Back in 1993 a friend of mine in Nashville was poking around looking for Clipper work here in Atlanta. He found out that UPS was reimplementing a small Summer '87 tool in 5.01, and the spec for the thing was almost an exact match for something he had written just for fun some weeks before. So here he was with an opportunity to make a quarter of a million dollars just for changing a dozen lines of code mostly relating to the banner page.
He dashed off a cover letter and a brief description of the program, put an executable and some sample data on a floppy and put the whole thing in an envelope and shipped it to UPS. Overnight.
Sheesh! Everybody gets these lyrics wrong. It goes:
Hallucinate
Desegregate
Mediate
Alleviate
Try not to hate
Love your mate
Don't suffocate on your own hate
Designate your love as fate
A one world state as human freight
The number eight
A white black state
A gentle trait
The broken crate
A heavy weight or just too late
Like pretty Kate have sex ornate
Now devastate
Appreciate
Depreciate
Fabricate
Emulate
The truth dilate
Special date
The animal we ate
Guilt debate
The edge serrate
A better rate
The youth irate
Deliberate
Fascinate
Deviate
Reinstate
Liberate
Too moderate
Recreate or detonate
Annihiliate
Atomic fate
Mediate
Clear the state
Activate
Now radiate
A perfect state
Food on plate
Gravitate the Earth's own weight
Designate your love as fate
At ninety-eight we all rotate
Hallucinate
Dessegregate
Mediate
Alleviate
Try not to hate
Love your mate
Don't suffocate on your own hate
Designate your love as fate
A one world state as human freight
The number eight
A white black state
A gentle trait
The broken crate
A heavy weight or just too late
Like pretty Kate have sex ornate
Now devastate
Appreciate
Depreciate
Fabricate
Emulate
The truth dilate
Special date
The animals we ate
Guilt debate
The edge serrate
A better rate
The youth irate
Deliberate
Fascinate
Deviate
Reinstate
I wonder if these techniques could be used to classify other stuff, and if so, how.
I had a hell of a time creating a database for my pornography collection. It had grown far beyond using Perl to scan a flat file full of descriptions to build a list of matching images, and the taxonomy started getting hairy enough to justify a normalized database full of nouns and verbs describing who was doing what to whom, but it started getting exponentially sticky when classifying "group" photos where there was a whole lot of shaking going on in the foreground and background both. When Oracle finally shipped their RDBMS on Linux I was thrilled but after spending countless hours installing it, importing all the BLOBs, building my lookup tables and description/narration/commentary tables and writing a batch thumbnailer in Perl and putting together a fairly comprehensive front end in Python, I realized that a fairly straightforward project had deteriorated into, well, wanking.
So my question is, can the type of fractal analysis being applied to identify and classify music be used to classify other types of data to the point of doing useful fuzzy matching for the purpose of identifying thematically related JPEGs?
Also, I think it would be really cool if you were listening to a song and decided you really liked it and could just instruct some sort of fractal music search agent that "hey, I really like this song. Could you find me some more songs like it?" and it would go find them for you. You could make a really kickass DJ out of such an agent by having it transition from song to song based on thematic similarities between them.
"Plex86" doesn't seem to have an entry at everything2.com. So I tried "Plex 86" and I got a link for, among other things, Seinfeld Episode 86, which is the one where George decides to act the opposite of how he always does, and lands a job with the New York Yankees.
In the meantime, Plex86 is an x86 virualizer that allows you to run multiple OSen concurrently on a single machine. What this means to you and me is that you can boot Linux, then run a real-live licensed Windows98 under it, without emulation, at near-native speeds. That's the Big Goal, anyway.
One thing it can fer sher handle is booting Linux under Linux, which is a good thing when you want to see if that new kernel boots.
The sites being slashdotted pretty thoroughly right now...
When it has it's own scripting language and you write MozEMACS in that language, run MozEMACS, then boot vmlinuz.el underneath MozEMACS, launch another copy of Mozilla underneath that, and play the networked first-person shoot-em-up imbedded in the spreadsheet as a fortune cookie, then we'll talk.
Until then, I'll stick to Lynx, thank you very much.
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.
The whole passage was about finding yourself in a place where you aren't producing visible results for your mental efforts. I can't remember how many times I've agonized for days or weeks over a hairy code module thinking I would have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, then just walking in one morning and making two or three small, seemingly unrelated changes, which would not only fix the thing, but would make it run right.
So I think you did the right thing by riding it out, reviewing fundamentals, letting the solution present itself to you of its own accord.
If you think of writer's block as a boulder in your path, you can extend the metaphor to how you go about destroying it: You can either flail away at it with a sledgehammer, expending enormous energy to make slow, painful progress; or you can study the rock, learn it, find the cracks, insert the chisel and destroy it with two or three taps. It is rather Zen. When you are not actively typing away at a problem, you are gaining awareness of its true nature.
So use your time of stuckness to do good things, and if you work where your manager says things like "I didn't hire you to think, I hired you to work", buy him a copy of Demarco and Lister's Peopleware and tell him to go away and come back when he's read it.
