Obviously this poster must be from the San Fernando Valley? That's where the teenage girls end every sentence with a rising tone? I guess he can blame the California educational system for his ignorance of punctuation? Oh, well, I guess he'll make it easier for my PDA to pass a Turing test?
The submitter writes: "While officially the number of child molestations did not change significantly"...
Excuse me? Did the submitter actually read the story he or she submitted? From the story: "Over the past decade, with the surge in Internet use, there has been no spike in the overall number of cases of sexual abuse against children. (There has been, it appears, a significant decrease...)"
Don't make the mistake of thinking you're saving money by paying $29 for Turbotax--or worse, paying $0.37 for a stamp.
I pay about $1K to my tax guy every year (my wife and I have fairly complex taxes). It's money well spent. Turbotax can save me from reading 500 pages of IRS publications every year (as I used to do), but it can't tell me that my perfectly legal deduction in category A would draw unwanted attention but that it could also fit into category B, which never would have occurred to me.
On average, I'd say that my tax guy has paid for himself by finding 20% more in stuff I would have missed than what he charges me.
BTW, I do use Linux. In true Unix fashion, my financial records are flat ASCII files. A few awk scripts and Makefiles put them together into summaries categorized by type of expense. I print the summaries using enscript and hand the result to the tax guy, who has gotten used to my oddness. He highlights income in one color, deductions in another, takes the sheet, and sends me a return to sign a week later. It's as smooth as can be.
You're proud that your daughter is reading well at 4-1/2, and attribute this to computers. But perhaps she's just talented, and computers have nothing to do with it. Perhaps they even slowed her down. How do you know? You have no comparative data.
Two things I am sure of are that (a) my 6-year-old daughter is also far ahead of her age group in reading, without significnat exposure to computers (or TV) even now, and (b) I had no trouble learning computers starting at the age of about 15.
Look at the "educational" software with a jaundiced eye. A lot of it is drill and kill, or "answer these very easy questions and then spend ten minutes killing aliens". No thanks. I'll let her read a pile of books every week, develop motor skills with her crayons, and stay the hell away from those snap-into-place electronic jigsaw puzzles.
Not that I'm a nut case about it. (I'm a nut case about TV, but that's a different question.) She gets to use the games on a few Web sites, mostly as a reward for things like finishing homework. I'm starting to think about how to teach her to touch-type. But she won't have the logic skills to do programming until she's at least 9, and my jaundiced eye sees very little else, if anything, that's indispensable.
To kids, the computer is a candy store. The longer you postpone their first visit, the better their (mental) teeth will be.
The biggest problem with Unix is the swarm of young developers who write code without understanding its history, philosophy, and design principles. How many programs insist on processing only one file rather than all arguments, simply because the author started on windows? How many refuse to read standard input and write standard output? How many insist on filling your screen with verbose and irrelevant chatter...often sent to stdout instead of stderr?
I wish I had a nickel for every time I've had to struggle with a Unix program written from a Windows or Mac mindset.
Hackers always come up with complex solutions to simple problems. The trouble with complicated solutions is that they fail in complicated ways.
In my safe deposit box is a sealed envelope labeled "To be opened in the event of the death of ". (It might say "death or severe disability"; I no longer remember.) My attorney also has the same envelope.
Inside the envelope is a PGP passphrase and instructions on where to find an encrypted file that contains all my other passwords, plus suggestions on colleagues who might know enough to get at that file without cracking my login and who will know how to use PGP. I keep that file updated for the simple reason that I can't possibly remember all the stupid Web logins I have to create to be able to buy stuff.
It's obvious that this is going to be a huge hit with the masses, so big that in ten years it'll be considered an indispensable feature.
At that point, what's a parent to do when he wants to get his kid a cellphone, but he doesn't want her hauling around a TV everywhere she goes--including school?
I downloaded the movie and watched for quite a while, but gave up. Too many of the splash screens are just stupid. The worst offenses:
Uploading minor variants on the same thing. Look, if you can't figure out which one is your best work, why expect us to make the decision for you? One guy uploaded the same picture of a pier four or five times, tinted red, blue, green, yellow. It's a loser in all of the colors.
