There is nothing in the Constitution that forbids racial classification of people. Indeed, the Constitution is utterly silent on the subject. "Color", roughly corresponding to today's "Race" question, was a question on the Census as early as the 1850 Census. The only mention in the Constitution of race at all is the 15th amendment, which reads, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
Today the "Race" question is used on the Census in order to meet the requirements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has been held by the courts to require that House districts be apportioned by race in order to provide proper representation for those of minority races. If you are a minority, it is thus in your best interests to put your proper race down, since that will get you more representation in Congress. If you are white... well, put something else down, it means non-whites get more representation, which I'm sure you're down with, right?:)
Other than that, I agree that the question is meaningless in today's day and age... just look at all the fuss in the Hispanic community, which demands that Hispanic be a "race" even though, like Cajun, Hispanic is a culture, not a race. (There are black Hispanics from the Dominican Republic and white Hispanics from pure European bloodlines, but most Hispanics here today are mostly Indios or mestizos, i.e., AmerInds with a bit of Spanish blood mixed in, and should probably check the "White" and "American Indian" boxes to indicate that they are mixed-race as well as the appropriate box under the "Hispanic origin" question). None of that would be an issue if we'd just get over this whole race thing. Unfortunately, as the racist morons waving around pictures of Obama in African witch doctor garb and passing around racist emails showing Obama as a watermelon-eating darkie show, some Americans *still* just don't get it...
The first U.S. Congress debated furiously over what questions would be asked on the first 1790 Census. Some members wanted to ask detailed questions about housing and wealth. Others wanted a simple count. In the end, one word kept coming up over and over again: FRAUD. The Census would be used to divvy up the House of Representatives, and would also be used to apportion taxes amongst the states. So there was big money involved, and much incentive to overcount or undercount.
In the end, the first U.S. Congress decided on one central principal of that first census: VERIFIABILITY. Each household would be associated with a specific district or ward. Each household would be identified by the name of its head of household. Each household would be thus be able to be visited by Census Bureau verifiers who could verify that the census as reported by the local judicial district was actually accurate. If the roster you got back from the 3rd Ward of Virginia said there was a Howard Mathers in district 3 who had one male, one female, and two children living in his household, you could go to district 3, ask around for Howard Mathers, and verify that he actually had four people living in his household.
The 1850 Census occurred at a time when representation was especially important because the South had already made secession threats and was threatening to inflate their Census counts in order to gain more representation in Congress. In addition, the population had grown such that it was possible for there to be two heads of households with the same name in a judicial district. So the 1850 Census was the first to require not only the name of the head of household, but the names and ages of all members of a household too, which allowed Census workers to uniquely identify which of the households headed by Howard Mathers that they were actually talking to. Census Bureau checkers could then come behind and not only locate the Howard Mathers who had five children listed below his name (as vs. the childless Howard Mathers), but if Howard replied that he only had four children, they could verify which of the children was missing and ask, "What about Jeffie?" At which point Howard says, "Never heard of him", or Howard says, "Oh, yeah, I forgot, he hadn't moved out yet then," or Howard says, "He was living with Aunt Mahoney over in the 5th ward at the time" and the verifier can then update the count accordingly.
So that, in a nutshell, is why the Census has asked for at least the name of the head of household ever since the very first census in 1790 -- it's all about verifiability.
Disclaimer: I worked for the Census Bureau as a contract verifier in 1995 during the Census Test that was validating the forms and procedures to be used during the 2000 Census. And yes, I did find inaccurate data in places, generally from people the original census takers could not find or the original census takers misread an address and put one family at an address they didn't live at while missing the family who actually lived in that address. Verifiability allowed us to correct these errors. Without verifiability, you're stuck with the same nonsense that is computerized electronic voting, where you can never validate that the data actually corresponds to real physical people rather than just being an artifact of computer bugs or hacking...
It is theoretically provable that there are software problems that cannot be detected algorithmically. See: Halting Problem. This isn't new, boys, this was proven back in 1936 by both Alan Turing and John von Neumann.
Meanwhile, David Gilbert's testimony is quite interesting. What it appears to say is that Toyota is failing to detect a boundary condition -- two circuits that are supposed to have a differential output that instead are grounded to each other, but the computer instead accepting them and failing to signal any error -- and that this might be an indication that Toyota has a problem inside their software with detecting error conditions in the throttle circuit. Gilbert did not say that what he discovered is *the* problem causing runaway accelerations, just that it indicated *a* problem. Toyota can try to spin this all they want, but as someone who has an EE+software engineering background, I agree with Gilbert that this seems to indicate that Toyota's throttle control software is not as robust as they claimed and thus cannot be eliminated as a possible cause of the problem. All Toyota is accomplishing with their dog and pony show is making them look like the cigarette companies -- i.e., a bunch of lying b*****ds more concerned about the bottom line than about the health and safety of their customers.
Indeed, I do buy a fair amount of Baen content. But as I point out, I can only consume so much sci-fi war porn before I want to read something else. I wish other publishers "got it" the way Baen does. Sad to say, book publishing is dominated by luddites who neither understand nor really want to understand anything even vaguely technological and who allow themselves to be swayed by the notion that DRM will stop piracy. I have the Kindle Reader on my Macbook Pro. You know how I could un-DRM any Amazon ebook, even without any technological help from pirate software? Simple. Just use the normal Apple screenshot program 'grab', make a screenshot of each page of the ebook as I flip through it, then run it all through a OCR program like VueScan. I can even automate the process via Applescript so I don't have to manually hit the snapshot button. Run the results through Calibre to convert to ePub so I can read the book on my Sony Reader. Done. (BTW, for the Baen fans, this idea is not original to me -- Lois Bujold used it in her 1990 novel The Vor Game, if I'm recalling correctly).
