Scientology shows questionable credibility? Get right out of town!
For an organisation that thinks we're all possessed by dead aliens using the ramblings of a drug addled hack who freely admitted he was in it for the money as the gospel, you can colour me shocked that they might have a somewhat warped view of the rest of the universe.
Someone has already pointed out that if you want a rock-solid stable video card under Linux, buy a board with an Intel G965 or G33/35 chipset, so I won't make that argument (although I will say the drivers aren't completely rock solid and lack many of the options I'm used to with the nVidia driver, like OGL vsync to stop "tearing" when I play full screen video).
However, I will say that ATI's Linux drivers have come on leaps and bounds since AMD took the helm. They're still sucky, but they now only about twice as sucky as nVidia, as opposed to the binary equivalent of disemboweling yourself with a grapefruit spoon. The fact that, thanks to AMD publishing the specs for the silicon, a fully OSS, clean room, accelerated driver is now possible is also a colossal boon, and I suspect that within a few months the RadeonHD driver will be featureful and stable enough to be more than adequate for most people, once the distros start picking up on it.
Then, of course, it'd be nice if someone could write a way of accelerating video so that all us Linux users without eleventy billion jiggahurtz processors could play back 1080p H.264...
I'd love to mod you up insightful, because you make the GP's point even better than he does. There's a vocal minority (hopefully it's a minority anyway) of Americans, like yourself, that seem to love to say "fuck you rest of world, we're better, so fnaar!". It's on the level of the sort of humour you get up to in the playground when you're six.
Individually, all of the americans I've met in person and on the internet (even the ones who pretend to be Canadian - by the way, you need to work on your accents;)) has been as nice as pie. But as a country you seem terribly good at thinking the world revolves around you. Most Brits learned this lesson last century, IMHO to the long-term benefit of the country. I'd like to think the US can too.
it's pretty easy to throttle a steward using the shoulder strap on your carry-on.
Thanks a bunch for pointing that out to them. They're now making me empty out my hand luggage, throw away the bag and superglue the contents to my naked flesh in the name of safety. I wish I was a travelling salesman for cushions rather than Rubiks cubes and fresh fish.
Screw planes, I'm going by boat.
So you admit to attempting to circumvent security and anti-terrorism measures? Very interesting, owlnation. Or should I call you Achmed?
If it's a VMWare box, I imagine nothing less than RAIDed 10/15k SAS drives will do - our main ESX cluster at work is six IBM x3850's, each with a bunch of 300GB 10k SAS drives in RAID10 for the system drives, and for storage a fibre LUN's into the SAN. Which, oddly enough, is packed to the gunnels with ~100TB worth of cheap, poorly performing SATA discs much like the WD one:)
In essence, the perfect combination - a few expensive, high performance drives where performance really matters (yep, we have DB servers running in VM's because of the HA aspect) hooked into bigger and cheaper drives where the prime motivator is large scale, economical storage.
Sustained thrashing is a fact of life when you're talking about large scale virtual environments, especially where thrash-happy windows is concerned. Where's my HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/ YouveGotSixteenFuckingGigsOfRamYouRetardedMachine WhyInTheNameOfCrapperoonyAreYouSwapping registry key?
Edit: damn lameness filter. Can't I have a "allow me to post transparently ficticious registry keys" checkbox in my profile? Sheesh.
So I'm not sure even the "competition is good for everyone" argument particularly applies here.
If even the two Opera users that there are* can keep Firefox on their toes, and by extension Microsoft and Apple, then everybody wins.
*In this thread at least, those two Opera users appear to be myself and whitelarker. For me and the way I browse, Firefox doesn't even come close, but I believe the point of this addendum, Acid $integer tests and Firefox is and always has been that whatever browser the user is using shouldn't matter when everyone sticks to the standards.
I guess it depends on your requirements. I have two 1TB GP's that I use for media storage; in sequential copies (i.e. copying my data on to the drive in the first place) they averaged 50-60MB/s, with the preceding drive (a WD 750GB AAKS) managed more like 55-62MB/s when I initially loaded it up. That's the only tim eI've ever maxed out this drive, as even recording three DVB streams to it and watching two from it simultaneously keeps it barely ticking over.
