I think Jonah Goldberg, from Nat'l Review, has written a couple of positive columns about Trek.
Then again, he's pretty damned kooky too.
I can tolerate preaching... it's when they have a Vulcan makes some vacuous generalization about what is or isn't logical that irritates me.
Like that one movie where they go back to rescue the whales. "Destroying a species is not logical." Well, why the fuck didn't we think of that?! If only we could have listened to a Paramount scriptwriter^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ^H^H^H^H^H a wise and hyper-logical alien being, we'd all be living in perfect harmony by now.
IANANE, but the 100 meter limit has everything to do with Ethernet. It's a collision detecting protocol, and the way it detects collisions is (effectively) by listening to the data it sends out. In short, the NIC sends a packet and listens for its own signal to ensure that the packet was sent correctly.
Thus, if the cable is too long your NIC won't hear itself in time again. This is also the case if your packet is too small, which is why the packet size is related to maximum cable length.
(Another side effect of this is that to keep the 100 M max cable length, 100base-T has to have a minimum packet size 10 times larger than 10base-T.)
Actually, I thought Trek (I mostly watched TNG) was pretty even handed. That's pretty impressive, as I doubt Patrick Stewart is the only leftist on the cast. (And, yes, he's one of my favorite actors in spite of his politics. As far as I'm concerned, actors can say whatever they like, though I find drooling offensive.)
They didn't usually go into a lot of detail on certain issues (or maybe they did in books or shows I never saw) such as the world government or the Prime Directive. Part of this is because such things are, like Asimov's Laws of Robotics, axiomatic in sci-fi. So by glossing over these details, they avoided arguments they could have screwed up badly.
Another thing that kept Trek balanced was fan influence... warlike Klingons were always much more popular because they appeal to our Jacksonian side, and the Ferenghi were never very popular because they were such a hamfisted caricature that only rabid lefties would find them funny.
I think you have to take what you can get from television, and since it tends to reflect your culture, you're probably not going to be happy with it if you're not happy with who you are.
On large multiuser servers, you certainly need people to be able to use x86 apps. If you're trying to centralize your Windows apps on a big server running Terminal Services, you'd want good 32 bit emulation.
High-performance workstations are still *personal* computers. There's always that one app someone wants. Or there's that one app that hasn't been ported... see Quark and Mac OS X.
And while software emulation is nice, the truth is that it's always going to be somewhat flaky, and as processors start to become more powerful than customers need, they'll demand better stability.
Nope, the enemy of tax reform is that fact that the top 20% of all voters pay 80% of taxes. They're also the ones that do the bulk of the paperwork.
That means that every time you try to reform taxes, the 80% who pay little or no taxes assume that they're going to have to pay more, if not now, in the future. In fact, that's what the Democrats say: "if we enact this tax cut, we'll have to pay for it down the road."
That's false when you consider the fact that during the 20th century, federal revenues as a percent of GDP never dipped below 17% or rose above 20%. Cutting taxes (and simplifying the tax code) releases a huge burden on the economy, which in turn generates more money to tax.
But as long as it's not in the immediate interest of the 80% who pay very little in taxes, it's going to be very difficult to achieve democratically.
Speaking as someone who was laid-off at the beginning of the dot-bomb, I know what the real world is. I know how hard it is out there right now - especially since I'm facing another chance at being "downsized."
Dropped out of school to try my hand at running a dotcom... back in to finish what I started, gonna go to the army now that we have a decent CIC. Get over yourself and your sob story, I'm not impressed.
You just don't want to believe that anyone could have a better insight into their own minds than you could, hunh?
Okay, I'm impressed. Most liberals, when smacked by reality, become conservatives. Fucking up and then fucking up again isn't gutsy, it's stupid, sorry.
The end all and be all of my statement is that NPR used to have guts, until it decided to suck Newt's cock back in 1994 when the buget fights were happening.
Right. NPR is part of the VRWC. Gotcha. Sure. It's all a big corporate conspiracy.
