I know this is boring, but rather than any new ad-ons, I'd like to firefox to be as fast or at least almost as fast as IE. Then I'd have a PRAYER of getting IE replaced with Mozilla, in the companies where I work. That would lead to replacing the Windows machines with Linux, and that would make me a happy person.
No, I'm not making this up to make Mozilla look bad. No, I'm not wrong. This is a killer in corporate America. Companies with big sloppy apps with laundry lists of data cannot use Mozilla. They're stuck with IE.
Speed up rendering for large tables. By a factor of ten or so.
Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID
on
What NAS To Buy?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Using RAID5, you get maybe 3 times the performance for reads (if you're lucky), and writes can be slower than a single drive due to parity calculations."
This is an old idea. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's worth thinking about in the situation.
Low-end controllers tend to have crappy processors on them. Crappy processors cannot compute a checksum very quickly. But modern non-crappy processors are insanely fast compared to modern disk.
When you make this sort of calculation, you have to figure out what is doing the checksumming. Think about the advantages of RAID-5 with instant checksumming, then back off from those based on how slow you believe the checksumming will be.
And all such calculations (for 10 or for 5) need to consider the number of spindles.
"many people believe in" the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I sure do. I know that there are millions of people around the world who do as well. I can't prove that, but I have faith.
Surely there must be some thick, hardcover, and most importantly, expensive textbooks which the Louisiana school board could be required to buy telling their students all about the obvious truth of the Spaghedeity.
A few bytes every few minutes about location and velocity, on an opt-in basis, could tell city planners and fellow drives so much about traffic conditions, routes, stop lights and how they should be timed, etc.
There are any number of devices which could do this, but a car being manufactured and sold in quantity would allow a lot of data, and could be used to improve traffic flow.
A junk food tax sounds like an INCREDIBLY good idea.
Increasing the cost of obesity reduces obesity. We don't know how much it would, but studies from cigarette taxes show that increases costs decrease consumption of even highly desirable things.
Obesity increases fuel consumption -- the obese eat more (more food transport and production fuel use) and weigh more (more transport costs in themselves). They eat 18% more, according the Lancet. The Lancet goes on to suggest that reducing obesity would reduce global warming.
And yes, their health care costs us -- we should be getting some of that back.
A small tax (in stores, vending machines and restaurants) on foods which digest quickly seems like a FANTASTIC idea. Not a big deal for someone that eats a few Snickers bars every month, but a noticeable pain for someone who eats them every day.
I can't find things without a lot of work, and I can NEVER be sure I've found everything. This, frankly, makes me mad.
Let's say you want a comedy from Thailand. You can search for Thai, you can search for Thailand, but if you search for both, it gives you all comedies AND all Thai movies. WELL THAT'S HELPFUL.
What about running time? I want a short movie. Nope. I want a G-rated movie. Nope. I want a movie that was added to their stock since April 8th, since that's the last time I checked all the new Thai comedies they got. Nope. I want an animated film in black and white. No way. I want to see only films which are not and have never been in my queue. Ha Ha! No.
Advanced search.
How long has their website been up and used, and yet still no advanced search? Long enough to mean it's not a "getting around to it" thing.
While it's not trivial to implement, it's not that hard, and they've had plenty of time to do it and yet they haven't done it.
It's clearly a business decision. They don't WANT us to be able to find what we want. They want us to follow a tree of behavior so they can predict usage/copies to own. They put us in a maze with a little cheese at the end and make US do the work.
This pisses me off. This makes me angry.
The less able to find what I want I am, the less enthusiastic I am about Netflix, the longer the movies I do get languish, because I'm settling, rather than getting what I want, and HEY! the happier Netflix is.
Cool word! But you're referring to the classic supply/demand sort of supply. How much is in the marketplace right now. I'm referring to how much oil THEY THINK their country is swimming on. Some heads of state won't give a rat's ass about providing for their countrymen when that oil is gone. Others do care. That influences what they decide their oil is worth.
Oil's funny. We could be paying a lot more for it, but we're not. When you're pricing marshmallows, you decide on $1.59 a bag without having to think to yourself, "If I make it $2 a bag, a coalition of governments may invade my country."
Agreed, but I suspect that the minute they're producing anything in _real_ quantity, such that thousands of drooling investors and tens of countrys want to set up their own factories to do the same, oil prices will magically drop enough to make it a lot less attractive.
You're assuming that it costs a lot to get it out of the ground. Prices have to do with
demand -- meaning what the folks with oil think they can get)
supply -- meaning (in this situation, and this isn't the usual meaning) how much oil they've got underneath their country -- when it's gone they're destitute, so they price accordingly
And then there's speculation, which is pushing prices up. But honestly, I don't know where that is in the process.
