Bands like The Stones, Aerosmith, etc, are all a thing of the past. They don't need them.
I have to disagree: without the Stones, Aerosmith, etc., today's "performers" wouldn't have anyting to remix.
It's been over a decade since a band could get signed without slutting themselves out on at least one song geared towards radio/video. Using an expert system to compute that hit only proves one thing: The industry has no use for actual creativity. Originality is dead. Has been for a while. Takes a hell of a lot of effort to find even echoes of.
This list is insane. It doesn't even have Finding Nemo, not that Tarantino had anything to do with that. Maybe he should have---the sharks scene would have been way more interesting.
Anybody want to go in on a company called "Pathetic Sellout, Inc."? Step 1 of our business plan is to have our name tattooed on this guy's forehead. Step 3 is profit.
You didn't cost them $0.5. They spent more on the water you used going to the toilet two or three times. If they had hand driers, that electricity cost them more than your laptop did.
They used more energy brewing your coffee refill than your laptop did. (Note to Starbucks victims---normal restaurants often provide "bottomless" cups of coffee for the price of a single cup, typically less than a dollar and a half).
If it was winter when you did this, you cost them more energy by opening the door to walk into the restaurant in the first place. Then again, you're providing them with 0.1kW of heat just by existing, so maybe you should be charging them.
I don't agree that because the problem is 1300 more complexe, the updates are 1300 times bigger.
More precisely, the complexity is a function of the number of unassigned crew multiplied by the number of unassigned flights. In a typical solution, matrix is built, costs are assigned to each combination, and assignments are built from there. Certain heuristics can keep ludicrous combinations out of the matrix, but the matrix is still going to be big. Since this is an RDBMS-based application, cost setting goes like this:
UPDATE crew_cost_matrix SET distance=get_distance(crew_id, flight_id);
Updating the entire table in one pass. So: If the table is big enough, the rollback segments (or something else) explode.
I will cheerfully concede, however, that the process could require O(n^2) computation time, thus bringing the system to a halt that way, before the disks even light up.
According to TFA (please R), the problem appears to be with the software used to reassign crews to planes, not the reservation system. Assigning crews works like this:
here is a list of flights that need crews
here are the unassigned crewmembers
mash them together into a fine paste.
Step 3 is the one that can be an O(2^n) problem of assigning weights to different crew/flight combinations. Even with a very clever set of heuristics the problem is at the very least still an O(n^2) or more likely (O(n^2*lg(n)) with an unconscionably high coefficient.
There are an amazing number of variables:
where are the flights going from/to
where are the crewmembers currently located
cost of deadheading crew
which crew is rated for what type of equipment
which crew are already assigned
which multirated crew can/should be reassigned
how close are crew to their legal flight time limits
which flights will not put those crew over their limits
As you can see, this sort of thing tends to stack up, and involves building lots of intermediate data. If you feed 500 flights into a system designed to handle 20 or 30 at a time, well, the problem is somewhere between 275 and 625 times more complex for O(n^2) and 1300 times more complex for O(n^2*lg(n)) and while building the cost matrix for the flight assignments yes they ran out of fucking disk space. Do you not know what a rollback segment is? It's what makes you run out of disk space while updating a table 1300 times larger than you thought it would be. Sheesh.
Based on those postings, I'm guessing the application is based on either Oracle or Sybase on HP-UX.
My preliminary diagnosis: blown rollback segment. With too many flights being cancelled, the simultaneous rescheduling of all those crew resulted in a SQL transaction that exceeded the size of what the DBMS could undo. So an uncommitted statement failed and the application code either was not prepared for such a possibility or could only handle it by timing out. Scheduling tasks could no longer move forward, and right now some poor DBA is hoping to Christ that he printed out that e-mail he wrote asking for more disk space...
If he doesn't like people poaching "his code", he shouldn't use a free license.
A fork from a GPL'd project is subject to the GPL. RTFGPL section 2.b for the specifics.
If the forker starts obfuscating his code, he is locking in his clients as effectively as if he closed the source. From what I hear so far, it looks like the fork happened because somebody got into a dick-size-war and started to lose. Now, he is trying to make his project better by attempting to sabotage your project. While he is not circumventing the letter of the GPL, he is violating its spirit by forsaking cooperation for his own glory.
Aside from the fact that he is, in effect, telling his users (if any are left) that he no longer gives a fuck about them, there is still nothing to prevent you from downloading the full source and running a diff to see what he's done.
To summarize: What you are doing is not merely ethical but encouraged by the spirit of Open Source. What the forker is doing is unethical, unsportsmanlike, and contrary to the spirit of Open Source. If he's true to the pattern of the Wounded Ego, he will soon threaten some sort of legal action against you. Ignore him. At this point, he has about as much credibility as SCO.