So what's the point of the DRM? Beats me, other than to attempt to tie people into Jeff Bezos's universe by making it inconvenient to read his ebooks on other readers? I dunno, but for some reason the luddites at the publishing companies, not understanding the difference between ebooks and mp3's, are bound and determined to prevent what happened to music publishers (which have lost half their sales) from happening to them, even though they don't understand why that's not going to happen to them. I mean, c'mon. *years* before iTunes made DRM'ed music available, Napster was sharing mp3's amongst millions of people. Has anybody seen *anything* like that happening with ebooks, even though, as I explain above, it's quite easy to "rip" a DRM'ed ebook to a plain ePub format and even though Baen's ebooks have been available un-DRM'ed for years? Hello? Hello?
The vast majority of novels never appear in hardback. The number of fiction authors whose books appear in hard cover barely cracks three digits in any given year. In particular, a typical midlist science fiction author such as John Scalzi will virtually never have any of his books come out in an mass market hardcover edition -- if he wins an award or something which puts him into the ALA's "buy this" lists, there might be a special hardcover library edition put out, but not a mass market hardcover edition.
Regarding the actual numbers, I must admit that I simplified. As Scalzi explains on his blog, "In the course of the production of my book, it is touched and receives positive benefit from (in no particular order): A writer, an agent, an editor, a copy editor, an art director, an artist, a book designer, a marketer, a publicist, a distributor and a bookseller. As an author, if I lose one of those people, the final product — a saleable book — suffers in one way or another." But the point is that up-front costs before the book ever hits the printer are what comprise most of the costs for a typical trade paperback, not incremental per-unit costs. This of course is inverted for best-sellers, where the up-front costs are amortized over far more units, but there were only 157 fiction books that sold more than 100,000 copies in 2008. That's it, according to Publisher's Weekly, and I suspect the numbers for 2009 are little different. And BTW, authors typically get a percentage of the cover price that is about $1.50 per hardback, about half that per paperback. Just in case you're wondering. That gets applied toward their advance until they sell out their advance.
In short, the argument that ebook versions of a novel should cost way less than paperback novels due to a lower marginal cost of production simply doesn't match the actual numbers. The marginal cost of production is not the primary thing driving book costs, whether ebook or otherwise. Rather, it is the up-front sunk costs in the editorial department and the fixed costs for marketing and publicizing the book which drive the costs for most books. Then there are the best-sellers, those selling more than 100,000 copies... but those are a distinct minority and are the only ones on which book publishers make any actual profits. In all of these scenarios, the marginal cost of production is not going to be even $1 for a trade paperback and will rarely be over $1.50 for a trade hardcover (obviously the last big brick Harry Potter novels cost a teeny bit more due to sheer volume of paper needed to print a 750 page novel, but not *that* much more), meaning that if we're talking marginal cost of production as the difference in price between a paperback and an ebook, we're not talking about a huge difference in price. Clearly the expectation that ebooks should cost a lot less than paper copies of the books because of lower marginal costs of production doesn't match the reality that marginal cost of production really IS marginal even for paper books. A little less, okay. A lot less? Well, that money will have to come from something other than marginal cost of production... probably either author advance, or by publishing fewer books by more marginal authors (those who sell less than 20,000 copies). Either alternative is not very good for those of us who enjoy books and buy hundreds of books per year -- mostly *not* the 150 books on the bestseller lists.
I'm sorry, but I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, the new unibody one with the "7 hour battery". and I get a 4 1/2 hour usable battery life. Granted, that's with WiFi, but the point is that an iPad is unlikely to have an actual 10 hour usable battery life.
And 10 inches is *not* a small screen. 10 inches is a typical netbook screen, i.e., *huge* for a portable device. Most ebook readers have 5 or 6 inch screens, a few have larger screens, but they're all e-ink screens which use power only when flipping to the next page. LCD screens, on the other hand, use power *all* the time -- a lot of it. Even an LED-backlit 10" screen is likely to use at least 7 watts of power in active use... and there's not a whole lot of space in the iPad for a big battery.
In short, I don't doubt that the iPad *could* have a "10 hour" battery life --*if* you turn the backlight down to levels so dim that you can't read the freakin' thing. Which is my problem with battery life on my Macbook Pro, I suspect -- I'm not as young as I was eleven years ago when I created this Slashdot account, and I can't see at such a dim level.
Sony's latest Readers do not impose restrictive DRM. Sony uses the standard open ePub format and the same Adobe DRM scheme as most of the other readers -- such as, say, Astak.
The average print science fiction paperback sells approximately 20,000 copies (this is an actual number from an actual mid-level author who has a good reputation in the industry). The majority of the cost of a print science fiction paperback is not the marginal cost of production, which is miniscule -- it costs less than $1 to print and ship a typical mass-market paperback. Rather, the majority of the cost of a print science fiction paperback is related to the costs of creating the actual content -- the editor, the proofreader, the cover artist, and the author's advance, which is probably going to be about $12,000 on that paperback (and figure he's going to get around $8,000 more in eventual royalties before the book goes out of print). Baen appears to believe that if you price ebooks at approximately $2 less than paperbacks and sell them direct, you can make the same amount of profit that you made from selling paperbacks. That's probably a reasonable indication that the price of producing an ebook is not much less than the price of producing a paperback novel, because Baen can price ebooks this way only because they're selling direct, without the $2 markup imposed by the supply chain.
I do agree, however, that the DRM situation is one decided reason to avoid e-books right now. The DRM situation is driving piracy right now because I, like you, am not going to invest large sums of money into throw-away content. I have files on my computer that are 25 years old now, that have been faithfully transferred from one computer to the next first via RS-232 serial cable and XMODEM, and later via Ethernet and either FTP or a network file sharing protocol. They're all still (mostly) readable because I avoided proprietary file formats, even though the first computer involved in this chain was a Commodore 64 and the last one is an Apple Macbook Pro. I cannot conceive of any scenario where I would allow a proprietary file format with no means of translating it into any other format exist on my computer.
