Slightly off topic, but since we're on the subject of hybrids: I'd like to understand why manufacturers keep coming out with hybrid SUV's, but not hybrid minivans.
I migth need a minivan in the coming future, shopped around for an hybrid one, but the only answer I get is "we don't have a minivan, but we're coming out with an SUV".
It seems to me that an hybrid minivan would make more sense, no ? People who buy SUV's buy a status ticket, they get a big car with a big engine that they can brag about, so why would they care about fuel economy. On the other hand, the only reason to buy a minivan is the practicalside of it, so adding better fuel economy to it would be a huge advantage over the other brands.
That's really easy to counter: Buy a headphone and listening to some music. I did that and I don't hear the click-click of my keyboard any more ; so it's safe now !!
Hopefully they'll use something modern like ARC that tries to keep in cache stuff that have been read at least twice, NOT LRU !!
AIX uses LRU today, so when you do a backup, the system tries to keep all filesystems in cache (well that what was read last !!), and will happily swap your apps out to disk in order to do so (with default tuning parameter).
I fondly remember the days when I was running Linux with no swap, none whatsoever...
Unlike say latest versions of AIX where the OS gives higher priority to the cache than to apps, and you have to go deep in the tuning manual to read that the default probably doesn't suit many situation, please adjust maxperm etc...
What were they thinking ?
If they wanted to make sure that nobody ever read their emails (NSA or others), all they had to do is mention viagra in it !!
note also that the uk has the highest number of cctv
More cameras could mean more freedom. For some reason feedom is interpreted more and more often as "anonymity". The problem with complete anonymity is that there are no more responsability for your acts, therefore not much freedom left.
For example in a society where we would all be completely anonymous, I could kill you without consequences for me. How free would you be ?
On the other hand, in a society where anonymity is removed, everybody becomes responsible for their acts, therefore you could walk in the middle of the night anywhere without fearing others, because if somebody did something to you, they would have to answer their act (hence, chances are that nobody will not do anything to you in fear of the consequences).
The good thing about beer (assuming one considers bud being a beer), is that if you drink enough of it, all those concerns about privacy will just go away... So keep drinking and you will eventually see that you really didn't have to worry about anything.
About 10 or 15 years ago this realisation happened in what's called "Crew/Cockpit Resource Management". The aviation industry was based on the american culture, and applied around the world without consideration for the differences in cultures.
The examples given always included the fact that a japanese copilot would rather die than tell the captain s/he is making a mistake...
Yes, you are right, I myself was vaccinated with the BCG (still have the mark on my arm !) - not sure how I forgot that. By the way you have to get a shot every 10 years to keep it up to date.
Now I did a bit more research, and yes tuberculosis seems to still be one of the deadliest, one third of the world's population is infected with TB.
Now the good news: People do research against tuberculosis and have made huge progress very recently. So this story should have been has big as the one about ebola...
Ebola scares us in the west because we don't have a cure, and death is nearly certain. We, the rich people in the west, feel threaten and therefore spend the money on looking for a vaccine for it, but consider this:
Very few (less than a 100) die of ebola each year. The biggest killer in the world is tuberculosis. Why don't we look for a vaccine against it ? Oh yeah that's right if somebocy gets tuberculosis in the west, we cure them with antibiotics - the people who die because of tuberculosis are in the poor countries... who cares.
On the other hand, if those 20-30 Intel CPUs are rendering CGI for a film, or modeling a jet engine (and thus running near 100% load), a zSeries CPU would only be able to take on the work of 4-5 Intel CPUs, if that.
If you have something cpu intensive, doing lots of floating point calculation then get yourself a pseries (a fancy name for RS/6000) - that's what they're good at and where they still beat the crap out of intel. Then you can pick either linux or AIX, although I'd picked AIX and install their "linux bundle" (pre-compiled open source stuff).
Terrorist will use use something else that governments aren't looking for. For example the US was ready for an invasion by planes missiles etc... but on Sept. 11, the terrorists used something nobody expected.