Uploading favorite photos. A picture of Patrick Stewart--with the wrong aspect ratio? What the heck does that have to do with The Gimp?
A splash screen should be more than just a pretty picture; it should serve as a representation of what the program is about. Too many people think "Oooh, I took such a pretty photo once, this is my chance to be famous." Sorry, no.
Some of the stuff uploaded is wonderful (I remember one that had an artist's palette...simple yet evocative).
I just wish someone had the time to reduce those 666+ submissions to a small subset chosen with the following rules:
No unmanipulated photographs.
If multiple minor variants on the same image are uploaded, only the first (or last--I don't really care how you break the tie) will be used.
The statistic you don't quote, because you don't know it, is how many legitimate e-mails you've missed because of C/R.
Many is the time I've gone out of my way to do somebody a favor: "Your Web site is down." "There is a bug in your open-source software; here's the patch." When they're running a C/R system, they are asking me to go out of my way twice, not once, to do them that favor. The hell with that.
I think I've replied to a C/R bot once in my life, in a situation where it was actually in my own interest to get the e-mail through. Otherwise, my favor just goes in the bucket where you dumped it.
Schwarzenegger was elected largely because the people were angry about the vehicle tax. His first act in office was to roll the tax back to pre-Davis levels (despite the fact that the state was in the red).
Now, a year later, he's busily raising...VEHICLE TAXES!
Actually, the judge explicitly said that Diebold had no usable copyright on their internal e-mails, because they had no commercial value.
This is the most overlooked part of the decision, yet it is a huge advance in copyright law. Here we have a judge saying that copyrights are only meaningful if you can reasonably expect to get money out of the material. In other words, this post is automatically copyrighted (a stupid idea enshrined in the 1976 copyright law), but I can't sue you for copying it because I'm never going to get any money out of it anyway.
Women are asking him where they can meet nerds? And he suggests Usenix? Oh. My. God.
It's truly awe-inspiring to think of the Usenix crowd being descended upon by a bunch of groupies. "Hi," (spoken in a breathy voice), "I'm Bambi. Do you really know how to boot Linux?"
"Not only that, baby, I even contributed a patch once!"
OK, that's it. I'm sending in next year's registration RIGHT NOW.
I also like Asprey's "War in the Shadows", though it's a long slog (two volumes). He makes it clear that the only way to win against guerillas is to make sure the common people support you, not the enemy -- and that, of course, means you'd better be willing to treat the people well.
I also concur with the other posters who recommended Liddell Hart. I'm unsurprised that the Army ignores him; his theory of the indirect approach is a huge mismatch for their love of fancy weaponry.
The number-one characteristic of a good resume is the year of publication. Release your resume in 1987, you'll definitely get a job. Same for 1998. From personal experience, I can say that 1975 was a poor choice, and of course you already know that the Bush II era is really bad. 2006 will probably be good.
Seriously, I think the most important advice I can give you is that you shouldn't let the failures get you down. I know how discouraging it is, but realize that your current difficulties aren't a reflection on your personal worth as much as on the economy.
If you can stick it out, things will get better.
The Sony 900 is nice; it has some pretty good flexibility. Programming it was a pain, but that's a one-time thing. But my wife isn't very fond of it , because she has to remember complicated modal sequences (press AMP, then press zero to choose the DVD input, then press DVD, then press play). The macros help, because I can put the common sequences in macro (hold down DVD for two seconds to turn everything on and get ready to put in a disc). But I'd really rather have one with the modality built into a physically movable switch or something.
The other problem with all of these is that the labels on the buttons rarely match what I've programmed. No eject button, so PIP ejects the VCR. No subtitle button, so SLEEP turns on DVD subtitles. Etc., etc. That MX-500 is starting to sound pretty good...
I guess if I can't use my laptop to read a scientific paper while sitting in the passenger seat, I shouldn't be able to read a book, either. Especially if it has pictures in it.