It's a fair warning, though---you never know when your LiveCD is going to be used to resurrect a crashed Pentium II that's being used as a print server. My primary computer is a PII/300 laptop with 64MB; the first time I booted Debian/Woody, the system was thrashing so hard that booting back into Windows 98 was something of a relief...
The article's main thrust seems to be that during a period ending about 5,200 years ago, the sun's output
decreased slightly for a period of one or two centuries,
stabilized back to "normal",
brightened dramatically for a decade or two, then
fell off dramatically for a long time.
It goes on to say (or at least imply) that we are now experiencing a similar pattern of solar output, currently being at stage (3) above.
If all this is accurate, putting the blame on human CO2 output might be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc: While humans are definitely producing a whole lot of CO2, it's arrogant to say that we're the ones messing up the climate. If the sun's output is getting ready to fall off by five percent or so, well, compared to that, human CO2 output will have about as much impact as a fart in a stadium.
Hell, we may end up praying for all the greenhouse effect we can find <g>.
So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to spend the rest of the morning Googling "fluctuations in solar output climate".
Maybe being on too many unsubscribe lists flagged his address as a spamtrap. This supposes better coordination between spammers than may exists, or course, but I sure wish it would happen to some of my accounts...
Are you sure you're not mistaking this with his $1 a year salary?
Evidently so. Thank you for pointing that out.
When Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, he did in fact acquire a symbolic single share of the company. When he had been booted way back when, he sold off all his shares, then founded NeXT. I think I took it for granted that he didn't acquire further shares.
Re:A Bit on the Racist Side
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1
First off, thank you for referring to me as a dolt. The presence of ad hominem attacks in the place of reason is very useful in determining whether a writer's arguments are worth listening to.
I will gladly stipulate that Japan is not a "superpower" in the global software market. I'm not agreeing, I'm just stipulating. But I'm willing to you could easily name five industries in which Japan is a superpower, and that their status in those industries is not merely from hard work, but from innovative solutions to problems the West had ignored. Beyond being innovators in these fields, they are innovators with tremendous sensitivity to the wants and needs of their customers. Research into those industries will reveal story after story of leaders forming teams that are given a problem and told, "solve it." Not a single word on how.
Please feel free to reply to me with more slurs, as you have already demonstrated a preference for this over actual thought.
IBM want to get rid of its current PC business. The question of whether it will be replaced by anything is still open. For that matter, so is the question of them selling at all.
Can anyone actually see Mr. Jobs actually going for this?
Mr. Jobs has one share of stock in Apple. One. Granted, he probably controls a rather impressive proxy, but if IBM moves to buy Apple, I'll gladly put a "yes" vote behind my shares, and offer them for sale to IBM.
On the contrary---Apple is one of the world's best design houses when it comes to UI and hardware you just want to sit and look at all day.
And what's been everybody's biggest beef with Linux? That the user interface Isn't There Yet. Apple's UI, though, is the There everybody wants to be. Except for the mouse thing. I want two buttons and a wheel. IBM could probably convince them to do that.
To me the Big Clue that this might happen is that IBM is looking to sell its Intel-based PC business. It's not that it hasn't been lucrative---they just don't want to have two competing lines.
It's speculation, of course. But I'm getting paid the boucoup bucks for my opinions, so I'm going to give you the best ones I have.
Re:A Bit on the Racist Side
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Stop thinking "Indian Engineer" and start thinking "Engineer in India" and you'll find your insinuations much less significant.
And Racism != Cultural Bias. Relationships between coworkers, between superiors and subordinates, and between employees and customers, all become substantially easier when they share a cultural frame of reference. Granted, engineering and other technical tasks are culture-independent, but (and this is important) only after a fully mutual understanding of the nature, purpose expected results of the work have been established. Cultural barriers can make those a genuine PITA to understand.
I have worked with many dilligent and extremely competent technical people from all over the globe. One extremely sharp fellow I worked with, when he was fresh off the boat, was given the task of putting together a UI for a set of data tables. His design and aesthetic decisions were appalling---from the point of view of our American customers. So I showed him an existing, well-liked design and told him, "Do it like this." He did, and it was excellent, as was all his subsequent work. Why? He got the cultural clue he needed to respond to his customers.
Again, race != culture. Cultural difference can cause a huge barrier even when race is totally irrelevant.
I can see this happening in the U.S., too, for several reasons.
E-mail is saturated with spam, and is more or less tied to a desk, while IM/SMS are fairly mobile technologies.
The biggest reasons, though, have to do with communication style and way of thinking. In general, younger people tend to think wide-and-shallow, where older people think focussed-and-deep. Younger peeople seem to multithread with ease, able to carry on several conversations at once, task-switching very effectively. Old people do this less well and even accuse younger fold of being attention-deficit.