My point is not "crude actually costs $32 per barrel to get out of the ground" it's "it is certainly possible that crude costs $0.27 per barrel to get out of the ground, though it might be $49.95 to get out of the ground." Most of us don't know what the margins are on oil after extraction.
A process like this MIGHT be cheaper than extraction. It certainly can be cheaper than our purchase price for extracted barrels from the sources we have today. That will drive such prices down.
I LOVE your #3 idea -- if we come up with a system which is carbon neutral and costs only a little more to acquire than drilling, hell yeah, let's make it illegal to drill for oil! If we could force than down the world's throat everyone would win except the people who currently have oil. They would lose big time. I'm ambivalent about that. (Canada's a big producer -- they'd probably go into the manufactured crude business in a big way and it'd be a wash for them. That is, unless it really does cost $0.27 to pump a barrel of crude out of a well.)
NB. I suspect that it DOES cost very little (a few bucks) to pull a barrel of oil out of the ground. It FINDING that oil that cost so much money.
With a new process, oil becomes a SURE THING. That would make the oil companies' profits PREDICTABLE FOREVER. Part of the financial world would love that.
"TSA's new rules only protect us from a non-existent breed of terrorists who are unable to lie."
This is silly and misses the point. They protect us from something far more dangerous to the regime: People who refuse to have their rights flushed away.
I'd love working in the building, myself. I can imagine each time I cross over the big gap between the most offset buildings. Each time I did this, I'd need to go up a level to the walkway and cross over a bunch of unused space which will provide more external surface area, thus making cooling more expensive. I'd just love it. People wasting my time on something inefficient is what I live for.
But why a bar code? Why not a bug? Or a CD ROM? Or a finger pressing an ANY key?
We've seen this. Every single day, the ILECs pour a lot of money into improvements. The spend the money on
1. Lobbyists
2. Campaign contributions
3.... Ok, well isn't that ENOUGH!?!?
4. Oh, ok, a few bucks now and then on basic improvements in areas where they can DEFINITELY get a profit on them in the short term.
Now, that all works very, VERY well to improve the company. The profit margins of the company, that is.
But the Incumbent local exchange carrier companies (the ILECs -- other wise known as TPC) in North America have spent so much money on discouraging competition through regulation that they have made their own business very expensive to run. They also have policies going back to the late 1800s of treating jobs as cogs in a machine with replaceable parts, so their labor relations are geared towards replaceability and strike-resilience. It's very inefficient.
And in a business where things can be automated up to wazoo, the ILECs are hamstrung by unions and their own evil need to have huge headcounts so that their lobbyists can pressure their unions to pressure the politicians to do as their lobbyists demand. Need for headcount reduces desire for automation.
You want more bandwidth? Push for campaign finance reform. Whenever you hear ANYTHING that a local ILEC wants from a politician, call your local reps and tell them you wont vote for them again if they vote for what the ILEC wants. Then, after any election, whether your anti-candidate wins or loses, call them and tell them that they didn't get YOUR vote because they voted with the ILEC.
Only by removing the best business model the ILECs have (preserving the status quo and gaming our democracy) will you get ILECs which listen to customers.
Besides being an amazing novel, Ubik is interesting because Phil actually wrote a SCRIPT to be filmed for Ubik. It's been published. You can buy it. It is, as far as I know, his only foray into screenwriting.
I completely agree -- it's the modern ones which require incredible horsepower. The older ones were written with the machine's constraints in mind. That's why I said "like running a modern paint program on an old machine."
On the other hand, I remember seeing the then incredible incredible "painter" (2.0?) -- it came in a paint can. Nice gimmick, great software, but SLOW as hell on the hardware of the day. I assume now that version runs fast, since we've sprinkled so much Moore's dust on it.
I notice that this machine redraws on zooms quickly, and creates a travel route quickly. That means the box has some real horsepower.
And yet, the dragging is way behind the finger, the responses of input and menu popup is slow -- it looks like running a modern paint program on an old machine.
This is not going to make for a pleasant user experience. Why is that stuff so uncrisp?
Yes, it is, however it won't work. The fact that it got the title "standard" will be used by Microsoft as a battering ram, and there won't always be someone with any sense around. Just look at voting machines. People in governments keep buying them, even from manufacturers who had been completely discredited. There now has to be a black mark on this thing so huge that Microsoft won't risk bringing it up.
The miniseries lacked pacing and directing in general. It was slow and long. If you'd read the books and wanted a replay of them, it was for you. It was not a quality product on its own, and not a mainstream product in general.
