This is one area where Google's search algorithm falls down [...] I wish there was the option for a decay (or timeout) function into their page-rank algorithms to reward contemporary information.
Look to the left of the search results. See the "Search Options" thing? Open that and you can restrict results by date range (and a number of other things).
I never noticed those options until someone pointed them out to me recently. I guess if you've been using something simple for a decade, at some point you stop looking for new things about it. But now I'm amazed all over again. For example, do a timeline search on Google for "New Orleans" and see the peaks around the Civil War and War of 1812, then click and read historical articles from those periods in the NYT.
Tying this back to the original article, I personally think it's awesome that the Internet appears to "remember" stuff from before it was built. Getting articles from 1861 in your search results is just trippy, so hats off to Google and the Times.
This could get political, so please don't take any of these comments as judgments on the personal worth of Americans or Europeans, or about which nations are better that which other ones. There are lots of fine folks on both sides of the pond, and there's more to life than salaries and GDP. I'm just trying to explain the salary difference, since you asked. I'll just throw these possible reasons out there and we'll see what sticks...
According to an article in The Economist earlier this year (sorry, don't have a link), American companies get a higher ROI (usually measured in increased productivity) on investments in IT projects (this actually goes with the company, not the worker, so it's probably down to management, but in any case a higher "R" makes you willing to be a little more free with the "I").
Also, Europeans work significantly fewer hours per year than Americans, on average. Like 15% fewer, according to that linked speech from the President of the European Central Bank. Looking at the yearly salary, then, distorts the figure for how much people are being paid for each unit of labor input (though, even per hour worked, Americans are more productive, so that further raises the value of the labor to the company).
Put another way, according to that same ECB article the US has a 50% higher GDP per capita than Europe (Europe's is two-thirds that of the US), so the output is higher, too. And some of that trickles down (not much, but some).
And, of course, unemployment in America is much lower than in Europe (for August, it was 4.6% in the US vs 9% in, e.g, Germany). If you have twice as many people looking for jobs, well, the employer can offer lower pay and someone will be glad to be earning more than zero.
So, those would make it reasonable for companies in the US to be willing to pay higher salaries.
Plus, it's easier to terminate people without cause in America, which means poor performers with their low salaries (who would otherwise drag down the average) can be taken off your books immediately, without a lengthy process of review and appeal. In some places in Europe, it can take a while to fire someone and may not be possible in borderline cases, and you have to demonstrate cause. Since IT workers often have privileges you don't want them to use during a hostile termination, this sometimes leads to the ludicrous situation of paying someone not to come to work for a few months (and that person is probably not going to get a raise and a bonus and bump up the average, eh?). Of course, despite this, unemployment is lower, anyway, so it's not like the US is cheating by not counting all the $0 salaries, unless maybe you count the huge prison population;)
Similarly, you have to take into account the large concentrations of American IT workers in places like Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is a very risky place. The companies that succeed are often flush with cash. But the companies that fail don't pay anybody, and unemployed people don't count into the average. And, of course, the cost of living is high in Silicon Valley.
So, those effects would also tend to raise the average.
Much of this stuff could be explained as the result of the different paths America and Europe have taken with running their societies, specifically with how much risk they are willing to tolerate. But, like I said, there's more to life than high salaries. And those American salaries are getting lower in real terms by the day as Americans' purchasing power is eroded by the falling dollar. So, enjoy your vacation days and social services and don't fret too much about it.;)
It's more complicated than that. Those two vehicles are in different classes (the 999 looks like a passenger car; the BB2 looks like a missile just wide enough for a driver), and OSU and Ford are actually working together on *both* vehicles, so it's a bit weird to try to portray them as being in competition with one another.
The Ford Fusion Hydrogen 999 fuel cell car - a collaboratively engineered racer with Ballard, Roush and Ohio State University - is one of two vehicles Ford's fuel cell research team is helping prepare to set world land speed records. Ford researchers also are working with Ohio State University student engineers on its Buckeye Bullet 2, a fuel cell-powered racer that will compete for a similar world record in the unlimited class category.
Ummm, because it's made by the Liebert Corporation? And it's their "XD" line of products? Is this the first time you've ever heard of branding?
You might as well ask: "Why call it 'Toyota Camry'? What, it's not a car?"
it's still just liquid cooling, something that existed in the server room long before Michael Dell ever sold a single server machine.
So? Cars have been around a long time, too. That doesn't mean I want to drive a Model T.
Anyway, the news here is not that there is a new HVAC product, but that Dell is going to be selling HVAC systems to datacenter owners.
Also, this system uses a gas/liquid phase-change cycle, and it operates on a different scope (zone and spot cooling -- doesn't get anywhere near the CPU), so it's really not like what most people would think of as liquid cooling systems for computers. It's just a way of getting the cooling closer to the heat source instead of blowing cold air around in ducts, such that your HVAC operates more efficiently.
Sure, this idea has been around for a while (though this system makes some improvements that are especially helpful for datacenter use). The news is that Dell is selling it.