Note: The above links to Amazon.com do not imply endorsement of them. Support your community's independent bookstores: read Amazon's reviews of these books, then purchase them locally.
Once a problem has been discovered, how do you keep it obscure?
All you can do is go back to the Bad Old Days of closed source cathedral systems and hoping to ghod the vendors get around to fixing their systems some day, because the social structures that surround crackers and kiddiez give you higher status if you are among the first to propagate a new crack. When one of them knows, they all know. It's the same with other group now--crackerz, Tori Amos fans, just whoever. If you have the info, you share it ASAFP and bask in the glory of being the first to break the story.
This will teach me to use the preview button--and not to skip my morning coffee.
With the cost of the RAID cabinets being equal, RAID-5 requires half plus one as many disks as RAID-10. Eight 9GB SCSI drives at RAID-10 will yield 36GB storage striped across five mirrored pairs of drives; to get 36GB RAID-5 storage, you need five 9GB disks with each stripe's parity information alternating among the drives.
A good RAID-10 setup will be able to read different data from each mirrored drive simultaneously, creating a potential 100% read performance advantage over RAID-5 or simple striping--200% for three-drive mirroring if you're that rich. Realistically, though, it comes out to a lower number whose upper limit is defined by the SCSI channel's throughput, and insert-your-bus-architecture-here's bandwidth, and your computer's general ability to keep its shit together.
Probably the best advantage RAID-10 has is that you will probably put each RAID-0 on its own controller, which that in addition to being able to survive a drive failure, you could live through a controller failure as well. Redundancy is your friend.
Okay enough rambling. This was supposed to be a simple clarification that said "RAID-5 costs less than RAID-10, not the other way around."
Whever you build a database, you must at how it will be used before you make physical layout decisions. The Asker here specified a data warehouse, which to me implies a DB which will be written to once then read hundreds of times afterwards. With an R/W ratio that high, write performance is only a minor consideration compared to read performance. While RAID-10 would give great all performance, for read access it won't do an awful lot better than RAID-5, at just over half the hardware cost.
So for a data warehouse I would not hesitate to do RAID-5.
As for mirroring, I can't speak for Sybase, but Oracle supports a wide variety of mirroring and networked DB options. I would look into something akin to snapshots, which are read-only copies of a master database. Designate one copy of the DB as the write-to master, and snapshot it over. Of course, this all depends on why you're mirroring. If you are doing this for redundancy in the event of catastrophe, look at your loss tolerance and acceptible downtime. You could do something as simple as making a copy of the database remotely, then copying over your redo logs at every log switch. Then if your database fails, use the redo logs to roll your remote database forward, and bring it on line.
I'd like to hear from someone who has used SCO recently: What does SCO have that Linux is missing? And what does SCO do better than Linux?
Because if Caldera gets ahold of it, it will inevitably be open-sourced and integrated into Linux-at-large. And good on Caldera for integrating it into their distro first.
Well, if we do the interface with the camera and a microphone, you could just yell "click!" real loud, and "clickclick!" real loud, and "draaaaaaaagdrop!" real loud too. I'm sure this will work out swell at the office.
So if there's all this monitoring software out there now that watches your keystrokes and sees which Web sites you're going to, what happens now that your boss can actually tell what part of the screen you're staring at? I mean, he's got a camera pointing straight at you now--now he can enforce the damned dress code through your computer.
Otherwise, yes, quite an interesting an innovative project. Even without my paranoia over being monitored (serves me right posting from work), there's another interesting application: testing the effectiveness of banner advertisement and UIs in general.
The first is a fairly obvious one. Advertisers want to know exactly what sorts of ads grab and hold a reader's attention. This could be bad, considering how many seizure-inducing flashy whirly banners there are already.
The second, though, is a very good thing. In a good UI, you should be able to focus on your work without being distracted by anything else. Furthermore, you should be able to find what you're looking for instantly. If GUI designers have the opportunity to see how long your eyes wander around the screen before you click on a particular button, they can use this data to rethink the button's appearance and location.
Auto-expanding dialogue boxes! What if you set up a toolkit in the upper-left corner of the screen and it opened automatically when you stared at it. And if you're too lazy for point-and-click, wait 'till we do stare-and-blink. I kind of like that last one---my biggest peeve with GUIs is having to take my hands off the keyboard to get something done.
Okay, enough random commentary. This is definitely an interesting project, no matter who wrote it.
You know, a lot of folks down here in the Data Belt have lots of annoying "What Would Slashdot Do?" paraphernalia--bumper stickers, buttons, tee shirts, that sort of thing. The real hardcores usually abbreviate it to "WW/.D?" which I think looks like a fragment of a uuencoded porno.GIF, but they use it both as a cultural identity thing and as a way of evangelizing. People walk up to them--they hope--and say, "Dude, what's a www dot slash dot d stand for?" and then they have a conversation about how Slashdot is their way of salvation.