I think the different governments should spend more money on trying to understand the causes of terrorism, and try to eliminate it at the source (which one could argue they already do with the war on terrorism).
You'll notice the article only mentions airborne threat... What about water ?
In north american culture the human naked body is a bad thing, and as a result, "to protect children", any movie with human naked body in it has all kind of restriction around it and around who can rent it, what time it can be aired etc....
There are still culture around the world (although less and less) where people just walk around naked. Last I have heard, the children in those culture are completely normal, and haven't turned blind for seeing nudity.
Another one you could look at is drugs, some very bad drugs responsible for thousand of deaths per year are legal (eg: alcohol), yet others which do not seem to be as harmfull aren't...
the reason normal EULAs are meaningless is because no contract terms were presented before money and product were exchanged.
Very good point, I hadn't thought of it... Now does that mean that it is legal to reverse engineer software etc... (since you own it) ? And I mean, DMCA not-with-standing.
CUUG, our local UNIX group, had a lawyer talking about this a couple of weeks ago. One thing that was very interresting was the fact that there is a good reason why Software is not sold to you, but licensed. If it were sold to you, it would become your property, and then a lot of laws would apply to it, giving you way to many rights, like re-selling it, reverse engineer it, etc... because it would be YOURS.
That is why the software industry has decided license software to you, because legally, when you license something to somebody, you can set whatever you want in the license, like "you shalt not reverse engineer this software", etc...
So, one would have to look at the license between SCO and IBM to be able to say if they can revoke it or not.
Learning to program in the 80's was simpler because the machines were more limited, and generally came with BASIC
On my TRS-80 BASIC was quite limited, plus admiting I used it would be admiting I actually used a Microsoft product at some point in my life;-) Anyway, I don't think programing back then was easier, if you wanted to do any kind of graphics you had to pretty much write it from scratch (there was no graphic library, engine etc...). If you wanted to get into something a bit advanced like having lower case characters in your output (no I am not kidding) or play "music" on the speaker, you had to learn Z80 assembler (I enjoyed it, but don't tell me it was simpler).
Beyond the technological limitation there was a culture thing too. Most kids today have access to a computer and can easily have access to somebody who has a clue about computers. Public libraries carry a lot of books about computing and programing these days.... Going online you can find documentation on pretty much anything, and even find people who can help you.
I had to buy my first computer which cost me the wages of working for two summers full time, and any adult I knew at the time thought it was a waste and that I should have bought a moped instead. To get books I had to go to specialized stores, and books were very expensive.
I know you're jocking, but you wouldn't believe how many users make that mistake. We double the number of CPU on a box, and the users always ask "so, are things going to go twice as fast now ?".
I used to try to explain that all processes have to be separated in what can be parralelised, and the part that is serial and can no advantage of multiprocessors... Now I go straigth to: If you can harvest your field in 9 days with one combine, then you should be able to harvest it in 1 day with 9 combine - but 9 women won't be able to produce a baby in 1 month...
That usually get them thinking, and I don't get any more question !!
In theory you are right, but the case of the poll tax proved you wrong. This was one of those "written in stone" thing that you couldn't go to a judge in order to have it changed, yet the English people fought it until it got changed...
For having lived in both system (common law and written law) I am still undecided which system is the best. They both have advantages, and cons.
One of the big advantage of the written law is that the little guy can go to the big guy with the book and say: "Look this is what's written". In countries with written laws, typically there are books for the little guy with all the explanation in plain language of what the law actually means. This is way easier to know what one is entitled to etc... rather than having to always resort to a lawyer, which might be wrong since in the end only do the judge decides.
Another big reason why a lot of people implement snapshot differently than NetApps, is to avoid shooting yourself in the foot. With NetApps, the snapshot data is kept on the same volume as the data itself, which leads to situation where you jump from say 50% usage to 99% just like that overnight (the snapshot area is allowed to run over the data area). This is quite a delicate situation as deleting files makes things worse (you have to get rid of old snapshots to free up space). I have seen big production database taken to their knees because of this.
