Good for you, but would clusty scale well if we all started using it and the had the overheads the google does?
How does the company that own clusty make money? If they want to scale to the size where we all could use it they need to find a way to make money in order to pay for the costs that would entail.
You are completely missing the about about this things use. In all modern warfare contexts the US has total air superiority. If a war arises where that is not the case, the US makes sure it gains air superiority very quickly.
Once you have air superiority and have bombed shit out of everything that could launch a missile large enough to reach it this thing is perfect for spotting hostile forces on the ground. Most of the people we now fight against are so out gunned in the skys they resort to terrorist and guerilla actions. This thing can be kept flying for very long periods, very cheaply. It also has the advantage of being able to hover. This means when it sees a target, it can remain stationary above it and maintain a visual for long periods.
The current solution is to use spy drones but they are vulnerable to small arms fire form the ground, need fuel, and have to fly in circles to maintain a visual on a fix position. This circling vastly reduces the effectiveness of the drones in urban environment with tall buildings.
So you're the kind of guy who yells at his kids when they go to the bathroom during a TV commercial break hey?
Of course not. The reason being that you do not go to the toilet during very commercial break. Also most TV ads where I live are actually louder than the program the break up so they can be heard in the other room. These two things have the net effect that you still get the message the advertiser was trying to put across.
By using adblock this is not the case. You are completely oblivious to any ad that was in the page. If everyone used ad-block could slashdot survive on just the revenue it currently gets from subscribers? I think probably not. If slashdot had to lock access to subscribers only would you subscribe?
Do I have to look at all the ads when I get on the bus, so as to justify the ticket's price?
No, but you probably saw the advert anyway you just did it subconsciously. This way the advert in question reinforced the brand image in your mind without you being consciously aware it was happening. Some of the most effective brand awareness adverts work by simply topping up your awareness of a brand. Call it a gentle reminder that the brand still exists. Banner adverts are very similar.
The fact is that a great many websites I use are ad-supported. This saves me money as I do not have to subscribe. Google are able to offer a very good search engine by selling paid relevant links beside free search results. Sometimes I click on them as if I am looking for something I will end up spending money on. In return google can track me all they like if it enables them to show me more relevant results.
I have more news for you, not only Google do this. Chances are anything you buy on a credit card gets gets recorded next to your name then used for profiling you in future. The bank then remove your name from this profile and then sell them en mass. Where did you think all the junk mail that comes through your door comes from? Store and loyalty cards certainly work the same way.
If you object to Googles privacy policy, then do not use any Google services.
This does not mean, use them through an anonymous proxy as that is theft, this means do not use them at all. Use an entirely free search engine that works just as well with a better privacy policy. Google make money through advertising, as do all large scale search engines. That is how they are able offer a service and not charge for it. There might be smaller free services that have a better privacy policy but would they still be free if they could put up with the load google is able to? The amount google must spend on staff and hardware must be obscene.
The most astounding thing from the original bug report is this:
Also some of my MySQL databases were killed...
This pretty much rules out me using Ext4 in a production environment. I have to admin some servers that have some damn big databases on them made up of some equally large tables. If I have to rebuild this from nightly backups or the replicated database just because the harddisk did not unmount properly or the box crashed then I am not going to risk it. Not when I know Ext3 handles the same situation flawlessly.
I know I could switch to make the back up the main server but this will also take too much of my too precious time to consider as we have various stuff that needs to run against the replicated DB. I would still then have to spend too much of my time making sure the old master was back in the system as the new slave to make sure we still have the same level resilience going forward.
If I wanted a server crash during a disk write to cause the entire file to be corrupt, I would never have upgraded from Ext2.
If I can choose between Performance and Reliability, I will choose Reliability every time.
And if it is a businesses right to delete comments they want deleted, as they stated in the terms that all posters agree to, it isn't censorship either. If I go onto a Disney children's forum and post nothing but swear words, and Disney deletes it, is that censorship too?
Yes it is. See the section on Moral Censorship at the top of the page.