It's pretty annoying because it's a melding of an interesting message with a trendy and insidious marketing technique. I started getting fed up with it the other day at the grocery store. A Volvo with a "WW/.D?" sticker cut was blocking the entrance to the parking lot for like three minutes while I blocked traffic behind me and they kept honking at me! There were a couple of perky, clean-cut teens out front at a table whose banner read "WW/.D?" in Helvitica 1280. They had on "WW/.D?" tee shirts and "WW/.D?" buttons and a huge stack of CD-ROMs and pamphlets. A guy with "WW/.D?" stitched into his bookbag stepped on my foot squashing the toe I broke in the parking lot kicking in the driver's door of the car in the handicapped spot with a "WW/.D?" sticker on it but no handicapped tag. I screamed an obscenity at him and he just said "Woah, Dude! At a time like this you should be asking, "What Would Slashdot Do?" then looked at me expectantly. I stalked off and calmed myself by mentally calculating how rapidly his blood CO2 saturation would rise while I strangled him.
The checkout line was insanely long and just crawled and when I got to the front I found out that the scanner was covered in crud and the cashier couldn't figure out how to clean it off with the Windex and paper towels that were right next to him and kept running the can over it, then looking at the can, running the can over it, then looking at the can, about a dozen times until it scanned, and Ghod help you if somebody bought elephant garlic or butter lettuce because evidently today is the first day he's ever seen food in its natural state. When he finally got started on my stuff he rang up my poblanos as red bell peppers and when I naively corrected his mistake he spent five minutes trying to figure out how to void the line before finally calling a manager over to Insert the Magic Key and I saw that he had on a metal bracelet that had "WW/.D?" stamped into it so I screamed "You know what Slashdot would do? Slashdot would order its food from WebVan so it wouldn't have to put up with morons like you anymore!" He kind of stared at me blankly, then asked me how to spell "poblano" so I said "B-E-L-L" just to get the hell out of there and when I got home I needed a warm bath and a really stiff drink.
What if they asked for an affidavit? Would that suffice? I really do have a hard time with a press that says, essentially, "This is true enough for public consumption, but not true enough to stand up in court."
But on the other hand....Obviously no reporter ever wants to give up their sources. And in this case, simply testifying or affirming the veracity of an article's claims could be an equivalent act. If the government has already discovered the identities of Slut Puppy and Master Pimp, then by saying that SP and MP are indeed the perpetrators of the alleged crime, Penenberg would effectively be giving them up.
It's an interesting dilemma. To quote Ashleigh Brilliant, "I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem."
Given the FBI's long history of abuses, power grabs, and rights violations, it's very easy to interpret nearly anything they do as sinister. But by automatically assuming that an entity or opponent is doing is motivated by evil or malice can blind you to what they are actually attempting to do. The problems arise when the guardians become so obsessed with what they are supposed to attack that they lose sight of what they are supposed to defend.
The FBI's stated mission is to protect U.S. citizens from foreign and domestic enemies by investigating violations of federal law. That is really and truly what they try do to, and for the most part people join the FBI to protect and to serve. And if you are trying to defend the U.S. against its enemies, you you need to be able to find them. And to be able to find them, you need to update your surveillance techniques. And if the criminal activity is happening or being coordinated on-line, then the investigation and surveillance has to happen there.
So the FBI starts advocating things like Clipper chips and Carnivore and starts lobbying for laws that require digital telephone switches have an evesdropping port built right in, and things like that. Can these tools be used to spy on criminals? Darn tootin'. They are fantastic for that. The problem is, though, that these tools can be misused as well.
As a civil libertarian, I believe that the U.S. Constitution serves primarily to limit governmental power. It does this because its framers recognized that government power is abusable in such a way that its abuse is not just possible, but inevitable. So we do indeed need to be wary when the FBI wants to put a full-blown sniffer in front of every ISP's switch. We all take it as a given that this powerful spying tool would eventually be turned against peacable citizens.
But what is the FBI's current intention for Carnivore? I suspect that in addition to its stated (albeit redundant) purpose as an Internet wiretapping tool, it is designed as a weapon against cyberterrorism; specifically, it is used to identify and terminate distributed denial-of-service attacks.
We all saw what happened a few months ago when the DDoS attacks happened against CNN and other high-profile sites. We all saw the havoc it wreaked and how hard it was to track down the perpetrators. But with Carnivore installed in front of the switch, the FBI could watch an attack develop real-time and terminate it immediately: First, they get sample packets from CNN. Then they broadcast a message to all Carnivore boxes to copy and block any packet going to CNN that matches the attack profile. Once the attack is contained, they swoop in with search warrants and arrest everybody who sent an attack packet.
So that's what they are trying to do. Cringely was only partially correct: the FBI's goal is not to shut down the Internet; it is to defend the entire Internet at one time.
Unfortunately, though, we can't let them do this, because as soon as the tool is in place, the RIAA will start pressuring the government to start actively patroling for MP3s, and the whole Carnivore matrix will become the web in which our freedom was finally ensnared.