As noted, it's byt far the quietest and coolest drive I've ever used, aprticularly when seeking. I'm prepared to wait an extra half hour in an eight hour rsync job if that's the case. It's just a case of priorities; fast, quiet, cheap. Pick any two. Balls to the wall performance has never been the be-all and end-all for any component in the consumer arena IME.
Geographically distributed? Basement dwellers usually only have the one basement, what with only having one mother. I, for one, wouldn't welcome cloning my matriarchal overlord.
If this goes ahead (which I don't think it will as RIPA is quite specific on the matter), I'm all for polluting the Phorm database. A screen scraper that, for example, every few minutes: Picked two random words from a dictionary Plugged them into a random search engine (google, youtube, ask... list is endless) Visited n of the first i links Visited x of the links on each of those pages, and thereafter a 5% chance of following any other link on that page
would do a great job of confusing the hell out of anything trying to track your browsing habits.
Exactly who would you be defrauding though? Unless it becomes illegal to browse random websites? If they're making money on a false assumption (i.e. every website you visit is something you're interested in buying something related to it) then how is it your fault if your predeliction for browsing random rubbish results in them feeding you worthless data? Is the pattern above really that difficult from this http://xkcd.com/214/ ? Maybe when our corporate plutocracies make not providing Innovative Marketing Solutions the Ability to Upsell via Creative Strategic Online-Enabled Mandatory Advertarial Enablement Solutions a criminal offence, until then they can fuck right off. I don't click on ads, I don't even look at ads, I've been trained since I was young enough to see to ignore ads. Hell, everyone who cold calls gets added to a list of Companies I Will Never Buy Anthing From. You can't force me to think ads are relevant, or even essential.
Disclaimer: I am not a BT customer, as in the past they have made their intentions of fucking over the user for the pursuit of greater profits highly visible to me. Their marketing and former monopoly status (switly turning into another monopoly that *isn't* state controlled), combined with most non-techies ignorance of how the internet works has made them exceptionally complacent, to the extent that the UK is beginning to resemble the US's dire telecoms market.
Three Ubuntu for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven Damn Small Linux for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine Linspire for Mortal Men doomed to die, One Debian for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. One Debian to rule them all, One slocate to find them, One distro to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the Land of Debian where the apt repositories lie.
Agree. I'm a self-taught IT professional that still doesn't have a qualification to his name. I got a computer for my 21st birthday and, instead of doing any work on my degree, spent all day tinkering with it - for as long as I've remembered I've not liked using anything unless I knew how it worked, and now that uni was forcing me into using a computer I had to figure it out.
Cut a long story short and I bollocks up my degreee because I've spent all my time fiddling with computers. Yet somehow I get an IT job and end up writing a crappy PHP-based job management system. I then find myself as a sysadmin for a financial startup. Startup gets bought and I'm transferred across to a Big Fat Sysadmin job and am told at the beginning that I'll have to switch to helpdesk because, frankly, this company doesn't employ people like me and I'm only here because it's illegal to sack me.
2 months later and my line manager is telling me I know more about how windows works than most of the MCSE's, and more about Linux that the RHCT's and the DBA's put together. Given that the old -> new company migration is still happening, I get my Big Fat Sysadmin role. Almost all the MCSE's are afraid of the command line and call me "Linux boy" yet mysteriously within a week the backups on their 12-node ESX cluster are working reliably again and there's a security policy in place to stop everyone logging in as root (3hrs VM downtime in my first week from people running the wrong command as root).
Moral of the story? If the circumstances are right, you can get by just fine without any qualifications, and IMHO my job is more interesting because I took the path less trodden and learnt computers from the CPU upwards (still can't figure out Excel to save my life). When you do get qualifications, alot of them are meaningless when compared to actual experience doing things (and most employers are aware of this - if you have experience, make a BIG thing of it) - I've sat through my MCSA, and precious little of that is about what the computer is actually doing (how can you talk about AD without understanding DNS, LDAP and Kerberos? Without that crucial understanding, how can you comprehend at what the data looks like, what paths the data is taking, how it is stored and transmitted, and how a failure at any of these different points will manifest itself?), it's about what buttons to press. Ambiguous questions usually result in "Use and/or buy Microsoft $software" answers being the right ones. Alot of employers are only looking for people who know which $software to buy, and how to use it The Microsoft Way. Others are looking for people to solve problems. MCS* typically help with the former, but (with the right sort of person) help with the latter too.