I don't think many people object to bans on drivers using laptops. But writing the law so that the passenger is also banned, that's just stupid.
I switched to Paymybills/Paytrust (E*Trade just divested them) several years ago, after an incident where I needed to produce a 6-month-old credit-card statement and couldn't. They archive everything for a year. At the end of the year, they charge me something like $20 to get a CD with images of all my bills. If I need a copy, I can print it out. So far, nobody has whined about forgery possibilities (with modern computer tools, I could forge any paper bill just as well anyway).
I don't want to say that Paytrust is perfect. Their standard response to my complaints about a bad UI was "it works like X". Really? Gee, I hadn't noticed. They have a nice all-electronic method of bill delivery, but using it would require me to establish individual passworded accounts with each biller. Not my idea of convenience.
There are also occasional troubles because my billing address is in South Dakota. I bought some tickets via Ticketmaster, and off my tickets went to Sioux Falls. Not helpful for getting into the theater.:-) But Paytrust just forwarded them to me, and I had the time to wait, so all was well.
All in all, it's been a great solution. I don't have to type complicated codes or write checks. Most of the work is remembering to occasionally copy the payment amounts into my checkbook so I can balance it.
My cousin happens to be at McMurdo right now. Here's what she said about the guy:
Since the subject is unexpected visits, I'll tell you what I know about
the Australian guy who tried to fly across the south pole to Argentina.
He got low on fuel and landed at McMurdo where he was most unwelcome and
apparently very unprepared. They've been feeding him and letting him
sleep in a fuel shack while they figure out what to do with him. I'm
going to try to get out and talk to him today, because I think he's
being sent back on a USAP flight tomorrow.
At the pole, I saw three guys who were skiing downwind to the coast with
kites and touring skis. They weren't particularly welcome there either.
I guess the US doesn't want to encourage people to do silly things in
Antarctica because they've had to pick up more than a few parts in the
past. Like the four skydivers who slammed into the snow near the south
pole several years ago.
Then again, no one owns Antarctica so why shouldn't people do what they
want.
So revelation of first & last names, plus an account number, stored unencrypted, is a trigger, huh? What's an "account number"? Does the law define it? If I cat/etc/passwd, does the sysadmin have to notify everybody?
Well, since I'm the person who gave the talk referenced in the original post, I suppose I ought to clear up a few misconceptions for folks. I'm not going to address every objection that's been raised, because most of them have been well addressed in our papers. I'll just highlight the most common misunderstandings.
First, the full title of the talk was "The Disk is Dead! Long Live the Disk!" We make no claim that disk manufacturers are going to go out of business tomorrow; history suggests that the technology will survive for at least a decade, and probably more than two. Talk titles are intended to generate attendance, not to summarize important research results in 8 words.
Second, the most common objection to the work boils down to "just use the cache". This point has been raised repeatedly on Slashdot over the past few years. However, if you read our papers or attend one of my colloquium talks (UCSC, May 22nd -- plug), you'll learn that LRU caching is inferior for a number of reasons. We were surprised by that result, but it's true. Putting a fake disk behind an IDE or SCSI interface is even worse, since that cripples bandwidth and flexibility.
Third, for people worried about battery failures, the only question of interest is the MTBF of the system as a whole. All systems fail, which is why we keep backups and double-check them. If your disk failed every 3 days, you couldn't get work done, but there was a time when we dealt with a failure every few months. Conquest's MTBF hasn't yet been analyzed rigorously, but I believe it to be more than 10,000 hours, which is good enough to make it usable.
Finally, I have chosen not to put my talk slides on the Web, at least not for the moment. But you're welcome to mail me with questions: geoff@cs.hmc.edu. It might take me a few days to answer, so be patient.
You can't wait indefinitely, of course, for two reasons: first, there's a limit to the amount of cache, and second, you want to sync stuff to disk for reliability. But I would have been more accurate to say that the leftover writes cause more head motion than absolutely necessary.
Contrary to what other posters have said, the original questioner was not asking about disk scheduling algorithms such as SCAN (elevator) or C-SCAN. Rather, the system he was recalling was the Log-Structured Filesystem (LFS) from Berkeley. The original work was done in the early 90's. The basic ideas were as follows:
Most disk activity is reads.