On the other hand, I would like to see a Carnivore-type system put in place by an industry consortium. It still strikes me as the best way to defend against DDoS.
For a long time Democrats ruled the congress. They kept putting their pet projects as riders and the republican presidents pretty much had to either sign or scrap the whole bill. Usually of course you attached your pet project to cancer research bill or something and when the president vetoed it or you opponents objected you got to yell Mr. So or so is against cancer research!."
I asserted that the addition of unrelated amendments has a much longer history and gave an example from 1905 of how state legislators in an almost exclusively Democratically controlled state attempted to use riders to pass questionable legislations. You suggested that adding porkbarrel projects on to critical bills was a Democratic invention used to extort passage from the President.
That's not the only fact you got wrong. Presidents have been lobbying for line-item veto power since Jefferson. The first line-item veto legislation was proposed in congress in 1876, 121 years before one ever went into effect.
The Line Item Veto Act of 1996 was became Public Law 104-130, going in to effect 1/1/1997. To quote the LOC abstract:
Whenever the President signed a bill or joint resolution, the President could cancel in whole (1) any dollar amount of discretionary budget authority, (2) any item of new direct spending, and (3) certain limited tax benefits. In exercising this authority, the President had to determine that such cancellation would (1) reduce the federal budget deficit, (2) not impair any essential government functions, and (3) not harm the national interest.
Any allocation disapproved by the line item veto had to go to deficit reduction. This is a far cry from being able to remove the CDA from the Telecommunications Act.
Then you said:
Then in a brilliant move at the end of the Bush presidency the democrats smelled a winner in Clinton and they passed the line item bill even though for years they were against it.
Surprise surprise the republicans now got to be on the receiving end of the shaft (so be careful what you ask for boys). So they challenged the law and the supreme court bailed them out by declaring the thing unconstitutional (not surprising how many republicans on the court).
As the title of the Act suggests, it was enacted in 1996, towards the end of Clintons first term. Both the House and the Senate were, at the time, Republican controlled, majority having been secured in the 1994 elections. It was a plank on the GOP's so-called "Contract with America", the only one Clinton supported. It went into effect 1/1/1997. Clinton applied it to an appropriations bill later that month. On 2/27/1997 the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case Clinton v. City of New York, which was brought by NYC and a group of Idaho Potato growers:
New York City sued to restore a provision that would have let the city and New York state raise taxes on hospitals and use the money to attract federal Medicaid payments.
The Snake River Potato Growers sued over Clinton's veto of a tax measure that would have allowed agricultural processors to defer capital gains taxes when they sell such facilities to farmers' cooperatives (source)
On 6/26 of that year the Court overturned P.L. 104-140 by a 6-3 margin. Breyer and Ginsburg, both Clinton appointees, were on the majority. Scalia and O'Connor, Republican appointees, dissented.
When the court's decision was announced, Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) called it "a great day for the U.S. Constitution."
Sorry, Malcontent, but riders have been around for a very, very long time. They have been used to pass unpassable legislation since at least the 1900s, and probably even longer than that. Example: In the state of Georgia the House has a rule that all debate and amendments to a bill can be stopped by a two-thirds majority of the present senators. This rule was enacted around 1905 because prohibitionists kept trying to tack alcohol bans on to the state budget, and the state very nearly did not have a budget for the 1906 fiscal year because a simple majority refused to let the then-minority prohibitionists extort their cooperation.
Riders are often slipped in as political compromises, with assorted legislators saying things like "My constituents couldn't care less if the US government stops supporting cheese prices, but they are really concerned that women in the armed forces are allowed to have abortions, so while I would hesitate to vote to eliminate cheese price supports, I would gladly vote 'yes' on a bill which prevented women in the armed forces from having abortions." So you end up with the 1998 Dairy Farmers Deregulation Act, which makes dairy farmers happy at the expense of taxpayers and the cheese-buying public, but oh-by-the-way makes having an abortion grounds for a dishonorable discharge from the Air Force.
It's like Ben Franklin said---people who respect the law and love sausage should never see either one being made.
I can't see any how SSH's restrictive license helped "improve" OpenSSH more so than it could have had it remained under the GPL or BSD license. If SSH-orignal had stayed open, OpenBSD could have improved it directly and we would all be much better off because not only would there be that much less dispute over which is the de facto standard SSH, but also they would not have had to undergo the whole cloning effort. Granted SSH gives OpenSSH something to compete against (and vice-versa), but given that different people have different needs, SSH's source tree would have forked into N competing branches anyway, just like Linux has.
Indeed the practice of erasing vellum scrolls for reuse was so common they had a name for the recycled scrolls. Vellum was highly prized for its durability--it was usually reused this way. Paper and parchment at the time had to be made a sheet at a time in a very labor-intensive process. The first European paper mills didn't come into existance until the 14th century and weren't widespread until the 16th.
What's most interesting about this is the synecdoche of the whole story: A monk sees a 170-page vellum manuscript, flips through it, thinks, "Bah! Just a bunch of math. Who cares about math? I'll just erase it and use the paper for a morally superior purpose: spreading my religion."