I am fairly fit. I am an avid mountain climber who climbs at least once a week. Ideally I would go climbing every other day but work gets in the way. Boxing on the WII is quite capable of wearing me out. It certainly raises my pulse and makes me perspire enough to be considered cardiovascular exercise.
Gotta love republicans. Even though there useless president had lost the respect of half the planet, almost bankrupt the entire nation with a pointless war that only benefited his own families oil empire and lost for the first ever time in a case at the WTO they still forecasting that the guy who has to pick up the pieces will fail when he only been in office for 1 month.
With an ability to make snap judgements like that its no wonder Bush invaded the wrong country after 9-11.
I would recommend you have a read of this guys previous book "Blink" if you have not read it before. It also bears a similar style and takes you on a bit of an adventure.
I read Blink and Freakonomics back to back and thought they complimented each other quite well even thought they were by different authors on different subjects.
Blink is largely about how snap judgements are not necessarily bad and is suggesting that you can make them better with practice. He suggests a number of examples in order to formulate tools that will improve your own quick decision making ability so when there really is not time to rationalise a problem fully you can still make a best guess.
True some of the suggestions are obvious but the examples made it worth a read.
MS essentially walked into the marketplace because programming for the XBox was easy if the game had a Windows version.
Actually this is utter rubbish. To create a game under windows there are several development kits you can use but to create a game for the xbox you have to use the MS tool set. I am not sure about the 360 but I know the compilers to create code for the original xbox were horrible to work with.
The xbox is very different from the PC in one important way, it needs signed code. This locks you in to using a very expensive development kit you have to purchase from Microsoft.
Why should plugins run in a sandbox? Someone has to install them. Can you install a plugin without knowing you are installing a new piece of software?
I know some company hide a plugin install with their software recently but even in that case the user had to know they were installing a new code to their PC that would be unlikely to run in a sandbox being it was stand alone application.
Code running from a web page that is executed without your consent should obviously run in a sandbox but code you have to install to you PC in order to run should surely be treated as trusted?
If I download an application to my linux box as a normal user it will not run in a sandbox, it will run with the full privileges that my current user has.
He also said that attaching a high status to scholars and scientists in society would help talents to flourish and science and technology to become domesticated, thus ensuring the country's progress and development.[28]
Now if only we in the west would catch up and do the same.
I now earn more than my friend doing vital scientific research into the human brain and the effects of ageing. He has a PhD and has just published his first paper. I flunked out of uni while studying a Physics BSc. Go figure.
The fact is that in our society the main status symbol is how much you earn, yet we pay people like teachers or university lecturers a pittance compared to the people who cause global financial disasters with an excess of greed. Yet our governments are throwing money at a thoroughly broken capitalist system that to me seems grossly unfair by design and also on the brink of collapse due to its bias towards the people at the top of the tree.
IBM can do what it wants with Linux, safe in the knowledge they are one of the companies with a patent portfolio.
Nice understatement. They are in the top 10 in terms of number of patents filed every year. In every year from 1994 - 2005 they top the list. They have been doing this since the 60's.
In my book that is not a patent portfolio anymore, that is now one of the largest patent war chests that any company has ever amassed.
Another example would be to note that the law now covers images up to 18, even though the age of consent is 16, so anything above that is entirely legal to do.
You are not a lawyer.
You are confusing the age of consent with the law on indecent images. They are not the same thing at all. It might be legal for me have sex with a 17 year old, but I not legally able to take pornographic photos of someone under the age of 18 without signed parental consent.
Disclaimer - I am also not a lawyer, but I have studied it many years ago so this may be out of date.
No? In which case one part of the internet will always be China's Internet while the English bit is everyones. This is because everyone speaks English as a second language.
We cannot moan about being excluded from certain discussions simply because most of the people directly affected by the discussion choose to have the discussion in their first language rather than ours.
In the case of the Virgin Killers album recently they did not "block" wikipedia, they proxied the entire site through their servers and returned a badly done 404 error for the offending page. This meant that all wikipedia edits appeared to come from one IP address and this is why it was noticed so quickly. Wikipedia automatically blocked that IP from creating new accounts as too many were created in a short space of time from that IP address so they assumed they were spam accounts. In this case the spam accounts were just random new users from anywhere in Britain.
