Actually it has everything to do with Time-Travel. Since Space and Time are the same thing, anytime you look through a telescope you're looking into the past and "time-travelling."
You can't change anything but you can observe it.
Most of the observations scientists are making today are of events that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago - we actually have no idea what's going on right at this second.
This is the original authors point. You have to actually watch the Clone Wars cartoons to get this.
The Clone Wars were on an epic scale comparable to WWI or II. Anakin and Obi-Wan get sent on tons of missions all over the galaxy where they get their asses kicked as much as they kick ass. It is brutal, and also where the whole story of General Grevious comes into light.
However if you don't see the shorts, then you have no idea of any of this. But alot of those cartoon shorts are very enlightening.
One that specifically comes to mind is where Anakin comes to a world where all the males have died and only women and children are left. Trying to figure out wtf happened, he finally discovers that the Empire/Republic had taken all the males (warrior race) and performed all these fucked up experiments on them that basically disformed all of 'em. Really crazy, but shows the true depth of his character, what he went through, and why he so easily turned to the dark side (it wasn't easily, he went through alot of shit).
It's is bad to assume that everyone will have watched and knows that tho. Tsk tsk.
Hah, that's funny cause the exact same thing happened to me and a large group of my friends - except that we actually had a mailing list setup all these years and blabbed to each other constantly on it.
LiveJournal came out, and our list traffic just plummeted. And other than their blogs, I don't really read any other ones. LJ lets you basically be very efficient at keeping up to date w/your friends.
Guys ever considered using Lighttpd? Definetely recommend taking a look at it.
We switched from Apache+mod_php to Lighttpd and PHP as a fastcgi module. Allows you to do crazy things like having boxes that only serve PHP requests... and it's almost a drop in Apache replacement but a single-process non-blocking daemon w/a memory+cpu footprint that's hard to believe.
I've banked with Wells Fargo for years and have seen some of these new Windows based ATMs already. It was *very* apparent when they switched, the old atm was monochrome green and the new one is color... and... they've already got advertisements on 'em. When you walk up to an unused one, it displays ads for random banking services but I expect to see Coke and Walmart ads anyday.
About 5 years ago at a company I worked at, we used a system similiar to this that actually took a picture of your eye, compared it to something on file, then let you inside of our building.
The system worked surprisingly well. It worked if you were drunk, if you had eyeglasses or contacts on, any number of variations. We even tried fooling it with digital cameras, polaroids, pictures and they never worked.
I was pretty impressed with it at the time - wish I could remember the name of the company that designed it.
Wow, even the non-technical explanations of a buffer overflow are still too technical. I love Shashdot.:)
Buffer = an empty bucket (of a fixed size) Data = water Overflow = filling the bucket with too much water
If you're going to fill the bucket up with water, you usually know when to stop. But what happens when you put too much water into the bucket?
It spills.. all over the place. And while you may know that once the water overflows you're going to get wet, if you do this enough times you gain a better understanding of what's going to happen to all that spilt water, and how to manipulate it.
This translates into being able to trick computer programs into basically doing anything.
Agreed 100%! Techies often seem to forget this, and having run my own businesses for years this was a lesson that was quickly learned.
Getting the product out of the door almost always has priority. Now, I'm not saying ship crappy products that don't work - but you can't always build the perfect product. And even if you did, you may learn sometime down the line that the perfect product you made is not the same perfect product that people want to buy.
For many businesses to survive - they simply have to be the first out the door. And while I've been programming for years and hate to admit it (or even say it in public), you can always fix a product later. But you cannot always gain more marketshare or sales later.. in fact as more time progresses it becomes exponentially harder and more cost-prohibitive.
And in the end, a business has to make money. It has to sell a product. There's no point in building the perfect product that no one uses because they bought your competitors 6 months to a year ago.
nope, just an admin who's learned that the simple solutions are often the best ones.
and if you think that post was uninformed, then you've obviously never spent the night in a datacenter bringing up a failed db server because of something that the data center techs told you never would happen - and it did anyways.
A lesson I learned a long time ago, always put the database servers on UPSes. Do so in a way that if primary power is ever lost, the servers shut themselves down and basically wait for human intervention (basically because if you reach this point, something horrible must have happened).
