Most of the time, when people say "Slashdot isn't the same as it was 15 years ago!", I reply with "You're not the same as you were 15 years ago!". Things change, and they can't always be like they were in the beginning. But this is one of those things that I miss too - having people who actually run the site comment on what's going on. And, although he probably won't see this reply due to nesting, I totally admire whipslash for diving into these threads like he/she has.
Man, I forgot that I was writing that on Slashdot and that somebody would take the time to go dig up the answer. I'm actually well enough versed in relativistic physics and astronomy to know that my dumb question was wildly oversimplified (I stopped at the Masters level instead of going on for a PhD), but thanks for posting the response anyway - it has more details in it than I had taken the time to read before.
If the universe is 14 billion years old and 46 billion light years in radius, that means it has expanded at an average of about 3.29 light years per year since the big bang. But... shouldn't it be limited to expanding at a rate of one light year per year?
There's a pretty major intersection in the town I live in that was wildly reworked in around 2005 or 2006, and Apple's maps still don't know about the change. Every single other mapping site I've looked at has it right. Take a look at the wonky intersection here:
Absolutely right. These suggestions are laughable, and that second one gives people a dangerous false sense of security. Mirroring is not backup - it will help save you from a catastrophic failure that is not able to mirror itself, but it won't safe you from the more common problem of deleting an important file the day before you need it.
Back at the time, I actually purposely avoided signing up because it was right at the time that web accounts were ballooning and I didn't want to add to my set of disjointed accounts. Now I'm kind of sad that my uid is so high.
... it's also not that hard to write your own. There are plenty of perl/python/whatever rss libraries out there to do all of the hard work, and then you just need to spend some time fiddling with CSS to make it look pretty. Here's what I created about 10 years ago, before all of these other things existed:
The lab was closed today and will be again tomorrow, and the townsite started voluntary evacuations last night. It turned into a mandatory evacuation this afternoon.
Luckily, I have some friends to stay with in Santa Fe.
There are oodles of configuration management tools out there that do at least most of what you want. My personal recommendation is Bcfg: http://www.bcfg2.org/ . It doesn't quite have the entire web interface (yet), but it is fantastic for keeping everything up to date and clean and telling you when you have outliers. I currently use it for the 350 or so support machines for the 5th fastest computer in the world, and I know _much_ larger installations are using too.
Ha! Take that one step further and you've got the winning combination: on my rather large system, I use an SVN-managed Bcfg2 repository to hold all of my config files. That way I've got disaster recovery and rollback in the version control system and good change control and monitoring with the configuration management system. It makes sleeping at night that much easier.
Have you considered using a configuration management tool such as Bcfg2 or cfengine to make sure your own config files are restored after package updates are made? You can never really trust those package maintainers...
One of the goals of Bcfg2 (a configuration management system developed at Argonne National Laboratory) is to help provide this kind of information for both the admin and the manager. Its reports system gives a clear look at how well managed a machine is both now and in the past, making it simple to define how up-to-date machines are staying and show how they have changed over the last week/month/quarter/whatever. This is touched on in a couple of the publications that go along with it.
(Yes, I am indeed in cahoots with the project, but I'm only gushing about it here because I actually think it works quite well.)
The obvious problem with this little calculation is that it is CRT-biased. The energystar page that all of the calculations came from doesn't mention what type of monitor it is talking about, but I'm pretty sure they're not talking about LCDs: an LCD's light is always on at the same brightness, and you have to use power to shut off the pixel in order to create black. So an LCD monitor would use just a tiny bit more power to display a black page than a white page. Now, go count how many CRTs your local pile of computers has, and then count it again in a year. Think it will all work?
Slashdot Mirror
Man, you are new around here! :)
What if I want to attach a file to a piece of email?
Most of the time, when people say "Slashdot isn't the same as it was 15 years ago!", I reply with "You're not the same as you were 15 years ago!". Things change, and they can't always be like they were in the beginning. But this is one of those things that I miss too - having people who actually run the site comment on what's going on. And, although he probably won't see this reply due to nesting, I totally admire whipslash for diving into these threads like he/she has.
Sounds a bit wobbly. Maybe silicon instead?