Of course, I have to wonder if he just flipped through it at random, decided to erase it, started erasing at page one and handing the pages one at at time to whoever was inscribing the prayer book, and when he got to the last page and saw "Love, Archimedes" written there, and had that hideous sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Remember when you were a junior in high school and accidently overwrite your English term paper with the lyrics to a Rush song and had no idea how to get it back and had to start over? Well this was much, much worse.
I'm not exactly sure what is done under MySQL, but elsewhere you would just make copies of your data files, assuming the files are set read-only or off-line or in a backup state.
Oracle8's LOB management indeed allows you to put the LOBs themselves in a different tablespace than the rest of the row; the table's physical rows store pointers to the other tablespace. With another RDBMS you could do it by hand by creating a table containing nothing but a primary key and your LOB. Reference the PK from your "master" table and your full table scans are as skinny as ever.
Putting the BLOB's data outside the RDBMS's management by putting it in external OS-managed datafiles makes referential integrity much more troublesome, and reverts transactions to a task handled explicitly rather than for free.
What's so crazy about pictures in a database? BLOBs come in awfully handy when your on-line catalog has pictures of the product in it. It's a lot more efficient to pull a long raw from your datafile than to do a system call that results in a linear scan through $CATALOG/images/product then pipe the found file's contents out to the client. It's also a lot safer--can you imagine the integrity nightmares that could be introduced when your image files can be affected from outside the RDBMS? I'd rather not add such tedious file management tasks on top of my present programming and DBA work.
On a more mundane level, discussion boards, document storage/retrieval systems and their ilk often need to store more than 8k worth of characters per record. It's trivial to add a column called "part" and split data in/out of it, but a trivial thing done over and over and over again becomes a nuisance. Oh, you could chain images and other binary data together as well, but that doesn't sound awfully fun either, what with all them 0x00 characters showing up and confusing C's string handlers.
I have a problem with this. If C-64 is the sixth-most downloaded Jewish hip-hop group on the planet, this implies there are at least five more Jewish hip-hop groups on the planet, and it's just awful. So is Israeli disco music.
On the plus side, now that they've been Slashdotted, they may become, say, the second-most downloaded Jewish hip-hop group on the planet, which implies only at least one more group, and two of these sure beats the hell out of six.
Certain things, like processed snack foods and hip-hop, are best left to the goyim.
How long before they make a v-chip version of it that turns off in the presence of offensive material? Congress'll make the damned things compulsory. And you thought your peril-sensitive sunglasses were cool...
Or better yet set the things up so you can "beam" stuff into a data port, so you can watch stunning 3d movies just like you were there, and you can watch it privately, to boot. 'Course, the cops'll all have little widgets they can just zap you with, leaving you blind until they arrest you. So many possibilities, so many possible abuses.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in 1993 a friend of mine in Nashville was poking around looking for Clipper work here in Atlanta. He found out that UPS was reimplementing a small Summer '87 tool in 5.01, and the spec for the thing was almost an exact match for something he had written just for fun some weeks before. So here he was with an opportunity to make a quarter of a million dollars just for changing a dozen lines of code mostly relating to the banner page.
He dashed off a cover letter and a brief description of the program, put an executable and some sample data on a floppy and put the whole thing in an envelope and shipped it to UPS. Overnight.
Using Federal Express.
--
Hallucinate
Desegregate
Mediate
Alleviate
Try not to hate
Love your mate
Don't suffocate on your own hate
Designate your love as fate
A one world state as human freight
The number eight
A white black state
A gentle trait
The broken crate
A heavy weight or just too late
Like pretty Kate have sex ornate
Now devastate
Appreciate
Depreciate
Fabricate
Emulate
The truth dilate
Special date
The animal we ate
Guilt debate
The edge serrate
A better rate
The youth irate
Deliberate
Fascinate
Deviate
Reinstate
Liberate
Too moderate
Recreate or detonate
Annihiliate
Atomic fate
Mediate
Clear the state
Activate
Now radiate
A perfect state
Food on plate
Gravitate the Earth's own weight
Designate your love as fate
At ninety-eight we all rotate
Hallucinate
Dessegregate
Mediate
Alleviate
Try not to hate
Love your mate
Don't suffocate on your own hate
Designate your love as fate
A one world state as human freight
The number eight
A white black state
A gentle trait
The broken crate
A heavy weight or just too late
Like pretty Kate have sex ornate
Now devastate
Appreciate
Depreciate
Fabricate
Emulate
The truth dilate
Special date
The animals we ate
Guilt debate
The edge serrate
A better rate
The youth irate
Deliberate
Fascinate
Deviate
Reinstate
Liberate
Liberate
Liberate
Liberate
Sax solo
Now 'scuse me while I kiss this guy...