Power is never supposed to go out in datacenters, you figure you're paying they money for it, but it always does... it's never just the power company.. always some combination of generator or UPSes being overloaded, circuit breakers being overloaded.. name any of 100 reasons. Power needs for server farms is such a complex thing that this is basically inevitable.
Anyways, the bottom line is that your time (or the downtime) is worth way more than the price of a few extra UPSes (and some serial/usb cables to talk to the db servers and inform 'em to shutdown).
In reality the DB boxes are the only things that you really have to consider this for. Outages across anything else you can deal with, but once the databases die you're pretty much looking at spending the night (or next coupla nights) in the datacenter.
I haven't played a MMO since SWG first hit, so I'm just now gettting what Thottbot, IGN, etc is... but here's my question:
If paying real money for in-game items is cheating, then isn't using an out-of-game utlility to locate items in-game also cheating as well?
Both involve doing something out-of-game that affects what's in game... This seems to me like the pot calling the kettle black!
Obviously, since Thottbot is an add-on, not every player has it. So even though it's a free add-on, it still unfairly gives some players an advantage over other players, which is essentially what's being argued.
Sorry, but if it comes down to me having problems with a driver versus not having a piece of hardware work at all, I'll take the former.
I almost threw my laptop out the window years ago when I installed Suse and couldn't figure out for the life of me why I couldn't get the damn WiFi interface to work.
When I discovered that it was because my laptop had an built-in wifi card that had a binary only driver (and I had to jump through hoops to install 3rd party support for it) I instantly just wiped Suse out and put Windows back on. A laptop is COMPLETELY USELESS to me without a functioning wireless interface.. and I don't want to have to jump through hoops to get the damn thing to work either - it's just frustrating.
This is exactly why I don't run Linux on my laptop. Most laptops (especially Intel Centrino-based) are shipping with binary-only drivers. This same problem is going to affect them - this is not just a USB camera issue...
Now are you seriously going to tell me (and millions of other users) that because the purists want it this way that we can't install a version of Linux on a laptop without net access w/o first hacking together a custom kernel?!? wtf?!?
I read an article on/. not too long ago that talked about the great lenghts Microsoft programmers went through to make sure that future versions of Windows were compatible with previous releases of software already in the wild - this is exactly why they have over 90 percent marketshare and 50 billion in the bank.
Note however that I did not say save a million dollars, I said make a million dollars. As you invest more and more money (and don't withdraw or use it) you reach a point where they money grows on it's own. Having more capitol only insures that you now have access to more aggresive investment options which generally yeild 10-20 percent returns... once you start, the more money you have the easier it is to make more money.
People are always commenting on Microsofts 50 billion in the bank... 50 billion at 10 percent a year?!? It grows expoentially beyond an amount that most of us can even comprehend (which is probably how it got to that amount in the first place).
Am I missing something? What's wrong with having a steady profit instead of a rising one?
This is a largely Western way of thinking - people think of things in terms of the immediate rather than the long term.
Many people could make a million dollars in 20-30 years by agressively saving and controlling their buying habits but would rather make that same million by buying a loterry ticket.
Our stock market doesn't seem to see value in companies that produce a steady profit. This probably is due in part to not a large number of tech companies paying dividends (dividends should be the whole point of stock, you buy some, invest, and when the company makes money you get some extra back). But instead what happens is you make money from selling the stock itself.
So, the way to make the most money is not investing in a company that's already at the top, it's in investing in a company that creates a new field (think aerospace initially, dot com initially, some say biotech eventually) where no one knows where the top is at yet.
It's not that the loud parts are clipped, rather they are compressed. Yes, audio hardware/software compressors while they can be a godsend at times, their overuse has makes things sound flat, loud, and boring. (Wouldn't it be great if everytime someone whispered to you, your brain instead cranked that whispering up to the equivalent shouting db level? That's what compressors do - so that the music is always shouting).
A compressor is a device that says when the music reaches a certain decibel level, reduce the volume by X (X=compression ratio). So with a compressor you can take a song and crank it up super loud, without fear of ever actually clipping the signal or the system (it hovers right below 0db).