The situation in ebook readers today reminds me of the situation in portable digital music players in April 2003, the month Apple introduced the iTunes Store. There were literally thousands of portable digital music players out there, the vast majority of which looked like portable USB keyfobs as far as operating systems were concerned, all of which played open unencrypted mp3 files. Then there was Apple selling their own proprietary-DRM'ed music files -- but it was integrated with the computer hardware and with their iPod music players. In the end people decided the convenience of having one application handle all their content whether local or located on a portable device was more important than the DRM, and the iPod won the portable digital music player contest by a landslide.
Right now, there are only three players that integrate content, software, and hardware: Sony, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. Amazon's Kindle wins the content war by a landslide, but their hardware looks dated and obsolete compared to the new readers from Sony and B&N. Sony's content situation is horrible -- books from Sony's ebook store actually cost more than paper books purchased in bookstores! The Nook right now is unobtainium and a bit unstable, as you'd expect from version 1.0 of a product, but is decidedly better hardware.
The wildcard is Apple. Will they do for ebooks what they did for digital music? The problem is that the iPad will have, realistically, a 5 hour battery life in normal usage, and that just isn't enough for most situations where I might haul my e-book reader. If I'm doing an intercontinental flight that is 10 hours long, a 5 hour battery life is a "don't even bother" for me. My Sony e-reader, on the other hand, will happily let me read books for 10 hours at a time, and still have plenty of battery life left, thanks to the e-ink display. It's just that my selection of content is rather limited -- all I have on it, for the most part, is Baen Webscriptions stuff (no DRM, reasonable prices), and you can only read so much sci-fi warporn before you're sick and tired of sci-fi warporn.
So I'm keeping my eye on Apple. But unless Steve Jobs has a change of heart on e-ink (which he sneers at) or there's some revolution in LCD technology that allows it to generate readable displays without a backlight and thus get decent battery life (don't care if it's as good as e-ink battery life, but it has to be at least competitive with the Nook's battery life!), the hardware simply isn't good enough. Otherwise I'd be reading books on my iPhone via Stanza or etc., which I'm not doing because realistically I only get three hours of battery life that way -- far less than if I fire up my e-ink based reader.
Oh, what about all these *other* ebook readers? Some of them have nice hardware and software. But it's all about content, in the end. I suspect they'll end up just like all those portable digital music players that plugged in like keyfobs -- they'll still sell, but the readers that allow a fully integrated content cycle (purchase, transfer, read) will be the ones that most people buy, because for most people, they just want to purchase books in a convenient manner and not worry about how they get onto the ebook reader.
Right, we did the same thing on our mixed networks, but you end up with multiple completely independent installs of the software at that point, including multiple complete versions of the Emacs.el and.elc files and so forth. This isn't such a PITA if you're compiling everything from source because you have to compile it on all those multiple platforms anyhow, but if you're talking about commercial software (gasp! The horror!) you're talking about multiple times the administrative overhead to keep the software up-to-date and functional. If you are in a school environment or in an R&D lab you probably don't notice any of this because schools don't purchase a lot of commercial software and R&D labs are typically self-administered by the zoo animals err developers:), but for corporate workstation deployments these are big issues. In any event I've wasted enough time on this. we're not talking about a huge gain with fat binaries but it does solve a real problem and it's sad that it was rejected as simply "not invented here" by people who have no (zero) clue of real-life IT, as vs. having a reasoned discussion of advantages and disadvantages. But that's how things work in Linux-land nowadays. Makes Theo and RMS look almost rational. Almost.
Sounds to me that you are rejecting an idea that was time-tested and proven decades ago and is just as applicable today as it was then simply because it was "not invented here" (where "here" is the microcomputer / Microsoft-centric world). Which is EXACTLY the attitude I was talking about. Sometimes daddy really DOES know best. You'll learn this. Eventually. When you're grumbling to some young sprout, "blankety-blank know-it-all whippersnappers refuse to listen to the hard voice of experience!".
Right. Now install it on a network share and run it on a network of 10,000 workstations, some of which are 32-bit workstations and some of which are 64-bit workstations. I can do it in 5 minutes with fat binaries. You, on the other hand...
Regarding compiling, anybody doing cross-platform development by definition has the compilers to produce binaries for those platforms. Cross compiling is not needed as long as you have a tool capable of tagging ELF hunks and concatenating them together into "fat" binaries and "fat" libraries. We've been there, done that, it's a solved problem, your software repository is on a NFS share, you compile to an architecture-specific directory on each of your platforms to create individual binaries that are to be turned into fat binaries and libraries, then on the platform with the fat binary tools you run them to assemble the architecture-specific stuff into actual binaries (thanks to ELF's hunk-based mechanism for assembling multiple hunks into one binary, of which unknown hunks are ignored). At one point Apple was actually doing this for three different platforms, before realizing that dropping PowerPC support for Snow Leopard would sell more Intel Macs. In a prior job we had a compile lab of 20 different machines running different architectures or OS versions that we fired up to create the final build, each machine dropped its driblets into the proper place on the NFS share, then the final build machine put it all together into the release package (note that this was not a setup based on fat binaries but the build process works the same for fat binaries with the exception that the final build machine does a bit more work). It's called professional Unix development, and we were doing it decades ago, long before Linux existed.
Regarding hard drive and network speed, in today's world of gigabit to the desktop and 10 gigabit backbones and 2 terabyte hard drives I don't know what you're talking about with "10 megabit" and "20 megabyte" cracks. You do realize that the primary expense in a networked workstation environment is administration, not hardware, right? The proper use for local hard drive in a networked workstation environment is for caching, not for software installation. We knew this truth about workstation management twenty years ago, but for some reason it has been forgotten in a world where Microsoft and their deranged horribly expensive and virtually impossible to manage workstation environment seems to be the model for how to do things. How many years of IT experience did you say you had, again?:).