Have you ever heard the ads for M$ and the William and Melinda Gates Foundation on NPR?
And this is supposed to prove exactly what? NPR has *always* gotten the majority of its funding from corporations. Of course, they omitted this fact when they were claiming the Republicans would do them in when they cut their funding... oh wait, that would contradict your obsession with Gingrich, wouldn't it?
Simply make sure the/sw directories (et. al) are not in the path for your scripts where you want to use the system-perl.
Maybe I should file a bug report on this, because I'd *like* to use fink's/sw/bin/init.sh, but it just appends everything. I think it ought to overwrite PERL_INC entirely. As it is, packages in/Library/Perl seemed to be showing up and that was causing all the problems.
So what I've done lately is just blast Apple's Perl (sudo rm -rf {/System/,/}Library/Perl) and build perl from scratch. (Use configure --prefix=/usr to put the new perl back in the right place... Apple has info.
I also want to see if I can overwrite Apple's Apache... then you have a nice set up where you have exactly the version of Perl you want, and exactly the version of Apache with mod_perl statically linked and all the modules built properly. Unfortunately, it goes against the "don't mess with Apple's distro" rules and I'm sure software update is going to break it horribly one day.
Try reading what I wrote, not just what your blinders will allow you to. I never attacked the capitalist model.
There's a difference between writing and a rant. You didn't attack anything, you just dribbled on about corporate whores.
Need I remind you, "public television" and "public radio" aren't supposed to "make" money. They're not-for-profit organizations.
Ever tried to manage one of these non-profits, or even work for them? They aren't supposed to turn a profit, true, but they do have an underlying mission and they can't *ignore* money.
They clearly aren't looking out for their listeners or for the values they claim to embrace. They're covering their asses and not taking chances.
Yeah, yeah, when you get into the real world you'll discover this thing called "the bottom line" and that all your infantile wailing about hypocrisy won't make it go away.
I have no admiration for those who do not take risks.
Oh you're so brave telling other people to take risks! So manly and big and tough! Swoon!
Perl gets old quickly... for example, DBI is now frozen for 5.6.0, which is the version Apple ships.
I also like the IO filters and all that nice stuff in 5.8.
Probably more important than the bleeding edge is being able to run older perl scripts. There are still some perl 4 scripts out there, and I'm not sure I'm even familiar enough with stuff like globs to be able to get them running in perl 5.
You really can't assume that because something ran on an older interpreter that it will run on a newer one. You ought to see the hoops Java developers jump through... and many of them still ship entirely separate VM's.
The guy lays out this elaborate scheme for having 20GB of DRAM backed by a 20GB disk.
Why not just use a few gigs for a great big disk cache?
Oh, wait, because that's exactly what modern operating systems do, so his article is completely pointless. Disk not fast enough? Add more cache...
Now, why does it *still* suck? The problem is simple: the filesystem. We're all stuck with a great big 50's era hierarchical DBMS running on our machines... think of all the crap you have to go through just to get at your files, and then you have to hope the filesystem isn't going to slow you down too much by letting your data get fragmented.
Does the "file and folder" metaphor not suit you? Tough. Don't like a long stream of bits? Code around it. Want transactions in your system? Do them yourself, filesystems are relics from the 50's when transactions were way too heavy.
And *forget* about application-independence. Once you've written a Word document out, it's only useful for a wordprocessor. No logical schema, no integrity constraints, forget *all* of that.
And definitely forget about a single-level store. Your program is going to have to spend its life shuttling crap between Storage and Core... even though most of your Storage is in Core and most of your Core is in Storage.
That's why the first thing a serious DBMS does is ditch the filesystem. We ought to treat the OS as a serious DBMS, too.
I'm one of the principal designers of a system called SMIRP.
It started out as a very simple system that didn't act as much more than a set of tables with some simple linking structures. On top of that is an alerting system, (so you can track new experiments being done) a full text index, bots for automating certain procedures, and a system for transferring data to Excel.