If you have a lot of RAM, caches do a good job of taking care of the reads.
The leftover writes drive the head crazy.
It is therefore a Good Idea to do the writes whereever the head happens to be, and let the disk be scrambled.
The LFS operated by creating a "log" in which all blocks were written sequentially. Reads required random seeks, but the cache was supposed to take care of that. Eventually the log filled, after which a cleaner (which ran in background) would recover the blocks discarded by deletes, and those blocks would be reused.
The original work was done by Mendel Rosenblum, one of the founders of VMware and the most recent (2002) winner of the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser award.
The problem, as it turned out, was the cleaner.
It put too much load on the disk.
The original theory was that the cleaner would run overnight, but on a continuously loaded system there was never idle time to use to run it.
In 20/20 hindsight, the idea was clearly flawed. If you look at my list above, you'll see that you are getting rid of scrambled writes by giving up sequential reads. Since reads are cached, you're (on average) giving up 1 approximately sequential read to get 1 sequential write. But that's wrong because occasionally the cache misses, so instead you give uyp 1.1 (or 1.001) sequential reads to earn 1 sequential write. Worse, you also have to pay overhead to the cleaner.
I can argue strongly that the only reason LFS ever saw the light of day was that the benchmarks used to evaluate it wound up highlighting its strengths and hiding its weaknesses. I don't think that was intentional, but it's what happened.
The most recent LFS work was by Drew Roselli, in the late 90's. She identified a lot of the causes of slowdowns in the original system, and found ways to mitigate them. Even so, though, the system has never lived up to its promise.
BTW, don't confuse LFS with journaling filesystems such as ReiserFS, XFS, and ext3. LFS had some journaling aspects, but its focus was performance rather than crash-proofing. One can argue that LFS influenced journaling filesystems, but it's not the same.
I forget which rent-a-car company tried taking fingerprints of their customers. I think the program survived a month before they dropped it because of complaints.
Of course, Texans aren't exactly noted for protecting their own civil rights, so it might fly in Dallas.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously this poster must be from the San Fernando Valley? That's where the teenage girls end every sentence with a rising tone? I guess he can blame the California educational system for his ignorance of punctuation? Oh, well, I guess he'll make it easier for my PDA to pass a Turing test?
Excuse me? Did the submitter actually read the story he or she submitted? From the story: "Over the past decade, with the surge in Internet use, there has been no spike in the overall number of cases of sexual abuse against children. (There has been, it appears, a significant decrease...)"
I pay about $1K to my tax guy every year (my wife and I have fairly complex taxes). It's money well spent. Turbotax can save me from reading 500 pages of IRS publications every year (as I used to do), but it can't tell me that my perfectly legal deduction in category A would draw unwanted attention but that it could also fit into category B, which never would have occurred to me. On average, I'd say that my tax guy has paid for himself by finding 20% more in stuff I would have missed than what he charges me.
BTW, I do use Linux. In true Unix fashion, my financial records are flat ASCII files. A few awk scripts and Makefiles put them together into summaries categorized by type of expense. I print the summaries using enscript and hand the result to the tax guy, who has gotten used to my oddness. He highlights income in one color, deductions in another, takes the sheet, and sends me a return to sign a week later. It's as smooth as can be.
Two things I am sure of are that (a) my 6-year-old daughter is also far ahead of her age group in reading, without significnat exposure to computers (or TV) even now, and (b) I had no trouble learning computers starting at the age of about 15.
Look at the "educational" software with a jaundiced eye. A lot of it is drill and kill, or "answer these very easy questions and then spend ten minutes killing aliens". No thanks. I'll let her read a pile of books every week, develop motor skills with her crayons, and stay the hell away from those snap-into-place electronic jigsaw puzzles.
