I admin about 20 solaris servers and have been a Unix admin for about 5 years. The main reasons I won't switch to Linux can be summed up in a couple short points.
1. Too small. It won't run on big enough boxes to do real datacenter work. My company runs data warehouses in the terabytes on servers with more processors and memory than Linux can handle. Before Linux can compete in the datacenter it needs to handle 16 procs at least, preferably as many as Solaris and the other commercial Unix implementations can. One other thing that is needed is for a volume manager and filesystem product with the functionality I can get from Veritas on Solaris. When you're dealing with 100-900 GB filesystems like the ones our databases live on the stuff built into Linux doesn't work.
2. Too fragile. I've never tried running big Oracle databases on Linux but what I've heard from people that have is that it is too prone to crashing and corruption. Plus the stability of the hardware isn't there. You simply can't buy an Intel/Linux server that has the stability and reliability that a Sun/Solaris box has. Hot swappable hardware, the ability to route around failures without a panic or reboot, and so on just doesn't exist (or at least is extremely uncommon) for Linux yet.
Both of these issues may well be fixed in the near future, but for Linux misses the mark too badly for me to even think about recommending Linux.
KISS Exposed. The ultimate depiction of the Good Life.
Sign me up for that gig!
By the way, the version of Detroit Rock City from their Australian Stadium Tour in ~1978 on that video is far and away my favorite of the 25+ versions I own on audio or video. If you're a KISS fan that hasn't seen this video yet you're missing out. Strutter from Cobo Hall in 1975 is awesome too.
I can relate to this topic very well, and may have a story you'll find amusing.
When I was in 8th grade me and two other fat, smart nerd guys always hung out together. A group of 7th graders ALWAYS picked on us, but in groups of 15 or 20 at a time so we were too scared to fight back and let the littler kids bully us.
One day I caught one of the little pricks when he was abusing us without enough of his friends around. I outweighed him by at least 50 pounds. I knocked him to the ground, wrapped one arm around his head as I leaned on him so he couldn't move, and started repeatedly punching him in the head as hard as I could with my free hand. He was a mess pretty quick. After a dozen punches or so I heard a loud clearing of the throat above me. I quit punching and looked up to find Mr. Schmidt, the football coach and playground attendant that day, looking down at me. He said "Is there some kind of problem?" I figured I was screwed if I tried to pull anything, so I let go of the kid, stood up, looked Mr. Schmidt in the eyes and said "There was, but I took care of it." He said "Good" and walked away.
He knew as well as I did that sticking up for myself was required, and as long as the other kid wasn't dead yet he outta drop it. And after that incident, the younger bullies were way less interested in harassing us since they knew we'd fight back.
Nope. Next one will be Bubba too. I had about 6 hamsters when I was a kid and all but the first one were named Bubba. When my Wife wanted to get one a couple years ago I suggested continuing the tradition.
Although I have to admit, Spike is a pretty cool name too.
Ummm, to get back on topic: telemarketers suck! Bubba is more useful to the economy to them and stuff.:-)
Those are some good ideas. I had a friend try that in reverse years ago. He called a pizza place and started asking the stupidest questions.
"Do you sell pizza? Do you have large pizza? Do you have medium pizza? Do you have small pizza? Can I get one topping? Can I get two toppings? Do you have pepperoni? Do you have sausage? . .." and so on. The idiot on the other end listened and answered the questions for like 10 minutes before my friend said "Ok, I'll call you right back" and hung up on them.
I signed up for our state do not call list, and probably would for the national one too. But sometimes it is fun to hassle them.
My wife has been home with medical problems the past couple moths and gets tons of telemarketer calls. Last night she told me the next time one calls she is going to ask them if they want to talk to our hamster and just go off on a huge tangent about him. See how long she can keep talking about Bubba before they finally give up and hang up on her. That might be fun to listen too, I wish I could stay home for it.
