[SNIP]Dave Winer has Dvorak on video describing his methodology for trolling the Mac community to pump up his stats." [SNIP] I have to admit I'm also guilty of posting the occasional inflammatory story, but I find it's usually best to suffix the title with a question mark, and let our ever-knowledgeable readers hash out the issue and decide for themselves.
You do it for the same reason Dvorak did it. Not to boost "stats"- to boost advertising revenue by increasign page hits. A 300-post thread is thrilling advertising-wise compared to a 30-comment thread. It's always about increasing advertising revenues.
The evil "main stream media" has a term for it: sensationalism. You should attract readers via the quality of your content, not its controversialism. These days I see the average tech story on the homepage of my city's newspaper 1, 2, 3 days before it hits slashdot- and half the time, it's an AP wire story! Gone are the days when the media outlets didn't have contacts in the tech industry or didn't "understand" it. Slashdot's become a real bore, and the quality of commentary both on the part of editors and readers has gone straight downhill.
Even if a zillion people did all try to get to the Victoria's Secret web site all at once, that would probably not affect my ability to access my email or read CNN's web site.
Unfortunately, due to consolidation, mergers, rabid anti-spam measures, and hard-line corporate push towards 'consumerism' on virtually any kind of internet connection- that's just not true anymore.
A few years ago, it used to be that Apple would bring Akamai to its knees every time they had a big announcement, and anyone that used Akamai (which was a large number of popular sites) would suffer; a million mac users would be trying to load up the webcast or hitting "refresh" a thousand times on store.apple.com or www.apple.com.
Google is another example. Google is so ingrained in people's brains that I watch fellow -professional- sysadmins ping "www.google.com" as a test of whether a machine has DNS and outgoing connectivity. People hardly bookmark things anymore; they just "google it" and sift through the first 6 hits or so to find what they were looking for.
Here's my point: pick any one of the big giants in the internet world today. Now picture they're gone- wiped off the map by a disgruntled employee, a natural disaster, or more likely these days- a corporate scandal (imagine what would happen if Google was the next Enron. If you think that's impossible, look at the Google CFO's background.) Now think about how much that would hurt the web. We've made progress in some areas of the Internet (DNS- you have lots of choices for registrars, though GoDaddy has become the largest by far, and now represents a similar risk), but lost massively in others.
I have ONE choice in internet service provides in my town. I live 20 miles from Boston, but because of "Gentlemen's agreements" that are pervasive in the telco industry, I can't get DSL because Comcast is in our town. 10 years ago I could pick from a dozen dialup ISPs, national, regional, and local- same for ISDN. Now I have ONE choice, and I live in one of the more wealthy and technologically advanced states in the union, and I'm not permitted by my ToS to run a webserver, email server, "discussion board", or "Internet relay chat server". I believe I'm not even allowed to run a VPN server. My ToS clearly states that I am a "consumer" of information services. That's progress?
Hibernation works by writing the contents of the RAM to the hard drive, so this would only work if you had = 256 MB RAM. I don't think too many new systems meet that requirement, and even less will after Vista comes out
Not to mention your average notebook hard drive these days is fully capable of pushing 20+MB/sec for the linear read a "resume" requires, unless the hibernation file is fragmented. Even fairly expensive media like Sandisk Compact Flash "Extreme III" cards for digital cameras can't hit that, and one of those (1GB) costs about the same as a 100GB hard drive. Silly.
My Macbook by default hibernates, but I found a setting to flip that off so that it "sleeps" like it should (involve the 'defaults' command, I forget exactly.) Now it takes about 2 seconds to 'wake up'. Ironically enough, hibernation takes longer than it takes to boot (about 25-30 seconds) and the scale has probably been tipped even further in favor of "booting" with another GB of ram I just added; by my rough calculation it'd take well over a minute if most memory was in use at time of hybernation (maybe the OS clears out all disk cache before doing it- you'd hope so.)
Hibernation is for when your battery is pretty much dead and the laptop wakes up to hibernate before it looses the contents of RAM due to battery failure...and can people REALLY not wait the time it takes to boot or wake up from hibernation and copy the data back into RAM? Yeesh.
This seems like an attempt to save themselves in a market they're just not competitive in. From all accounts I've seen (and personal experience), Seagate's ATA-drive reliability is in the trashcan these days; the 7200.8 was a fiasco, and the 7200.9 doesn't seem much better. IBM sold off their drive business (which was a market leader in almost all segments) after the Deskstar/Deathstar fiasco, but Hitachi seems to be doing fabulously. I had a 7200.9 300GB drive that died within 12 hours of operation. It's been RMA'd, and the replacement will be sold on Craigslist or similar. In the meantime, a shiny new, cheaper, cooler-running, quieter Samsung Spinpoint is sitting in its place.
I think Seagate has seen the writing on the wall- hence the merger with Maxtor. I would imagine you'll see them merge Seagate/Maxtor technology in their ATA line and sell exclusively under Maxtor, and Seagate will go back to being a mostly SCSI brand, as their reputation there seems intact.
However, VMWare is the one shining light in my shop. It does exactly what they say it does and it does it flawlessly. Every feature is as you would expect and (ESX) host servers stay up for months at a time. Never have we had to reboot a host to solve a stability issue. It just freakin' works.