--
I had a hell of a time creating a database for my pornography collection. It had grown far beyond using Perl to scan a flat file full of descriptions to build a list of matching images, and the taxonomy started getting hairy enough to justify a normalized database full of nouns and verbs describing who was doing what to whom, but it started getting exponentially sticky when classifying "group" photos where there was a whole lot of shaking going on in the foreground and background both. When Oracle finally shipped their RDBMS on Linux I was thrilled but after spending countless hours installing it, importing all the BLOBs, building my lookup tables and description/narration/commentary tables and writing a batch thumbnailer in Perl and putting together a fairly comprehensive front end in Python, I realized that a fairly straightforward project had deteriorated into, well, wanking.
So my question is, can the type of fractal analysis being applied to identify and classify music be used to classify other types of data to the point of doing useful fuzzy matching for the purpose of identifying thematically related JPEGs?
Also, I think it would be really cool if you were listening to a song and decided you really liked it and could just instruct some sort of fractal music search agent that "hey, I really like this song. Could you find me some more songs like it?" and it would go find them for you. You could make a really kickass DJ out of such an agent by having it transition from song to song based on thematic similarities between them.
--
In the meantime, Plex86 is an x86 virualizer that allows you to run multiple OSen concurrently on a single machine. What this means to you and me is that you can boot Linux, then run a real-live licensed Windows98 under it, without emulation, at near-native speeds. That's the Big Goal, anyway.
One thing it can fer sher handle is booting Linux under Linux, which is a good thing when you want to see if that new kernel boots.
The sites being slashdotted pretty thoroughly right now...
--
Until then, I'll stick to Lynx, thank you very much.
--
So I think you did the right thing by riding it out, reviewing fundamentals, letting the solution present itself to you of its own accord.
If you think of writer's block as a boulder in your path, you can extend the metaphor to how you go about destroying it: You can either flail away at it with a sledgehammer, expending enormous energy to make slow, painful progress; or you can study the rock, learn it, find the cracks, insert the chisel and destroy it with two or three taps. It is rather Zen. When you are not actively typing away at a problem, you are gaining awareness of its true nature.
So use your time of stuckness to do good things, and if you work where your manager says things like "I didn't hire you to think, I hired you to work", buy him a copy of Demarco and Lister's Peopleware and tell him to go away and come back when he's read it.
Note: The above links to Amazon.com do not imply endorsement of them. Support your community's independent bookstores: read Amazon's reviews of these books, then purchase them locally.
--
All you can do is go back to the Bad Old Days of closed source cathedral systems and hoping to ghod the vendors get around to fixing their systems some day, because the social structures that surround crackers and kiddiez give you higher status if you are among the first to propagate a new crack. When one of them knows, they all know. It's the same with other group now--crackerz, Tori Amos fans, just whoever. If you have the info, you share it ASAFP and bask in the glory of being the first to break the story.
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With the cost of the RAID cabinets being equal, RAID-5 requires half plus one as many disks as RAID-10. Eight 9GB SCSI drives at RAID-10 will yield 36GB storage striped across five mirrored pairs of drives; to get 36GB RAID-5 storage, you need five 9GB disks with each stripe's parity information alternating among the drives.
A good RAID-10 setup will be able to read different data from each mirrored drive simultaneously, creating a potential 100% read performance advantage over RAID-5 or simple striping--200% for three-drive mirroring if you're that rich. Realistically, though, it comes out to a lower number whose upper limit is defined by the SCSI channel's throughput, and insert-your-bus-architecture-here's bandwidth, and your computer's general ability to keep its shit together.
Probably the best advantage RAID-10 has is that you will probably put each RAID-0 on its own controller, which that in addition to being able to survive a drive failure, you could live through a controller failure as well. Redundancy is your friend.
Okay enough rambling. This was supposed to be a simple clarification that said "RAID-5 costs less than RAID-10, not the other way around."
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Whever you build a database, you must at how it will be used before you make physical layout decisions. The Asker here specified a data warehouse, which to me implies a DB which will be written to once then read hundreds of times afterwards. With an R/W ratio that high, write performance is only a minor consideration compared to read performance. While RAID-10 would give great all performance, for read access it won't do an awful lot better than RAID-5, at just over half the hardware cost.
So for a data warehouse I would not hesitate to do RAID-5.
As for mirroring, I can't speak for Sybase, but Oracle supports a wide variety of mirroring and networked DB options. I would look into something akin to snapshots, which are read-only copies of a master database. Designate one copy of the DB as the write-to master, and snapshot it over. Of course, this all depends on why you're mirroring. If you are doing this for redundancy in the event of catastrophe, look at your loss tolerance and acceptible downtime. You could do something as simple as making a copy of the database remotely, then copying over your redo logs at every log switch. Then if your database fails, use the redo logs to roll your remote database forward, and bring it on line.
World of possibilities.
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Because if Caldera gets ahold of it, it will inevitably be open-sourced and integrated into Linux-at-large. And good on Caldera for integrating it into their distro first.
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Well, if we do the interface with the camera and a microphone, you could just yell "click!" real loud, and "clickclick!" real loud, and "draaaaaaaagdrop!" real loud too. I'm sure this will work out swell at the office.
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You could wink. That's probably even better because one eye is still pointing at your target so you could do drag and drop.