One important point about this. In any given chess position there may be very many moves, but only a very small fraction of them are worth anything at all. The rest are simply bad moves that hurt your position. Typically even in a very complex positon a quick (few seconds at most) glance at the position can eliminate all but a handful of moves. That is how masters can play simultaneous matches against dozens of opponents at once, they can eliminate all the bad moves from consideration and spend a short time thinking about the 2 or 3 decent choices left.
The computer doesn't need to consider the bad moves much at all. It is a pretty safe assumption that the opponent will not choose a terrible move. But if they are stupid enough to play one then the computer can calculate the new position as needed.
Hmm. They list penicillin, which saved millions of lives, and polio vaccine that prevented at least thousands of not millions of cases of paralysis as happening decades ago.
And all we can manage lately is helping Bob Dole sprout wood? I think the pharmaceutical industry is in trouble.
One other comment: I worked at Medtronic (largest pacemaker manufacturer) for about 3 years. Some of the stories about how that got invented by the dude they mention in that article and Earl Bakken (the founder of Medtronic who worked with him) are pretty interesting. The early ones were external, and you had to have it hooked up to a electrical socket. When the power went out so did your pacemaker, so they then started connecting them to big batteries similar to car batteries. Imagine having to drag that around with you all day? Having a pacemaker in the early days was no fun. But better than being dead I guess.
View from Eden Prairie, MN (long)
on
Meet The Leonids
·
· Score: 1
I went out to observe the Leonids at 4:00 am and stayed out until 5:10 am. The moon was very bright so the limiting magnitude was about 4 or 4.5 (vs. 6 in a typical dark sky). You could see all the prominent stars in the constellations, but there were plenty of stars I knew you should be able to see with your naked eye that were invisible due to the brightness. There was about 40% thin cloud cover at first, which decreased throughout the night to none by the time I went in. The clouds were thin enough that even when they covered a constellation you could still see the brighter stars. The main thing they did was light up the sky even worse than the moon alone would have.
At first very little was going on. There were no meteors at all the first 10 minutes or so. I was beginning to wonder if it was just too bright and thinking about going in. Then I thought I caught a couple in my peripheral vision. Then one that was clearly visible. So I decided to stay out. Good call.
It built up slowly, then seemed to jump dramatically about 4:30 (I didn't remember a watch so the times are guesses). I saw 3 of them which came so quickly in the same part of the sky that they were all visible at once. Then after about a 5 second pause another 2 happened simultaneously. A friend mentioned seeing similar bursts in his email about the Leonids. My guess as to the explaination for these is that one particle breaks up high enough in the atmosphere that it isn't glowing yet, then each part continues on roughly the same trajectory so they burn up at roughly the same spot at the same time. I saw a few of those bursts and so did he, so it seems too common for random chance. I never saw 3 simultaneous meteors in different areas or different trajectories, so it seems to me there must be a cause for why the paths were so similar on all the observed bursts.
During the peak there were several meteors a minute. At the very highest point it was probably 10 or more per minute. I was wondering if I could keep accurate count they were coming so fast. Unfortunately, that is where the intensity of the shower quit increasing. It only lasted a few minutes then it was back to the 2-5 per minute range. The peak lasted about 15-20 minutes, then it started tapering off. By the end I had to wait several minutes between meteors again, although I'm sure there were many, many faint ones all along I just couldn't see.
Almost half of the meteors I counted left visible trails which lasted from one to several seconds. This is way higher than I expected. I wonder if the atmosphere was so saturated from the thin cloud cover that they were leaving contrails just like jets do on certain days.
I saw 2 which were definately brighter than Jupiter. The brightest was much brighter, probably as bright as Venus. It left a multipart smoke trail the brightest chunk of which was also brighter than Jupiter. The trail was visible for about 15-20 seconds. There were another 6-8 which were brighter than Regulus (magnitude 1) and probably a dozen or more roughly equal to regulus.