What's surprising is that for the most part, the underlying structure stayed exactly the same even though we've been running all the operations in an inorganic chemistry lab on for, oh, four years now. I've been chewing over ways of rewriting it because, honestly, it's still the same prototype. I'd love to go with an all Perl solution... but the damned thing just works and I have other stuff to do.
Some lessons I've learned, problems I've run into:
A general interface. You really need a flexible structure because scientists never know what parameters they're going to use until they do the experiment. Our big success has been such a simple structure that people can throw a SMIRPSpace together in minutes.
Browser based interface. It's great because it's ubiquitous, but it's painful because of the inflexibility of forms. One big win with it is that you can get a horde of workstudies to form a pipeline. For example, a grad student might put a request in the system for an article, a workstudy recieves a notification of the change and hits the web to fill in details, another then gets notified and sends a request to the library, another gets notified and scans the result and finally the grad student sees a scanned copy of the article.
Excel based interface. It's great because people can play with data, but it's Excel...
XML is garbage. There's nothing you can do in XML that you can't do better with a flat file + regexes, or a SQL DBMS. XML is utterly, completely worthless.
Proprietary products. This won't be a huge surprise to/.'ers, but we got seriously screwed when the prototype we did in Cold Fusion became production code and we realised that Allaire (and later Macromedia) would not computer redistribution for less than 10,000 units. I could try to get it running on another CF implementation (I think there's some Blue Dragon or something) but honestly, I'd rather rewrite the whole thing.
Reporting. This is *hard* to do. We still don't have any serious system for handling reports beyond "import the data to Excel and do it manually."
You've gotta be pretty far out there to think NPR is part of a vast right-wing corporate conspiracy.
One nice thing about being a conservative is that I don't get my undies in a knot when someone I admire makes a lot of money. I say, "more power to 'em" and try to emulate their success.
I mean, how can you even enjoy music? If it's any good, they inevitably "sell out" to try and make a few bucks... you must be stuck listening to the Flaming Lips latest hit "10,000 Cats Burning to Death Slowly."
(Don't tell me.. the Flaming Lips sold out too...)
One problem I have is getting perl and Fink to behave. I don't think this is Fink's fault, but I've checked the site and haven't seen a very good solution.
For starters, if you upgrade Fink's version of perl, then all the old perl libraries will be binary incompatible. (And here, Apache + mod_perl counts as a "library" since it won't boot.)
Do I go and rebuild all my libraries? Or rebuild the default install of perl? Or muck about with @INC? I could do that... but it defeats the purpose of Fink.
Maybe it's safer to have multiple versions, and I can certainly uninstall Fink very easily, but it still seems to be a bit of a mess.
Even if you avoid the package manager and build everything manually Fink still saves a huge amount of time because all the annoying fixes are already there. But it's disappointing that we're not really that much better than Windows when it comes to simple issues like binary compatibility. (Honestly, how is it any different than DLL-hell?)
I'm *really* hoping that in the future, Apple is going to provide upgraded facilities for package management. My dream is that one day we'll have a utility that will analyze our system and all the little customizations we've made and get a full analysis, and the ability to easily turn things on and off... just like good old Extensions Manager, but universal.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Jonah Goldberg, from Nat'l Review, has written a couple of positive columns about Trek.
H ^H^H^H^H^H a wise and hyper-logical alien being, we'd all be living in perfect harmony by now.
Then again, he's pretty damned kooky too.
I can tolerate preaching... it's when they have a Vulcan makes some vacuous generalization about what is or isn't logical that irritates me.
Like that one movie where they go back to rescue the whales. "Destroying a species is not logical." Well, why the fuck didn't we think of that?! If only we could have listened to a Paramount scriptwriter^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^
IANANE, but the 100 meter limit has everything to do with Ethernet. It's a collision detecting protocol, and the way it detects collisions is (effectively) by listening to the data it sends out. In short, the NIC sends a packet and listens for its own signal to ensure that the packet was sent correctly.