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Otherwise, yes, quite an interesting an innovative project. Even without my paranoia over being monitored (serves me right posting from work), there's another interesting application: testing the effectiveness of banner advertisement and UIs in general.
The first is a fairly obvious one. Advertisers want to know exactly what sorts of ads grab and hold a reader's attention. This could be bad, considering how many seizure-inducing flashy whirly banners there are already.
The second, though, is a very good thing. In a good UI, you should be able to focus on your work without being distracted by anything else. Furthermore, you should be able to find what you're looking for instantly. If GUI designers have the opportunity to see how long your eyes wander around the screen before you click on a particular button, they can use this data to rethink the button's appearance and location.
Auto-expanding dialogue boxes! What if you set up a toolkit in the upper-left corner of the screen and it opened automatically when you stared at it. And if you're too lazy for point-and-click, wait 'till we do stare-and-blink. I kind of like that last one---my biggest peeve with GUIs is having to take my hands off the keyboard to get something done.
Okay, enough random commentary. This is definitely an interesting project, no matter who wrote it.
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It's pretty annoying because it's a melding of an interesting message with a trendy and insidious marketing technique. I started getting fed up with it the other day at the grocery store. A Volvo with a "WW/.D?" sticker cut was blocking the entrance to the parking lot for like three minutes while I blocked traffic behind me and they kept honking at me! There were a couple of perky, clean-cut teens out front at a table whose banner read "WW/.D?" in Helvitica 1280. They had on "WW/.D?" tee shirts and "WW/.D?" buttons and a huge stack of CD-ROMs and pamphlets. A guy with "WW/.D?" stitched into his bookbag stepped on my foot squashing the toe I broke in the parking lot kicking in the driver's door of the car in the handicapped spot with a "WW/.D?" sticker on it but no handicapped tag. I screamed an obscenity at him and he just said "Woah, Dude! At a time like this you should be asking, "What Would Slashdot Do?" then looked at me expectantly. I stalked off and calmed myself by mentally calculating how rapidly his blood CO2 saturation would rise while I strangled him.
The checkout line was insanely long and just crawled and when I got to the front I found out that the scanner was covered in crud and the cashier couldn't figure out how to clean it off with the Windex and paper towels that were right next to him and kept running the can over it, then looking at the can, running the can over it, then looking at the can, about a dozen times until it scanned, and Ghod help you if somebody bought elephant garlic or butter lettuce because evidently today is the first day he's ever seen food in its natural state. When he finally got started on my stuff he rang up my poblanos as red bell peppers and when I naively corrected his mistake he spent five minutes trying to figure out how to void the line before finally calling a manager over to Insert the Magic Key and I saw that he had on a metal bracelet that had "WW/.D?" stamped into it so I screamed "You know what Slashdot would do? Slashdot would order its food from WebVan so it wouldn't have to put up with morons like you anymore!" He kind of stared at me blankly, then asked me how to spell "poblano" so I said "B-E-L-L" just to get the hell out of there and when I got home I needed a warm bath and a really stiff drink.
So that's what Slashdot would do.
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But on the other hand....Obviously no reporter ever wants to give up their sources. And in this case, simply testifying or affirming the veracity of an article's claims could be an equivalent act. If the government has already discovered the identities of Slut Puppy and Master Pimp, then by saying that SP and MP are indeed the perpetrators of the alleged crime, Penenberg would effectively be giving them up.
It's an interesting dilemma. To quote Ashleigh Brilliant, "I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem."
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The FBI's stated mission is to protect U.S. citizens from foreign and domestic enemies by investigating violations of federal law. That is really and truly what they try do to, and for the most part people join the FBI to protect and to serve. And if you are trying to defend the U.S. against its enemies, you you need to be able to find them. And to be able to find them, you need to update your surveillance techniques. And if the criminal activity is happening or being coordinated on-line, then the investigation and surveillance has to happen there.
So the FBI starts advocating things like Clipper chips and Carnivore and starts lobbying for laws that require digital telephone switches have an evesdropping port built right in, and things like that. Can these tools be used to spy on criminals? Darn tootin'. They are fantastic for that. The problem is, though, that these tools can be misused as well.
As a civil libertarian, I believe that the U.S. Constitution serves primarily to limit governmental power. It does this because its framers recognized that government power is abusable in such a way that its abuse is not just possible, but inevitable. So we do indeed need to be wary when the FBI wants to put a full-blown sniffer in front of every ISP's switch. We all take it as a given that this powerful spying tool would eventually be turned against peacable citizens.
But what is the FBI's current intention for Carnivore? I suspect that in addition to its stated (albeit redundant) purpose as an Internet wiretapping tool, it is designed as a weapon against cyberterrorism; specifically, it is used to identify and terminate distributed denial-of-service attacks.