On the other hand, the other implementations are a bit slower because the blocks are copied instead of being just not deleted, but snapshots never take space from data. The implementer has to make the choice, space control and simple understanding of space vs. speed to snapshot and recovery.
"Note that StarOffice, the full product, is not open source. It becomes open source (and integrated into Open Office) as features trickle into the public domain. Certain parts of StarOffice are tied up in IP restrictions. Fortunately they are not too important."
True, but that means that you can buy a hell of an office product that work on several different platform including Linux from SUN for.... 35$ !!
I believe the main reason they have to charge for it is because there are a lot of nice looking fonts in it that SUN doesn't own. Now if you are ready to draw those fonts for us for free and put them in OpenOffice, maybe we wouldn't need StarOffice.Open source is good, but that doesn't mean that anything not open source is evil.
Making people speak with an accent to make them another nationality is a very American thing.
Sorry long post (rant), but this is one of my my pet peeve....
Have you seen the movie "Chocolate" ? Actors talking english with a french accent, so that we know that they are in France !! Well I spent a lot of time in France, and people there tend to speak french, not english with a french accent !!
Have you seen "Home Alone" ? The funniest movie ever. I don't mean for the plot, but when they get to the airport in France, nobody in the whole airport speaks french with a french accent, all the supposed french people have a heavy american accent, that is so funny !! Especially that it is obvious that the airport part of the movie was made in France (you can recognize CDG, which I think would be quite difficult to re-construct in a studio)... I believe there are 55 million or so people who speak french with a fench accent in France, you'd think it'd be easier to hire a couple of them, rather than fly somebody in to speak with an american accent !!
Slashdot Mirror
What's broken on UNIX ?
Pipes get broken regularly, hence the broken pipe error message !!
Slightly off topic, but since we're on the subject of hybrids: I'd like to understand why manufacturers keep coming out with hybrid SUV's, but not hybrid minivans.
I migth need a minivan in the coming future, shopped around for an hybrid one, but the only answer I get is "we don't have a minivan, but we're coming out with an SUV".
It seems to me that an hybrid minivan would make more sense, no ? People who buy SUV's buy a status ticket, they get a big car with a big engine that they can brag about, so why would they care about fuel economy. On the other hand, the only reason to buy a minivan is the practicalside of it, so adding better fuel economy to it would be a huge advantage over the other brands.
Am I confused here ??
That's really easy to counter: Buy a headphone and listening to some music. I did that and I don't hear the click-click of my keyboard any more ; so it's safe now !!
AIX uses LRU today, so when you do a backup, the system tries to keep all filesystems in cache (well that what was read last !!), and will happily swap your apps out to disk in order to do so (with default tuning parameter).
I fondly remember the days when I was running Linux with no swap, none whatsoever...
Unlike say latest versions of AIX where the OS gives higher priority to the cache than to apps, and you have to go deep in the tuning manual to read that the default probably doesn't suit many situation, please adjust maxperm etc...
What were they thinking ?
If they wanted to make sure that nobody ever read their emails (NSA or others), all they had to do is mention viagra in it !!
note also that the uk has the highest number of cctv
More cameras could mean more freedom. For some reason feedom is interpreted more and more often as "anonymity". The problem with complete anonymity is that there are no more responsability for your acts, therefore not much freedom left.
For example in a society where we would all be completely anonymous, I could kill you without consequences for me. How free would you be ?
On the other hand, in a society where anonymity is removed, everybody becomes responsible for their acts, therefore you could walk in the middle of the night anywhere without fearing others, because if somebody did something to you, they would have to answer their act (hence, chances are that nobody will not do anything to you in fear of the consequences).
Cameras everywhere might enhanced freedom...
The good thing about beer (assuming one considers bud being a beer), is that if you drink enough of it, all those concerns about privacy will just go away... So keep drinking and you will eventually see that you really didn't have to worry about anything.