Thus, if the cable is too long your NIC won't hear itself in time again. This is also the case if your packet is too small, which is why the packet size is related to maximum cable length.
(Another side effect of this is that to keep the 100 M max cable length, 100base-T has to have a minimum packet size 10 times larger than 10base-T.)
Or lack thereof!
Actually, I thought Trek (I mostly watched TNG) was pretty even handed. That's pretty impressive, as I doubt Patrick Stewart is the only leftist on the cast. (And, yes, he's one of my favorite actors in spite of his politics. As far as I'm concerned, actors can say whatever they like, though I find drooling offensive.)
They didn't usually go into a lot of detail on certain issues (or maybe they did in books or shows I never saw) such as the world government or the Prime Directive. Part of this is because such things are, like Asimov's Laws of Robotics, axiomatic in sci-fi. So by glossing over these details, they avoided arguments they could have screwed up badly.
Another thing that kept Trek balanced was fan influence... warlike Klingons were always much more popular because they appeal to our Jacksonian side, and the Ferenghi were never very popular because they were such a hamfisted caricature that only rabid lefties would find them funny.
I think you have to take what you can get from television, and since it tends to reflect your culture, you're probably not going to be happy with it if you're not happy with who you are.
On large multiuser servers, you certainly need people to be able to use x86 apps. If you're trying to centralize your Windows apps on a big server running Terminal Services, you'd want good 32 bit emulation.
High-performance workstations are still *personal* computers. There's always that one app someone wants. Or there's that one app that hasn't been ported... see Quark and Mac OS X.
And while software emulation is nice, the truth is that it's always going to be somewhat flaky, and as processors start to become more powerful than customers need, they'll demand better stability.
By gov't approved you mean "gov't enforced."
'net access is hardly a natural monopoly.
The one that made me stop was the guy who claimed to be representing the fraternal order of the police. Hell, there were scams happening *on* 9/11!
In my next residence I will register my phone under an alias.
Get an unlisted number. Get checks that do not have your address and phone # on them. Get a free voicemail account to fill out on forms.
Babies are invaluable because of their potential as human beings, but potential isn't achievement.
I think a mother is due special respect, if only because she went through more pain than I'm ever likely to experience to bring me into this world.
Let's see: one is a poop factory, the other is a beautiful woman.
As a matter of fact, yes, I do expect people to earn respect. Show me some punk ass kid vs. a Vietnam veteran, guess who's going to get my respect.
Do you normally compare your wife to your baby as though they're equally deserving of respect?
Nope, the enemy of tax reform is that fact that the top 20% of all voters pay 80% of taxes. They're also the ones that do the bulk of the paperwork.
That means that every time you try to reform taxes, the 80% who pay little or no taxes assume that they're going to have to pay more, if not now, in the future. In fact, that's what the Democrats say: "if we enact this tax cut, we'll have to pay for it down the road."
That's false when you consider the fact that during the 20th century, federal revenues as a percent of GDP never dipped below 17% or rose above 20%. Cutting taxes (and simplifying the tax code) releases a huge burden on the economy, which in turn generates more money to tax.
But as long as it's not in the immediate interest of the 80% who pay very little in taxes, it's going to be very difficult to achieve democratically.
Speaking as someone who was laid-off at the beginning of the dot-bomb, I know what the real world is. I know how hard it is out there right now - especially since I'm facing another chance at being "downsized."
Dropped out of school to try my hand at running a dotcom... back in to finish what I started, gonna go to the army now that we have a decent CIC. Get over yourself and your sob story, I'm not impressed.
You just don't want to believe that anyone could have a better insight into their own minds than you could, hunh?
Okay, I'm impressed. Most liberals, when smacked by reality, become conservatives. Fucking up and then fucking up again isn't gutsy, it's stupid, sorry.
The end all and be all of my statement is that NPR used to have guts, until it decided to suck Newt's cock back in 1994 when the buget fights were happening.
Right. NPR is part of the VRWC. Gotcha. Sure. It's all a big corporate conspiracy.