The point Sting was making was not just that the Russians had tender feelings, but rather that they didn't want to cause a global thermonuclear war because it would result in the annihilation of millions of their countrymen, including their own families, for whom they had these tender feelings. In other words, he was saying that mutually assured destruction was, after all, a good deterrent.
The comparison with dictators is therefore not really apt. Hitler and Stalin had no such assurance of destruction hanging over their heads, and it's probable that they discounted any future possibility of punishment for their actions.
In other words, Hitler and Stalin were "homicidal maniacs" because they thought they could get away with it, while Russians like Petrov didn't push the button because they knew they wouldn't get away with it.
As someone else mentioned, I think they are still a victim of their own success. Sure it's been over a year since launch, but they were expecting 250,000 subscribers and got 6,000,000.
The controlling factor for their server performance should not be the total number of subscribers, but the number of subscribers per realm, and Blizzard has complete control over that number, because they can mark a realm as "full" and disallow logins/signups. IOW, as you know, those 6,000,000 people are not all playing in the same game at the same time.
It should be possible to make the realms completely independent, so that this just becomes a matter of horizontal scaling, and having hardware/systems monkeys roll out new realms via some standard operating procedure.
Unfortunately, based on the rumors I have heard, Blizzard has chosen to tie a bunch of stuff together. For instance, the common web forums use the characters from all the realms (the web forums know about your level 23 mage), they have a single set of auth servers, it's not clear that the item databases are not shared between realms, and so on. This is sort of sad, because it's not like Blizzard are the first people to roll out an MMORPG.
Now, some might argue that tying some of this stuff together makes for a better user experience. However, when this entanglement leads to downtimes, one could make the argument that it's not worth it.
Anyway, my point is not to bash on Blizzard; I'm sure they've made some difficult design decisions correctly, and some difficult ones incorrectly. My point is that "we have lots of users" is not a good excuse when you have a service that lets you divide those users into sub-populations, and that there are probably architectural improvements they could make to improve their scalability. The real question is whether they have competent and experienced systems engineers to help them make those improvements, and whether management is committed to supporting them.
Anyway, so much for pre-coffee ramblings....
Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction
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An Alternate Human
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For this reason, I wouldn't expect many species to evolve with a larger-than-necessary distance between their brain and their sensory organs (unless such creature evolved a much faster method of conducting nerve impulses than we possess).
Hate to dash your expectations, but our optic nerves don't exactly take the shortest route to the brain. They start at our eyeballs and go all the way around our head before connecting to the visual cortex in the back of the brain, switching left and right as they do it.
This is a larger-than-necessary distance -- if we flipped the brain back around, we could make it much shorter (and get rid of the left/right swap).
Or we could keep it about the same length and move our brain into our chests as the article proposes, or put the eyes on stalks or something. This is not to mention the fact that we have many, longer nerves that work just fine, and that there are animals with even longer optic nerves who see just fine. Length isn't the issue.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but you don't look like one, and just in case you're not being deliberately inflammatory...
With my first comment, I was just trying to be friendly and informative (apparently the moderators agreed).
You responded with name-calling and bragging about how great you were.
I should have made this more clear in my previous post, but in my book this calls for taking you down a peg, hence the snarkiness centered around the content of your insults and braggadocio.
And now you respond by questioning my parentage...
All I'm trying to say here is, if you don't want to experience endless cycles of negativity, maybe a place to start would be to avoid opening your comments with personal insults. Many people respond negatively to them.
Of course I know that, silly monkey. I've been a sysadmin and perl coder for eons. It was the limitations in those existing ren scripts that led me to create one with an expanded feature set (such as the ability to chain multiple regexps serially on the command line).
You must not have looked at them very closely, then -- rename takes a perl expression, not a regex, which allows you to chain multiple regexes together with semicolons, or to use another delimiter in your regex, or to use conditionals, loops, and other more powerful constructs.
But maybe all that is only obvious to us monkeys.
Of course, it can also run without warnings if you turn -w on, doesn't define variables it doesn't use, doesn't use 53 different global variables, and so on. To each his own, I guess -- that must be what Perl looks like after eons.
a perl script I wrote to rename files using a series of regular expressions.
You realize that Larry Wall already wrote that a long time (14 years) ago and bundled it with the Perl sources, and it's installed on pretty much any Debian-based system (including Ubuntu), right?
$ head `which rename` #!/usr/bin/perl -w # # This script was developed by Robin Barker (Robin.Barker@npl.co.uk), # from Larry Wall's original script eg/rename from the perl source. # # This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it # under the same terms as Perl itself. # # Larry(?)'s RCS header: # RCSfile: rename,v Revision: 4.1 Date: 92/08/07 17:20:30
$ tar ztf perl_5.6.1.orig.tar.gz | grep rename perl-5.6.1/eg/rename
"One of the biggest reasons for many people to switch to a UNIX desktop, away from Windows, is security."
Huh? Maybe that's the talk among the amateur kiddies on IRC and Slashdot.
However, of all the professionals (Software Engineers) and academics (Linguists, Sociologists, etc) I know that use UNIX desktops, not one of them has told me they use it for the security -- they use it for the applications. Security is an afterthought for most people. Instead, they use it because it offers an environment in which they can most easily do the things they need to do on a day-to-day basis.