About 10 or 15 years ago this realisation happened in what's called "Crew/Cockpit Resource Management". The aviation industry was based on the american culture, and applied around the world without consideration for the differences in cultures.
The examples given always included the fact that a japanese copilot would rather die than tell the captain s/he is making a mistake...
Apple has now switch to a BSD system, and everybody knows that BSD is dead. So Apple should be doubly dead very soon...
Yes, you are right, I myself was vaccinated with the BCG (still have the mark on my arm !) - not sure how I forgot that. By the way you have to get a shot every 10 years to keep it up to date.
Now I did a bit more research, and yes tuberculosis seems to still be one of the deadliest, one third of the world's population is infected with TB. Now the good news: People do research against tuberculosis and have made huge progress very recently. So this story should have been has big as the one about ebola...
Ebola scares us in the west because we don't have a cure, and death is nearly certain. We, the rich people in the west, feel threaten and therefore spend the money on looking for a vaccine for it, but consider this:
Very few (less than a 100) die of ebola each year. The biggest killer in the world is tuberculosis. Why don't we look for a vaccine against it ? Oh yeah that's right if somebocy gets tuberculosis in the west, we cure them with antibiotics - the people who die because of tuberculosis are in the poor countries... who cares.
On the other hand, if those 20-30 Intel CPUs are rendering CGI for a film, or modeling a jet engine (and thus running near 100% load), a zSeries CPU would only be able to take on the work of 4-5 Intel CPUs, if that.
If you have something cpu intensive, doing lots of floating point calculation then get yourself a pseries (a fancy name for RS/6000) - that's what they're good at and where they still beat the crap out of intel. Then you can pick either linux or AIX, although I'd picked AIX and install their "linux bundle" (pre-compiled open source stuff).
Terrorist will use use something else that governments aren't looking for. For example the US was ready for an invasion by planes missiles etc... but on Sept. 11, the terrorists used something nobody expected.
I think the different governments should spend more money on trying to understand the causes of terrorism, and try to eliminate it at the source (which one could argue they already do with the war on terrorism).
You'll notice the article only mentions airborne threat... What about water ?
In north american culture the human naked body is a bad thing, and as a result, "to protect children", any movie with human naked body in it has all kind of restriction around it and around who can rent it, what time it can be aired etc....
There are still culture around the world (although less and less) where people just walk around naked. Last I have heard, the children in those culture are completely normal, and haven't turned blind for seeing nudity.
Another one you could look at is drugs, some very bad drugs responsible for thousand of deaths per year are legal (eg: alcohol), yet others which do not seem to be as harmfull aren't...
So in Egypt they have a thing about religion...
the reason normal EULAs are meaningless is because no contract terms were presented before money and product were exchanged.
Very good point, I hadn't thought of it... Now does that mean that it is legal to reverse engineer software etc... (since you own it) ? And I mean, DMCA not-with-standing.
If only they read slashdot, they'd have known about this...
CUUG, our local UNIX group, had a lawyer talking about this a couple of weeks ago. One thing that was very interresting was the fact that there is a good reason why Software is not sold to you, but licensed. If it were sold to you, it would become your property, and then a lot of laws would apply to it, giving you way to many rights, like re-selling it, reverse engineer it, etc... because it would be YOURS.
That is why the software industry has decided license software to you, because legally, when you license something to somebody, you can set whatever you want in the license, like "you shalt not reverse engineer this software", etc...
So, one would have to look at the license between SCO and IBM to be able to say if they can revoke it or not.
Learning to program in the 80's was simpler because the machines were more limited, and generally came with BASIC
;-) Anyway, I don't think programing back then was easier, if you wanted to do any kind of graphics you had to pretty much write it from scratch (there was no graphic library, engine etc...). If you wanted to get into something a bit advanced like having lower case characters in your output (no I am not kidding) or play "music" on the speaker, you had to learn Z80 assembler (I enjoyed it, but don't tell me it was simpler).