Have you ever heard the ads for M$ and the William and Melinda Gates Foundation on NPR?
And this is supposed to prove exactly what? NPR has *always* gotten the majority of its funding from corporations. Of course, they omitted this fact when they were claiming the Republicans would do them in when they cut their funding... oh wait, that would contradict your obsession with Gingrich, wouldn't it?
Nice job. I was a bit surprised to see Fortune doing a class warfare piece... that's what you'd expect in the Nation.
Who on Earth would want to advertise their sour grapes to every prospective client or employer?
If you're pissed, just say, "look, I'm having difficulty negotiating a good deal with these people" or some kind of euphamism.
But don't let everyone know that things got messy!
Simply make sure the /sw directories (et. al) are not in the path for your scripts where you want to use the system-perl.
/sw/bin/init.sh, but it just appends everything. I think it ought to overwrite PERL_INC entirely. As it is, packages in /Library/Perl seemed to be showing up and that was causing all the problems.
Maybe I should file a bug report on this, because I'd *like* to use fink's
So what I've done lately is just blast Apple's Perl (sudo rm -rf {/System/,/}Library/Perl) and build perl from scratch. (Use configure --prefix=/usr to put the new perl back in the right place... Apple has info.
I also want to see if I can overwrite Apple's Apache... then you have a nice set up where you have exactly the version of Perl you want, and exactly the version of Apache with mod_perl statically linked and all the modules built properly. Unfortunately, it goes against the "don't mess with Apple's distro" rules and I'm sure software update is going to break it horribly one day.
Blarrgh.
Try reading what I wrote, not just what your blinders will allow you to. I never attacked the capitalist model.
There's a difference between writing and a rant. You didn't attack anything, you just dribbled on about corporate whores.
Need I remind you, "public television" and "public radio" aren't supposed to "make" money. They're not-for-profit organizations.
Ever tried to manage one of these non-profits, or even work for them? They aren't supposed to turn a profit, true, but they do have an underlying mission and they can't *ignore* money.
They clearly aren't looking out for their listeners or for the values they claim to embrace. They're covering their asses and not taking chances.
Yeah, yeah, when you get into the real world you'll discover this thing called "the bottom line" and that all your infantile wailing about hypocrisy won't make it go away.
I have no admiration for those who do not take risks.
Oh you're so brave telling other people to take risks! So manly and big and tough! Swoon!
Perl gets old quickly... for example, DBI is now frozen for 5.6.0, which is the version Apple ships.
I also like the IO filters and all that nice stuff in 5.8.
Probably more important than the bleeding edge is being able to run older perl scripts. There are still some perl 4 scripts out there, and I'm not sure I'm even familiar enough with stuff like globs to be able to get them running in perl 5.
You really can't assume that because something ran on an older interpreter that it will run on a newer one. You ought to see the hoops Java developers jump through... and many of them still ship entirely separate VM's.
The guy lays out this elaborate scheme for having 20GB of DRAM backed by a 20GB disk.
Why not just use a few gigs for a great big disk cache?
Oh, wait, because that's exactly what modern operating systems do, so his article is completely pointless. Disk not fast enough? Add more cache...
Now, why does it *still* suck? The problem is simple: the filesystem. We're all stuck with a great big 50's era hierarchical DBMS running on our machines... think of all the crap you have to go through just to get at your files, and then you have to hope the filesystem isn't going to slow you down too much by letting your data get fragmented.
Does the "file and folder" metaphor not suit you? Tough. Don't like a long stream of bits? Code around it. Want transactions in your system? Do them yourself, filesystems are relics from the 50's when transactions were way too heavy.
And *forget* about application-independence. Once you've written a Word document out, it's only useful for a wordprocessor. No logical schema, no integrity constraints, forget *all* of that.
And definitely forget about a single-level store. Your program is going to have to spend its life shuttling crap between Storage and Core... even though most of your Storage is in Core and most of your Core is in Storage.
That's why the first thing a serious DBMS does is ditch the filesystem. We ought to treat the OS as a serious DBMS, too.