They want their bash and their xterms and their emacs or vi. They want their compiler. They want their statistics package. They want to munge some data files with a quick perl script. They've built business logic around shared NFS directories to help in work review and sharing. In short, they want to get some work done.
Sure, the sales people still want their Windows and their Powerpoint and Outlook. And there are whole fields of programming that revolve around Windows. But there are a lot of people who just don't intersect that world, and for whom Windows is mainly a platform for games and photo sharing at home. Either way, the choice of platform is about what you want to do. Security is just something you do to make sure nothing interferes with what you want to do.
The "feature" that I find annoying about top, though it's really rather necessary for a CLI program, is that only the most CPU-intensive programs at a given instant get to the top. [...] I find that KSysGuard works pretty well for this, since the processes all stay in the same place
This has nothing to do with CLI vs GUI programs, and everything to do with what you're choosing to sort by. You can change the sort order in top.
If you sort by PID or process name or something else less volatile than CPU percentages, the processes all stay in the same place in top, too. However, if you're looking for programs that are using a lot of CPU over time, it's probably worth sorting by cumulative CPU time instead.
Read the man page or the interactive help (hit "?").
This is just a fancy electric heater. It is no more and no less efficient than any common electric heater that generates heat by running a current through a coiled wire.
Any "inefficiency" in any of the steps of splitting the water and combining it back again is dissipated as heat. (Did you think the energy just disappeared?) This "waste heat" is a problem if your goal is to move a car around. If your goal is just to generate heat (usually the point of a fireplace, which is what they call this), then that "waste heat" is just "heat."
And if your goal is not to generate heat, but to make your room hotter, you can get it hotter for less power by moving heat in from somewhere outside the room. But people still seem to like the red, glowing, fire-hazard space-heater method, so maybe they'll like the open-flame method even more.
Most people will ogle at the fact that it doesn't produce harmful emmissions but neglect the fact the the emmissions are just further upstream.
Meh. You could say the same thing about any other electric heater. They don't produce local emissions, and use the same amount of power-plant juice per watt of heat generated.
Anyway, I prefer to turn electricity into heat by making a bunch of silicon circuits change state billions of times a second, but if other people want to look at a pretty flame, they can go right ahead.
I've been living long enough and I've traveled enough places [...]
I find it quite amusing that you open with language quite similar to that of the rhetorical buffoon in my post ("I've been around the block a few times").
Talk about extrapolating from scant evidence. Why is it that you think that casual observations during a long life and travel make you more qualified to discuss climatology than the many climatologists who have spent their long lives and travel in the active and specific study of the subject? No, seriously; this is not an appeal to authority -- I'm just curious.
But if the behaviour of that system is opaque, what to conclude from a history of tossing 60 heads and 60 tails ? Nothing. The next 500 tosses (weather) may end up all heads [...]
You appear to be attempting to construct a false dichotomy: that one either knows everything with certainty or nothing at all. In reality, it is possible to make statements about probability that do not make certain predictions, but that still are informative.
I do have a problem with global warming doomsayers acting as if they fully know the system underneath their predictions. They don't. Hence their predictions are not convincing
Who are these "global warming doomsayers"? Is your problem only with them or with all climatologists who make predictions? If the latter, can you please prove that all these people act "as if they fully know the system"?
In any case, you appear to be attempting to say here that one must fully understand a system in order to make useful predictions about it. This is easily disproven.
To use your example, I doubt either you or I fully know the mechanics involved in a toss of a normal coin . The mass distribution of the coin, the force applied, the distance to the floor, and the behavior of the floor and coin on impact may not be fully known. Yet it is still possible to make statements about the odds that can be useful for descision-making. If you watch the coin come up heads 27 times and tails 33 times in 60 tosses, and I for some strange reason offer you 3:1 odds on heads and 2:3 odds on tails, and you must bet, then you should probably take heads, even though you don't know for sure that you will win.
It should be obvious, but I'll make it clear just in case, that the point here is not that the climate is like coins or roulette. The point is this: it is easy to prove false your arguments that predictions that are not absolutely certain hold no worth and that a failure to be able to be able to make completely certain short-term predictions about weather indicates an inability to make informative long-term predictions about climate.
Predicting climate 10 years out is even more uncertain than predicting the average movement of the DJ over 10 years.
I'd like to see this statement proven, but I doubt you can prove it any time soon (note that anecdotes are not an acceptable measure of uncertainty).
Since you seem to think the ability to predict local weather is related to the ability to predict climate change, however, you might start with something easier. Look at whether and by how much the 3-day temperature forecast for a set of randomly selected localities in the US is better than just random guesses -- the data should all be publicly available. Then, can you find a system that makes a 3-day forecast of values for a set of randomly selected stocks that is more accurate than that?
Next, of course, you'd still need to show that this applies to longer-term predictions of global climate and the DJIA. Of course, that will take a long time to test, but the money from the stock prediction system should provide you with a substantial income to use during this time.