Overall I saw 108 meteors, 50 of which left trails. I also recorded 15 "probable" meteors where I saw a flash in my peripheral vision but couldn't lock onto it fast enough to be positive it was one. I'm sure the number would have been much higher if I could have gotten to a dark sky but the moon, clouds, and Eden Prairie backyard skyglow conspired to wipe out the majority of the meteors which were too faint to see.
Ummm, you realize in your sig if the price to performance ratio gives a divide by zero error, you are saying the PERFORMANCE is zero, not the price, right?
A couple years back I heard a guy on the radio. He taped telemarketer calls for comic purposes. He always had them call back later so he could prepare.
Anyways, one day he had a call from a pre-bought funeral/gravesite service. He said to call back tomorrow then recored it. It was totally hilarious, here is the transcript as best as I can remember.
Telemarketer: Would you be interested in a pre-paid funeral service and gravesite to spare your family the burden . . .
Guy: (Sniffing as if he just got done crying) You know, it is amazing that you called just now. You see, I got fired yesterday. My wife said she coulnd't take living with such a loser any more, so she took my kids and left me. I was just praying to god to give me a sign if I should kill myself or not, and then you called!
TM: Ummmm, sir, can I get you some help or something.
Guy: No, you have made my decision very clear for me. How can I pay for the funeral, do you take visa?
TM: Uh, no, I can't do that right now. But I can have a salesman come visit you next week. Can I call somebody to help you or something.
Guy: Nope, I'm fine. Hang on a second. (pause, then sound of gunshot then dude falling to ground)
TM: SIIIRRRR!!! then scrambles to call the cops, ambulance, whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
I admin about 20 solaris servers and have been a Unix admin for about 5 years. The main reasons I won't switch to Linux can be summed up in a couple short points.
1. Too small. It won't run on big enough boxes to do real datacenter work. My company runs data warehouses in the terabytes on servers with more processors and memory than Linux can handle. Before Linux can compete in the datacenter it needs to handle 16 procs at least, preferably as many as Solaris and the other commercial Unix implementations can. One other thing that is needed is for a volume manager and filesystem product with the functionality I can get from Veritas on Solaris. When you're dealing with 100-900 GB filesystems like the ones our databases live on the stuff built into Linux doesn't work.
2. Too fragile. I've never tried running big Oracle databases on Linux but what I've heard from people that have is that it is too prone to crashing and corruption. Plus the stability of the hardware isn't there. You simply can't buy an Intel/Linux server that has the stability and reliability that a Sun/Solaris box has. Hot swappable hardware, the ability to route around failures without a panic or reboot, and so on just doesn't exist (or at least is extremely uncommon) for Linux yet.
Both of these issues may well be fixed in the near future, but for Linux misses the mark too badly for me to even think about recommending Linux.
bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb
bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb
we should bomb them I think
bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb
bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb
wouldn't a bomb for iraq be nice
bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb
bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb
kaboom!
YES!!!!
KISS Exposed. The ultimate depiction of the Good Life.
Sign me up for that gig!
By the way, the version of Detroit Rock City from their Australian Stadium Tour in ~1978 on that video is far and away my favorite of the 25+ versions I own on audio or video. If you're a KISS fan that hasn't seen this video yet you're missing out. Strutter from Cobo Hall in 1975 is awesome too.
I can relate to this topic very well, and may have a story you'll find amusing.
When I was in 8th grade me and two other fat, smart nerd guys always hung out together. A group of 7th graders ALWAYS picked on us, but in groups of 15 or 20 at a time so we were too scared to fight back and let the littler kids bully us.
One day I caught one of the little pricks when he was abusing us without enough of his friends around. I outweighed him by at least 50 pounds. I knocked him to the ground, wrapped one arm around his head as I leaned on him so he couldn't move, and started repeatedly punching him in the head as hard as I could with my free hand. He was a mess pretty quick. After a dozen punches or so I heard a loud clearing of the throat above me. I quit punching and looked up to find Mr. Schmidt, the football coach and playground attendant that day, looking down at me. He said "Is there some kind of problem?" I figured I was screwed if I tried to pull anything, so I let go of the kid, stood up, looked Mr. Schmidt in the eyes and said "There was, but I took care of it." He said "Good" and walked away.