On my TRS-80 BASIC was quite limited, plus admiting I used it would be admiting I actually used a Microsoft product at some point in my life
Beyond the technological limitation there was a culture thing too. Most kids today have access to a computer and can easily have access to somebody who has a clue about computers. Public libraries carry a lot of books about computing and programing these days.... Going online you can find documentation on pretty much anything, and even find people who can help you.
I had to buy my first computer which cost me the wages of working for two summers full time, and any adult I knew at the time thought it was a waste and that I should have bought a moped instead. To get books I had to go to specialized stores, and books were very expensive.
Simpler ? I think not.
I know you're jocking, but you wouldn't believe how many users make that mistake. We double the number of CPU on a box, and the users always ask "so, are things going to go twice as fast now ?".
I used to try to explain that all processes have to be separated in what can be parralelised, and the part that is serial and can no advantage of multiprocessors... Now I go straigth to: If you can harvest your field in 9 days with one combine, then you should be able to harvest it in 1 day with 9 combine - but 9 women won't be able to produce a baby in 1 month...
That usually get them thinking, and I don't get any more question !!
In theory you are right, but the case of the poll tax proved you wrong. This was one of those "written in stone" thing that you couldn't go to a judge in order to have it changed, yet the English people fought it until it got changed...
For having lived in both system (common law and written law) I am still undecided which system is the best. They both have advantages, and cons.
One of the big advantage of the written law is that the little guy can go to the big guy with the book and say: "Look this is what's written". In countries with written laws, typically there are books for the little guy with all the explanation in plain language of what the law actually means. This is way easier to know what one is entitled to etc... rather than having to always resort to a lawyer, which might be wrong since in the end only do the judge decides.
Another big reason why a lot of people implement snapshot differently than NetApps, is to avoid shooting yourself in the foot. With NetApps, the snapshot data is kept on the same volume as the data itself, which leads to situation where you jump from say 50% usage to 99% just like that overnight (the snapshot area is allowed to run over the data area). This is quite a delicate situation as deleting files makes things worse (you have to get rid of old snapshots to free up space). I have seen big production database taken to their knees because of this.
On the other hand, the other implementations are a bit slower because the blocks are copied instead of being just not deleted, but snapshots never take space from data. The implementer has to make the choice, space control and simple understanding of space vs. speed to snapshot and recovery.
"Note that StarOffice, the full product, is not open source. It becomes open source (and integrated into Open Office) as features trickle into the public domain. Certain parts of StarOffice are tied up in IP restrictions. Fortunately they are not too important."
True, but that means that you can buy a hell of an office product that work on several different platform including Linux from SUN for.... 35$ !!
I believe the main reason they have to charge for it is because there are a lot of nice looking fonts in it that SUN doesn't own. Now if you are ready to draw those fonts for us for free and put them in OpenOffice, maybe we wouldn't need StarOffice.Open source is good, but that doesn't mean that anything not open source is evil.
Making people speak with an accent to make them another nationality is a very American thing.
Sorry long post (rant), but this is one of my my pet peeve....
Have you seen the movie "Chocolate" ? Actors talking english with a french accent, so that we know that they are in France !! Well I spent a lot of time in France, and people there tend to speak french, not english with a french accent !!
Have you seen "Home Alone" ? The funniest movie ever. I don't mean for the plot, but when they get to the airport in France, nobody in the whole airport speaks french with a french accent, all the supposed french people have a heavy american accent, that is so funny !! Especially that it is obvious that the airport part of the movie was made in France (you can recognize CDG, which I think would be quite difficult to re-construct in a studio)... I believe there are 55 million or so people who speak french with a fench accent in France, you'd think it'd be easier to hire a couple of them, rather than fly somebody in to speak with an american accent !!
"but never once mentions consumer privacy concerns. Guess that kind of stuff just isn't important anymore"
/ never was and still isn't that important /
s/ just isn't important anymore
Businesses never were interrested in privacy issue, and it's not really their problem anyway. It's up to us, consumers, to remind them.