The result of this is that if you looked at a compressed waveform, they are no dynamics in it at all. The peaks and values of the entire wav are all maxed out. While this is louder, you have almost no dynamic range. Compression comes at a cost - most engineers these days don't seen to realize this.
CDs aren't actually recorded like this. The recordings are fine - it's when they go in to get the whole song (and CD) mastered that this happens. Audio Engineers are under increasing pressure to make the CD "sound louder" by the PHBs.
This is also great news for the BSD license in general. Many people believe that the only true OS License is the GPL, because of it's requirement that all improvements are always kept open; That with the BSD license, companies will just take the source, brand it, and never give anything back to the community.
This is just another example of a company not having to be forced to do the right thing, but rather just doing the right thing because they recognize the advantages. Kudos.
You've obviously never run a large database before. While a single RAID partition is fine for most uses, when you get into situations where you measure queries by how many are run per second then things really start to hit the fan.
Tablespaces allow you to do things like place a table that is 90 percent read and 10 percent write on one RAID array while taking another table that is maybe 50 percent write and 50 percent read on another table and then taking the Postgres WAL and placing that on a completely different array.
Table usage varies greatly across large databases. Some tables barely get touched, others get written to alot, others get read from alot.
I'm currently running a database where our peak loads are around 35 queries, per second. I've actually symlinked table locations to put my most heavily accessed tables on a seperate RAID array from the rest of my database. This gave me a 3 fold increase in speed. This is really noticed when we do things like VACUUM the db.
I live in Los Angeles, and they tried to build a subway stretching from Downtown LA to the Beach Area (about 15 miles). It made it about 4 miles before the project got killed. This was after getting approval for the entire distance.
The biggest issue was would they have enough riders to actually pay for it. They determined that they would (even with as many people driving out here that we have). Then the next issue became right of way, alot of people got paid of... then they started building the subway, had one bad accident (it involved some stores on a street dropping a few inches due to some bad tunneling) and the entire multi-billion dollar project was killed. Just like that. Other reasons why our rail systems suck:
- Ever heard of imminent domain? That doesn't mean crap out here. The last freeway we had built in LA (the 105 in the 70's mind you) ended up paying out almost half a billion dollars in lawsuits for forcing people to move. - Big cities in the US are spread too far apart. Even with an optimal number of people travelling between cities, the numbers aren't high enough in most places to warrant running trains frequently enough and at a low enough price to make people actually take them. - Trains out here make way too many stops and aren't fast enough. It takes almost 2X longer to reach many destinations by train than car. Since most people have cars anyways, they'd rather drive. - Cheap airlines fares end up making railtravel only slightly cheaper than airline travel. I've bought round-trip tickets from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for $40 (1 hour flight, 4.5 hour drive).. $20 each way and only 1/4 the time!
You can't actually drink alcohol in theaters out in LA. We had a new theater open up that actually has a bar inside, however they give you drinks in glasses and you aren't allowed to take them out of the "bar area".
The reasoning behind this is that if they allowed you to take the drink into the dark, then you could give it to a minor (and we all know how dangerous drunk minors are!)
Kinda sucks, but all that happens now is that my friends and I get stupid drunk right before the movie starts, wander over to the bathroom (VERY IMPORTANT), then stumble into the theater to watch the previews in a drunken stupor.
Driving a route that takes me through that interchange takes 45 minutes at midnight, 1.5 hours around noon, and 2 hours during rush hour.
I laugh at Seattle and NYC traffic patterns, you guys have nothing on LA. The sad thing is we don't have a couple or bridges or interchanges that are bad, every freeway everywhere is bad. No matter which way you go, you're screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it has everything to do with Time-Travel. Since Space and Time are the same thing, anytime you look through a telescope you're looking into the past and "time-travelling."
You can't change anything but you can observe it.
Most of the observations scientists are making today are of events that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago - we actually have no idea what's going on right at this second.
This is the original authors point. You have to actually watch the Clone Wars cartoons to get this.