Some so-called "statistician" had the gall to tell me that the odds in roulette are stacked in favor of the house! He mumbled some nonsense about "probability" which I was too stupid to comprehend and told me that while I "might have short-term, unpredictable changes in winnings, the long-term trend favored the house by several percent."
But I don't believe him anyway (we all know there are liars, damned liars, and statisticians). I asked him what number the ball would land on next, and he didn't know! He just gave me some lame "forecast" with a bunch of percentages. I may not understand this "probability," but I've been around the block a few times and know a quack when I see one.
How can he claim to predict what is likely to happen to my money in the long term if he can't even predict exactly what number the ball will land on next?!
Alright, croupier, I've got my kids' whole college fund to invest here, so let's start with a thousand on black! Wooo!
Our species is also the only one we know whom Nature has granted two blessed capacities: the ability to perceive our doom and the ingenuity to avoid it.
I hope you will forgive some us if we choose to make use of these gifts, instead of nihilisically throwing them back in her face.
Perhaps it is better for other civilizations in the universe that we contain our "values" and "explorations" on this pile of crap we call Earth and not infect other worlds with our wisdom.
In the meantime, if you find human existence so utterly insufferable, Nature has also kindly given you the means by which you may remove yourself from it.
How about 420,000 years? And all I had to do was an obvious google search.
Or I could have looked at wikipedia for discussion and pretty graphs.
The fact that some scientists may be focusing their attention in particular studies on post-industrial-revolution effects doesn't mean that other scientists haven't established a longer baseline in other studies. There are a lot of data out there if you go look for them, so I'm not sure why the grandparent only referenced short-term studies.
The energy cost in manufacturing the turbines is greater than the energy gain you get back from them.
Incorrect.
Well, I suppose that technically it depends on how long you run it, which is true of every generator, including gas and coal-powered ones. If you just make the turbine, run it for a month, then tear it down, of course that would be wasteful. But we must assume that when you say "get from them", you mean over their multi-decade lifetime, rather than over a second.
That's why people talk about the "energy payback" time, which is the amount of time you need to run the generator (powered by whatever source) to pay back the initial investment of energy you made in its manufacture.
For wind turbines, the energy payback takes only a few months (varies depending on how much wind you get, of course), well within the life of the turbine.
This should be sort of obvious if you think about it for a second. Why would you make something to sell wholesale-priced energy if it takes more retail-priced energy to produce (not to mention the costs of raw materials and profit margins along the way)? I don't think the subsidies are *that* good.
Anyway, even if you can't think, you could at least search Google.
Hey, don't ask me. The details in the doc are a little sparse, and there's no precise description of the implementation.
However, if you read that snippet again, it seems they are saying they store the session key in some database in a way that's associated with the user's account: "This key is then stored in the database, waiting to be retrieved upon an authorized request by the client software."
So, when you log back in with your password, you're probably given access to your previous session keys. At the very least they say they send you the key and the file when you retrieve a file: "the key and the file are then sent to the client, and the client decrypts the file".
Of course, there's nothing that indicates they've tried to address (as you mentioned) the client storing old keys or just grabbing your password, or the admin doing a little "select KEY from KEYTBL where USER=("SEWilco")". But there's not really a well-developed discussion of threat models in there, anyway. I've had interview candidates with 30 minutes and a whiteboard design and describe better systems than what we get out of this document.
By default, all of your files that sit on our World Wide Server are encrypted with 128-bit AES encryption.
Oh, great, "encryption" hand-waving.
I invite you to read the white paper I wrote about our security
OK, I did, and must note at first that the discussion of security therein is really poorly developed. I also noticed this snippet:
All files stored on the World Wide Server are compressed and encrypted. Each file is encrypted according to the session key at the time the file is stored. This key is then stored in the database, waiting to be retrieved upon an authorized request by the client software. The key and the file are then sent to the client, and the client decrypts the file.
I think that pretty much speaks for itself, but to anyone who doesn't get it: they are storing and transferring the key right alongside the ciphertext! Why bother with the encryption, then? The only possible reason is to say "hey, we use encryption!" This encryption is worthless. It's like buying an expensive deadbolt and leaving the key in the door.
You say "this attention to detail prevents administrators from being able to snoop on a user's data", but what prevents an administrator or government agent from just retrieving the key from the database?
Any security minded people out there, I encourage you to read the security sections of the PDF linked in the parent (unless you're already burned out). It's hilarious. "Ooooh, we use password hashes."
spam won't be possible if it's computationally intensive
A common fallacy; the actual situation is just the opposite. Spammers don't use their own computers to send spam. They use hordes of virus-infected Windows machines. Compute costs them nothing or at most some small fee to a virus writer over IRC.
Legitimate organizations use expensive, highly-available, rack-mounted servers. They actually care if they lose a message due to machine failure, and they can't illegally use someone else's machines to do the work for them. Compute for them is very expensive.
Making SMTP more computationally expensive just hurts the good guys. The only reason this proposal has any merit is that it's imposing this penalty to get some other benefit, authentication from the signing, which will actually help identify legitimate mail, since the spammers can't do the computation at all without the private key.
Re:JOE is your friend....
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JOE Hits 3.0
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Cannot believe the bunch of negative comments on Joe... what are you trolling about?