Then why does the article say that support is absolutely atrocious for 2.6 kernels? Quote from the article:
If you're using Linux and there is a dire need to use a 2.6 kernel in a VM [virtual machine], wait for ESX 3.0. VMware ESX Server has been plagued with time-keeping and performance issues that are reportedly resolved in the 3.0 version. I have personally configured and run 2.4 kernels inside of virtual machines that performed as expected for some large organizations only to see the same applications run degraded on a 2.6 kernel.
And, FYI, GPS in certain applications and situations can give accuracy to within cm range (mm range if using differential GPS and post processing which this device could do).
Not without on-site differential GPS corrections, no...not even on the military band; WAAS at theoretical best gives you about 6 feet. Far as I know the most accurate non-military system is John Deere's private differential system, and it doesn't give anywhere near the accuracy you are talking about.
PS, from Wikipedia.
Each satellite repeatedly re-broadcasts the exact time according to its internal atomic clock along with a digital data packet. The data includes the orbital elements of the satellite's precise position, satellite status messages, and an almanac of the approximate position of every other active GPS satellite. The almanac lets GPS receivers use data from the strongest satellite signal to locate other satellites.
Receivers
GPS receivers calculate their current position (latitude, longitude, elevation), and the precise time, using the process of trilateration. This involves measuring the distance to at least four satellites by comparing the satellites' coded time signal (PRN Code) transmissions. The receiver calculates the orbit of each satellite based on information encoded in their radio signals, and measures the distance to each satellite, called a pseudorange, based on the time delay from when the satellite signals were sent until they were received.
*SNIP
One complication is that GPS receivers do not have atomic clocks, so the precise time is not known when the signals arrive. Fortunately, even the relatively simple clock within the receiver provides an accurate comparison of the timing of the signals from the different satellites. The receiver is able to determine exactly when the signals were received by adjusting its internal clock (and therefore the spheres' radii) so that the spheres intersect near one point.
So, sorry Dr. Dickhead Nitpicker EE, if I didn't get it EXACTLY right, but looks like I came pretty goddamn close.
Sorry, GPS location requirements don't rely on the timing on the board, all of the timing and position is derived from the received signal. You need to be able to receive 3 or more satellites for a fix
I don't think you understand how GPS works. Simplifying- a GPS receiver looks at when signals with the same timestamp arrive, and deduces how far it is from each satellite from that. If a signal from Satellite A saying "hey, it's 12:01:05 right NOW arrives a second after a similar signal from Satellite B, then the receiever knows that it is 1 light-second further away from Satellite A than B (this is a gross exaggeration of the scale of time involved.) With 3-4 satellites, you get a position fix.
Modern receivers can track 12-20 satellites at once and get accuracy down to 10 feet or so. There are two things the receiver must do which are timing-related:
1)Figure out what time it -really- is, so it can set an internal chronometer, so it can know the exact distance it is from satellites, versus relative distances
2)Record as exactly as possible when each satellite's particular timestamp came in
Both require -staggering- accuracy that a PC, or your USRP board, are incapable of providing. Clock skew considered perfectly acceptable in a PC is considered monumentally inaccurate in a GPS receiver...and the timing resolution isn't anywhere near good enough either. You're talking about comparing timing in LIGHT FEET, and light takes 1/299,792,458th of a second to travel a meter. It's about one NANOSECOND a foot, so you need resolution exceeding 10nS.
You've got to do a lot of signal processing to ignore spurious signals, as GPS signals love to bounce off some things, and get absorbed readily by others. You've got to have an incredibly low noise, highly sensitive receiver, as GPS is readily absorbed by just about anything, and that includes trees.
The current state of the art is SiRF's SiRF-3 chipset; I've got a Garmin handheld with one, and I can get a 30 foot position lock inside my house, under treecover. I can get a 10 foot lock if I'm outside with enough satellites in view and a WAAS differential signal. I'd -really- like to see you try to beat that.
"Here," he explains, "I'm grabbing FM." "All of it?" I ask. "All of it," he says. I'm suddenly glad the soundcard isn't working.
Not quite- in order to fit the swath of FM radio into that USB2 pipe, it isn't sampling it in any great detail. If you tried to decode one station, it'd most likely sound like a tin can, unless you sampled a narrower slice of the FM band. So don't get too excited. Claiming the motherboard or these devices are "universal" is extremely misleading. You buy modules that transmit or receive on different bands. They're usually pretty wide in frequency spectrum, but they also generally aren't anywhere near as good as dedicated receivers for those bands, and they're not "universal."
Claims of being able to receive GPS are also misleading- you'd be able to decode individual satellites and perhaps obtain a fix within a mile or so, but getting accuracy anywhere near what a $100 handheld GPS unit can do, would require incredible timing accuracy that board just doesn't have. Remember...GPS works by timing how far radio waves w/time signals take to travel...down to about 10 feet in some cases. Think hard about what kind of timing accuracy and precision that requires.
The vast secret operation has updated the duck-and-cover scenarios of the 1950s with state-of-the-art technology -- alerts and updates delivered by pager and PDA
RICE_BABY: "LOLZ IN DA BUNKA WHERE U @?"