Actually, not a solution in search of a problem. The fundamental problem is allowing program installation on a shared disk for use by networked workstations despite the various systems using that disk being of varying types. You cannot solve that with package management because you need all packages installed at the same time -- i.e., your Emacs binary must run on x86, amd64, sparc, whatever and you simply cannot install three different packages from three different architectures onto the same file server and then mount that share as the/usr/local share of your workstation network, it just does not work because the binaries will conflict. The issue is that this is only a problem if you are wanting to deploy Linux on the desktop in a network installation similar to the old Unix networked workstations of yore, and the desktop is a place where the current Linux developers don't really care (see XKCD #619). It is extremely frustrating to me to see Linux developers reject the experience that we Unix old-timers have regarding how to reduce the management and maintenance costs of large networked deployments of workstations simply because a) it was Not Invented Here (in the insular incestuous Linux world), and b) because they don't care about the workstation in the first place other than perhaps as a stand-alone workstation as home, certainly not corporate deployments of workstations, which bore them utterly.
It's the same reason why Android is a user interface disaster compared to the iPhone and Palm Pre -- geeks thinking like geeks, instead of geeks thinking like users. The package management thing is a hack, a hack which is useful only on stand-alone servers or stand-alone workstations and utterly useless at getting workstation administrative costs down, which requires a networked software installation and where fat binaries mean you install *one* package rather than needing several different filesystem shares with multiple package installations that are largely identical. But workstation administration costs, while a concern for users of Linux, aren't a concern for core Linux developers because they don't know, understand, or care about the workstation other than their personal development machine at home. So it goes.
Re:SCO Survivor -- beware the quiet one
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Be aware that L.A.M. is a notorious net.flake and thus you have to be careful what you take away from his rantings.
> This comes to a fundamental nature of monolithic development
The Linux kernel is monolithic in the sense that it runs everything in a single kernel address space, all at the same protection level, but it is not monolithic in terms of the code structure or the development model.
I'm not sure you understand just how tightly bound the filesystem layer is with the rest of the system now. Sure, you can write to the VFS layer and whip out something fairly swiftly -- but the buffer caching mechanism that is above and below the VFS layer is a hairy bunch of interactions if you want to do anything other than the buffered fixed-size block writes that the VFS layer currently supports.
A filesystem that supports variable-sized packet writing would *NOT* be easy, and would require major modifications to the kernel from the VFS layer to buffer cache all the way down to the individual SCSI and IDE drivers (although SCSI drivers, at least, *do* have support for variable-sized packets, so if there's a problem there it's a problem at the IDE driver level). There's just too much hard-wired all down the bottom of the API stack to do things easily if they were not invented at the time that the original authors designed the API stack.
Look, this isn't a problem specific to Linux. When Solaris came out in 1989 or so, it had a state of the art tape driver. Today, its tape driver sucks the big one -- it locks up regularly, does not support any modern tape drive features such as the LOCATE function or block positioning, and otherwise shows the fact that it was designed in 1989-1990 to the primitive hardware available at that time. It appears to be an architectural limitation in the Solaris kernel where it'd take ripping up a bunch of code to fix it, because otherwise the functionality would have been added over the years just as it was in IRIX, FreeBSD, and Linux.
As for why the Linux API stack has gotten so intertangled: It's all about performance. The Linux API stack used to be a lot cleaner and simpler, but as Mindcraft showed (in their second, fair, test, not in the first one that was rigged), it was also significantly slower than a kernel that had been hacked up with all sorts of nifty performance tricks. If you want to, e.g., ship a packet directly from a disk buffer to a network interface (a common performance trick), that means you have an interaction between the network API and the disk buffer API (and the filesystem API that is filling the disk buffer). Those interactions build up over the years. It's called "cruft", and Linux is starting to get somewhat crufty, though it's not as bad as in some applications of Linux's age that I've dealt with.
Anyhow, enough for now. It's late at night even here in San Francisco...
You have to remember the market this book is going after. An introvert at peace with his introversion, who has already adjusted his lifestyle to suit himself, is not going to be in the bookstore looking for this book, much less buying it. So what you get is the miserable geeks saying "Why can't I be a party animal like my friends?!" who goes out looking for a book like this.
Any "self help" book is aimed at making members of a particular population say "Ah hah! That's me!" when they read the first few pages. It's like heroin for the miserable. After all, if you were happy and well adjusted, why would you be browsing the "self help" aisle?
Reminds me of an ex-girlfriend I had who was addicted to self-help books. The following song was written in her honor:-).
Self Improvement Copyright 1996 Eric Lee Green
Well I'm into self-improvement
oh I got all the books
you know the ones I'm talkin' about
how to improve your health and looks
well I read'm from cover to cover
every day from mornin' to night
well I don't seem to be improvin'
guess I gotta buy more books tonight
[Chorus]
oh I'm into self-improvement
oh I got all the books
I got a smile on my inner child
I'm in touch, connected and hooked.
well here's one 'bout bein' happy
and here's one about chicken soup
and here's one about becomin'
a millionaire before the age of thirty
[spoken]
whoops I'm thirty-three
do I want to buy that one?
No, here's one about being rich in your golden years
guess I'll read that one and see
[Chorus]
well my life is so darned busy
fixin' myself all day long
don't got no time for lovers
gotta fix every thing that's wrong
well I know if I just buy the right one
then everything will be all right
till then got no time for nothin'
gotta read these books to find a life
These tests in the end are somewhat subjective in nature. You'd understand better if you knew how the real Meyers-Brigg test was calibrated. Basically, it was calibrated by asking *other* people about the person taking the test, and then statistically correlating the answers on the test with those other people's opinions.
That said, scores on the test *do* change over time. For example, most people become more "J" (Judging) as they age, because they gain more experience and gain more fixed opinions about things. While I was an INTP at age 25, nowdays I tend to score an INTJ. But then, I suspect I was close to the boundary mark on the P/J scale in the first place, and 10+ years of experience was enough to push me over.