To me it seems fairly obvious why the IWF does not notify who they block, if they did then chances are the people running the blocked site would immediately alter the way they posted the images such that they avoid the block.
If the IWF had notified a legitimate child porn site they were doing this the site would have just put the offending images on some sort of constantly moving address that could not be blocked so easily. If I wanted to I would immediately host all dodgy images on dynamic URLs that were calculated on the fly using a formula in JS on the client and PHP on the server. This is trivial to implement and would only be bypassed by blocking the entire site or manually whitelisting each legitimate page on the site.
This may have resulted in an entire site being blocked as it was the only solution to still be effective. In the case of a shared site where some content is legal and some not (ie - photobucket or similar) this would be like using a nuclear weapon as a fly swatter. Millions of innocent people would get pissed off and complain.
In this case they say it was a one incident in 12 years where things got blocked wrongly not because they blocked the wrong thing, but because people not viewing the offending page were also affected.
There will always be cases where the wrong thing triggers a complaint and gets blocked pending review, but hopefully these incidents will not affect other people browsing legitimate content on the same site that has not triggered the same complaint. It may be that one users home page on shared site contains indecency while every other page is just random students work. Unix defaults to sharing home pages in the format of http://www.whatever.net/~username/ if you enable this in option in apache.
On another note I said badly done earlier regarding the 404 error as they actually screwed that up. From memory I think they returned a "Site not found" page regarding a single page on a site yet the rest of wikipedia was available. This gave away to me what was happening so maybe they whole keeping quiet about the blocklist is a waste of time anyway. Although I am a professional webmaster and server administrator so I am certainly in minority in terms of internet knowledge amongst the general public.
I use wikis a lot so immediately recognised that I would have been looking at the page saying the page did not exist and could log in to create it. It seems that the IWF's biggest mistake was not accounting for sites that have strange custom 404 error pages provide by the server. If they want to give me a call I can help them with this in future as I have a few ideas:)
.... just as it's illegal to photograph people who are clearly identifiable in public and selling those photos.
Yet there is an entire industry that does just this to people in the public eye. Is there some legal exemption for people who have been previously in same lame film or made a pop song?
Or are you in fact talking complete and utter rubbish.
If there was such a law you can bet people like Brad Pitt and Britney Spears would be using it regularly to get some privacy from the Paparazzi.
There is only one law I can think of that this would break, and that MIGHT be Sharia Law, but since I am not an expert on the Qur'an I am not even sure of that.
I thought you mentioned using the acceptable latency of email in your post to poll the server less often and hence save power. I was try to say this was not necessary as the phone doesnt have to poll a server for emails at all as the emails are "pushed" to the device.
From my very sketchy knowledge on the system they have a special system to push email to the device. Normal POP3 relies on the device to constantly check the mail server. This might be ok for a computer but makes no sense from a the point of view of a mobile device on limited power. This means the phone is only using power when it recieves the email or when you try and use it.
This is far more power efficient than the system you mentioned using latency. This also means you have zero latency as it becomes far closer to the way a phone operates when receiving text messages or similar.
Sorry, I thought everyone on slashdot would know this so left it out. From the way your post has been modded Push email technology is clearly not as widespread knowledge here as I thought.
Actually no, the electoral college system was put in place to ensure that a president was always elected cleanly and that no election would result in a split vote where nobody got a decent majority. Look at what has just happened in Israel, no clear leader was elected and so the country now has several months where it has no clear leader. This does not help anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for you, but would clusty scale well if we all started using it and the had the overheads the google does?
How does the company that own clusty make money? If they want to scale to the size where we all could use it they need to find a way to make money in order to pay for the costs that would entail.
You are completely missing the about about this things use. In all modern warfare contexts the US has total air superiority. If a war arises where that is not the case, the US makes sure it gains air superiority very quickly.