CHAIN_MAN: "AT DA DOOR OPEN UP LOL"
SHRUB: "B SERIYUS U 2"
BROWNIE: "YEAH U NEVER KNOW WHOS GONNA SEE YER MESSAGES"
WASH_POST: "YEAH LOL IN UR NETWORK READIN YER MESSAGES SEE YOU IN THE PAPERS"
RUMMY: "LOL SEE YOU IN GITMO ALL YOUR RIGHTS ARE BELONG TO ME"
It's funny how many of these problems would be at least partially solved by proper DNS.
...and postfix checks, blah blah. The reason these CAN'T be enabled, and I have tried on a volunteer site I help run- is because many major internet service providers don't have proper forward and reverse DNS set up for their mail clusters. A certain major cable company in Florida comes to mind; a list member spent 2 hours trying to explain to the tech support grunts that the problem was that a machine in their outgoing mail server cluster didn't have a reverse IP address. They kept trying to troubleshoot DNS on HIS computer, despite his pleas for them to just forward his report to the infrastructure guys- that they would understand. We kept running across these bozo internet service providers, and had to give up.
Aside from that...when I enabled just "HELO domain must match the domain of the hostname found by reverse lookup", spam volume dropped by over half. Enabling "MAIL FROM must match" cut it even further, since almost all spam claims to be from something else.
All sorts of brilliant, talented people today put far more work into fixing SMTP in various ways (with anti-virus, anti-phishing technologies, anti-spam, anti-spoofing cumbersome encryption technologies, and much more)
It's funny how many of these problems would be at least partially solved by proper DNS.
Postfix, for example, can be configured to be varyingly anal about how closely the reverse lookup matches HELO, the MAIL FROM domain, etc. SPF extends the concept.
However, most of the time I'm able to get 8mbps, when the remote end can handle it. I have servers hosted at a location where I know I have plenty of bandwidth
Seconded- Apple system updates, for example, come in at just about maximum line speed, and the torrent of Dapper came in at a total data rate of about 750KB/sec, while uploading at about 65KB/sec..don't forget overhead of communicating with a whole boatload of peers (several thousand on the main torrent.) Increasingly I'm running across sites that have no trouble maxxing out speeds.
Besides, I didn't pay for the upper class of comcast service just to get another 2Mbit a second download; I paid for it to get the 3x increase in upload (768Kbit vs. "less than 384".)
To the best of my knowledge you get no SLA with commercial DSL or cable accounts either (at least I don't and don't know of anyone who does). You have to buck up and pay for T or Frame or OC lines before you get an SLA.
That's because the FCC mandates SLAs on T/Frame/OC lines.
They have been an oddity until now, but hearing about these numbers stations makes me think our very own slashdot is being used as a covert channel.
Or it's just a creative troll, hoping someone will spend hours or days trying to figure out meaning behind what's really just the numeric output of/dev/random or something.
I've honestly always though "number stations" were pretty much the same thing...someone having their jollies. Has anyone actually tried to get a fix on them? I thought HAMs loved doing "hunts"...why don't they do a "hunt" on some number stations some time?
Server Too Busy
HttpException (0x80004005): Server Too Busy]
System.Web.HttpRuntime.RejectRequestInternal(HttpW orkerRequest wr) +148
Version Information: Microsoft.NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.2300; ASP.NET
Version:1.1.4322.2300
Guess they should have reviewed it as a webserver, instead.
FWIW, my 17 inch MBP has none of the problems reported about the 15 inch model. It is quiet and runs relatively cool. Much cooler in fact than the 17 HP notebook it replaced.
FWIW, my 15 inch MBP has none of the problems reported about the 15 inch model. It is quiet and runs relatively cool. Not quite as cool as my 17" G4 powerbook it replaced, but it is easily several magnitudes faster. It is MUCH cooler than my old G3 Lombard was.
The solution is to force these politians to take vacation 360 out of 365 days of the year to limit the damage and stupidity caused.
What do you think they do now? Your average congrescritter spends most of his or her time campaigning, travelling to Iraq (big with voters, see "campaigning"), taking trips to speak or attend meetings (paid for by lobbyists), and so on. Governors like to do it too- the governor of MA, Mitt Romney, has practically been out of office more than he has been in, because he's so busy travelling around the world (literally!) because he wants to be "presidential."
Check out the voting record of most of these people...half the time they're never around and don't even bother to vote. I seem to recall one was even caught using another's access card (for the voting system) because the other one couldn't be bothered to leave their office. It's absolutely pathetic- they've completely forgotten what their job is. A representative's job is NOT TO GET RE-ELECTED. It is to REPRESENT.
Don't forget No One Lives Forever, where the object is mostly to sneak around, since you're a spy, or dispose of the baddies quietly. It's worth it to sneak around too- the guards in various places have conversations to alert you to their presence and such. The conversations are hilarious.
Two of them inside one of the "evil hideous" discuss how one's brother has gone into the business of kitchen remodelling, and the other asks for the brother's number as his wife has been nagging him to have something done about theirs.
Another trio of baddies earlier in the game wax philosophic about how "there just aren't any truly evil organizations anymore", and of course, at some point, there's a discussion involving how they don't get any respect. "Do this, shoot that. I tell you..."
It was great. In almost any other game, you just shoot the guards and bad guys. But in NOLF, you actually kinda feel for them. They're just regular Joes, wondering about which HMO plan to sign up for, renovating their house, not really liking their job, etc. Well, except that they have guns and they'll kill you if they see you.