One thing to bear in mind is that these are very much analog measures, not digital (either-or) measures. For example, the "I" scale includes both the nearly-autistic who really don't care to be around other people (who peg the meter far to the left of the "I" zone), and folks who enjoy being around other people but also like being alone occasionally, folks who are almost over the line in the middle into the "E" zone. When you get close to that line is when the Myers-Briggs test is least predictive, because of the way it was calibrated. (And forget about pop psychology book tests, which were never calibrated and are generally total bullcr*p).
First, having social skills and being social is not something restricted to extroverts. There are introverts who have social skills and who are social. The difference between the two is more a case of approach to life than skills. A true extrovert has to have people around him or he's lost, while an introvert with social skills likes being around people, but likes being by himself too.
Secondly, behaviors can be learned and unlearned. Man is, after all, a very flexible creature. Thus I am probably as classic an introvert as you'll find (bordering on autistic), who is quite happy in the classic introvert's situation of a room, a computer keyboard, and lots of neat ideas to play with, but have learned over the years to enjoy interacting with and being in the company of competent people. But this doesn't change my fundamental approach to life, which is very much the idea-oriented approach of the introvert, rather than the people-oriented approach of the extrovert.
Introversion vs. extroversion is not a matter of verbal abilities. In my opinion, it's more a matter of one lives in a world of ideas, while the other lives in a world of people. Online use of verbal skills to play with complex ideas is thus exactly the kind of thing an introvert would do, whereas the extrovert would become bored with the "cold dry flat text" of a board like Slashdot and either go to something more interactive like IRC where he can feel like he's interacting with other people, or go do something with his friends.
is UUNET UK. They have been contacted. They are aware that they're hosting a notorious spam operation (listed in the SPEWS spammer list) on their network. They're not interested in disconnecting the EE guys, because "we're MCI-Worldcom, we don't care as long as they pay their bills, we own half the Internet backbone so we don't have to care haha!".
Heheh, tells you just what Apache under FreeBSD on a Celeron 800 with 64mb of memory can do when it's serving a single simple static page over and over again:-). After I figured out why my EMAIL wasn't coming up (a difficult task before I got coffee into me!) and replaced all that sluggish PHP with a simple static page, it served over 8,000 hits between 6am and7am, or roughly 2 per second. And wasn't even breathing hard -- the disk light only sporadically flashed as it wrote to the log file (wonders of caching!) and CPU usage was under 20%. The only reason I finally set the Referer in my httpd.conf to ship requests off to the evidence-eliminator-sucks.com sites (mirrored at 3 different locations on the Internet at the time, now mirrored at 4 different locations as my last mirror came online about an hour ago), was because my 512kbit upstream was clogged.
I doubt that the "geniuses" at the evidence-eliminator.com site would know how to write a simple HTML page (without all that Frontpage garbage and flash animations) if Xemacs bit them on the arse, and they certainly aren't mirrored at four different locations on the Internet with a rotating DNS. Geeks rule!:-).
No, it's more a case that the mighty web server of BadTux Enterprises has a lofty 64 megabytes of memory, and Linux has gotten a bit too bloated to like running in 64 megabytes of memory. As a firm advocate of "the right tool for the right job", FreeBSD and its "jail" mechanism were the right tool for the job -- pretty much the lightest footprint I could get that would run on that rather pathetic hardware. And my confidence was justified -- once I killed off the PHP/MySQL code that was sucking up all my memory and causing it to thrash like a demon, it handled the full bandwidth of a 512kb DSL line with not an issue, not even burping past 10% on the CPU usage scale.
The big problem was lack of RAM. CPU load was only 10% or so, but it was thrashing like crazy. But the biggest issue is that GeekLog, the blogging software that I use (because it's easy to modify to look the way I want it to look, and does everything I want) is slow as a slug. It doesn't do any kind of caching of its MySQL lookups, every page hit requires a MySQL query. That usually doesn't matter, but when you suddenly have 10 hits per second, it does, especially when the MySQL server is running on the same machine! Once I changed the page to being a static page instead of going through all that bloated PHP, the machine didn't even breathe hard, even though it was maxing out my 512kbit DSL connection.
In any event, an upgrade is out of the question at the moment, since my income is negative right now:-(. But if I were to upgrade that server, it would definitely be with more memory.
Slashdot Mirror
Today the "Race" question is used on the Census in order to meet the requirements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has been held by the courts to require that House districts be apportioned by race in order to provide proper representation for those of minority races. If you are a minority, it is thus in your best interests to put your proper race down, since that will get you more representation in Congress. If you are white... well, put something else down, it means non-whites get more representation, which I'm sure you're down with, right? :)
Other than that, I agree that the question is meaningless in today's day and age... just look at all the fuss in the Hispanic community, which demands that Hispanic be a "race" even though, like Cajun, Hispanic is a culture, not a race. (There are black Hispanics from the Dominican Republic and white Hispanics from pure European bloodlines, but most Hispanics here today are mostly Indios or mestizos, i.e., AmerInds with a bit of Spanish blood mixed in, and should probably check the "White" and "American Indian" boxes to indicate that they are mixed-race as well as the appropriate box under the "Hispanic origin" question). None of that would be an issue if we'd just get over this whole race thing. Unfortunately, as the racist morons waving around pictures of Obama in African witch doctor garb and passing around racist emails showing Obama as a watermelon-eating darkie show, some Americans *still* just don't get it...
In the end, the first U.S. Congress decided on one central principal of that first census: VERIFIABILITY. Each household would be associated with a specific district or ward. Each household would be identified by the name of its head of household. Each household would be thus be able to be visited by Census Bureau verifiers who could verify that the census as reported by the local judicial district was actually accurate. If the roster you got back from the 3rd Ward of Virginia said there was a Howard Mathers in district 3 who had one male, one female, and two children living in his household, you could go to district 3, ask around for Howard Mathers, and verify that he actually had four people living in his household.