We all saw what happened a few months ago when the DDoS attacks happened against CNN and other high-profile sites. We all saw the havoc it wreaked and how hard it was to track down the perpetrators. But with Carnivore installed in front of the switch, the FBI could watch an attack develop real-time and terminate it immediately: First, they get sample packets from CNN. Then they broadcast a message to all Carnivore boxes to copy and block any packet going to CNN that matches the attack profile. Once the attack is contained, they swoop in with search warrants and arrest everybody who sent an attack packet.
So that's what they are trying to do. Cringely was only partially correct: the FBI's goal is not to shut down the Internet; it is to defend the entire Internet at one time.
Unfortunately, though, we can't let them do this, because as soon as the tool is in place, the RIAA will start pressuring the government to start actively patroling for MP3s, and the whole Carnivore matrix will become the web in which our freedom was finally ensnared.
On the other hand, I would like to see a Carnivore-type system put in place by an industry consortium. It still strikes me as the best way to defend against DDoS.
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That's not the only fact you got wrong. Presidents have been lobbying for line-item veto power since Jefferson. The first line-item veto legislation was proposed in congress in 1876, 121 years before one ever went into effect.
The Line Item Veto Act of 1996 was became Public Law 104-130, going in to effect 1/1/1997. To quote the LOC abstract:
Any allocation disapproved by the line item veto had to go to deficit reduction. This is a far cry from being able to remove the CDA from the Telecommunications Act.Then you said:
As the title of the Act suggests, it was enacted in 1996, towards the end of Clintons first term. Both the House and the Senate were, at the time, Republican controlled, majority having been secured in the 1994 elections. It was a plank on the GOP's so-called "Contract with America", the only one Clinton supported. It went into effect 1/1/1997. Clinton applied it to an appropriations bill later that month. On 2/27/1997 the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case Clinton v. City of New York, which was brought by NYC and a group of Idaho Potato growers:
On 6/26 of that year the Court overturned P.L. 104-140 by a 6-3 margin. Breyer and Ginsburg, both Clinton appointees, were on the majority. Scalia and O'Connor, Republican appointees, dissented.When the court's decision was announced, Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) called it "a great day for the U.S. Constitution."
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Riders are often slipped in as political compromises, with assorted legislators saying things like "My constituents couldn't care less if the US government stops supporting cheese prices, but they are really concerned that women in the armed forces are allowed to have abortions, so while I would hesitate to vote to eliminate cheese price supports, I would gladly vote 'yes' on a bill which prevented women in the armed forces from having abortions." So you end up with the 1998 Dairy Farmers Deregulation Act, which makes dairy farmers happy at the expense of taxpayers and the cheese-buying public, but oh-by-the-way makes having an abortion grounds for a dishonorable discharge from the Air Force.
It's like Ben Franklin said---people who respect the law and love sausage should never see either one being made.
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I can't see any how SSH's restrictive license helped "improve" OpenSSH more so than it could have had it remained under the GPL or BSD license. If SSH-orignal had stayed open, OpenBSD could have improved it directly and we would all be much better off because not only would there be that much less dispute over which is the de facto standard SSH, but also they would not have had to undergo the whole cloning effort. Granted SSH gives OpenSSH something to compete against (and vice-versa), but given that different people have different needs, SSH's source tree would have forked into N competing branches anyway, just like Linux has.
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What's most interesting about this is the synecdoche of the whole story: A monk sees a 170-page vellum manuscript, flips through it, thinks, "Bah! Just a bunch of math. Who cares about math? I'll just erase it and use the paper for a morally superior purpose: spreading my religion."
Of course, I have to wonder if he just flipped through it at random, decided to erase it, started erasing at page one and handing the pages one at at time to whoever was inscribing the prayer book, and when he got to the last page and saw "Love, Archimedes" written there, and had that hideous sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Remember when you were a junior in high school and accidently overwrite your English term paper with the lyrics to a Rush song and had no idea how to get it back and had to start over? Well this was much, much worse.
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I'm not exactly sure what is done under MySQL, but elsewhere you would just make copies of your data files, assuming the files are set read-only or off-line or in a backup state.
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Putting the BLOB's data outside the RDBMS's management by putting it in external OS-managed datafiles makes referential integrity much more troublesome, and reverts transactions to a task handled explicitly rather than for free.
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On a more mundane level, discussion boards, document storage/retrieval systems and their ilk often need to store more than 8k worth of characters per record. It's trivial to add a column called "part" and split data in/out of it, but a trivial thing done over and over and over again becomes a nuisance. Oh, you could chain images and other binary data together as well, but that doesn't sound awfully fun either, what with all them 0x00 characters showing up and confusing C's string handlers.
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On the plus side, now that they've been Slashdotted, they may become, say, the second-most downloaded Jewish hip-hop group on the planet, which implies only at least one more group, and two of these sure beats the hell out of six.
Certain things, like processed snack foods and hip-hop, are best left to the goyim.
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Or better yet set the things up so you can "beam" stuff into a data port, so you can watch stunning 3d movies just like you were there, and you can watch it privately, to boot. 'Course, the cops'll all have little widgets they can just zap you with, leaving you blind until they arrest you. So many possibilities, so many possible abuses.
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