I know there's a sequel out..I hope it's as good as the first one.
The software, which is based on FreeBSD, Samba, and PHP, includes an operating system that supports various software RAID models and a Web user interface. The server supports access from Windows machines, Apple Macs
Look. Just because MacOS X supports SMB, does not mean that SMB is an acceptable solution for file-serving to MacOS X clients.
SMB is absolutely glacial at file metadata/folder retrieval compared to Appleshare. Do the following test: back up a large volume via SMB using Retrospect or a similar tool on the Mac. Then repeat using Appleshare. Using SMB, the file/folder scan will progressively slow down and take hours to finish.
SMB does not support the character set or file-name lengths Macs REQUIRE. Yes, I said, REQUIRE. You'll discover this when you go to make an emergency backup of a mac to a SMB share and get errors about filenames that are too long, or have characters that aren't valid. A lot of applications contain files in their internal structure that violate SMB naming restrictions.
When Samba runs across a file that it can't display the name for...IT IGNORES IT!
Samba requires a lot of tweaking to get it to perform decently, and despite the usual recommended config changes, I've never been able to get Samba to perform as well as a "stock" Appleshare client.
Netatalk has some of its own crankyness (and if you run Debian/Ubuntu, you need to rebuild the debian package with SSL support or passwords are transmitted in the clear, thanks to the OpenSSL/GNU idiocy), but it doesn't have nearly the basic functionality problems Samba does for Macs.
Sidenote: looks like they "borrowed" the complete user interface from m0n0wall...and it looks like they MIGHT use netatalk...googling turned up some hints that netatalk might be built-in.
wasn't there a plane crash a few years back caused by both planes trying to avoid a mid air collision actually moving into each other?
I don't recall that accident- but I do recall very vividly the huge mess around Air France Flight 296. The pilot was doing a low pass for an air show, gave the engines throttle, and the computer on the Airbus 320 decided "no". The plane crashed and killed three people.
There are photos showing people who never should have touched the black box (civilian aviation authorities, instead of the police), taking it away...and the black box that was taken away from the scene was intact, but the one returned (under court order 10 days later) was different in appearance, if I recall. Quite a bit of telemetry had been completely erased from the data tapes and remaining data was out of sync.
The whole problem originated because some engineer thought it would be a good idea to inject some code into the process of "pilot decides to apply throttle, engines respond." The pilot should ALWAYS be free to override systems, and you should have a really, really, really REALLY good reason for putting any logic into control systems. It almost never works without some sort of hitch; complexity breeds problems.
On almost any plane with an autopilot system, there is a BIG red button on the control yolk that, when pressed, immediately PHYSICALLY disconnects the autopilot from the control systems and sounds a loud beeper for a few seconds.
Furthermore, run-up procedures (at least in non-commercial, small planes I flew in as a passenger) have the pilot a)check that he can physically overpower the autopilot in all control directions (they have a clutch, basically, on the autopilot motors) and b)that the emergency disconnect works. The tests are repeated for rudder and alieron adjustments.
We also have a huge, peer-reviewed system for continuously training pilots in all aspects of flying; pilot's associations, company training and bulletins on safety, procedures, etc in most airlines, and word of mouth. We don't have that for engineers that program computers that handle critical-to-life-and-safety systems on planes...unless they're very experienced pilots themselves. Even then, do you really think Airbus flight control programmers sit down and hobnob with Boeing fligh control programmers? Hell no...
GPUs are nice, but there's the little matter of getting data and results on and off the chip.
Not to mention that their dollar figures are somewhat misleading, as they didn't include the cost of the host PC...and AMD Opeteron 280 processors don't cost ANYWHERE NEAR $2,000. They also didn't show us how cheaper processors do.
You can buy a Tyan quad-CPU motherboard for about $1k, and the dual-core version of the 280 for $1k tops. So...that's $5-5.5K for a box with EIGHT processors that will do 6 million complex values in almost half the time as the $500 video card sitting in a workstation that most likely costs well over $1,500. So it's not really quite as simple as "OMG 4X PERFORMANCE, ONE QUARTER THE COST!!!"
Also, did you know that you can buy a Sempron motherboard, 1GB of ram, and sempron processor for about $150 these days? For the same cost as that one GPU, you can buy 3 complete Sempron systems and have change left over for your networking gear.
if you're only considering 32-bit floating point numbers and don't need full IEEE-754 compliance.
Nevermind that you need a decent host to feed the card data, twice the ram compared to what is on the card, and you can't put more than one card in a PC. So one "system" costs a lot more than just the $500 for the card.
I'm not aware of many rackmount servers that have AGP or PCI-E slots except the Apple XServe, so you're possibly looking at using minitower type machines or building rackmount boxes yourself, and we all know how well both of those work for clusters.
Most video cards also use a considerable amount of power...some several times what the various low-power processors use. There aren't a whole lot of SMP motherboards (especially for power-efficient processors), but is this really the most efficient (cost, power, space) solution? Especially considering that for every video card, you'll have a processor anyway?
This inculcation of curiosity and resourcefulness is what makes studying at MIT truly unique. No wonder it is one of the premier educational institutions in the world.
You don't live in Boston, so you don't hear about what MIT is often in the news for: students getting really hammered, and occasionally falling out of dorm room windows and getting killed.