Summary fo the moral: interviewers, I hope to god you actually read those CV's and don't just blindly grep for MCSA or MCSE because, if you do, some desperate company going through the dregs of monster.com is going to be pilfering a colossal asset to the company from under your nose.
Sincerely, Hugely obstinate and arrogant sysadmin;)
Thankfully for me, my "is this person a horrible human being?" questions get a higher priority on my Relationship Alpha Testing questionnaire than my "does this person believe in some form of religion?" questions:)
Only if you define a shortcut as a much shorter route that gets you to the wrong destination.
As an often-scientific athiest, I'm prepared to date people from any different religions, as long as we're both content to let one anothers belief systems not interfere with our love life. But I have difficulty talking to anyone who believes a few miniscule globules of rock millions of miles away can effect something as complex as our personalities and day-to-day activities. Same for alot of/.'ers I imagine - you can appreciate someone who's put a lot of thought into their belief system and come to their own conclusion and is happy with it and the way it helps them live their life - systems of belief are an entirely human construct and are thus irrational by default:) But people who have convinced themselves that astrology exists and then try to subvert physics with claptrap about subtle variations in gravitic attractions and how it aligns iron particles in your blood which short-circuit synapses into taking certain descisions? All without a shred of proof? All without a shred of evidence, even? You're a moron and I'm incapable of respecting your intellect.
Yes, I realise it's not their whole personality (don't get me wrong, I've met hundreds of lovely people who happened to believe in something ridiculous), but to me it's just like talking to someone with LIAR tattoed across their forehead and taking everything they say at face value.
Agree 100%. I've got to the stage where if I see something list MySQL support without Postgres support, I'm generally of the opinion they're not taking things seriously enough:) Postgres has been by DB of choice for about two years now, and I've yet to have it balls up on me, and speed has never been an issue - like you say, as soon as you start doing non-trivial stuff, Postgres utterly thrashes MySQL.
The Royal Mail had its own miniature underground system in London, used to ferry the post between the capital's various sorting offices - quite surprised they weren't mentioned in the blurb even if they did take their inspiration from the Chicago system.
Don't think this idea would have much traction for individual deliveries though - tunnels are farkin' expensive, especially when you're going underneath stuff that's already been built over the top. Regional/district depots though, yes. Bit like a postal service sorting office then:)
Is that why my dump trucks of data keep getting stuck in the tubes? It's entirely due to corpses? Brings a whole new meaning to the term "bandwidth throttling" - "use too much of the wrong data and we'll strangle you!".
N.B. I'm patenting the idea of strangling people for using the internet in the wrong way. So if you want to use it Comcast (BTW, you might want to just call it 'permanent sentience delaying' in the T's and C's) you're going to have to pay me for it.
As t'other poster pointed out; CFS = Completely Fair Scheduling = CPU scheduler = what process gets how much of the CPU CFQ = Completely Fair Queuing = I/O scheduler = what process gets how much of the hard disc
FWIW, on our database loads at least, I find that whilst deadline tends to give the lowest single transaction rate, CFQ gives better overall performance (i.e. more transactions served) over a given time period. Anyone tried the CFQ, deadline and no-op schedulers on a solid state disc yet?
Aye, I didn't expect they were - it's just a shock to see such a huge improvement almost overnight:D Development of the BSD's might appear glacial to those, like me, who are used to Linux, but it's refreshing to see that when they finally implement things they tend to get it very, very right.
Yeah, I've spent enough (down)time repairing MyISAM's to care about the supposed speed benefit any more - I'm a firm Postgres fan as well. On mine and others machines, the new 8.3 is blazingly fast, and there was a bench that I can't find any more that showed it trouncing MySQL for speed, and I've since ported all my little homebrew database thingies over to it. Shame that alot of apps only support MySQL (damn you, MythTV!).
Very, very nice scaling performance under PGSQL is evident in the PDF, and I've no reason to assume the benches aren't legit. I think part fo the reason that PG was traditionally slower than MySQL was that it did lots of complicated locking to provide better scalability across processors, whereas we see MySQL performance dropping off after we go to more than eight cores. I think this was the same philosophy Sun took with "Slowaris", which was also far more scalabe than Linux at the time the moniker was in widespread use.