The Clone Wars were on an epic scale comparable to WWI or II. Anakin and Obi-Wan get sent on tons of missions all over the galaxy where they get their asses kicked as much as they kick ass. It is brutal, and also where the whole story of General Grevious comes into light.
However if you don't see the shorts, then you have no idea of any of this. But alot of those cartoon shorts are very enlightening.
One that specifically comes to mind is where Anakin comes to a world where all the males have died and only women and children are left. Trying to figure out wtf happened, he finally discovers that the Empire/Republic had taken all the males (warrior race) and performed all these fucked up experiments on them that basically disformed all of 'em. Really crazy, but shows the true depth of his character, what he went through, and why he so easily turned to the dark side (it wasn't easily, he went through alot of shit).
It's is bad to assume that everyone will have watched and knows that tho. Tsk tsk.
Hah, that's funny cause the exact same thing happened to me and a large group of my friends - except that we actually had a mailing list setup all these years and blabbed to each other constantly on it.
LiveJournal came out, and our list traffic just plummeted. And other than their blogs, I don't really read any other ones. LJ lets you basically be very efficient at keeping up to date w/your friends.
Guys ever considered using Lighttpd? Definetely recommend taking a look at it.
We switched from Apache+mod_php to Lighttpd and PHP as a fastcgi module. Allows you to do crazy things like having boxes that only serve PHP requests... and it's almost a drop in Apache replacement but a single-process non-blocking daemon w/a memory+cpu footprint that's hard to believe.
On that note keep up the good work w/Wikipedia!
I've banked with Wells Fargo for years and have seen some of these new Windows based ATMs already. It was *very* apparent when they switched, the old atm was monochrome green and the new one is color ... and ... they've already got advertisements on 'em. When you walk up to an unused one, it displays ads for random banking services but I expect to see Coke and Walmart ads anyday.
About 5 years ago at a company I worked at, we used a system similiar to this that actually took a picture of your eye, compared it to something on file, then let you inside of our building.
The system worked surprisingly well. It worked if you were drunk, if you had eyeglasses or contacts on, any number of variations. We even tried fooling it with digital cameras, polaroids, pictures and they never worked.
I was pretty impressed with it at the time - wish I could remember the name of the company that designed it.
Windows-E opens up explorer. Links to other useful Windows Key Shortcuts.
Wow, even the non-technical explanations of a buffer overflow are still too technical. I love Shashdot. :)
Buffer = an empty bucket (of a fixed size)
Data = water
Overflow = filling the bucket with too much water
If you're going to fill the bucket up with water, you usually know when to stop. But what happens when you put too much water into the bucket?
It spills.. all over the place. And while you may know that once the water overflows you're going to get wet, if you do this enough times you gain a better understanding of what's going to happen to all that spilt water, and how to manipulate it.
This translates into being able to trick computer programs into basically doing anything.
Agreed 100%! Techies often seem to forget this, and having run my own businesses for years this was a lesson that was quickly learned.
Getting the product out of the door almost always has priority. Now, I'm not saying ship crappy products that don't work - but you can't always build the perfect product. And even if you did, you may learn sometime down the line that the perfect product you made is not the same perfect product that people want to buy.
For many businesses to survive - they simply have to be the first out the door. And while I've been programming for years and hate to admit it (or even say it in public), you can always fix a product later. But you cannot always gain more marketshare or sales later.. in fact as more time progresses it becomes exponentially harder and more cost-prohibitive.
And in the end, a business has to make money. It has to sell a product. There's no point in building the perfect product that no one uses because they bought your competitors 6 months to a year ago.
nope, just an admin who's learned that the simple solutions are often the best ones.
and if you think that post was uninformed, then you've obviously never spent the night in a datacenter bringing up a failed db server because of something that the data center techs told you never would happen - and it did anyways.
A lesson I learned a long time ago, always put the database servers on UPSes. Do so in a way that if primary power is ever lost, the servers shut themselves down and basically wait for human intervention (basically because if you reach this point, something horrible must have happened).
:)
Power is never supposed to go out in datacenters, you figure you're paying they money for it, but it always does... it's never just the power company.. always some combination of generator or UPSes being overloaded, circuit breakers being overloaded.. name any of 100 reasons. Power needs for server farms is such a complex thing that this is basically inevitable.