The 1850 Census occurred at a time when representation was especially important because the South had already made secession threats and was threatening to inflate their Census counts in order to gain more representation in Congress. In addition, the population had grown such that it was possible for there to be two heads of households with the same name in a judicial district. So the 1850 Census was the first to require not only the name of the head of household, but the names and ages of all members of a household too, which allowed Census workers to uniquely identify which of the households headed by Howard Mathers that they were actually talking to. Census Bureau checkers could then come behind and not only locate the Howard Mathers who had five children listed below his name (as vs. the childless Howard Mathers), but if Howard replied that he only had four children, they could verify which of the children was missing and ask, "What about Jeffie?" At which point Howard says, "Never heard of him", or Howard says, "Oh, yeah, I forgot, he hadn't moved out yet then," or Howard says, "He was living with Aunt Mahoney over in the 5th ward at the time" and the verifier can then update the count accordingly.
So that, in a nutshell, is why the Census has asked for at least the name of the head of household ever since the very first census in 1790 -- it's all about verifiability.
Disclaimer: I worked for the Census Bureau as a contract verifier in 1995 during the Census Test that was validating the forms and procedures to be used during the 2000 Census. And yes, I did find inaccurate data in places, generally from people the original census takers could not find or the original census takers misread an address and put one family at an address they didn't live at while missing the family who actually lived in that address. Verifiability allowed us to correct these errors. Without verifiability, you're stuck with the same nonsense that is computerized electronic voting, where you can never validate that the data actually corresponds to real physical people rather than just being an artifact of computer bugs or hacking...
Meanwhile, David Gilbert's testimony is quite interesting. What it appears to say is that Toyota is failing to detect a boundary condition -- two circuits that are supposed to have a differential output that instead are grounded to each other, but the computer instead accepting them and failing to signal any error -- and that this might be an indication that Toyota has a problem inside their software with detecting error conditions in the throttle circuit. Gilbert did not say that what he discovered is *the* problem causing runaway accelerations, just that it indicated *a* problem. Toyota can try to spin this all they want, but as someone who has an EE+software engineering background, I agree with Gilbert that this seems to indicate that Toyota's throttle control software is not as robust as they claimed and thus cannot be eliminated as a possible cause of the problem. All Toyota is accomplishing with their dog and pony show is making them look like the cigarette companies -- i.e., a bunch of lying b*****ds more concerned about the bottom line than about the health and safety of their customers.
So what's the point of the DRM? Beats me, other than to attempt to tie people into Jeff Bezos's universe by making it inconvenient to read his ebooks on other readers? I dunno, but for some reason the luddites at the publishing companies, not understanding the difference between ebooks and mp3's, are bound and determined to prevent what happened to music publishers (which have lost half their sales) from happening to them, even though they don't understand why that's not going to happen to them. I mean, c'mon. *years* before iTunes made DRM'ed music available, Napster was sharing mp3's amongst millions of people. Has anybody seen *anything* like that happening with ebooks, even though, as I explain above, it's quite easy to "rip" a DRM'ed ebook to a plain ePub format and even though Baen's ebooks have been available un-DRM'ed for years? Hello? Hello?
Regarding the actual numbers, I must admit that I simplified. As Scalzi explains on his blog, "In the course of the production of my book, it is touched and receives positive benefit from (in no particular order): A writer, an agent, an editor, a copy editor, an art director, an artist, a book designer, a marketer, a publicist, a distributor and a bookseller. As an author, if I lose one of those people, the final product — a saleable book — suffers in one way or another." But the point is that up-front costs before the book ever hits the printer are what comprise most of the costs for a typical trade paperback, not incremental per-unit costs. This of course is inverted for best-sellers, where the up-front costs are amortized over far more units, but there were only 157 fiction books that sold more than 100,000 copies in 2008. That's it, according to Publisher's Weekly, and I suspect the numbers for 2009 are little different. And BTW, authors typically get a percentage of the cover price that is about $1.50 per hardback, about half that per paperback. Just in case you're wondering. That gets applied toward their advance until they sell out their advance.
In short, the argument that ebook versions of a novel should cost way less than paperback novels due to a lower marginal cost of production simply doesn't match the actual numbers. The marginal cost of production is not the primary thing driving book costs, whether ebook or otherwise. Rather, it is the up-front sunk costs in the editorial department and the fixed costs for marketing and publicizing the book which drive the costs for most books. Then there are the best-sellers, those selling more than 100,000 copies... but those are a distinct minority and are the only ones on which book publishers make any actual profits. In all of these scenarios, the marginal cost of production is not going to be even $1 for a trade paperback and will rarely be over $1.50 for a trade hardcover (obviously the last big brick Harry Potter novels cost a teeny bit more due to sheer volume of paper needed to print a 750 page novel, but not *that* much more), meaning that if we're talking marginal cost of production as the difference in price between a paperback and an ebook, we're not talking about a huge difference in price. Clearly the expectation that ebooks should cost a lot less than paper copies of the books because of lower marginal costs of production doesn't match the reality that marginal cost of production really IS marginal even for paper books. A little less, okay. A lot less? Well, that money will have to come from something other than marginal cost of production... probably either author advance, or by publishing fewer books by more marginal authors (those who sell less than 20,000 copies). Either alternative is not very good for those of us who enjoy books and buy hundreds of books per year -- mostly *not* the 150 books on the bestseller lists.
And 10 inches is *not* a small screen. 10 inches is a typical netbook screen, i.e., *huge* for a portable device. Most ebook readers have 5 or 6 inch screens, a few have larger screens, but they're all e-ink screens which use power only when flipping to the next page. LCD screens, on the other hand, use power *all* the time -- a lot of it. Even an LED-backlit 10" screen is likely to use at least 7 watts of power in active use... and there's not a whole lot of space in the iPad for a big battery.
In short, I don't doubt that the iPad *could* have a "10 hour" battery life --*if* you turn the backlight down to levels so dim that you can't read the freakin' thing. Which is my problem with battery life on my Macbook Pro, I suspect -- I'm not as young as I was eleven years ago when I created this Slashdot account, and I can't see at such a dim level.
Sony's latest Readers do not impose restrictive DRM. Sony uses the standard open ePub format and the same Adobe DRM scheme as most of the other readers -- such as, say, Astak.