MIT has a huge problem with drug abuse- and that includes alcohol. Having lived in the same city as MIT for over a decade, I'm not really sure why everyone thinks MIT is the greatest technical school in the world...it's not even close. I've spoken to a lot of managers at high-tech companies that won't hire fresh MIT grads because a)they don't know anything actually useful and b)they think they know everything, so when they're doing something wrong, they don't listen to coworkers, team leaders, and managers.
My favorite example is the manager who told me about the MIT programmer he hired that wouldn't use constants...he's plug in the same number 50 times in his algorithm, instead of defining a properly named constant...and his variable names were hilariously bad. Basically, it was clear he never learned proper programming techniques. Despite the manager's insistence that he define constants, etc (ie follow company coding standards), the guy kept doing it his way.
So he was fired. Ever wonder why so many MIT grads work for other MIT grads? It's because they're un-employable by anyone else.
And then there was that old puzzle game before it that was a huge smash hit created by that Pazhitnov guy in Russia . . . what was that again? I forget.
I hope you're joking....Tetris. Pazhitnov's Wikipedia page. Interesting that he's still "in the scene" with one of his games included on some of the Xbox 360's...
The reason to keep those addresses secret is because if the spammers found them, they would not be useful anymore. If you have a static IP address, the problem is you. Someone with access to your out-bound email is sending spam.
Only problem is that I keep hearing from friends who have really locked down mail servers but keep getting blocked by spamcop...yet spamcop claims the friend's mail server sent a message to one of their secret mailboxes.
Don't blame SpamCop for the situation that results in your IP address being reported to them.
I'm sorry, but that's pass-the-buck bullshit. If spamcop is technically incompetent, of course they should be blamed when they improperly list someone.
Slashdot Mirror
[SNIP]Dave Winer has Dvorak on video describing his methodology for trolling the Mac community to pump up his stats." [SNIP] I have to admit I'm also guilty of posting the occasional inflammatory story, but I find it's usually best to suffix the title with a question mark, and let our ever-knowledgeable readers hash out the issue and decide for themselves.
You do it for the same reason Dvorak did it. Not to boost "stats"- to boost advertising revenue by increasign page hits. A 300-post thread is thrilling advertising-wise compared to a 30-comment thread. It's always about increasing advertising revenues.
The evil "main stream media" has a term for it: sensationalism. You should attract readers via the quality of your content, not its controversialism. These days I see the average tech story on the homepage of my city's newspaper 1, 2, 3 days before it hits slashdot- and half the time, it's an AP wire story! Gone are the days when the media outlets didn't have contacts in the tech industry or didn't "understand" it. Slashdot's become a real bore, and the quality of commentary both on the part of editors and readers has gone straight downhill.
Unfortunately, due to consolidation, mergers, rabid anti-spam measures, and hard-line corporate push towards 'consumerism' on virtually any kind of internet connection- that's just not true anymore.
A few years ago, it used to be that Apple would bring Akamai to its knees every time they had a big announcement, and anyone that used Akamai (which was a large number of popular sites) would suffer; a million mac users would be trying to load up the webcast or hitting "refresh" a thousand times on store.apple.com or www.apple.com.
Google is another example. Google is so ingrained in people's brains that I watch fellow -professional- sysadmins ping "www.google.com" as a test of whether a machine has DNS and outgoing connectivity. People hardly bookmark things anymore; they just "google it" and sift through the first 6 hits or so to find what they were looking for.
Here's my point: pick any one of the big giants in the internet world today. Now picture they're gone- wiped off the map by a disgruntled employee, a natural disaster, or more likely these days- a corporate scandal (imagine what would happen if Google was the next Enron. If you think that's impossible, look at the Google CFO's background.) Now think about how much that would hurt the web. We've made progress in some areas of the Internet (DNS- you have lots of choices for registrars, though GoDaddy has become the largest by far, and now represents a similar risk), but lost massively in others.
I have ONE choice in internet service provides in my town. I live 20 miles from Boston, but because of "Gentlemen's agreements" that are pervasive in the telco industry, I can't get DSL because Comcast is in our town. 10 years ago I could pick from a dozen dialup ISPs, national, regional, and local- same for ISDN. Now I have ONE choice, and I live in one of the more wealthy and technologically advanced states in the union, and I'm not permitted by my ToS to run a webserver, email server, "discussion board", or "Internet relay chat server". I believe I'm not even allowed to run a VPN server. My ToS clearly states that I am a "consumer" of information services. That's progress?
Not to mention your average notebook hard drive these days is fully capable of pushing 20+MB/sec for the linear read a "resume" requires, unless the hibernation file is fragmented. Even fairly expensive media like Sandisk Compact Flash "Extreme III" cards for digital cameras can't hit that, and one of those (1GB) costs about the same as a 100GB hard drive. Silly.
My Macbook by default hibernates, but I found a setting to flip that off so that it "sleeps" like it should (involve the 'defaults' command, I forget exactly.) Now it takes about 2 seconds to 'wake up'. Ironically enough, hibernation takes longer than it takes to boot (about 25-30 seconds) and the scale has probably been tipped even further in favor of "booting" with another GB of ram I just added; by my rough calculation it'd take well over a minute if most memory was in use at time of hybernation (maybe the OS clears out all disk cache before doing it- you'd hope so.)