Focussed-and-deep is something you improve at as you age. Young people can do it, and when one conversational thread merits attention, the others melt away.
It's just a theory, and I'm no developmental psychologist. IANAL, either, but this is Slashdot.
I agree with your content, but not with your subject line. In the free world, "Korea" means free Korea, e.g. South Korea, just like time was "Germany" meant West Germany.
We can spend plenty of time arguing over how much freedom South Korea's government provides its people, but the bottom line is that I don't accept the legitimacy of North Korea's government. North Korea's government will not survive the opening of North Korea's southern border.
There are tasks which root must run before and after the install process, but as of 8i I don't recall anything root needed to do during the install. Oracle makes a point of documenting what parts of the install require root, and what root access is used to do, such as:
Create the Oracle user account and group,
Create and write to new directories under/var,/usr, etc.,
Create rc files owned by root to start Oracle,
chown any dedicated spindles to Oracle,
To allocate port 80 for Oracle Web Services, and
Several that I forgot.
Before using Oracle for production work or hard testing, the superuser may need to tune kernel parameters and rebuild the system.
There is a substantial difference between needing (and documenting) the use of root for an install and insisting on running as root without giving the customer a legitimate reason. A standard pre-purchase question to a vendor should always be, "What is the minimum permission set your application requires, and why?"
Slashdot Mirror
I have to disagree: without the Stones, Aerosmith, etc., today's "performers" wouldn't have anyting to remix.
It's been over a decade since a band could get signed without slutting themselves out on at least one song geared towards radio/video. Using an expert system to compute that hit only proves one thing: The industry has no use for actual creativity. Originality is dead. Has been for a while. Takes a hell of a lot of effort to find even echoes of.
This list is insane. It doesn't even have Finding Nemo, not that Tarantino had anything to do with that. Maybe he should have---the sharks scene would have been way more interesting.
Or maybe "Please Slap Me LLC".
They used more energy brewing your coffee refill than your laptop did. (Note to Starbucks victims---normal restaurants often provide "bottomless" cups of coffee for the price of a single cup, typically less than a dollar and a half).
If it was winter when you did this, you cost them more energy by opening the door to walk into the restaurant in the first place. Then again, you're providing them with 0.1kW of heat just by existing, so maybe you should be charging them.
BAAHAHAHAHA! What'd they prototype this on, a Gameboy?
TFA says there was a hard-limit of "32000". I wonder if they mean a signed 16-bit counter or a #define TABLE_MAX 32658. Either way, Ewww.!
Yeh. Sorry I got snippy earlier. New baby in the house. Sleeplessness affects mood.
I will cheerfully concede, however, that the process could require O(n^2) computation time, thus bringing the system to a halt that way, before the disks even light up.
Step 3 is the one that can be an O(2^n) problem of assigning weights to different crew/flight combinations. Even with a very clever set of heuristics the problem is at the very least still an O(n^2) or more likely (O(n^2*lg(n)) with an unconscionably high coefficient.
There are an amazing number of variables:
As you can see, this sort of thing tends to stack up, and involves building lots of intermediate data. If you feed 500 flights into a system designed to handle 20 or 30 at a time, well, the problem is somewhere between 275 and 625 times more complex for O(n^2) and 1300 times more complex for O(n^2*lg(n)) and while building the cost matrix for the flight assignments yes they ran out of fucking disk space. Do you not know what a rollback segment is? It's what makes you run out of disk space while updating a table 1300 times larger than you thought it would be. Sheesh.
My preliminary diagnosis: blown rollback segment. With too many flights being cancelled, the simultaneous rescheduling of all those crew resulted in a SQL transaction that exceeded the size of what the DBMS could undo. So an uncommitted statement failed and the application code either was not prepared for such a possibility or could only handle it by timing out. Scheduling tasks could no longer move forward, and right now some poor DBA is hoping to Christ that he printed out that e-mail he wrote asking for more disk space...
So which one of us should forward the link to CNN?
A fork from a GPL'd project is subject to the GPL. RTFGPL section 2.b for the specifics.
If the forker starts obfuscating his code, he is locking in his clients as effectively as if he closed the source. From what I hear so far, it looks like the fork happened because somebody got into a dick-size-war and started to lose. Now, he is trying to make his project better by attempting to sabotage your project. While he is not circumventing the letter of the GPL, he is violating its spirit by forsaking cooperation for his own glory.
Aside from the fact that he is, in effect, telling his users (if any are left) that he no longer gives a fuck about them, there is still nothing to prevent you from downloading the full source and running a diff to see what he's done.
To summarize: What you are doing is not merely ethical but encouraged by the spirit of Open Source. What the forker is doing is unethical, unsportsmanlike, and contrary to the spirit of Open Source. If he's true to the pattern of the Wounded Ego, he will soon threaten some sort of legal action against you. Ignore him. At this point, he has about as much credibility as SCO.