Wait, we're talking about text editors, and you can't believe there's a flamewar? Is this your first day on the Internet?
Slashdot Mirror
This is one area where Google's search algorithm falls down [...] I wish there was the option for a decay (or timeout) function into their page-rank algorithms to reward contemporary information.
Look to the left of the search results. See the "Search Options" thing? Open that and you can restrict results by date range (and a number of other things).
I never noticed those options until someone pointed them out to me recently. I guess if you've been using something simple for a decade, at some point you stop looking for new things about it. But now I'm amazed all over again. For example, do a timeline search on Google for "New Orleans" and see the peaks around the Civil War and War of 1812, then click and read historical articles from those periods in the NYT.
Tying this back to the original article, I personally think it's awesome that the Internet appears to "remember" stuff from before it was built. Getting articles from 1861 in your search results is just trippy, so hats off to Google and the Times.
(Sadly, that's just a video of an iPhone -- couldn't find one of a hard drive.)
Can anybody explain this huge difference?
;)
;)
This could get political, so please don't take any of these comments as judgments on the personal worth of Americans or Europeans, or about which nations are better that which other ones. There are lots of fine folks on both sides of the pond, and there's more to life than salaries and GDP. I'm just trying to explain the salary difference, since you asked. I'll just throw these possible reasons out there and we'll see what sticks...
According to an article in The Economist earlier this year (sorry, don't have a link), American companies get a higher ROI (usually measured in increased productivity) on investments in IT projects (this actually goes with the company, not the worker, so it's probably down to management, but in any case a higher "R" makes you willing to be a little more free with the "I").
Also, Europeans work significantly fewer hours per year than Americans, on average. Like 15% fewer, according to that linked speech from the President of the European Central Bank. Looking at the yearly salary, then, distorts the figure for how much people are being paid for each unit of labor input (though, even per hour worked, Americans are more productive, so that further raises the value of the labor to the company).
Put another way, according to that same ECB article the US has a 50% higher GDP per capita than Europe (Europe's is two-thirds that of the US), so the output is higher, too. And some of that trickles down (not much, but some).
And, of course, unemployment in America is much lower than in Europe (for August, it was 4.6% in the US vs 9% in, e.g, Germany). If you have twice as many people looking for jobs, well, the employer can offer lower pay and someone will be glad to be earning more than zero.
So, those would make it reasonable for companies in the US to be willing to pay higher salaries.
Plus, it's easier to terminate people without cause in America, which means poor performers with their low salaries (who would otherwise drag down the average) can be taken off your books immediately, without a lengthy process of review and appeal. In some places in Europe, it can take a while to fire someone and may not be possible in borderline cases, and you have to demonstrate cause. Since IT workers often have privileges you don't want them to use during a hostile termination, this sometimes leads to the ludicrous situation of paying someone not to come to work for a few months (and that person is probably not going to get a raise and a bonus and bump up the average, eh?). Of course, despite this, unemployment is lower, anyway, so it's not like the US is cheating by not counting all the $0 salaries, unless maybe you count the huge prison population
Similarly, you have to take into account the large concentrations of American IT workers in places like Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is a very risky place. The companies that succeed are often flush with cash. But the companies that fail don't pay anybody, and unemployed people don't count into the average. And, of course, the cost of living is high in Silicon Valley.
So, those effects would also tend to raise the average.
Much of this stuff could be explained as the result of the different paths America and Europe have taken with running their societies, specifically with how much risk they are willing to tolerate. But, like I said, there's more to life than high salaries. And those American salaries are getting lower in real terms by the day as Americans' purchasing power is eroded by the falling dollar. So, enjoy your vacation days and social services and don't fret too much about it.
This article will give you some more context:
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/07/10/fords-hyd
Why call it "Liebert XD" ? What, it's not water ?
Ummm, because it's made by the Liebert Corporation? And it's their "XD" line of products?
Is this the first time you've ever heard of branding?
You might as well ask: "Why call it 'Toyota Camry'? What, it's not a car?"
it's still just liquid cooling, something that existed in the server room long before Michael Dell ever sold a single server machine.
So? Cars have been around a long time, too. That doesn't mean I want to drive a Model T.
Anyway, the news here is not that there is a new HVAC product, but that Dell is going to be selling HVAC systems to datacenter owners.
Also, this system uses a gas/liquid phase-change cycle, and it operates on a different scope (zone and spot cooling -- doesn't get anywhere near the CPU), so it's really not like what most people would think of as liquid cooling systems for computers. It's just a way of getting the cooling closer to the heat source instead of blowing cold air around in ducts, such that your HVAC operates more efficiently.
Sure, this idea has been around for a while (though this system makes some improvements that are especially helpful for datacenter use). The news is that Dell is selling it.
Your post seems to have missed the point.
The point Sting was making was not just that the Russians had tender feelings, but rather that they didn't want to cause a global thermonuclear war because it would result in the annihilation of millions of their countrymen, including their own families, for whom they had these tender feelings. In other words, he was saying that mutually assured destruction was, after all, a good deterrent.