Once you have air superiority and have bombed shit out of everything that could launch a missile large enough to reach it this thing is perfect for spotting hostile forces on the ground. Most of the people we now fight against are so out gunned in the skys they resort to terrorist and guerilla actions. This thing can be kept flying for very long periods, very cheaply. It also has the advantage of being able to hover. This means when it sees a target, it can remain stationary above it and maintain a visual for long periods.
The current solution is to use spy drones but they are vulnerable to small arms fire form the ground, need fuel, and have to fly in circles to maintain a visual on a fix position. This circling vastly reduces the effectiveness of the drones in urban environment with tall buildings.
So you're the kind of guy who yells at his kids when they go to the bathroom during a TV commercial break hey?
Of course not. The reason being that you do not go to the toilet during very commercial break. Also most TV ads where I live are actually louder than the program the break up so they can be heard in the other room. These two things have the net effect that you still get the message the advertiser was trying to put across.
By using adblock this is not the case. You are completely oblivious to any ad that was in the page. If everyone used ad-block could slashdot survive on just the revenue it currently gets from subscribers? I think probably not. If slashdot had to lock access to subscribers only would you subscribe?
Do I have to look at all the ads when I get on the bus, so as to justify the ticket's price?
No, but you probably saw the advert anyway you just did it subconsciously. This way the advert in question reinforced the brand image in your mind without you being consciously aware it was happening. Some of the most effective brand awareness adverts work by simply topping up your awareness of a brand. Call it a gentle reminder that the brand still exists. Banner adverts are very similar.
The fact is that a great many websites I use are ad-supported. This saves me money as I do not have to subscribe. Google are able to offer a very good search engine by selling paid relevant links beside free search results. Sometimes I click on them as if I am looking for something I will end up spending money on. In return google can track me all they like if it enables them to show me more relevant results.
I have more news for you, not only Google do this. Chances are anything you buy on a credit card gets gets recorded next to your name then used for profiling you in future. The bank then remove your name from this profile and then sell them en mass. Where did you think all the junk mail that comes through your door comes from? Store and loyalty cards certainly work the same way.
I hate advertising, but as long as I can opt out it's OK with me.
You can opt out, you can start paying for all services that would normally be ad supported. Anything else is just freeloading.
If you object to Googles privacy policy, then do not use any Google services.
This does not mean, use them through an anonymous proxy as that is theft, this means do not use them at all. Use an entirely free search engine that works just as well with a better privacy policy. Google make money through advertising, as do all large scale search engines. That is how they are able offer a service and not charge for it. There might be smaller free services that have a better privacy policy but would they still be free if they could put up with the load google is able to? The amount google must spend on staff and hardware must be obscene.
Who cares what went wrong? If I can avoid this happening by using Ext3 I will stick with Ext3.
I am not interested in blame, just a resilient system.
The most astounding thing from the original bug report is this:
Also some of my MySQL databases were killed...
This pretty much rules out me using Ext4 in a production environment. I have to admin some servers that have some damn big databases on them made up of some equally large tables. If I have to rebuild this from nightly backups or the replicated database just because the harddisk did not unmount properly or the box crashed then I am not going to risk it. Not when I know Ext3 handles the same situation flawlessly.
I know I could switch to make the back up the main server but this will also take too much of my too precious time to consider as we have various stuff that needs to run against the replicated DB. I would still then have to spend too much of my time making sure the old master was back in the system as the new slave to make sure we still have the same level resilience going forward.
If I wanted a server crash during a disk write to cause the entire file to be corrupt, I would never have upgraded from Ext2.
If I can choose between Performance and Reliability, I will choose Reliability every time.
And if it is a businesses right to delete comments they want deleted, as they stated in the terms that all posters agree to, it isn't censorship either. If I go onto a Disney children's forum and post nothing but swear words, and Disney deletes it, is that censorship too?
Yes it is. See the section on Moral Censorship at the top of the page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
Have you ever tried boxing on the wii??
I am fairly fit. I am an avid mountain climber who climbs at least once a week. Ideally I would go climbing every other day but work gets in the way. Boxing on the WII is quite capable of wearing me out. It certainly raises my pulse and makes me perspire enough to be considered cardiovascular exercise.