Anyways, the bottom line is that your time (or the downtime) is worth way more than the price of a few extra UPSes (and some serial/usb cables to talk to the db servers and inform 'em to shutdown).
In reality the DB boxes are the only things that you really have to consider this for. Outages across anything else you can deal with, but once the databases die you're pretty much looking at spending the night (or next coupla nights) in the datacenter.
Been there, done that.
I haven't played a MMO since SWG first hit, so I'm just now gettting what Thottbot, IGN, etc is... but here's my question:
If paying real money for in-game items is cheating, then isn't using an out-of-game utlility to locate items in-game also cheating as well?
Both involve doing something out-of-game that affects what's in game... This seems to me like the pot calling the kettle black!
Obviously, since Thottbot is an add-on, not every player has it. So even though it's a free add-on, it still unfairly gives some players an advantage over other players, which is essentially what's being argued.
Sorry, but if it comes down to me having problems with a driver versus not having a piece of hardware work at all, I'll take the former.
I almost threw my laptop out the window years ago when I installed Suse and couldn't figure out for the life of me why I couldn't get the damn WiFi interface to work.
When I discovered that it was because my laptop had an built-in wifi card that had a binary only driver (and I had to jump through hoops to install 3rd party support for it) I instantly just wiped Suse out and put Windows back on. A laptop is COMPLETELY USELESS to me without a functioning wireless interface.. and I don't want to have to jump through hoops to get the damn thing to work either - it's just frustrating.
This is exactly why I don't run Linux on my laptop. Most laptops (especially Intel Centrino-based) are shipping with binary-only drivers. This same problem is going to affect them - this is not just a USB camera issue...
/. not too long ago that talked about the great lenghts Microsoft programmers went through to make sure that future versions of Windows were compatible with previous releases of software already in the wild - this is exactly why they have over 90 percent marketshare and 50 billion in the bank.
Now are you seriously going to tell me (and millions of other users) that because the purists want it this way that we can't install a version of Linux on a laptop without net access w/o first hacking together a custom kernel?!? wtf?!?
I read an article on
FreeBSD, NetBSD, (and OpenBSD?) have been able to run Linux binaries natively for years and guess what - hardly anyone uses it.
Why? Because for the most part the same apps that can be run in binary mode is just as easily ported to the BSD anyways.
My guess is the same thing will happen with Solaris.
You've illustrated my point exactly.
Note however that I did not say save a million dollars, I said make a million dollars. As you invest more and more money (and don't withdraw or use it) you reach a point where they money grows on it's own. Having more capitol only insures that you now have access to more aggresive investment options which generally yeild 10-20 percent returns... once you start, the more money you have the easier it is to make more money.
People are always commenting on Microsofts 50 billion in the bank... 50 billion at 10 percent a year?!? It grows expoentially beyond an amount that most of us can even comprehend (which is probably how it got to that amount in the first place).
Am I missing something? What's wrong with having a steady profit instead of a rising one?
This is a largely Western way of thinking - people think of things in terms of the immediate rather than the long term.
Many people could make a million dollars in 20-30 years by agressively saving and controlling their buying habits but would rather make that same million by buying a loterry ticket.
Our stock market doesn't seem to see value in companies that produce a steady profit. This probably is due in part to not a large number of tech companies paying dividends (dividends should be the whole point of stock, you buy some, invest, and when the company makes money you get some extra back). But instead what happens is you make money from selling the stock itself.
So, the way to make the most money is not investing in a company that's already at the top, it's in investing in a company that creates a new field (think aerospace initially, dot com initially, some say biotech eventually) where no one knows where the top is at yet.
It's not that the loud parts are clipped, rather they are compressed. Yes, audio hardware/software compressors while they can be a godsend at times, their overuse has makes things sound flat, loud, and boring. (Wouldn't it be great if everytime someone whispered to you, your brain instead cranked that whispering up to the equivalent shouting db level? That's what compressors do - so that the music is always shouting).