It's a fair warning, though---you never know when your LiveCD is going to be used to resurrect a crashed Pentium II that's being used as a print server. My primary computer is a PII/300 laptop with 64MB; the first time I booted Debian/Woody, the system was thrashing so hard that booting back into Windows 98 was something of a relief...
It goes on to say (or at least imply) that we are now experiencing a similar pattern of solar output, currently being at stage (3) above.
If all this is accurate, putting the blame on human CO2 output might be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc: While humans are definitely producing a whole lot of CO2, it's arrogant to say that we're the ones messing up the climate. If the sun's output is getting ready to fall off by five percent or so, well, compared to that, human CO2 output will have about as much impact as a fart in a stadium.
Hell, we may end up praying for all the greenhouse effect we can find <g>.
So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to spend the rest of the morning Googling "fluctuations in solar output climate".
Maybe being on too many unsubscribe lists flagged his address as a spamtrap. This supposes better coordination between spammers than may exists, or course, but I sure wish it would happen to some of my accounts...
Evidently so. Thank you for pointing that out.
When Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, he did in fact acquire a symbolic single share of the company. When he had been booted way back when, he sold off all his shares, then founded NeXT. I think I took it for granted that he didn't acquire further shares.
I will gladly stipulate that Japan is not a "superpower" in the global software market. I'm not agreeing, I'm just stipulating. But I'm willing to you could easily name five industries in which Japan is a superpower, and that their status in those industries is not merely from hard work, but from innovative solutions to problems the West had ignored. Beyond being innovators in these fields, they are innovators with tremendous sensitivity to the wants and needs of their customers. Research into those industries will reveal story after story of leaders forming teams that are given a problem and told, "solve it." Not a single word on how.
Please feel free to reply to me with more slurs, as you have already demonstrated a preference for this over actual thought.
IBM want to get rid of its current PC business. The question of whether it will be replaced by anything is still open. For that matter, so is the question of them selling at all.
Mr. Jobs has one share of stock in Apple. One. Granted, he probably controls a rather impressive proxy, but if IBM moves to buy Apple, I'll gladly put a "yes" vote behind my shares, and offer them for sale to IBM.
And what's been everybody's biggest beef with Linux? That the user interface Isn't There Yet. Apple's UI, though, is the There everybody wants to be. Except for the mouse thing. I want two buttons and a wheel. IBM could probably convince them to do that.
To me the Big Clue that this might happen is that IBM is looking to sell its Intel-based PC business. It's not that it hasn't been lucrative---they just don't want to have two competing lines.
It's speculation, of course. But I'm getting paid the boucoup bucks for my opinions, so I'm going to give you the best ones I have.
And Racism != Cultural Bias. Relationships between coworkers, between superiors and subordinates, and between employees and customers, all become substantially easier when they share a cultural frame of reference. Granted, engineering and other technical tasks are culture-independent, but (and this is important) only after a fully mutual understanding of the nature, purpose expected results of the work have been established. Cultural barriers can make those a genuine PITA to understand.
I have worked with many dilligent and extremely competent technical people from all over the globe. One extremely sharp fellow I worked with, when he was fresh off the boat, was given the task of putting together a UI for a set of data tables. His design and aesthetic decisions were appalling---from the point of view of our American customers. So I showed him an existing, well-liked design and told him, "Do it like this." He did, and it was excellent, as was all his subsequent work. Why? He got the cultural clue he needed to respond to his customers.
Again, race != culture. Cultural difference can cause a huge barrier even when race is totally irrelevant.
E-mail is saturated with spam, and is more or less tied to a desk, while IM/SMS are fairly mobile technologies.
The biggest reasons, though, have to do with communication style and way of thinking. In general, younger people tend to think wide-and-shallow, where older people think focussed-and-deep. Younger peeople seem to multithread with ease, able to carry on several conversations at once, task-switching very effectively. Old people do this less well and even accuse younger fold of being attention-deficit.
Focussed-and-deep is something you improve at as you age. Young people can do it, and when one conversational thread merits attention, the others melt away.
It's just a theory, and I'm no developmental psychologist. IANAL, either, but this is Slashdot.
We can spend plenty of time arguing over how much freedom South Korea's government provides its people, but the bottom line is that I don't accept the legitimacy of North Korea's government. North Korea's government will not survive the opening of North Korea's southern border.
Mom, that better be Dad you're talking to!
Before using Oracle for production work or hard testing, the superuser may need to tune kernel parameters and rebuild the system.
There is a substantial difference between needing (and documenting) the use of root for an install and insisting on running as root without giving the customer a legitimate reason. A standard pre-purchase question to a vendor should always be, "What is the minimum permission set your application requires, and why?"