People who read Dune had problems with the Lynch version -- HUGE problems. But it was paced well, delivered lines with impact and was visually stunning. A big-budget film needs to take its cues from the Lynch version, not SciFi's.
PHBs will see MSOOXML (hearafter pronounce Moose-OX-Emmel) as an open standard, when we know it's not. Until there's a fraud investigation and prosecution (for any aspect of it -- no mater how small) this will stand. Once MS is convicted for some petty fraud in relation to it, there will be a concrete rebuttal. "It's an open standard." "The standard was pushed through by fraud."
Until that day, we're left with paragraphs of response, which won't be believed -- we need a one sentence response backed up by a WSJ article.
CompTIA's a bunch of weasels. They're a lobbying group who represent big business, not individual programmers/techies. These folks lobbied for us not getting overtime, for instance.
They're also the mouth-breathers who came up with the Network+ cert.
I suspect that this survey is as crooked as they could figure out how to make it, to support their causes.
The army's idea of tuition is a state school. It's a drop in the bucket compared to what MIT wants. Financially, you'll do much better in a skilled labor job.
Will the army send you to Iraq? Will they give you good training? Will they put you on an interesting tech (unlikely)?
It's all a crapshoot, and when it all comes down to it, you have NO RIGHTS once you join the army. Not even the right to leave when they said you could without being screwed around with.
Joining any armed service is the worst decision anyone could make, if they're thinking of going to MIT. Loans will cover the cost of MIT. Get loans and pay for them in the private sector. You wanna help the military? Go to MIT on loans, get a degree, then go work for a defense contractor and do something interesting. Don't like what you're working on? LEAVE. Go work for another one. Or work for a company that's not a defense contractor, build up their tech, then watch them get a contract. Get rich.
And what they're doing in labs at MIT is definitely more interesting than most of what the amry would put you on.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is boring, but rather than any new ad-ons, I'd like to firefox to be as fast or at least almost as fast as IE. Then I'd have a PRAYER of getting IE replaced with Mozilla, in the companies where I work. That would lead to replacing the Windows machines with Linux, and that would make me a happy person.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=352367
No, I'm not making this up to make Mozilla look bad. No, I'm not wrong. This is a killer in corporate America. Companies with big sloppy apps with laundry lists of data cannot use Mozilla. They're stuck with IE.
Speed up rendering for large tables. By a factor of ten or so.
"Using RAID5, you get maybe 3 times the performance for reads (if you're lucky), and writes can be slower than a single drive due to parity calculations."
This is an old idea. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's worth thinking about in the situation.
Low-end controllers tend to have crappy processors on them. Crappy processors cannot compute a checksum very quickly. But modern non-crappy processors are insanely fast compared to modern disk.
When you make this sort of calculation, you have to figure out what is doing the checksumming. Think about the advantages of RAID-5 with instant checksumming, then back off from those based on how slow you believe the checksumming will be.
And all such calculations (for 10 or for 5) need to consider the number of spindles.
"many people believe in" the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I sure do. I know that there are millions of people around the world who do as well. I can't prove that, but I have faith.
Surely there must be some thick, hardcover, and most importantly, expensive textbooks which the Louisiana school board could be required to buy telling their students all about the obvious truth of the Spaghedeity.
I'm betting on "Bribes from telcos".
A few bytes every few minutes about location and velocity, on an opt-in basis, could tell city planners and fellow drives so much about traffic conditions, routes, stop lights and how they should be timed, etc.
There are any number of devices which could do this, but a car being manufactured and sold in quantity would allow a lot of data, and could be used to improve traffic flow.
Increasing the cost of obesity reduces obesity. We don't know how much it would, but studies from cigarette taxes show that increases costs decrease consumption of even highly desirable things.
Obesity increases fuel consumption -- the obese eat more (more food transport and production fuel use) and weigh more (more transport costs in themselves). They eat 18% more, according the Lancet. The Lancet goes on to suggest that reducing obesity would reduce global warming.
And yes, their health care costs us -- we should be getting some of that back.
A small tax (in stores, vending machines and restaurants) on foods which digest quickly seems like a FANTASTIC idea. Not a big deal for someone that eats a few Snickers bars every month, but a noticeable pain for someone who eats them every day.
Obama came out (today) for this bill.
He's for telecom immunity, if it means avoid snitty zingers from the Republicans about Fisa. Whatever's convenient.
It would really be nice if I could now say "he just lost my vote."
Netflix drives me NUTS.
I can't find things without a lot of work, and I can NEVER be sure I've found everything. This, frankly, makes me mad.