Still, I hope Linux can at least match this sort of superb scalability. CFS is fairly new, and I know there's optimisation work been done to it in.24 and.25, although it was a little sad to see the first iteration of CFS performing more poorly than its predecessor (and, if this is the case, I can see why Linus stonewalled CK's patches for so long, since they were mainly tested on desktop workloads). Are there any apples-to-apples comparisons out there that test various flavours and versions of Linux and BSD with a wide range of benchmarks? At the best review sites do a few benches with MySQL, and six months later everything has changed so it's incredibly difficult to do good performance comparisons.
Even so, it's refreshing to see precious little of the "BSD fudged their benchmarks!" trollspeak in the LKML thread, and plenty of talk about how to make Linux better. Open source is hippy capitalism - it also needs healthy competition to keep it in check:)
Hey, we can at least be thankful that they didn't move the "back" button to the bottom right hand corner, remove the option to configure connection settings from within the app itself, reverse the direction of scrolling (i.e. scroll right and left to go up and down and vice versa), raster bitmaps and GIF files in CMYK as opposed to RGB and turn sentences begining with prepositions into French swearing. All these new UI paradigms we're missing out on!
In a rare moment of originality, a young MS exec, having just read the hitch hikers guide, sent a binary of IE7 back in time in an attempt to sue the companies developing firefox, opera and a million and one other more inventive browsers in the future for copying IE's features. Unfortunately, the court dismissed the new IE interface as a crude hoax perpetrated by 4chan, and the budding young exec was made Ballmer's personal chair man.
Not that I think the IE7 interface is an abomination of consistency and style or anything;)
Not that anyone will see this comment, but I've just found out that google calculator is a brilliant way of measuring the actual time cost of one, two, three nines:
Slashdot Mirror
Scientology shows questionable credibility? Get right out of town!
For an organisation that thinks we're all possessed by dead aliens using the ramblings of a drug addled hack who freely admitted he was in it for the money as the gospel, you can colour me shocked that they might have a somewhat warped view of the rest of the universe.
Someone has already pointed out that if you want a rock-solid stable video card under Linux, buy a board with an Intel G965 or G33/35 chipset, so I won't make that argument (although I will say the drivers aren't completely rock solid and lack many of the options I'm used to with the nVidia driver, like OGL vsync to stop "tearing" when I play full screen video).
However, I will say that ATI's Linux drivers have come on leaps and bounds since AMD took the helm. They're still sucky, but they now only about twice as sucky as nVidia, as opposed to the binary equivalent of disemboweling yourself with a grapefruit spoon. The fact that, thanks to AMD publishing the specs for the silicon, a fully OSS, clean room, accelerated driver is now possible is also a colossal boon, and I suspect that within a few months the RadeonHD driver will be featureful and stable enough to be more than adequate for most people, once the distros start picking up on it.
Then, of course, it'd be nice if someone could write a way of accelerating video so that all us Linux users without eleventy billion jiggahurtz processors could play back 1080p H.264...
I'd love to mod you up insightful, because you make the GP's point even better than he does. There's a vocal minority (hopefully it's a minority anyway) of Americans, like yourself, that seem to love to say "fuck you rest of world, we're better, so fnaar!". It's on the level of the sort of humour you get up to in the playground when you're six.
;)) has been as nice as pie. But as a country you seem terribly good at thinking the world revolves around you. Most Brits learned this lesson last century, IMHO to the long-term benefit of the country. I'd like to think the US can too.
Individually, all of the americans I've met in person and on the internet (even the ones who pretend to be Canadian - by the way, you need to work on your accents
it's pretty easy to throttle a steward using the shoulder strap on your carry-on.
;)
Thanks a bunch for pointing that out to them. They're now making me empty out my hand luggage, throw away the bag and superglue the contents to my naked flesh in the name of safety. I wish I was a travelling salesman for cushions rather than Rubiks cubes and fresh fish.
Screw planes, I'm going by boat.
So you admit to attempting to circumvent security and anti-terrorism measures? Very interesting, owlnation. Or should I call you Achmed?