Christopher Tookey of the Daily Mail, UK also laid into it
I very much doubt any Daily Mail readers are going to appreciate a book about power corrupting people.
Gotta love republicans. Even though there useless president had lost the respect of half the planet, almost bankrupt the entire nation with a pointless war that only benefited his own families oil empire and lost for the first ever time in a case at the WTO they still forecasting that the guy who has to pick up the pieces will fail when he only been in office for 1 month.
With an ability to make snap judgements like that its no wonder Bush invaded the wrong country after 9-11.
I would recommend you have a read of this guys previous book "Blink" if you have not read it before. It also bears a similar style and takes you on a bit of an adventure.
I read Blink and Freakonomics back to back and thought they complimented each other quite well even thought they were by different authors on different subjects.
Blink is largely about how snap judgements are not necessarily bad and is suggesting that you can make them better with practice. He suggests a number of examples in order to formulate tools that will improve your own quick decision making ability so when there really is not time to rationalise a problem fully you can still make a best guess.
True some of the suggestions are obvious but the examples made it worth a read.
MS essentially walked into the marketplace because programming for the XBox was easy if the game had a Windows version.
Actually this is utter rubbish. To create a game under windows there are several development kits you can use but to create a game for the xbox you have to use the MS tool set. I am not sure about the 360 but I know the compilers to create code for the original xbox were horrible to work with.
The xbox is very different from the PC in one important way, it needs signed code. This locks you in to using a very expensive development kit you have to purchase from Microsoft.
Why should plugins run in a sandbox? Someone has to install them. Can you install a plugin without knowing you are installing a new piece of software?
I know some company hide a plugin install with their software recently but even in that case the user had to know they were installing a new code to their PC that would be unlikely to run in a sandbox being it was stand alone application.
Code running from a web page that is executed without your consent should obviously run in a sandbox but code you have to install to you PC in order to run should surely be treated as trusted?
If I download an application to my linux box as a normal user it will not run in a sandbox, it will run with the full privileges that my current user has.
He also said that attaching a high status to scholars and scientists in society would help talents to flourish and science and technology to become domesticated, thus ensuring the country's progress and development.[28]
Now if only we in the west would catch up and do the same.
I now earn more than my friend doing vital scientific research into the human brain and the effects of ageing. He has a PhD and has just published his first paper. I flunked out of uni while studying a Physics BSc. Go figure.
The fact is that in our society the main status symbol is how much you earn, yet we pay people like teachers or university lecturers a pittance compared to the people who cause global financial disasters with an excess of greed. Yet our governments are throwing money at a thoroughly broken capitalist system that to me seems grossly unfair by design and also on the brink of collapse due to its bias towards the people at the top of the tree.
IBM can do what it wants with Linux, safe in the knowledge they are one of the companies with a patent portfolio.
Nice understatement. They are in the top 10 in terms of number of patents filed every year. In every year from 1994 - 2005 they top the list. They have been doing this since the 60's.
In my book that is not a patent portfolio anymore, that is now one of the largest patent war chests that any company has ever amassed.
http://www.uspto.gov/go/taf/reports_top10.htm
Shit at least you gave until Friday. A proper PHB says you should have done it 2 days before he asked for it.
Why am I trolling?
It was a serious well meant point on the way I thought the original poster (who spoke Chinese) was using the expression "Chinese Internet".
Another example would be to note that the law now covers images up to 18, even though the age of consent is 16, so anything above that is entirely legal to do.
You are not a lawyer.
You are confusing the age of consent with the law on indecent images. They are not the same thing at all. It might be legal for me have sex with a 17 year old, but I not legally able to take pornographic photos of someone under the age of 18 without signed parental consent.
Disclaimer - I am also not a lawyer, but I have studied it many years ago so this may be out of date.
Do you speak and write fluent Chinese?
No? In which case one part of the internet will always be China's Internet while the English bit is everyones. This is because everyone speaks English as a second language.