The comparison with dictators is therefore not really apt. Hitler and Stalin had no such assurance of destruction hanging over their heads, and it's probable that they discounted any future possibility of punishment for their actions.
In other words, Hitler and Stalin were "homicidal maniacs" because they thought they could get away with it, while Russians like Petrov didn't push the button because they knew they wouldn't get away with it.
As someone else mentioned, I think they are still a victim of their own success. Sure it's been over a year since launch, but they were expecting 250,000 subscribers and got 6,000,000.
The controlling factor for their server performance should not be the total number of subscribers, but the number of subscribers per realm, and Blizzard has complete control over that number, because they can mark a realm as "full" and disallow logins/signups. IOW, as you know, those 6,000,000 people are not all playing in the same game at the same time.
It should be possible to make the realms completely independent, so that this just becomes a matter of horizontal scaling, and having hardware/systems monkeys roll out new realms via some standard operating procedure.
Unfortunately, based on the rumors I have heard, Blizzard has chosen to tie a bunch of stuff together. For instance, the common web forums use the characters from all the realms (the web forums know about your level 23 mage), they have a single set of auth servers, it's not clear that the item databases are not shared between realms, and so on. This is sort of sad, because it's not like Blizzard are the first people to roll out an MMORPG.
Now, some might argue that tying some of this stuff together makes for a better user experience. However, when this entanglement leads to downtimes, one could make the argument that it's not worth it.
Anyway, my point is not to bash on Blizzard; I'm sure they've made some difficult design decisions correctly, and some difficult ones incorrectly. My point is that "we have lots of users" is not a good excuse when you have a service that lets you divide those users into sub-populations, and that there are probably architectural improvements they could make to improve their scalability. The real question is whether they have competent and experienced systems engineers to help them make those improvements, and whether management is committed to supporting them.
Anyway, so much for pre-coffee ramblings....
For this reason, I wouldn't expect many species to evolve with a larger-than-necessary distance between their brain and their sensory organs (unless such creature evolved a much faster method of conducting nerve impulses than we possess).
Hate to dash your expectations, but our optic nerves don't exactly take the shortest route to the brain. They start at our eyeballs and go all the way around our head before connecting to the visual cortex in the back of the brain, switching left and right as they do it.
This is a larger-than-necessary distance -- if we flipped the brain back around, we could make it much shorter (and get rid of the left/right swap).
Or we could keep it about the same length and move our brain into our chests as the article proposes, or put the eyes on stalks or something. This is not to mention the fact that we have many, longer nerves that work just fine, and that there are animals with even longer optic nerves who see just fine. Length isn't the issue.
You're a snarky little bastard aren't you?
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but you don't look like one, and just in case you're not being deliberately inflammatory...
With my first comment, I was just trying to be friendly and informative (apparently the moderators agreed).
You responded with name-calling and bragging about how great you were.
I should have made this more clear in my previous post, but in my book this calls for taking you down a peg, hence the snarkiness centered around the content of your insults and braggadocio.
And now you respond by questioning my parentage...
All I'm trying to say here is, if you don't want to experience endless cycles of negativity, maybe a place to start would be to avoid opening your comments with personal insults. Many people respond negatively to them.
Of course I know that, silly monkey. I've been a sysadmin and perl coder for eons. It was the limitations in those existing ren scripts that led me to create one with an expanded feature set (such as the ability to chain multiple regexps serially on the command line).
You must not have looked at them very closely, then -- rename takes a perl expression, not a regex, which allows you to chain multiple regexes together with semicolons, or to use another delimiter in your regex, or to use conditionals, loops, and other more powerful constructs.
But maybe all that is only obvious to us monkeys.
Of course, it can also run without warnings if you turn -w on, doesn't define variables it doesn't use, doesn't use 53 different global variables, and so on. To each his own, I guess -- that must be what Perl looks like after eons.
a perl script I wrote to rename files using a series of regular expressions.
You realize that Larry Wall already wrote that a long time (14 years) ago and bundled it with the Perl sources, and it's installed on pretty much any Debian-based system (including Ubuntu), right?
$ head `which rename`
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# This script was developed by Robin Barker (Robin.Barker@npl.co.uk),
# from Larry Wall's original script eg/rename from the perl source.
#
# This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
# under the same terms as Perl itself.
#
# Larry(?)'s RCS header:
# RCSfile: rename,v Revision: 4.1 Date: 92/08/07 17:20:30
$ tar ztf perl_5.6.1.orig.tar.gz | grep rename
perl-5.6.1/eg/rename
Whoops!
"One of the biggest reasons for many people to switch to a UNIX desktop, away from Windows, is security."
Huh? Maybe that's the talk among the amateur kiddies on IRC and Slashdot.
However, of all the professionals (Software Engineers) and academics (Linguists, Sociologists, etc) I know that use UNIX desktops, not one of them has told me they use it for the security -- they use it for the applications. Security is an afterthought for most people. Instead, they use it because it offers an environment in which they can most easily do the things they need to do on a day-to-day basis.
They want their bash and their xterms and their emacs or vi. They want their compiler. They want their statistics package. They want to munge some data files with a quick perl script. They've built business logic around shared NFS directories to help in work review and sharing. In short, they want to get some work done.