Hibernation is for when your battery is pretty much dead and the laptop wakes up to hibernate before it looses the contents of RAM due to battery failure...and can people REALLY not wait the time it takes to boot or wake up from hibernation and copy the data back into RAM? Yeesh.
This seems like an attempt to save themselves in a market they're just not competitive in. From all accounts I've seen (and personal experience), Seagate's ATA-drive reliability is in the trashcan these days; the 7200.8 was a fiasco, and the 7200.9 doesn't seem much better. IBM sold off their drive business (which was a market leader in almost all segments) after the Deskstar/Deathstar fiasco, but Hitachi seems to be doing fabulously. I had a 7200.9 300GB drive that died within 12 hours of operation. It's been RMA'd, and the replacement will be sold on Craigslist or similar. In the meantime, a shiny new, cheaper, cooler-running, quieter Samsung Spinpoint is sitting in its place.
I think Seagate has seen the writing on the wall- hence the merger with Maxtor. I would imagine you'll see them merge Seagate/Maxtor technology in their ATA line and sell exclusively under Maxtor, and Seagate will go back to being a mostly SCSI brand, as their reputation there seems intact.
However, VMWare is the one shining light in my shop. It does exactly what they say it does and it does it flawlessly. Every feature is as you would expect and (ESX) host servers stay up for months at a time. Never have we had to reboot a host to solve a stability issue. It just freakin' works.
Then why does the article say that support is absolutely atrocious for 2.6 kernels? Quote from the article:
If you're using Linux and there is a dire need to use a 2.6 kernel in a VM [virtual machine], wait for ESX 3.0. VMware ESX Server has been plagued with time-keeping and performance issues that are reportedly resolved in the 3.0 version. I have personally configured and run 2.4 kernels inside of virtual machines that performed as expected for some large organizations only to see the same applications run degraded on a 2.6 kernel.
Not without on-site differential GPS corrections, no...not even on the military band; WAAS at theoretical best gives you about 6 feet. Far as I know the most accurate non-military system is John Deere's private differential system, and it doesn't give anywhere near the accuracy you are talking about.
PS, from Wikipedia. Each satellite repeatedly re-broadcasts the exact time according to its internal atomic clock along with a digital data packet. The data includes the orbital elements of the satellite's precise position, satellite status messages, and an almanac of the approximate position of every other active GPS satellite. The almanac lets GPS receivers use data from the strongest satellite signal to locate other satellites.
Receivers
GPS receivers calculate their current position (latitude, longitude, elevation), and the precise time, using the process of trilateration. This involves measuring the distance to at least four satellites by comparing the satellites' coded time signal (PRN Code) transmissions. The receiver calculates the orbit of each satellite based on information encoded in their radio signals, and measures the distance to each satellite, called a pseudorange, based on the time delay from when the satellite signals were sent until they were received.
*SNIP
One complication is that GPS receivers do not have atomic clocks, so the precise time is not known when the signals arrive. Fortunately, even the relatively simple clock within the receiver provides an accurate comparison of the timing of the signals from the different satellites. The receiver is able to determine exactly when the signals were received by adjusting its internal clock (and therefore the spheres' radii) so that the spheres intersect near one point.
So, sorry Dr. Dickhead Nitpicker EE, if I didn't get it EXACTLY right, but looks like I came pretty goddamn close.
I don't think you understand how GPS works. Simplifying- a GPS receiver looks at when signals with the same timestamp arrive, and deduces how far it is from each satellite from that. If a signal from Satellite A saying "hey, it's 12:01:05 right NOW arrives a second after a similar signal from Satellite B, then the receiever knows that it is 1 light-second further away from Satellite A than B (this is a gross exaggeration of the scale of time involved.) With 3-4 satellites, you get a position fix.
Modern receivers can track 12-20 satellites at once and get accuracy down to 10 feet or so. There are two things the receiver must do which are timing-related:
1)Figure out what time it -really- is, so it can set an internal chronometer, so it can know the exact distance it is from satellites, versus relative distances
2)Record as exactly as possible when each satellite's particular timestamp came in
Both require -staggering- accuracy that a PC, or your USRP board, are incapable of providing. Clock skew considered perfectly acceptable in a PC is considered monumentally inaccurate in a GPS receiver...and the timing resolution isn't anywhere near good enough either. You're talking about comparing timing in LIGHT FEET, and light takes 1/299,792,458th of a second to travel a meter. It's about one NANOSECOND a foot, so you need resolution exceeding 10nS.
You've got to do a lot of signal processing to ignore spurious signals, as GPS signals love to bounce off some things, and get absorbed readily by others. You've got to have an incredibly low noise, highly sensitive receiver, as GPS is readily absorbed by just about anything, and that includes trees.
The current state of the art is SiRF's SiRF-3 chipset; I've got a Garmin handheld with one, and I can get a 30 foot position lock inside my house, under treecover. I can get a 10 foot lock if I'm outside with enough satellites in view and a WAAS differential signal. I'd -really- like to see you try to beat that.
Not quite- in order to fit the swath of FM radio into that USB2 pipe, it isn't sampling it in any great detail. If you tried to decode one station, it'd most likely sound like a tin can, unless you sampled a narrower slice of the FM band. So don't get too excited. Claiming the motherboard or these devices are "universal" is extremely misleading. You buy modules that transmit or receive on different bands. They're usually pretty wide in frequency spectrum, but they also generally aren't anywhere near as good as dedicated receivers for those bands, and they're not "universal."