We cannot moan about being excluded from certain discussions simply because most of the people directly affected by the discussion choose to have the discussion in their first language rather than ours.
In the case of the Virgin Killers album recently they did not "block" wikipedia, they proxied the entire site through their servers and returned a badly done 404 error for the offending page. This meant that all wikipedia edits appeared to come from one IP address and this is why it was noticed so quickly. Wikipedia automatically blocked that IP from creating new accounts as too many were created in a short space of time from that IP address so they assumed they were spam accounts. In this case the spam accounts were just random new users from anywhere in Britain.
To me it seems fairly obvious why the IWF does not notify who they block, if they did then chances are the people running the blocked site would immediately alter the way they posted the images such that they avoid the block.
If the IWF had notified a legitimate child porn site they were doing this the site would have just put the offending images on some sort of constantly moving address that could not be blocked so easily. If I wanted to I would immediately host all dodgy images on dynamic URLs that were calculated on the fly using a formula in JS on the client and PHP on the server. This is trivial to implement and would only be bypassed by blocking the entire site or manually whitelisting each legitimate page on the site.
This may have resulted in an entire site being blocked as it was the only solution to still be effective. In the case of a shared site where some content is legal and some not (ie - photobucket or similar) this would be like using a nuclear weapon as a fly swatter. Millions of innocent people would get pissed off and complain.
In this case they say it was a one incident in 12 years where things got blocked wrongly not because they blocked the wrong thing, but because people not viewing the offending page were also affected.
There will always be cases where the wrong thing triggers a complaint and gets blocked pending review, but hopefully these incidents will not affect other people browsing legitimate content on the same site that has not triggered the same complaint. It may be that one users home page on shared site contains indecency while every other page is just random students work. Unix defaults to sharing home pages in the format of http://www.whatever.net/~username/ if you enable this in option in apache.
On another note I said badly done earlier regarding the 404 error as they actually screwed that up. From memory I think they returned a "Site not found" page regarding a single page on a site yet the rest of wikipedia was available. This gave away to me what was happening so maybe they whole keeping quiet about the blocklist is a waste of time anyway. Although I am a professional webmaster and server administrator so I am certainly in minority in terms of internet knowledge amongst the general public.
I use wikis a lot so immediately recognised that I would have been looking at the page saying the page did not exist and could log in to create it. It seems that the IWF's biggest mistake was not accounting for sites that have strange custom 404 error pages provide by the server. If they want to give me a call I can help them with this in future as I have a few ideas :)
.... just as it's illegal to photograph people who are clearly identifiable in public and selling those photos.
Yet there is an entire industry that does just this to people in the public eye. Is there some legal exemption for people who have been previously in same lame film or made a pop song?
Or are you in fact talking complete and utter rubbish.
If there was such a law you can bet people like Brad Pitt and Britney Spears would be using it regularly to get some privacy from the Paparazzi.
There is only one law I can think of that this would break, and that MIGHT be Sharia Law, but since I am not an expert on the Qur'an I am not even sure of that.
Not sure, I certainly meant no offence :)
I thought you mentioned using the acceptable latency of email in your post to poll the server less often and hence save power. I was try to say this was not necessary as the phone doesnt have to poll a server for emails at all as the emails are "pushed" to the device.
From my very sketchy knowledge on the system they have a special system to push email to the device. Normal POP3 relies on the device to constantly check the mail server. This might be ok for a computer but makes no sense from a the point of view of a mobile device on limited power. This means the phone is only using power when it recieves the email or when you try and use it.
This is far more power efficient than the system you mentioned using latency. This also means you have zero latency as it becomes far closer to the way a phone operates when receiving text messages or similar.
Sorry, I thought everyone on slashdot would know this so left it out. From the way your post has been modded Push email technology is clearly not as widespread knowledge here as I thought.
Here's a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_e-mail
Actually no, the electoral college system was put in place to ensure that a president was always elected cleanly and that no election would result in a split vote where nobody got a decent majority. Look at what has just happened in Israel, no clear leader was elected and so the country now has several months where it has no clear leader. This does not help anyone.