A compressor is a device that says when the music reaches a certain decibel level, reduce the volume by X (X=compression ratio). So with a compressor you can take a song and crank it up super loud, without fear of ever actually clipping the signal or the system (it hovers right below 0db).
The result of this is that if you looked at a compressed waveform, they are no dynamics in it at all. The peaks and values of the entire wav are all maxed out. While this is louder, you have almost no dynamic range. Compression comes at a cost - most engineers these days don't seen to realize this.
CDs aren't actually recorded like this. The recordings are fine - it's when they go in to get the whole song (and CD) mastered that this happens. Audio Engineers are under increasing pressure to make the CD "sound louder" by the PHBs.
Star Wars III: "Birth of the Empire"
If you take it in content, the name actually fits more closely with the later(earlier) movies.
The Phantom Menace
Attack of the Clones
---
Birth of the Empire
A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
There are just rumors that this will be the new title tho... time will tell.
This is also great news for the BSD license in general. Many people believe that the only true OS License is the GPL, because of it's requirement that all improvements are always kept open; That with the BSD license, companies will just take the source, brand it, and never give anything back to the community.
This is just another example of a company not having to be forced to do the right thing, but rather just doing the right thing because they recognize the advantages. Kudos.
You've obviously never run a large database before. While a single RAID partition is fine for most uses, when you get into situations where you measure queries by how many are run per second then things really start to hit the fan.
Tablespaces allow you to do things like place a table that is 90 percent read and 10 percent write on one RAID array while taking another table that is maybe 50 percent write and 50 percent read on another table and then taking the Postgres WAL and placing that on a completely different array.
Table usage varies greatly across large databases. Some tables barely get touched, others get written to alot, others get read from alot.
I'm currently running a database where our peak loads are around 35 queries, per second. I've actually symlinked table locations to put my most heavily accessed tables on a seperate RAID array from the rest of my database. This gave me a 3 fold increase in speed. This is really noticed when we do things like VACUUM the db.
I live in Los Angeles, and they tried to build a subway stretching from Downtown LA to the Beach Area (about 15 miles). It made it about 4 miles before the project got killed. This was after getting approval for the entire distance.
The biggest issue was would they have enough riders to actually pay for it. They determined that they would (even with as many people driving out here that we have). Then the next issue became right of way, alot of people got paid of... then they started building the subway, had one bad accident (it involved some stores on a street dropping a few inches due to some bad tunneling) and the entire multi-billion dollar project was killed. Just like that. Other reasons why our rail systems suck:
- Ever heard of imminent domain? That doesn't mean crap out here. The last freeway we had built in LA (the 105 in the 70's mind you) ended up paying out almost half a billion dollars in lawsuits for forcing people to move.
- Big cities in the US are spread too far apart. Even with an optimal number of people travelling between cities, the numbers aren't high enough in most places to warrant running trains frequently enough and at a low enough price to make people actually take them.
- Trains out here make way too many stops and aren't fast enough. It takes almost 2X longer to reach many destinations by train than car. Since most people have cars anyways, they'd rather drive.
- Cheap airlines fares end up making railtravel only slightly cheaper than airline travel. I've bought round-trip tickets from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for $40 (1 hour flight, 4.5 hour drive).. $20 each way and only 1/4 the time!
You can't actually drink alcohol in theaters out in LA. We had a new theater open up that actually has a bar inside, however they give you drinks in glasses and you aren't allowed to take them out of the "bar area".
The reasoning behind this is that if they allowed you to take the drink into the dark, then you could give it to a minor (and we all know how dangerous drunk minors are!)
Kinda sucks, but all that happens now is that my friends and I get stupid drunk right before the movie starts, wander over to the bathroom (VERY IMPORTANT), then stumble into the theater to watch the previews in a drunken stupor.
I knew it.
Driving a route that takes me through that interchange takes 45 minutes at midnight, 1.5 hours around noon, and 2 hours during rush hour.
I laugh at Seattle and NYC traffic patterns, you guys have nothing on LA. The sad thing is we don't have a couple or bridges or interchanges that are bad, every freeway everywhere is bad. No matter which way you go, you're screwed.
Yes. I submitted this same story like 4-5 months ago and had it rejected.