Claims of being able to receive GPS are also misleading- you'd be able to decode individual satellites and perhaps obtain a fix within a mile or so, but getting accuracy anywhere near what a $100 handheld GPS unit can do, would require incredible timing accuracy that board just doesn't have. Remember...GPS works by timing how far radio waves w/time signals take to travel...down to about 10 feet in some cases. Think hard about what kind of timing accuracy and precision that requires.
RICE_BABY: "LOLZ IN DA BUNKA WHERE U @?"
CHAIN_MAN: "AT DA DOOR OPEN UP LOL"
SHRUB: "B SERIYUS U 2"
BROWNIE: "YEAH U NEVER KNOW WHOS GONNA SEE YER MESSAGES"
WASH_POST: "YEAH LOL IN UR NETWORK READIN YER MESSAGES SEE YOU IN THE PAPERS"
RUMMY: "LOL SEE YOU IN GITMO ALL YOUR RIGHTS ARE BELONG TO ME"
WASH_POST: "OH SHI..."
...and postfix checks, blah blah. The reason these CAN'T be enabled, and I have tried on a volunteer site I help run- is because many major internet service providers don't have proper forward and reverse DNS set up for their mail clusters. A certain major cable company in Florida comes to mind; a list member spent 2 hours trying to explain to the tech support grunts that the problem was that a machine in their outgoing mail server cluster didn't have a reverse IP address. They kept trying to troubleshoot DNS on HIS computer, despite his pleas for them to just forward his report to the infrastructure guys- that they would understand. We kept running across these bozo internet service providers, and had to give up.
Aside from that...when I enabled just "HELO domain must match the domain of the hostname found by reverse lookup", spam volume dropped by over half. Enabling "MAIL FROM must match" cut it even further, since almost all spam claims to be from something else.
It's funny how many of these problems would be at least partially solved by proper DNS.
Postfix, for example, can be configured to be varyingly anal about how closely the reverse lookup matches HELO, the MAIL FROM domain, etc. SPF extends the concept.
Seconded- Apple system updates, for example, come in at just about maximum line speed, and the torrent of Dapper came in at a total data rate of about 750KB/sec, while uploading at about 65KB/sec..don't forget overhead of communicating with a whole boatload of peers (several thousand on the main torrent.) Increasingly I'm running across sites that have no trouble maxxing out speeds.
Besides, I didn't pay for the upper class of comcast service just to get another 2Mbit a second download; I paid for it to get the 3x increase in upload (768Kbit vs. "less than 384".)
That's because the FCC mandates SLAs on T/Frame/OC lines.
Or it's just a creative troll, hoping someone will spend hours or days trying to figure out meaning behind what's really just the numeric output of /dev/random or something.
I've honestly always though "number stations" were pretty much the same thing...someone having their jollies. Has anyone actually tried to get a fix on them? I thought HAMs loved doing "hunts"...why don't they do a "hunt" on some number stations some time?
HttpException (0x80004005): Server Too Busy]
System.Web.HttpRuntime.RejectRequestInternal(Http
Version Information: Microsoft
Version:1.1.4322.2300
Guess they should have reviewed it as a webserver, instead.
FWIW, my 15 inch MBP has none of the problems reported about the 15 inch model. It is quiet and runs relatively cool. Not quite as cool as my 17" G4 powerbook it replaced, but it is easily several magnitudes faster. It is MUCH cooler than my old G3 Lombard was.
What do you think they do now? Your average congrescritter spends most of his or her time campaigning, travelling to Iraq (big with voters, see "campaigning"), taking trips to speak or attend meetings (paid for by lobbyists), and so on. Governors like to do it too- the governor of MA, Mitt Romney, has practically been out of office more than he has been in, because he's so busy travelling around the world (literally!) because he wants to be "presidential."
Check out the voting record of most of these people...half the time they're never around and don't even bother to vote. I seem to recall one was even caught using another's access card (for the voting system) because the other one couldn't be bothered to leave their office. It's absolutely pathetic- they've completely forgotten what their job is. A representative's job is NOT TO GET RE-ELECTED. It is to REPRESENT.
Don't forget No One Lives Forever, where the object is mostly to sneak around, since you're a spy, or dispose of the baddies quietly. It's worth it to sneak around too- the guards in various places have conversations to alert you to their presence and such. The conversations are hilarious.
Two of them inside one of the "evil hideous" discuss how one's brother has gone into the business of kitchen remodelling, and the other asks for the brother's number as his wife has been nagging him to have something done about theirs.
Another trio of baddies earlier in the game wax philosophic about how "there just aren't any truly evil organizations anymore", and of course, at some point, there's a discussion involving how they don't get any respect. "Do this, shoot that. I tell you..."
It was great. In almost any other game, you just shoot the guards and bad guys. But in NOLF, you actually kinda feel for them. They're just regular Joes, wondering about which HMO plan to sign up for, renovating their house, not really liking their job, etc. Well, except that they have guns and they'll kill you if they see you.
I know there's a sequel out..I hope it's as good as the first one.
...and useless because Samba has a maximum filesize of just 2GB, whereas Appleshare 3.1 supports a maximum [volume and file] size of 8 TB.