Not that I'm a nut case about it. (I'm a nut case about TV, but that's a different question.) She gets to use the games on a few Web sites, mostly as a reward for things like finishing homework. I'm starting to think about how to teach her to touch-type. But she won't have the logic skills to do programming until she's at least 9, and my jaundiced eye sees very little else, if anything, that's indispensable.
To kids, the computer is a candy store. The longer you postpone their first visit, the better their (mental) teeth will be.
I wish I had a nickel for every time I've had to struggle with a Unix program written from a Windows or Mac mindset.
In my safe deposit box is a sealed envelope labeled "To be opened in the event of the death of ". (It might say "death or severe disability"; I no longer remember.) My attorney also has the same envelope.
Inside the envelope is a PGP passphrase and instructions on where to find an encrypted file that contains all my other passwords, plus suggestions on colleagues who might know enough to get at that file without cracking my login and who will know how to use PGP. I keep that file updated for the simple reason that I can't possibly remember all the stupid Web logins I have to create to be able to buy stuff.
End of problem.
At that point, what's a parent to do when he wants to get his kid a cellphone, but he doesn't want her hauling around a TV everywhere she goes--including school?
A splash screen should be more than just a pretty picture; it should serve as a representation of what the program is about. Too many people think "Oooh, I took such a pretty photo once, this is my chance to be famous." Sorry, no.
Some of the stuff uploaded is wonderful (I remember one that had an artist's palette...simple yet evocative). I just wish someone had the time to reduce those 666+ submissions to a small subset chosen with the following rules:
- No unmanipulated photographs.
- If multiple minor variants on the same image are uploaded, only the first (or last--I don't really care how you break the tie) will be used.
That would be a huge public service.Many is the time I've gone out of my way to do somebody a favor: "Your Web site is down." "There is a bug in your open-source software; here's the patch." When they're running a C/R system, they are asking me to go out of my way twice, not once, to do them that favor. The hell with that.
I think I've replied to a C/R bot once in my life, in a situation where it was actually in my own interest to get the e-mail through. Otherwise, my favor just goes in the bucket where you dumped it.
Schwarzenegger was elected largely because the people were angry about the vehicle tax. His first act in office was to roll the tax back to pre-Davis levels (despite the fact that the state was in the red).
Now, a year later, he's busily raising...VEHICLE TAXES!
You gotta admire his panache.
This is the most overlooked part of the decision, yet it is a huge advance in copyright law. Here we have a judge saying that copyrights are only meaningful if you can reasonably expect to get money out of the material. In other words, this post is automatically copyrighted (a stupid idea enshrined in the 1976 copyright law), but I can't sue you for copying it because I'm never going to get any money out of it anyway.
This is a major step forward for freedom.
It's truly awe-inspiring to think of the Usenix crowd being descended upon by a bunch of groupies. "Hi," (spoken in a breathy voice), "I'm Bambi. Do you really know how to boot Linux?" "Not only that, baby, I even contributed a patch once!"
OK, that's it. I'm sending in next year's registration RIGHT NOW.
I also concur with the other posters who recommended Liddell Hart. I'm unsurprised that the Army ignores him; his theory of the indirect approach is a huge mismatch for their love of fancy weaponry.
The number-one characteristic of a good resume is the year of publication. Release your resume in 1987, you'll definitely get a job. Same for 1998. From personal experience, I can say that 1975 was a poor choice, and of course you already know that the Bush II era is really bad. 2006 will probably be good.
Seriously, I think the most important advice I can give you is that you shouldn't let the failures get you down. I know how discouraging it is, but realize that your current difficulties aren't a reflection on your personal worth as much as on the economy. If you can stick it out, things will get better.
Wait, Rush Limbaugh is deaf? And here I thought he was dumb...
The other problem with all of these is that the labels on the buttons rarely match what I've programmed. No eject button, so PIP ejects the VCR. No subtitle button, so SLEEP turns on DVD subtitles. Etc., etc. That MX-500 is starting to sound pretty good...
I don't think many people object to bans on drivers using laptops. But writing the law so that the passenger is also banned, that's just stupid.