I'm one of the principal designers of a system called SMIRP.
/.'ers, but we got seriously screwed when the prototype we did in Cold Fusion became production code and we realised that Allaire (and later Macromedia) would not computer redistribution for less than 10,000 units. I could try to get it running on another CF implementation (I think there's some Blue Dragon or something) but honestly, I'd rather rewrite the whole thing.
It started out as a very simple system that didn't act as much more than a set of tables with some simple linking structures. On top of that is an alerting system, (so you can track new experiments being done) a full text index, bots for automating certain procedures, and a system for transferring data to Excel.
What's surprising is that for the most part, the underlying structure stayed exactly the same even though we've been running all the operations in an inorganic chemistry lab on for, oh, four years now. I've been chewing over ways of rewriting it because, honestly, it's still the same prototype. I'd love to go with an all Perl solution... but the damned thing just works and I have other stuff to do.
Some lessons I've learned, problems I've run into:
A general interface. You really need a flexible structure because scientists never know what parameters they're going to use until they do the experiment. Our big success has been such a simple structure that people can throw a SMIRPSpace together in minutes.
Browser based interface. It's great because it's ubiquitous, but it's painful because of the inflexibility of forms. One big win with it is that you can get a horde of workstudies to form a pipeline. For example, a grad student might put a request in the system for an article, a workstudy recieves a notification of the change and hits the web to fill in details, another then gets notified and sends a request to the library, another gets notified and scans the result and finally the grad student sees a scanned copy of the article.
Excel based interface. It's great because people can play with data, but it's Excel...
XML is garbage. There's nothing you can do in XML that you can't do better with a flat file + regexes, or a SQL DBMS. XML is utterly, completely worthless.
Proprietary products. This won't be a huge surprise to
Reporting. This is *hard* to do. We still don't have any serious system for handling reports beyond "import the data to Excel and do it manually."
Those attempts are being made either by a worm or some automated script. No human being is actually going to see them.
If you want to block them:
http://www.leekillough.com/robots.html
And another point: they can find it with a simple portscan, so it's not even particularly obscure.
It's just Apple Filing Protocol, which is just the new term form AppleShare.
Some rough equivalences:
AppleTalk ~~ NetBIOS ~~ TCP
AppleShare == Apple Filing Protocol ~~ SMB == CIFS
sudo rm -rf Public is too hard?
You've gotta be pretty far out there to think NPR is part of a vast right-wing corporate conspiracy.
One nice thing about being a conservative is that I don't get my undies in a knot when someone I admire makes a lot of money. I say, "more power to 'em" and try to emulate their success.
I mean, how can you even enjoy music? If it's any good, they inevitably "sell out" to try and make a few bucks... you must be stuck listening to the Flaming Lips latest hit "10,000 Cats Burning to Death Slowly."
(Don't tell me.. the Flaming Lips sold out too...)
One problem I have is getting perl and Fink to behave. I don't think this is Fink's fault, but I've checked the site and haven't seen a very good solution.
For starters, if you upgrade Fink's version of perl, then all the old perl libraries will be binary incompatible. (And here, Apache + mod_perl counts as a "library" since it won't boot.)
Do I go and rebuild all my libraries? Or rebuild the default install of perl? Or muck about with @INC? I could do that... but it defeats the purpose of Fink.
Maybe it's safer to have multiple versions, and I can certainly uninstall Fink very easily, but it still seems to be a bit of a mess.
Even if you avoid the package manager and build everything manually Fink still saves a huge amount of time because all the annoying fixes are already there. But it's disappointing that we're not really that much better than Windows when it comes to simple issues like binary compatibility. (Honestly, how is it any different than DLL-hell?)
I'm *really* hoping that in the future, Apple is going to provide upgraded facilities for package management. My dream is that one day we'll have a utility that will analyze our system and all the little customizations we've made and get a full analysis, and the ability to easily turn things on and off... just like good old Extensions Manager, but universal.