Look. Just because MacOS X supports SMB, does not mean that SMB is an acceptable solution for file-serving to MacOS X clients.
Netatalk has some of its own crankyness (and if you run Debian/Ubuntu, you need to rebuild the debian package with SSL support or passwords are transmitted in the clear, thanks to the OpenSSL/GNU idiocy), but it doesn't have nearly the basic functionality problems Samba does for Macs.
Sidenote: looks like they "borrowed" the complete user interface from m0n0wall...and it looks like they MIGHT use netatalk...googling turned up some hints that netatalk might be built-in.
I don't recall that accident- but I do recall very vividly the huge mess around Air France Flight 296. The pilot was doing a low pass for an air show, gave the engines throttle, and the computer on the Airbus 320 decided "no". The plane crashed and killed three people.
There are photos showing people who never should have touched the black box (civilian aviation authorities, instead of the police), taking it away...and the black box that was taken away from the scene was intact, but the one returned (under court order 10 days later) was different in appearance, if I recall. Quite a bit of telemetry had been completely erased from the data tapes and remaining data was out of sync.
The whole problem originated because some engineer thought it would be a good idea to inject some code into the process of "pilot decides to apply throttle, engines respond." The pilot should ALWAYS be free to override systems, and you should have a really, really, really REALLY good reason for putting any logic into control systems. It almost never works without some sort of hitch; complexity breeds problems.
On almost any plane with an autopilot system, there is a BIG red button on the control yolk that, when pressed, immediately PHYSICALLY disconnects the autopilot from the control systems and sounds a loud beeper for a few seconds.
Furthermore, run-up procedures (at least in non-commercial, small planes I flew in as a passenger) have the pilot a)check that he can physically overpower the autopilot in all control directions (they have a clutch, basically, on the autopilot motors) and b)that the emergency disconnect works. The tests are repeated for rudder and alieron adjustments.
We also have a huge, peer-reviewed system for continuously training pilots in all aspects of flying; pilot's associations, company training and bulletins on safety, procedures, etc in most airlines, and word of mouth. We don't have that for engineers that program computers that handle critical-to-life-and-safety systems on planes...unless they're very experienced pilots themselves. Even then, do you really think Airbus flight control programmers sit down and hobnob with Boeing fligh control programmers? Hell no...
Not to mention that their dollar figures are somewhat misleading, as they didn't include the cost of the host PC...and AMD Opeteron 280 processors don't cost ANYWHERE NEAR $2,000. They also didn't show us how cheaper processors do.
You can buy a Tyan quad-CPU motherboard for about $1k, and the dual-core version of the 280 for $1k tops. So...that's $5-5.5K for a box with EIGHT processors that will do 6 million complex values in almost half the time as the $500 video card sitting in a workstation that most likely costs well over $1,500. So it's not really quite as simple as "OMG 4X PERFORMANCE, ONE QUARTER THE COST!!!"
Also, did you know that you can buy a Sempron motherboard, 1GB of ram, and sempron processor for about $150 these days? For the same cost as that one GPU, you can buy 3 complete Sempron systems and have change left over for your networking gear.
Nevermind that you need a decent host to feed the card data, twice the ram compared to what is on the card, and you can't put more than one card in a PC. So one "system" costs a lot more than just the $500 for the card.
I'm not aware of many rackmount servers that have AGP or PCI-E slots except the Apple XServe, so you're possibly looking at using minitower type machines or building rackmount boxes yourself, and we all know how well both of those work for clusters.
Most video cards also use a considerable amount of power...some several times what the various low-power processors use. There aren't a whole lot of SMP motherboards (especially for power-efficient processors), but is this really the most efficient (cost, power, space) solution? Especially considering that for every video card, you'll have a processor anyway?
You don't live in Boston, so you don't hear about what MIT is often in the news for: students getting really hammered, and occasionally falling out of dorm room windows and getting killed.
MIT has a huge problem with drug abuse- and that includes alcohol. Having lived in the same city as MIT for over a decade, I'm not really sure why everyone thinks MIT is the greatest technical school in the world...it's not even close. I've spoken to a lot of managers at high-tech companies that won't hire fresh MIT grads because a)they don't know anything actually useful and b)they think they know everything, so when they're doing something wrong, they don't listen to coworkers, team leaders, and managers.
My favorite example is the manager who told me about the MIT programmer he hired that wouldn't use constants...he's plug in the same number 50 times in his algorithm, instead of defining a properly named constant...and his variable names were hilariously bad. Basically, it was clear he never learned proper programming techniques. Despite the manager's insistence that he define constants, etc (ie follow company coding standards), the guy kept doing it his way.
So he was fired. Ever wonder why so many MIT grads work for other MIT grads? It's because they're un-employable by anyone else.
I hope you're joking....Tetris. Pazhitnov's Wikipedia page. Interesting that he's still "in the scene" with one of his games included on some of the Xbox 360's...
Only problem is that I keep hearing from friends who have really locked down mail servers but keep getting blocked by spamcop...yet spamcop claims the friend's mail server sent a message to one of their secret mailboxes.
Don't blame SpamCop for the situation that results in your IP address being reported to them.
I'm sorry, but that's pass-the-buck bullshit. If spamcop is technically incompetent, of course they should be blamed when they improperly list someone.