Man, I forgot that I was writing that on Slashdot and that somebody would take the time to go dig up the answer. I'm actually well enough versed in relativistic physics and astronomy to know that my dumb question was wildly oversimplified (I stopped at the Masters level instead of going on for a PhD), but thanks for posting the response anyway - it has more details in it than I had taken the time to read before.
If the universe is 14 billion years old and 46 billion light years in radius, that means it has expanded at an average of about 3.29 light years per year since the big bang. But... shouldn't it be limited to expanding at a rate of one light year per year?
Computer science _is_ the math. If you ignore the math, you're ignoring the entire field.
There's a pretty major intersection in the town I live in that was wildly reworked in around 2005 or 2006, and Apple's maps still don't know about the change. Every single other mapping site I've looked at has it right. Take a look at the wonky intersection here:
https://maps.google.com/?ll=35...
and compare it to the same view in Apple's maps. It's like going back in time 8 years!
Wait a minute... what does the base unit "mate" mean then?
I read this summary just so I could see how many times the obscure acronym was used without definition. It met my expectations!
Absolutely right. These suggestions are laughable, and that second one gives people a dangerous false sense of security. Mirroring is not backup - it will help save you from a catastrophic failure that is not able to mirror itself, but it won't safe you from the more common problem of deleting an important file the day before you need it.
I wish I knew 15 years ago that it would be cool to have a really low slashdot UID, otherwise I wouldn't have waited so long to sign up for one.
Four digits to the rescue!
Jon gave a talk at LISA a couple of years ago about this same project:
https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa11/project-cau%C3%A3
[Citation needed]
Back at the time, I actually purposely avoided signing up because it was right at the time that web accounts were ballooning and I didn't want to add to my set of disjointed accounts. Now I'm kind of sad that my uid is so high.
... and do you find Gnome3 frustrating to use? This is the data point we've all been waiting for!
... it's also not that hard to write your own. There are plenty of perl/python/whatever rss libraries out there to do all of the hard work, and then you just need to spend some time fiddling with CSS to make it look pretty. Here's what I created about 10 years ago, before all of these other things existed:
http://www.wirelesscouch.net/cgi-bin/headlines/headlines.pl
(Well, maybe those other things existed. I certainly didn't know about them though.)
The lab was closed today and will be again tomorrow, and the townsite started voluntary evacuations last night. It turned into a mandatory evacuation this afternoon.
Luckily, I have some friends to stay with in Santa Fe.
There are oodles of configuration management tools out there that do at least most of what you want. My personal recommendation is Bcfg: http://www.bcfg2.org/ . It doesn't quite have the entire web interface (yet), but it is fantastic for keeping everything up to date and clean and telling you when you have outliers. I currently use it for the 350 or so support machines for the 5th fastest computer in the world, and I know _much_ larger installations are using too.
Ha! Take that one step further and you've got the winning combination: on my rather large system, I use an SVN-managed Bcfg2 repository to hold all of my config files. That way I've got disaster recovery and rollback in the version control system and good change control and monitoring with the configuration management system. It makes sleeping at night that much easier.
Have you considered using a configuration management tool such as Bcfg2 or cfengine to make sure your own config files are restored after package updates are made? You can never really trust those package maintainers...
http://www.wirelesscouch.net/cgi-bin/headlines/headlines.pl
One of the goals of Bcfg2 (a configuration management system developed at Argonne National Laboratory) is to help provide this kind of information for both the admin and the manager. Its reports system gives a clear look at how well managed a machine is both now and in the past, making it simple to define how up-to-date machines are staying and show how they have changed over the last week/month/quarter/whatever. This is touched on in a couple of the publications that go along with it.
(Yes, I am indeed in cahoots with the project, but I'm only gushing about it here because I actually think it works quite well.)
The obvious problem with this little calculation is that it is CRT-biased. The energystar page that all of the calculations came from doesn't mention what type of monitor it is talking about, but I'm pretty sure they're not talking about LCDs: an LCD's light is always on at the same brightness, and you have to use power to shut off the pixel in order to create black. So an LCD monitor would use just a tiny bit more power to display a black page than a white page. Now, go count how many CRTs your local pile of computers has, and then count it again in a year. Think it will all work?