Sure, the sales people still want their Windows and their Powerpoint and Outlook. And there are whole fields of programming that revolve around Windows. But there are a lot of people who just don't intersect that world, and for whom Windows is mainly a platform for games and photo sharing at home. Either way, the choice of platform is about what you want to do. Security is just something you do to make sure nothing interferes with what you want to do.
The "feature" that I find annoying about top, though it's really rather necessary for a CLI program, is that only the most CPU-intensive programs at a given instant get to the top. [...] I find that KSysGuard works pretty well for this, since the processes all stay in the same place
This has nothing to do with CLI vs GUI programs, and everything to do with what you're choosing to sort by. You can change the sort order in top.
If you sort by PID or process name or something else less volatile than CPU percentages, the processes all stay in the same place in top, too. However, if you're looking for programs that are using a lot of CPU over time, it's probably worth sorting by cumulative CPU time instead.
Read the man page or the interactive help (hit "?").
Real efficient use of electricity also.
This is just a fancy electric heater. It is no more and no less efficient than any common electric heater that generates heat by running a current through a coiled wire.
Any "inefficiency" in any of the steps of splitting the water and combining it back again is dissipated as heat. (Did you think the energy just disappeared?) This "waste heat" is a problem if your goal is to move a car around. If your goal is just to generate heat (usually the point of a fireplace, which is what they call this), then that "waste heat" is just "heat."
And if your goal is not to generate heat, but to make your room hotter, you can get it hotter for less power by moving heat in from somewhere outside the room. But people still seem to like the red, glowing, fire-hazard space-heater method, so maybe they'll like the open-flame method even more.
Most people will ogle at the fact that it doesn't produce harmful emmissions but neglect the fact the the emmissions are just further upstream.
Meh. You could say the same thing about any other electric heater. They don't produce local emissions, and use the same amount of power-plant juice per watt of heat generated.
Anyway, I prefer to turn electricity into heat by making a bunch of silicon circuits change state billions of times a second, but if other people want to look at a pretty flame, they can go right ahead.
I've been living long enough and I've traveled enough places [...]
I find it quite amusing that you open with language quite similar to that of the rhetorical buffoon in my post ("I've been around the block a few times").
Talk about extrapolating from scant evidence. Why is it that you think that casual observations during a long life and travel make you more qualified to discuss climatology than the many climatologists who have spent their long lives and travel in the active and specific study of the subject? No, seriously; this is not an appeal to authority -- I'm just curious.
But if the behaviour of that system is opaque, what to conclude from a history of tossing 60 heads and 60 tails ? Nothing. The next 500 tosses (weather) may end up all heads [...]
You appear to be attempting to construct a false dichotomy: that one either knows everything with certainty or nothing at all. In reality, it is possible to make statements about probability that do not make certain predictions, but that still are informative.
I do have a problem with global warming doomsayers acting as if they fully know the system underneath their predictions. They don't. Hence their predictions are not convincing
Who are these "global warming doomsayers"? Is your problem only with them or with all climatologists who make predictions? If the latter, can you please prove that all these people act "as if they fully know the system"?
In any case, you appear to be attempting to say here that one must fully understand a system in order to make useful predictions about it. This is easily disproven.
To use your example, I doubt either you or I fully know the mechanics involved in a toss of a normal coin . The mass distribution of the coin, the force applied, the distance to the floor, and the behavior of the floor and coin on impact may not be fully known. Yet it is still possible to make statements about the odds that can be useful for descision-making. If you watch the coin come up heads 27 times and tails 33 times in 60 tosses, and I for some strange reason offer you 3:1 odds on heads and 2:3 odds on tails, and you must bet, then you should probably take heads, even though you don't know for sure that you will win.
It should be obvious, but I'll make it clear just in case, that the point here is not that the climate is like coins or roulette. The point is this: it is easy to prove false your arguments that predictions that are not absolutely certain hold no worth and that a failure to be able to be able to make completely certain short-term predictions about weather indicates an inability to make informative long-term predictions about climate.
Predicting climate 10 years out is even more uncertain than predicting the average movement of the DJ over 10 years.
I'd like to see this statement proven, but I doubt you can prove it any time soon (note that anecdotes are not an acceptable measure of uncertainty).
Since you seem to think the ability to predict local weather is related to the ability to predict climate change, however, you might start with something easier. Look at whether and by how much the 3-day temperature forecast for a set of randomly selected localities in the US is better than just random guesses -- the data should all be publicly available. Then, can you find a system that makes a 3-day forecast of values for a set of randomly selected stocks that is more accurate than that?
Next, of course, you'd still need to show that this applies to longer-term predictions of global climate and the DJIA. Of course, that will take a long time to test, but the money from the stock prediction system should provide you with a substantial income to use during this time.
Some so-called "statistician" had the gall to tell me that the odds in roulette are stacked in favor of the house! He mumbled some nonsense about "probability" which I was too stupid to comprehend and told me that while I "might have short-term, unpredictable changes in winnings, the long-term trend favored the house by several percent."