I don't want to say that Paytrust is perfect. Their standard response to my complaints about a bad UI was "it works like X". Really? Gee, I hadn't noticed. They have a nice all-electronic method of bill delivery, but using it would require me to establish individual passworded accounts with each biller. Not my idea of convenience.
There are also occasional troubles because my billing address is in South Dakota. I bought some tickets via Ticketmaster, and off my tickets went to Sioux Falls. Not helpful for getting into the theater. :-) But Paytrust just forwarded them to me, and I had the time to wait, so all was well.
All in all, it's been a great solution. I don't have to type complicated codes or write checks. Most of the work is remembering to occasionally copy the payment amounts into my checkbook so I can balance it.
Damn.
First, the full title of the talk was "The Disk is Dead! Long Live the Disk!" We make no claim that disk manufacturers are going to go out of business tomorrow; history suggests that the technology will survive for at least a decade, and probably more than two. Talk titles are intended to generate attendance, not to summarize important research results in 8 words.
Second, the most common objection to the work boils down to "just use the cache". This point has been raised repeatedly on Slashdot over the past few years. However, if you read our papers or attend one of my colloquium talks (UCSC, May 22nd -- plug), you'll learn that LRU caching is inferior for a number of reasons. We were surprised by that result, but it's true. Putting a fake disk behind an IDE or SCSI interface is even worse, since that cripples bandwidth and flexibility.
Third, for people worried about battery failures, the only question of interest is the MTBF of the system as a whole. All systems fail, which is why we keep backups and double-check them. If your disk failed every 3 days, you couldn't get work done, but there was a time when we dealt with a failure every few months. Conquest's MTBF hasn't yet been analyzed rigorously, but I believe it to be more than 10,000 hours, which is good enough to make it usable.
Finally, I have chosen not to put my talk slides on the Web, at least not for the moment. But you're welcome to mail me with questions: geoff@cs.hmc.edu. It might take me a few days to answer, so be patient.
You can't wait indefinitely, of course, for two reasons: first, there's a limit to the amount of cache, and second, you want to sync stuff to disk for reliability. But I would have been more accurate to say that the leftover writes cause more head motion than absolutely necessary.
- Most disk activity is reads.
- If you have a lot of RAM, caches do a good job of taking care of the reads.
- The leftover writes drive the head crazy.
- It is therefore a Good Idea to do the writes whereever the head happens to be, and let the disk be scrambled.
The LFS operated by creating a "log" in which all blocks were written sequentially. Reads required random seeks, but the cache was supposed to take care of that. Eventually the log filled, after which a cleaner (which ran in background) would recover the blocks discarded by deletes, and those blocks would be reused.The original work was done by Mendel Rosenblum, one of the founders of VMware and the most recent (2002) winner of the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser award.
The problem, as it turned out, was the cleaner. It put too much load on the disk. The original theory was that the cleaner would run overnight, but on a continuously loaded system there was never idle time to use to run it.
In 20/20 hindsight, the idea was clearly flawed. If you look at my list above, you'll see that you are getting rid of scrambled writes by giving up sequential reads. Since reads are cached, you're (on average) giving up 1 approximately sequential read to get 1 sequential write. But that's wrong because occasionally the cache misses, so instead you give uyp 1.1 (or 1.001) sequential reads to earn 1 sequential write. Worse, you also have to pay overhead to the cleaner.
I can argue strongly that the only reason LFS ever saw the light of day was that the benchmarks used to evaluate it wound up highlighting its strengths and hiding its weaknesses. I don't think that was intentional, but it's what happened.
The most recent LFS work was by Drew Roselli, in the late 90's. She identified a lot of the causes of slowdowns in the original system, and found ways to mitigate them. Even so, though, the system has never lived up to its promise.
BTW, don't confuse LFS with journaling filesystems such as ReiserFS, XFS, and ext3. LFS had some journaling aspects, but its focus was performance rather than crash-proofing. One can argue that LFS influenced journaling filesystems, but it's not the same.
Hmmm, now I know why Dustin wasn't in class very much this fall!
Of course, Texans aren't exactly noted for protecting their own civil rights, so it might fly in Dallas.