Let's say you want a comedy from Thailand. You can search for Thai, you can search for Thailand, but if you search for both, it gives you all comedies AND all Thai movies. WELL THAT'S HELPFUL.
What about running time? I want a short movie. Nope. I want a G-rated movie. Nope. I want a movie that was added to their stock since April 8th, since that's the last time I checked all the new Thai comedies they got. Nope. I want an animated film in black and white. No way. I want to see only films which are not and have never been in my queue. Ha Ha! No.
Advanced search.
How long has their website been up and used, and yet still no advanced search? Long enough to mean it's not a "getting around to it" thing.
While it's not trivial to implement, it's not that hard, and they've had plenty of time to do it and yet they haven't done it.
It's clearly a business decision. They don't WANT us to be able to find what we want. They want us to follow a tree of behavior so they can predict usage/copies to own. They put us in a maze with a little cheese at the end and make US do the work.
This pisses me off.
This makes me angry.
The less able to find what I want I am, the less enthusiastic I am about Netflix, the longer the movies I do get languish, because I'm settling, rather than getting what I want, and HEY! the happier Netflix is.
Bastards.
Cool word! But you're referring to the classic supply/demand sort of supply. How much is in the marketplace right now. I'm referring to how much oil THEY THINK their country is swimming on. Some heads of state won't give a rat's ass about providing for their countrymen when that oil is gone. Others do care. That influences what they decide their oil is worth.
Oil's funny. We could be paying a lot more for it, but we're not. When you're pricing marshmallows, you decide on $1.59 a bag without having to think to yourself, "If I make it $2 a bag, a coalition of governments may invade my country."
Agreed, but I suspect that the minute they're producing anything in _real_ quantity, such that thousands of drooling investors and tens of countrys want to set up their own factories to do the same, oil prices will magically drop enough to make it a lot less attractive.
You're assuming that it costs a lot to get it out of the ground. Prices have to do with
demand -- meaning what the folks with oil think they can get)
supply -- meaning (in this situation, and this isn't the usual meaning) how much oil they've got underneath their country -- when it's gone they're destitute, so they price accordingly
And then there's speculation, which is pushing prices up. But honestly, I don't know where that is in the process.
My point is not "crude actually costs $32 per barrel to get out of the ground" it's "it is certainly possible that crude costs $0.27 per barrel to get out of the ground, though it might be $49.95 to get out of the ground." Most of us don't know what the margins are on oil after extraction.
A process like this MIGHT be cheaper than extraction. It certainly can be cheaper than our purchase price for extracted barrels from the sources we have today. That will drive such prices down.
I LOVE your #3 idea -- if we come up with a system which is carbon neutral and costs only a little more to acquire than drilling, hell yeah, let's make it illegal to drill for oil! If we could force than down the world's throat everyone would win except the people who currently have oil. They would lose big time. I'm ambivalent about that. (Canada's a big producer -- they'd probably go into the manufactured crude business in a big way and it'd be a wash for them. That is, unless it really does cost $0.27 to pump a barrel of crude out of a well.)
NB. I suspect that it DOES cost very little (a few bucks) to pull a barrel of oil out of the ground. It FINDING that oil that cost so much money.
With a new process, oil becomes a SURE THING. That would make the oil companies' profits PREDICTABLE FOREVER. Part of the financial world would love that.
"TSA's new rules only protect us from a non-existent breed of terrorists who are unable to lie."
This is silly and misses the point. They protect us from something far more dangerous to the regime: People who refuse to have their rights flushed away.
It joins these wonderful architectural accomplishments:
http://swedish.wunderground.com/data/wximagenew/p/pjgeraci/188.jpg
http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/writing/folio/vol2/duck_side.jpg
http://i-eclectica.org/wordpress/wp-content/my images/architecture/architecture2/piano house 1.jpg
http://dvice.com/pics/shoe_building.jpg
http://dvice.com/pics/japan_upsidedown_house.jpg
I'd love working in the building, myself. I can imagine each time I cross over the big gap between the most offset buildings. Each time I did this, I'd need to go up a level to the walkway and cross over a bunch of unused space which will provide more external surface area, thus making cooling more expensive. I'd just love it. People wasting my time on something inefficient is what I live for.
But why a bar code? Why not a bug? Or a CD ROM? Or a finger pressing an ANY key?
We've seen this. Every single day, the ILECs pour a lot of money into improvements. The spend the money on
... Ok, well isn't that ENOUGH!?!?
1. Lobbyists
2. Campaign contributions
3.
4. Oh, ok, a few bucks now and then on basic improvements in areas where they can DEFINITELY get a profit on them in the short term.