But I don't believe him anyway (we all know there are liars, damned liars, and statisticians). I asked him what number the ball would land on next, and he didn't know! He just gave me some lame "forecast" with a bunch of percentages. I may not understand this "probability," but I've been around the block a few times and know a quack when I see one.
How can he claim to predict what is likely to happen to my money in the long term if he can't even predict exactly what number the ball will land on next?!
Alright, croupier, I've got my kids' whole college fund to invest here, so let's start with a thousand on black! Wooo!
Our species is doomed to die, anyway.
Our species is also the only one we know whom Nature has granted two blessed capacities: the ability to perceive our doom and the ingenuity to avoid it.
I hope you will forgive some us if we choose to make use of these gifts, instead of nihilisically throwing them back in her face.
Perhaps it is better for other civilizations in the universe that we contain our "values" and "explorations" on this pile of crap we call Earth and not infect other worlds with our wisdom.
In the meantime, if you find human existence so utterly insufferable, Nature has also kindly given you the means by which you may remove yourself from it.
200 years is way too short to tell us anything
How about 420,000 years? And all I had to do was an obvious google search.
Or I could have looked at wikipedia for discussion and pretty graphs.
The fact that some scientists may be focusing their attention in particular studies on post-industrial-revolution effects doesn't mean that other scientists haven't established a longer baseline in other studies. There are a lot of data out there if you go look for them, so I'm not sure why the grandparent only referenced short-term studies.
The energy cost in manufacturing the turbines is greater than the energy gain you get back from them.
Incorrect.
Well, I suppose that technically it depends on how long you run it, which is true of every generator, including gas and coal-powered ones. If you just make the turbine, run it for a month, then tear it down, of course that would be wasteful. But we must assume that when you say "get from them", you mean over their multi-decade lifetime, rather than over a second.
That's why people talk about the "energy payback" time, which is the amount of time you need to run the generator (powered by whatever source) to pay back the initial investment of energy you made in its manufacture.
For wind turbines, the energy payback takes only a few months (varies depending on how much wind you get, of course), well within the life of the turbine.
This should be sort of obvious if you think about it for a second. Why would you make something to sell wholesale-priced energy if it takes more retail-priced energy to produce (not to mention the costs of raw materials and profit margins along the way)? I don't think the subsidies are *that* good.
Anyway, even if you can't think, you could at least search Google.
If math is a sport then what isn't a sport. Fuck. [emphasis mine]
You said it. That is something that probably won't be in the Olympics for a long while.
Hey, don't ask me. The details in the doc are a little sparse, and there's no precise description of the implementation.
However, if you read that snippet again, it seems they are saying they store the session key in some database in a way that's associated with the user's account: "This key is then stored in the database, waiting to be retrieved upon an authorized request by the client software."
So, when you log back in with your password, you're probably given access to your previous session keys. At the very least they say they send you the key and the file when you retrieve a file: "the key and the file are then sent to the client, and the client decrypts the file".
Of course, there's nothing that indicates they've tried to address (as you mentioned) the client storing old keys or just grabbing your password, or the admin doing a little "select KEY from KEYTBL where USER=("SEWilco")". But there's not really a well-developed discussion of threat models in there, anyway. I've had interview candidates with 30 minutes and a whiteboard design and describe better systems than what we get out of this document.
Oh, great, "encryption" hand-waving.
I invite you to read the white paper I wrote about our security
OK, I did, and must note at first that the discussion of security therein is really poorly developed. I also noticed this snippet:
I think that pretty much speaks for itself, but to anyone who doesn't get it: they are storing and transferring the key right alongside the ciphertext! Why bother with the encryption, then? The only possible reason is to say "hey, we use encryption!" This encryption is worthless. It's like buying an expensive deadbolt and leaving the key in the door.
You say "this attention to detail prevents administrators from being able to snoop on a user's data", but what prevents an administrator or government agent from just retrieving the key from the database?
Any security minded people out there, I encourage you to read the security sections of the PDF linked in the parent (unless you're already burned out). It's hilarious. "Ooooh, we use password hashes."
No-one expects you to pray to the backup gods religiously every morning before breakfast
Speak for yourself.
When my users don't pray to the backup god, "accidents" happen. And tapes are so easy to misplace.
A prayer here, an offering there, and all can be right again.
spam won't be possible if it's computationally intensive
A common fallacy; the actual situation is just the opposite. Spammers don't use their own computers to send spam. They use hordes of virus-infected Windows machines. Compute costs them nothing or at most some small fee to a virus writer over IRC.
Legitimate organizations use expensive, highly-available, rack-mounted servers. They actually care if they lose a message due to machine failure, and they can't illegally use someone else's machines to do the work for them. Compute for them is very expensive.
Making SMTP more computationally expensive just hurts the good guys. The only reason this proposal has any merit is that it's imposing this penalty to get some other benefit, authentication from the signing, which will actually help identify legitimate mail, since the spammers can't do the computation at all without the private key.
Cannot believe the bunch of negative comments on Joe... what are you trolling about?
Wait, we're talking about text editors, and you can't believe there's a flamewar? Is this your first day on the Internet?