I do agree, however, that the DRM situation is one decided reason to avoid e-books right now. The DRM situation is driving piracy right now because I, like you, am not going to invest large sums of money into throw-away content. I have files on my computer that are 25 years old now, that have been faithfully transferred from one computer to the next first via RS-232 serial cable and XMODEM, and later via Ethernet and either FTP or a network file sharing protocol. They're all still (mostly) readable because I avoided proprietary file formats, even though the first computer involved in this chain was a Commodore 64 and the last one is an Apple Macbook Pro. I cannot conceive of any scenario where I would allow a proprietary file format with no means of translating it into any other format exist on my computer.
Right now, there are only three players that integrate content, software, and hardware: Sony, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. Amazon's Kindle wins the content war by a landslide, but their hardware looks dated and obsolete compared to the new readers from Sony and B&N. Sony's content situation is horrible -- books from Sony's ebook store actually cost more than paper books purchased in bookstores! The Nook right now is unobtainium and a bit unstable, as you'd expect from version 1.0 of a product, but is decidedly better hardware.
The wildcard is Apple. Will they do for ebooks what they did for digital music? The problem is that the iPad will have, realistically, a 5 hour battery life in normal usage, and that just isn't enough for most situations where I might haul my e-book reader. If I'm doing an intercontinental flight that is 10 hours long, a 5 hour battery life is a "don't even bother" for me. My Sony e-reader, on the other hand, will happily let me read books for 10 hours at a time, and still have plenty of battery life left, thanks to the e-ink display. It's just that my selection of content is rather limited -- all I have on it, for the most part, is Baen Webscriptions stuff (no DRM, reasonable prices), and you can only read so much sci-fi warporn before you're sick and tired of sci-fi warporn.
So I'm keeping my eye on Apple. But unless Steve Jobs has a change of heart on e-ink (which he sneers at) or there's some revolution in LCD technology that allows it to generate readable displays without a backlight and thus get decent battery life (don't care if it's as good as e-ink battery life, but it has to be at least competitive with the Nook's battery life!), the hardware simply isn't good enough. Otherwise I'd be reading books on my iPhone via Stanza or etc., which I'm not doing because realistically I only get three hours of battery life that way -- far less than if I fire up my e-ink based reader.
Oh, what about all these *other* ebook readers? Some of them have nice hardware and software. But it's all about content, in the end. I suspect they'll end up just like all those portable digital music players that plugged in like keyfobs -- they'll still sell, but the readers that allow a fully integrated content cycle (purchase, transfer, read) will be the ones that most people buy, because for most people, they just want to purchase books in a convenient manner and not worry about how they get onto the ebook reader.
Right, we did the same thing on our mixed networks, but you end up with multiple completely independent installs of the software at that point, including multiple complete versions of the Emacs .el and .elc files and so forth. This isn't such a PITA if you're compiling everything from source because you have to compile it on all those multiple platforms anyhow, but if you're talking about commercial software (gasp! The horror!) you're talking about multiple times the administrative overhead to keep the software up-to-date and functional. If you are in a school environment or in an R&D lab you probably don't notice any of this because schools don't purchase a lot of commercial software and R&D labs are typically self-administered by the zoo animals err developers :), but for corporate workstation deployments these are big issues. In any event I've wasted enough time on this. we're not talking about a huge gain with fat binaries but it does solve a real problem and it's sad that it was rejected as simply "not invented here" by people who have no (zero) clue of real-life IT, as vs. having a reasoned discussion of advantages and disadvantages. But that's how things work in Linux-land nowadays. Makes Theo and RMS look almost rational. Almost.
Sounds to me that you are rejecting an idea that was time-tested and proven decades ago and is just as applicable today as it was then simply because it was "not invented here" (where "here" is the microcomputer / Microsoft-centric world). Which is EXACTLY the attitude I was talking about. Sometimes daddy really DOES know best. You'll learn this. Eventually. When you're grumbling to some young sprout, "blankety-blank know-it-all whippersnappers refuse to listen to the hard voice of experience!".
Right. Now install it on a network share and run it on a network of 10,000 workstations, some of which are 32-bit workstations and some of which are 64-bit workstations. I can do it in 5 minutes with fat binaries. You, on the other hand...
Regarding hard drive and network speed, in today's world of gigabit to the desktop and 10 gigabit backbones and 2 terabyte hard drives I don't know what you're talking about with "10 megabit" and "20 megabyte" cracks. You do realize that the primary expense in a networked workstation environment is administration, not hardware, right? The proper use for local hard drive in a networked workstation environment is for caching, not for software installation. We knew this truth about workstation management twenty years ago, but for some reason it has been forgotten in a world where Microsoft and their deranged horribly expensive and virtually impossible to manage workstation environment seems to be the model for how to do things. How many years of IT experience did you say you had, again? :).
It's the same reason why Android is a user interface disaster compared to the iPhone and Palm Pre -- geeks thinking like geeks, instead of geeks thinking like users. The package management thing is a hack, a hack which is useful only on stand-alone servers or stand-alone workstations and utterly useless at getting workstation administrative costs down, which requires a networked software installation and where fat binaries mean you install *one* package rather than needing several different filesystem shares with multiple package installations that are largely identical. But workstation administration costs, while a concern for users of Linux, aren't a concern for core Linux developers because they don't know, understand, or care about the workstation other than their personal development machine at home. So it goes.
Be aware that L.A.M. is a notorious net.flake and thus you have to be careful what you take away from his rantings.
The Linux kernel is monolithic in the sense that it runs everything in a single kernel address space, all at the same protection level, but it is not monolithic in terms of the code structure or the development model.