Now, that all works very, VERY well to improve the company. The profit margins of the company, that is.
But the Incumbent local exchange carrier companies (the ILECs -- other wise known as TPC) in North America have spent so much money on discouraging competition through regulation that they have made their own business very expensive to run. They also have policies going back to the late 1800s of treating jobs as cogs in a machine with replaceable parts, so their labor relations are geared towards replaceability and strike-resilience. It's very inefficient.
And in a business where things can be automated up to wazoo, the ILECs are hamstrung by unions and their own evil need to have huge headcounts so that their lobbyists can pressure their unions to pressure the politicians to do as their lobbyists demand. Need for headcount reduces desire for automation.
You want more bandwidth? Push for campaign finance reform. Whenever you hear ANYTHING that a local ILEC wants from a politician, call your local reps and tell them you wont vote for them again if they vote for what the ILEC wants. Then, after any election, whether your anti-candidate wins or loses, call them and tell them that they didn't get YOUR vote because they voted with the ILEC.
Only by removing the best business model the ILECs have (preserving the status quo and gaming our democracy) will you get ILECs which listen to customers.
Besides being an amazing novel, Ubik is interesting because Phil actually wrote a SCRIPT to be filmed for Ubik. It's been published. You can buy it. It is, as far as I know, his only foray into screenwriting.
I completely agree -- it's the modern ones which require incredible horsepower. The older ones were written with the machine's constraints in mind. That's why I said "like running a modern paint program on an old machine."
On the other hand, I remember seeing the then incredible incredible "painter" (2.0?) -- it came in a paint can. Nice gimmick, great software, but SLOW as hell on the hardware of the day. I assume now that version runs fast, since we've sprinkled so much Moore's dust on it.
I notice that this machine redraws on zooms quickly, and creates a travel route quickly. That means the box has some real horsepower.
And yet, the dragging is way behind the finger, the responses of input and menu popup is slow -- it looks like running a modern paint program on an old machine.
This is not going to make for a pleasant user experience. Why is that stuff so uncrisp?
"I think I own this land."
"Really? Well, I think I own this land."
It's all IP.
I still miss my TRS-100. I so want something that light with a good keyboard. A bigger screen though. PLEASE.
Sane? I refer you to the history with Diebold and voting machines. Sane (or not stupid, or not looking for an excuse) is not that common.
Yes, it is, however it won't work. The fact that it got the title "standard" will be used by Microsoft as a battering ram, and there won't always be someone with any sense around. Just look at voting machines. People in governments keep buying them, even from manufacturers who had been completely discredited. There now has to be a black mark on this thing so huge that Microsoft won't risk bringing it up.
The miniseries lacked pacing and directing in general. It was slow and long. If you'd read the books and wanted a replay of them, it was for you. It was not a quality product on its own, and not a mainstream product in general.
People who read Dune had problems with the Lynch version -- HUGE problems. But it was paced well, delivered lines with impact and was visually stunning. A big-budget film needs to take its cues from the Lynch version, not SciFi's.
PHBs will see MSOOXML (hearafter pronounce Moose-OX-Emmel) as an open standard, when we know it's not. Until there's a fraud investigation and prosecution (for any aspect of it -- no mater how small) this will stand. Once MS is convicted for some petty fraud in relation to it, there will be a concrete rebuttal. "It's an open standard." "The standard was pushed through by fraud."
Until that day, we're left with paragraphs of response, which won't be believed -- we need a one sentence response backed up by a WSJ article.
CompTIA's a bunch of weasels. They're a lobbying group who represent big business, not individual programmers/techies. These folks lobbied for us not getting overtime, for instance.
They're also the mouth-breathers who came up with the Network+ cert.
I suspect that this survey is as crooked as they could figure out how to make it, to support their causes.
The army's idea of tuition is a state school. It's a drop in the bucket compared to what MIT wants. Financially, you'll do much better in a skilled labor job.
Will the army send you to Iraq? Will they give you good training? Will they put you on an interesting tech (unlikely)?
It's all a crapshoot, and when it all comes down to it, you have NO RIGHTS once you join the army. Not even the right to leave when they said you could without being screwed around with.
Joining any armed service is the worst decision anyone could make, if they're thinking of going to MIT. Loans will cover the cost of MIT. Get loans and pay for them in the private sector. You wanna help the military? Go to MIT on loans, get a degree, then go work for a defense contractor and do something interesting. Don't like what you're working on? LEAVE. Go work for another one. Or work for a company that's not a defense contractor, build up their tech, then watch them get a contract. Get rich.
And what they're doing in labs at MIT is definitely more interesting than most of what the amry would put you on.