, I would hope that it would generate some income for several years, rather than just get swiped off PirateBay by spotty-faced freeloaders.
You don't have to be a professional navigator to use a clock and sextant. In fact, years ago, I have been in a situation where salt and water worked their usual magic on a brand new LORAN system (this was 10 years before GPS became available), so I had to rely on them for most of the long trip. But doing it the old way is nearly as good.
It's not so much fun in bad weather, though, when you can't see the sun, stars or horizon. Dead-reckoning is sometimes little better than guessing.
In any case, how often do you really need to rebuild your kernel? I pretty much only do mine when it occurs to me these days (say every 3 months or so) unless I have a new device or I want to try a different filesystem.
It's not as if it really contains so many absolute howlers of bugs that we need to keep up with every patch for security.
Someone still has to sit down and make the decision to write and test a new driver for a fast-fading piece of legacy hardware
Not necessarily. That depends on whether or not it's a good use of his time.
Developer time is probably better spent supporting current devices with decent specifications, which are more likely to be useful for a long time.
The only times I've had driver issues with Linux were back in the mid-'90s on a no-name-brand motherboard (SiS chipset), and with a parallel-port Umax scanner. No-name hardware is probably always going to be problematic, but I don't think it's really the Linux developers' job to compensate for people being too mean to buy proper hardware, however often they get lucky.
This aside, I am continually amazed at how well most distributions support all kinds of devices out of the box, with no user intervention required at all. I can't say that for any Windows version I have tried.
I have a mac and my peripherals all work great.
I also have a Mac, but it doesn't have any peripherals. Those are all attached to my Linux desktop machine. Which brings me to addressing the concern of the parent with his Canon scanner woes:
Why not try installing Sane (and xsane) to interface with the scanner?
Sane supports most of the more common brands of scanner, provided they don't rely on funky things like parallel ports.
Dodos are extinct
And, according to the record, dodos were like big heavyweight turkeys that never tasted too good in the first place, but they all got eaten anyway.
Whereas Internet Explorer is
Oh wait...
Hey, I forsee a time when HTML will be regarded as a "legacy" markup, only to be accessed by a special extension.
We're almost at that stage now. It often seems to me that the only real reason for all that dynamic and so-called "Web 2.0" content is to deliver more bandwidth-intensive advertising. Maybe it's time to take a step back and have a Campaign For Real HTML.
In the article (someone has to read it, but what the hell, this is /.), the subject of piracy is not an issue.
The point you're all missing is that any legally downloaded copy of a book can be prevented from being accessed via TTS by a customer with some form of reading disability.
I have no axe to grind regarding the merits (or otherwise) of the technology, but the point is that if you have paid for the content, you should be allowed to access it however you want. Deliberately locking out legitimate users with disabilities is seriously bad medicine, and anyone who does so deserves all the bad karma he'll get.
it's a test of faith.
This is such a cop-out, it makes me tired. You could substitute "wilful stupidity", and it would mean the same thing. A god that demands that you suspend your capability to reason when it suits him is not much of a god.
A false... trilemma...
No. A trilemma can have several definitions, depending on who you talk to. Sometimes it's applied as "out of [A B C] you can have two, but not all three" (e.g. [A + B] but not C).
In this case, it's obviously applied as "take your pick": you can have A or B or C.
*queue smartass replies with inches per hour in scientific notation*
I wouldn't. I think they work in cubits there. Or is it fathoms?
I find it very amusing that such an orbital speed would put you somewhere in the neighborhood of Uranus.
Just so long as he's not in the neighbourhood of mine.
I'd like a way to switch off this "focused laser" approach
/dev/null (a hangover from days when the preference setting wasn't there, but my own paranoia remains), so the cookies disappear whenever I close the browser.
Easy. Just lose those persistent cookies. My cookies file is just a symlink to
In any case, I find it fairly easy to pull up earlier search results when I want them, because I always use Google's advanced search page.
That's the number we used to represent just-short-of-infinity when having nerd arguments as kids in the 80s.
;-)
Hmmm. I remember people using the word back in the '60s. But given that the word googol (10^10^100) itself goes back to 1939, I guess the term is even older (!) than I am.
Now that is a very good question. Or at least it would be if there were more than two MacBook Air owners.