He knew as well as I did that sticking up for myself was required, and as long as the other kid wasn't dead yet he outta drop it. And after that incident, the younger bullies were way less interested in harassing us since they knew we'd fight back.
I gotta get enough money to retire, a big house with a fast network, and one hell of a gaming rig
before one of these games comes out.
And a desk chair with built in toilet might help too.
Dang it! I even used the preview button. Missed that one though.
Nope. Next one will be Bubba too. I had about 6 hamsters when I was a kid and all but the first one were named Bubba. When my Wife wanted to get one a couple years ago I suggested continuing the tradition.
:-)
Although I have to admit, Spike is a pretty cool name too.
Ummm, to get back on topic: telemarketers suck! Bubba is more useful to the economy to them and stuff.
Those are some good ideas. I had a friend try that in reverse years ago. He called a pizza place and started asking the stupidest questions.
." and so on. The idiot on the other end listened and answered the questions for like 10 minutes before my friend said "Ok, I'll call you right back" and hung up on them.
"Do you sell pizza? Do you have large pizza? Do you have medium pizza? Do you have small pizza? Can I get one topping? Can I get two toppings? Do you have pepperoni? Do you have sausage? . .
He was kinda a jerk, but damn funny to listen to.
I signed up for our state do not call list, and probably would for the national one too. But sometimes it is fun to hassle them.
My wife has been home with medical problems the past couple moths and gets tons of telemarketer calls. Last night she told me the next time one calls she is going to ask them if they want to talk to our hamster and just go off on a huge tangent about him. See how long she can keep talking about Bubba before they finally give up and hang up on her. That might be fun to listen too, I wish I could stay home for it.
Back when East and West Germany reunited, Dave Letterman had a top 10 list with the subject:
.
"Top 10 Ways France Is Celebrating German Reunification"
I don't remember all of them, but I'll never forget number 1 . .
#1 Cut up white bedsheets into convenient flag-sized squares.
Ralph
One important point about this. In any given chess position there may be very many moves, but only a very small fraction of them are worth anything at all. The rest are simply bad moves that hurt your position. Typically even in a very complex positon a quick (few seconds at most) glance at the position can eliminate all but a handful of moves. That is how masters can play simultaneous matches against dozens of opponents at once, they can eliminate all the bad moves from consideration and spend a short time thinking about the 2 or 3 decent choices left.
The computer doesn't need to consider the bad moves much at all. It is a pretty safe assumption that the opponent will not choose a terrible move. But if they are stupid enough to play one then the computer can calculate the new position as needed.
Ralph
Play a game against me, you'll win for sure!
Yeah, and your GWBASIC program on the MS-DOS 2.0 XT machine would be WAY faster than the same program running in Visual Basic on a 2GHZ Win XP box. :-)
Hmm. They list penicillin, which saved millions of lives, and polio vaccine that prevented at least thousands of not millions of cases of paralysis as happening decades ago.
And all we can manage lately is helping Bob Dole sprout wood? I think the pharmaceutical industry is in trouble.
One other comment: I worked at Medtronic (largest pacemaker manufacturer) for about 3 years. Some of the stories about how that got invented by the dude they mention in that article and Earl Bakken (the founder of Medtronic who worked with him) are pretty interesting. The early ones were external, and you had to have it hooked up to a electrical socket. When the power went out so did your pacemaker, so they then started connecting them to big batteries similar to car batteries. Imagine having to drag that around with you all day? Having a pacemaker in the early days was no fun. But better than being dead I guess.
I went out to observe the Leonids at 4:00 am and stayed out until
5:10 am. The moon was very bright so the limiting magnitude was about 4 or 4.5
(vs. 6 in a typical dark sky). You could see all the prominent stars in the
constellations, but there were plenty of stars I knew you should be able to see
with your naked eye that were invisible due to the brightness. There was about
40% thin cloud cover at first, which decreased throughout the night to none by
the time I went in. The clouds were thin enough that even when they covered a
constellation you could still see the brighter stars. The main thing they did
was light up the sky even worse than the moon alone would have.