If it's a VMWare box, I imagine nothing less than RAIDed 10/15k SAS drives will do - our main ESX cluster at work is six IBM x3850's, each with a bunch of 300GB 10k SAS drives in RAID10 for the system drives, and for storage a fibre LUN's into the SAN. Which, oddly enough, is packed to the gunnels with ~100TB worth of cheap, poorly performing SATA discs much like the WD one :)
In essence, the perfect combination - a few expensive, high performance drives where performance really matters (yep, we have DB servers running in VM's because of the HA aspect) hooked into bigger and cheaper drives where the prime motivator is large scale, economical storage.
Sustained thrashing is a fact of life when you're talking about large scale virtual environments, especially where thrash-happy windows is concerned. Where's my HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/ YouveGotSixteenFuckingGigsOfRamYouRetardedMachine WhyInTheNameOfCrapperoonyAreYouSwapping registry key?
Edit: damn lameness filter. Can't I have a "allow me to post transparently ficticious registry keys" checkbox in my profile? Sheesh.
So I'm not sure even the "competition is good for everyone" argument particularly applies here.
If even the two Opera users that there are* can keep Firefox on their toes, and by extension Microsoft and Apple, then everybody wins.
*In this thread at least, those two Opera users appear to be myself and whitelarker. For me and the way I browse, Firefox doesn't even come close, but I believe the point of this addendum, Acid $integer tests and Firefox is and always has been that whatever browser the user is using shouldn't matter when everyone sticks to the standards.
I guess it depends on your requirements. I have two 1TB GP's that I use for media storage; in sequential copies (i.e. copying my data on to the drive in the first place) they averaged 50-60MB/s, with the preceding drive (a WD 750GB AAKS) managed more like 55-62MB/s when I initially loaded it up. That's the only tim eI've ever maxed out this drive, as even recording three DVB streams to it and watching two from it simultaneously keeps it barely ticking over.
As noted, it's byt far the quietest and coolest drive I've ever used, aprticularly when seeking. I'm prepared to wait an extra half hour in an eight hour rsync job if that's the case. It's just a case of priorities; fast, quiet, cheap. Pick any two. Balls to the wall performance has never been the be-all and end-all for any component in the consumer arena IME.
Not when you can buy two 1TB hard drives for the price of a BD burner and some blank discs.
Geographically distributed? Basement dwellers usually only have the one basement, what with only having one mother. I, for one, wouldn't welcome cloning my matriarchal overlord.
If this goes ahead (which I don't think it will as RIPA is quite specific on the matter), I'm all for polluting the Phorm database. A screen scraper that, for example, every few minutes:
Picked two random words from a dictionary
Plugged them into a random search engine (google, youtube, ask... list is endless)
Visited n of the first i links
Visited x of the links on each of those pages, and thereafter a 5% chance of following any other link on that page
would do a great job of confusing the hell out of anything trying to track your browsing habits.
Exactly who would you be defrauding though? Unless it becomes illegal to browse random websites? If they're making money on a false assumption (i.e. every website you visit is something you're interested in buying something related to it) then how is it your fault if your predeliction for browsing random rubbish results in them feeding you worthless data? Is the pattern above really that difficult from this http://xkcd.com/214/ ? Maybe when our corporate plutocracies make not providing Innovative Marketing Solutions the Ability to Upsell via Creative Strategic Online-Enabled Mandatory Advertarial Enablement Solutions a criminal offence, until then they can fuck right off. I don't click on ads, I don't even look at ads, I've been trained since I was young enough to see to ignore ads. Hell, everyone who cold calls gets added to a list of Companies I Will Never Buy Anthing From. You can't force me to think ads are relevant, or even essential.
Disclaimer: I am not a BT customer, as in the past they have made their intentions of fucking over the user for the pursuit of greater profits highly visible to me. Their marketing and former monopoly status (switly turning into another monopoly that *isn't* state controlled), combined with most non-techies ignorance of how the internet works has made them exceptionally complacent, to the extent that the UK is beginning to resemble the US's dire telecoms market.
Three Ubuntu for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven Damn Small Linux for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine Linspire for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One Debian for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Debian to rule them all, One slocate to find them,
One distro to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Debian where the apt repositories lie.
http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros
Agree. I'm a self-taught IT professional that still doesn't have a qualification to his name. I got a computer for my 21st birthday and, instead of doing any work on my degree, spent all day tinkering with it - for as long as I've remembered I've not liked using anything unless I knew how it worked, and now that uni was forcing me into using a computer I had to figure it out.