I'm not sure you understand just how tightly bound the filesystem layer is with the rest of the system now. Sure, you can write to the VFS layer and whip out something fairly swiftly -- but the buffer caching mechanism that is above and below the VFS layer is a hairy bunch of interactions if you want to do anything other than the buffered fixed-size block writes that the VFS layer currently supports. A filesystem that supports variable-sized packet writing would *NOT* be easy, and would require major modifications to the kernel from the VFS layer to buffer cache all the way down to the individual SCSI and IDE drivers (although SCSI drivers, at least, *do* have support for variable-sized packets, so if there's a problem there it's a problem at the IDE driver level). There's just too much hard-wired all down the bottom of the API stack to do things easily if they were not invented at the time that the original authors designed the API stack.
Look, this isn't a problem specific to Linux. When Solaris came out in 1989 or so, it had a state of the art tape driver. Today, its tape driver sucks the big one -- it locks up regularly, does not support any modern tape drive features such as the LOCATE function or block positioning, and otherwise shows the fact that it was designed in 1989-1990 to the primitive hardware available at that time. It appears to be an architectural limitation in the Solaris kernel where it'd take ripping up a bunch of code to fix it, because otherwise the functionality would have been added over the years just as it was in IRIX, FreeBSD, and Linux.
As for why the Linux API stack has gotten so intertangled: It's all about performance. The Linux API stack used to be a lot cleaner and simpler, but as Mindcraft showed (in their second, fair, test, not in the first one that was rigged), it was also significantly slower than a kernel that had been hacked up with all sorts of nifty performance tricks. If you want to, e.g., ship a packet directly from a disk buffer to a network interface (a common performance trick), that means you have an interaction between the network API and the disk buffer API (and the filesystem API that is filling the disk buffer). Those interactions build up over the years. It's called "cruft", and Linux is starting to get somewhat crufty, though it's not as bad as in some applications of Linux's age that I've dealt with.
Anyhow, enough for now. It's late at night even here in San Francisco...
-E
'Nuff said.
Any "self help" book is aimed at making members of a particular population say "Ah hah! That's me!" when they read the first few pages. It's like heroin for the miserable. After all, if you were happy and well adjusted, why would you be browsing the "self help" aisle?
Reminds me of an ex-girlfriend I had who was addicted to self-help books. The following song was written in her honor :-).
Self Improvement
Copyright 1996 Eric Lee Green
Well I'm into self-improvement
oh I got all the books
you know the ones I'm talkin' about
how to improve your health and looks
well I read'm from cover to cover
every day from mornin' to night
well I don't seem to be improvin'
guess I gotta buy more books tonight
[Chorus]
oh I'm into self-improvement
oh I got all the books
I got a smile on my inner child
I'm in touch, connected and hooked.
well here's one 'bout bein' happy
and here's one about chicken soup
and here's one about becomin'
a millionaire before the age of thirty
[spoken]
whoops I'm thirty-three
do I want to buy that one?
No, here's one about being rich in your golden years
guess I'll read that one and see
[Chorus]
well my life is so darned busy
fixin' myself all day long
don't got no time for lovers
gotta fix every thing that's wrong
well I know if I just buy the right one
then everything will be all right
till then got no time for nothin'
gotta read these books to find a life
[Chorus]
That said, scores on the test *do* change over time. For example, most people become more "J" (Judging) as they age, because they gain more experience and gain more fixed opinions about things. While I was an INTP at age 25, nowdays I tend to score an INTJ. But then, I suspect I was close to the boundary mark on the P/J scale in the first place, and 10+ years of experience was enough to push me over.
One thing to bear in mind is that these are very much analog measures, not digital (either-or) measures. For example, the "I" scale includes both the nearly-autistic who really don't care to be around other people (who peg the meter far to the left of the "I" zone), and folks who enjoy being around other people but also like being alone occasionally, folks who are almost over the line in the middle into the "E" zone. When you get close to that line is when the Myers-Briggs test is least predictive, because of the way it was calibrated. (And forget about pop psychology book tests, which were never calibrated and are generally total bullcr*p).
Secondly, behaviors can be learned and unlearned. Man is, after all, a very flexible creature. Thus I am probably as classic an introvert as you'll find (bordering on autistic), who is quite happy in the classic introvert's situation of a room, a computer keyboard, and lots of neat ideas to play with, but have learned over the years to enjoy interacting with and being in the company of competent people. But this doesn't change my fundamental approach to life, which is very much the idea-oriented approach of the introvert, rather than the people-oriented approach of the extrovert.
Introversion vs. extroversion is not a matter of verbal abilities. In my opinion, it's more a matter of one lives in a world of ideas, while the other lives in a world of people. Online use of verbal skills to play with complex ideas is thus exactly the kind of thing an introvert would do, whereas the extrovert would become bored with the "cold dry flat text" of a board like Slashdot and either go to something more interactive like IRC where he can feel like he's interacting with other people, or go do something with his friends.
is UUNET UK. They have been contacted. They are aware that they're hosting a notorious spam operation (listed in the SPEWS spammer list) on their network. They're not interested in disconnecting the EE guys, because "we're MCI-Worldcom, we don't care as long as they pay their bills, we own half the Internet backbone so we don't have to care haha!".
I doubt that the "geniuses" at the evidence-eliminator.com site would know how to write a simple HTML page (without all that Frontpage garbage and flash animations) if Xemacs bit them on the arse, and they certainly aren't mirrored at four different locations on the Internet with a rotating DNS. Geeks rule! :-).
No, it's more a case that the mighty web server of BadTux Enterprises has a lofty 64 megabytes of memory, and Linux has gotten a bit too bloated to like running in 64 megabytes of memory. As a firm advocate of "the right tool for the right job", FreeBSD and its "jail" mechanism were the right tool for the job -- pretty much the lightest footprint I could get that would run on that rather pathetic hardware. And my confidence was justified -- once I killed off the PHP/MySQL code that was sucking up all my memory and causing it to thrash like a demon, it handled the full bandwidth of a 512kb DSL line with not an issue, not even burping past 10% on the CPU usage scale.
In any event, an upgrade is out of the question at the moment, since my income is negative right now :-(. But if I were to upgrade that server, it would definitely be with more memory.