At first very little was going on. There were no meteors at all the first 10
minutes or so. I was beginning to wonder if it was just too bright and
thinking about going in. Then I thought I caught a couple in my peripheral
vision. Then one that was clearly visible. So I decided to stay out. Good
call.
It built up slowly, then seemed to jump dramatically about 4:30 (I didn't
remember a watch so the times are guesses). I saw 3 of them which came so
quickly in the same part of the sky that they were all visible at once. Then
after about a 5 second pause another 2 happened simultaneously. A friend
mentioned seeing similar bursts in his email about the Leonids. My guess as to
the explaination for these is that one particle breaks up high enough in the
atmosphere that it isn't glowing yet, then each part continues on roughly the
same trajectory so they burn up at roughly the same spot at the same time. I
saw a few of those bursts and so did he, so it seems too common for random
chance. I never saw 3 simultaneous meteors in different areas or different
trajectories, so it seems to me there must be a cause for why the paths were so
similar on all the observed bursts.
During the peak there were several meteors a minute. At the very highest point
it was probably 10 or more per minute. I was wondering if I could keep accurate
count they were coming so fast. Unfortunately, that is where the intensity of
the shower quit increasing. It only lasted a few minutes then it was back to
the 2-5 per minute range. The peak lasted about 15-20 minutes, then it started
tapering off. By the end I had to wait several minutes between meteors again,
although I'm sure there were many, many faint ones all along I just couldn't
see.
Almost half of the meteors I counted left visible trails which lasted from one
to several seconds. This is way higher than I expected. I wonder if the atmosphere was so saturated from the thin
cloud cover that they were leaving contrails just like jets do on certain days.
I saw 2 which were definately brighter than Jupiter. The brightest was much
brighter, probably as bright as Venus. It left a multipart smoke trail the
brightest chunk of which was also brighter than Jupiter. The trail was visible
for about 15-20 seconds. There were another 6-8 which were brighter than
Regulus (magnitude 1) and probably a dozen or more roughly equal to regulus.
Overall I saw 108 meteors, 50 of which left trails. I also recorded 15
"probable" meteors where I saw a flash in my peripheral vision but couldn't
lock onto it fast enough to be positive it was one. I'm sure the number would
have been much higher if I could have gotten to a dark sky but the moon,
clouds, and Eden Prairie backyard skyglow conspired to wipe out the majority of
the meteors which were too faint to see.
Ummm, you realize in your sig if the price to performance ratio gives a divide by zero error, you are saying the PERFORMANCE is zero, not the price, right?
A couple years back I heard a guy on the radio. He taped telemarketer calls for comic purposes. He always had them call back later so he could prepare. Anyways, one day he had a call from a pre-bought funeral/gravesite service. He said to call back tomorrow then recored it. It was totally hilarious, here is the transcript as best as I can remember. Telemarketer: Would you be interested in a pre-paid funeral service and gravesite to spare your family the burden . . . Guy: (Sniffing as if he just got done crying) You know, it is amazing that you called just now. You see, I got fired yesterday. My wife said she coulnd't take living with such a loser any more, so she took my kids and left me. I was just praying to god to give me a sign if I should kill myself or not, and then you called! TM: Ummmm, sir, can I get you some help or something. Guy: No, you have made my decision very clear for me. How can I pay for the funeral, do you take visa? TM: Uh, no, I can't do that right now. But I can have a salesman come visit you next week. Can I call somebody to help you or something. Guy: Nope, I'm fine. Hang on a second. (pause, then sound of gunshot then dude falling to ground) TM: SIIIRRRR!!! then scrambles to call the cops, ambulance, whatever.
They should get a battlebot! One with a big pickaxe would do the job.