;)
Cut a long story short and I bollocks up my degreee because I've spent all my time fiddling with computers. Yet somehow I get an IT job and end up writing a crappy PHP-based job management system. I then find myself as a sysadmin for a financial startup. Startup gets bought and I'm transferred across to a Big Fat Sysadmin job and am told at the beginning that I'll have to switch to helpdesk because, frankly, this company doesn't employ people like me and I'm only here because it's illegal to sack me.
2 months later and my line manager is telling me I know more about how windows works than most of the MCSE's, and more about Linux that the RHCT's and the DBA's put together. Given that the old -> new company migration is still happening, I get my Big Fat Sysadmin role. Almost all the MCSE's are afraid of the command line and call me "Linux boy" yet mysteriously within a week the backups on their 12-node ESX cluster are working reliably again and there's a security policy in place to stop everyone logging in as root (3hrs VM downtime in my first week from people running the wrong command as root).
Moral of the story? If the circumstances are right, you can get by just fine without any qualifications, and IMHO my job is more interesting because I took the path less trodden and learnt computers from the CPU upwards (still can't figure out Excel to save my life). When you do get qualifications, alot of them are meaningless when compared to actual experience doing things (and most employers are aware of this - if you have experience, make a BIG thing of it) - I've sat through my MCSA, and precious little of that is about what the computer is actually doing (how can you talk about AD without understanding DNS, LDAP and Kerberos? Without that crucial understanding, how can you comprehend at what the data looks like, what paths the data is taking, how it is stored and transmitted, and how a failure at any of these different points will manifest itself?), it's about what buttons to press. Ambiguous questions usually result in "Use and/or buy Microsoft $software" answers being the right ones. Alot of employers are only looking for people who know which $software to buy, and how to use it The Microsoft Way. Others are looking for people to solve problems. MCS* typically help with the former, but (with the right sort of person) help with the latter too.
Summary fo the moral: interviewers, I hope to god you actually read those CV's and don't just blindly grep for MCSA or MCSE because, if you do, some desperate company going through the dregs of monster.com is going to be pilfering a colossal asset to the company from under your nose.
Sincerely,
Hugely obstinate and arrogant sysadmin
Thankfully for me, my "is this person a horrible human being?" questions get a higher priority on my Relationship Alpha Testing questionnaire than my "does this person believe in some form of religion?" questions :)
Only if you define a shortcut as a much shorter route that gets you to the wrong destination.
/.'ers I imagine - you can appreciate someone who's put a lot of thought into their belief system and come to their own conclusion and is happy with it and the way it helps them live their life - systems of belief are an entirely human construct and are thus irrational by default :) But people who have convinced themselves that astrology exists and then try to subvert physics with claptrap about subtle variations in gravitic attractions and how it aligns iron particles in your blood which short-circuit synapses into taking certain descisions? All without a shred of proof? All without a shred of evidence, even? You're a moron and I'm incapable of respecting your intellect.
/asbestos long johns
:)
As an often-scientific athiest, I'm prepared to date people from any different religions, as long as we're both content to let one anothers belief systems not interfere with our love life. But I have difficulty talking to anyone who believes a few miniscule globules of rock millions of miles away can effect something as complex as our personalities and day-to-day activities. Same for alot of
Yes, I realise it's not their whole personality (don't get me wrong, I've met hundreds of lovely people who happened to believe in something ridiculous), but to me it's just like talking to someone with LIAR tattoed across their forehead and taking everything they say at face value.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/astrology.html
P.S. A prize of fifty points and a bowl of raspberry jelly to the first person who correctly guesses my relationship status
Wouldn't it make more sense to put the DRM on the blueprints instead?
Agree 100%. I've got to the stage where if I see something list MySQL support without Postgres support, I'm generally of the opinion they're not taking things seriously enough :) Postgres has been by DB of choice for about two years now, and I've yet to have it balls up on me, and speed has never been an issue - like you say, as soon as you start doing non-trivial stuff, Postgres utterly thrashes MySQL.
The Royal Mail had its own miniature underground system in London, used to ferry the post between the capital's various sorting offices - quite surprised they weren't mentioned in the blurb even if they did take their inspiration from the Chicago system.
:)
Don't think this idea would have much traction for individual deliveries though - tunnels are farkin' expensive, especially when you're going underneath stuff that's already been built over the top. Regional/district depots though, yes. Bit like a postal service sorting office then
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway
On a related note, those of you who've seen Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere will already have seen lots of the tunnels.
Is that why my dump trucks of data keep getting stuck in the tubes? It's entirely due to corpses? Brings a whole new meaning to the term "bandwidth throttling" - "use too much of the wrong data and we'll strangle you!".
N.B. I'm patenting the idea of strangling people for using the internet in the wrong way. So if you want to use it Comcast (BTW, you might want to just call it 'permanent sentience delaying' in the T's and C's) you're going to have to pay me for it.
As t'other poster pointed out;
CFS = Completely Fair Scheduling = CPU scheduler = what process gets how much of the CPU
CFQ = Completely Fair Queuing = I/O scheduler = what process gets how much of the hard disc
FWIW, on our database loads at least, I find that whilst deadline tends to give the lowest single transaction rate, CFQ gives better overall performance (i.e. more transactions served) over a given time period. Anyone tried the CFQ, deadline and no-op schedulers on a solid state disc yet?
Aye, I didn't expect they were - it's just a shock to see such a huge improvement almost overnight :D Development of the BSD's might appear glacial to those, like me, who are used to Linux, but it's refreshing to see that when they finally implement things they tend to get it very, very right.
Yeah, I've spent enough (down)time repairing MyISAM's to care about the supposed speed benefit any more - I'm a firm Postgres fan as well. On mine and others machines, the new 8.3 is blazingly fast, and there was a bench that I can't find any more that showed it trouncing MySQL for speed, and I've since ported all my little homebrew database thingies over to it. Shame that alot of apps only support MySQL (damn you, MythTV!).
Very, very nice scaling performance under PGSQL is evident in the PDF, and I've no reason to assume the benches aren't legit. I think part fo the reason that PG was traditionally slower than MySQL was that it did lots of complicated locking to provide better scalability across processors, whereas we see MySQL performance dropping off after we go to more than eight cores. I think this was the same philosophy Sun took with "Slowaris", which was also far more scalabe than Linux at the time the moniker was in widespread use.
.24 and .25, although it was a little sad to see the first iteration of CFS performing more poorly than its predecessor (and, if this is the case, I can see why Linus stonewalled CK's patches for so long, since they were mainly tested on desktop workloads). Are there any apples-to-apples comparisons out there that test various flavours and versions of Linux and BSD with a wide range of benchmarks? At the best review sites do a few benches with MySQL, and six months later everything has changed so it's incredibly difficult to do good performance comparisons.
:)
Still, I hope Linux can at least match this sort of superb scalability. CFS is fairly new, and I know there's optimisation work been done to it in
Even so, it's refreshing to see precious little of the "BSD fudged their benchmarks!" trollspeak in the LKML thread, and plenty of talk about how to make Linux better. Open source is hippy capitalism - it also needs healthy competition to keep it in check
Offtopic: bug linked to in the LKML pointed me at this http://www.latencytop.org/ Sounds quite nifty
I think the same can be said for any OS that isn't win32.
Hey, we can at least be thankful that they didn't move the "back" button to the bottom right hand corner, remove the option to configure connection settings from within the app itself, reverse the direction of scrolling (i.e. scroll right and left to go up and down and vice versa), raster bitmaps and GIF files in CMYK as opposed to RGB and turn sentences begining with prepositions into French swearing. All these new UI paradigms we're missing out on!
;)
In a rare moment of originality, a young MS exec, having just read the hitch hikers guide, sent a binary of IE7 back in time in an attempt to sue the companies developing firefox, opera and a million and one other more inventive browsers in the future for copying IE's features. Unfortunately, the court dismissed the new IE interface as a crude hoax perpetrated by 4chan, and the budding young exec was made Ballmer's personal chair man.
Not that I think the IE7 interface is an abomination of consistency and style or anything
Not that anyone will see this comment, but I've just found out that google calculator is a brilliant way of measuring the actual time cost of one, two, three nines:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?num=20&hl=en&safe=off&client=opera&rls=en&hs=8ZF&q=0.01%25+of+1+year+in+minutes&btnG=Search&meta=