Re:Your system must have something mine doesn't.
on
Linux 3.0
·
· Score: 2
Windows "finds" it again and again.
Trust me. I've looked. There are a lot of BIOSes which "show" a floppy drive + controller to the OS, despite one not being there, and other settings being set as such. Because Win9x would crash hard if there was no floppy controller + drive in many common configurations.
Perhaps we should name it after something simple, yet powerful...
Perhaps a Norse god, or legendary Scandinavian warrior?
Your system must have something mine doesn't.
on
Linux 3.0
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Wintendo has no floppy device, and I have disabled the floppy controller in the BIOS. Accidently clicking it in explorer makes the A750 into a paperweight for a few minutes, as I have to deal with Windows trying to work with what isn't there. It's probably partially the BIOS's fault, but the entire thing is a cluster fuck that should've been fixed back in the days of Win95.
Already has this feature, has had it for years.
on
Linux 3.0
·
· Score: 2
"MessageBackColor=8 To specify the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) background (screen) color. Default is blue (1). See "BLUE (OR ANY OTHER COLOR) SCREEN OF DEATH", also in TIPS95.TXT [part of W95-11D.ZIP], or in MYTIPS31.TXT [part of W31-11D.ZIP], for complete details.
MessageTextColor=C To specify the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) foreground (text) color. Default is bright white (F). See "BLUE (OR ANY OTHER COLOR) SCREEN OF DEATH", also in TIPS95.TXT [part of W95-11D.ZIP], or in MYTIPS31.TXT [part of W31-11D.ZIP], for complete details."
Oh well, nice attempt;-)
DOS didn't have automount.
on
Linux 3.0
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
DOS had stateless device access. Until you tried to look at a device, DOS would not touch the device (floppy drive, hd, or CDROM drive). But when you did change to the device, it would try and read in its base directory and bootsector.
Windows emulates its behaviour towards floppy disk drives, as you will find out very painfully if you click on the A: on a computer without a floppy drive (which, for me, is all of them), or without a disk in the drive.
Automount only works on hardware that gives feedback on when media is inserted (such as a CDROM drive). To prevent Badness (TM) in the blocklayer, the automount has traditionally been eschewed in favour of explicit mount. Why? Try removing a CD that's being read from in Win9x, and watch the blue-screen "Please insert CD labelled..." as the kernel catches a block layer exception. This can be worked around by adding drive locks every time the drive is accessed, but it's generally considered to be a hairy problem best solved by having a smarter user.
Of course, many distributions include the (separate) automount patch anyways, and people who want this behaviour won't be rolling their own kernels any time soon.
MS to Australia: This is the Xbox, the most powerful gaming console. But you can't rent games for it, you can't buy games for it. Heck, you can't even buy the console itself in your country. You're lucky we show you this amazingy thing at all! Just remember, you can't play it!
For those of us who like having a motherboard we can place into a system and not have to worry about parts failing on it, the wonderfully solid-state nature of passive cooling is impossible to beat. If I want more performance, I'll either pay more or wait a little while longer, thanks. I want stability and a minimization of moving parts in my PC, because moving parts = failing parts. Failing parts are expensive!
How many active-cooling north bridge motherboards have you owned? I owned one. Its north bridge fan failed after only 3 months of constant use. Compared to every other motherboard I own, none of which require a fan (most don't even require a heatsink, and they power 1Ghz systems!), it was a terrible mistake purchase. I've since replaced it with a motherboard bought specifically because its north brigde used passive cooling. It's given no problems in the year+ of service it's given.
An aside: You're going to be old and infirm someday. Don't believe the lies that you'll actually be able to live off of your government pension (since it started as a senior-vote-buying measure, and will end when it runs out of money or leads to huge defecits once the boomers all retire), because you will be screwed. The first thing you should do is go and buy this book, then read it. Follow its advice.
Once you have a secure financial base, go ahead and explore the world, get married, etc. Do whatever your heart desires, but do not get started without some money saved away for your retirement, or you will be screwed when you're older.
Back to the question at hand: If you really speak a variety of languages, see what it takes to get a work visa there. Often it's a lot of work, but it can be really fun to live somewhere for a year and do whatever it is you're skilled at doing (good non-tech ones are teaching english, cooking, bartending, etc). You can't just go to a country and work there legally unless you have a work visa, so be sure to get that squared away first.
Another thing to do would be to save up money, and backpack across Europe (or somewhere else that's population dense). It's fairly easy to do, there are plenty of youth hostels, and transportation between locales is cheap if you hitch-it. Heck, if you're feeling daring, you could even try to do it while carting along a small appliance.
Rich with mythology, or rich with widely-believed lies?
Don't shave, your hair will grow faster!
I'm aware of Usa (pronouced OO-sah). If you read their pages, you'll see they even include references at the end of their pages. Their credibility is firmly established in my mind, yours is not.
Snopes is the calm voice of reason that people seem to ignore, in HTML form. People who are way too gullible for their own good will believe practically anything told to them by "trusted friends" (who, in turn heard it from "another friend"), even if it contradicts logic, facts, and everything else. They sum it all up in an easy-to-read format.
As for his/her post not being a response, I'd say you're wrong. It was a response to the fact that this person was repeating a lie like it was a fact. Stopping the spread of lies, and general enlightenment, is something that everyone in society should try to do. By ending stupidmemes like the girl who masturbated with a lobster dieing with baby-lobsters in a sensitive place, you make the society a better place to be.
It's been a while since I worked so directly with the processor that I'd know that:) Another bonus of 64-bit is that a 100Mhz 64-bit bus will do the memory related work for those operands as quickly as a 200Mhz 32-bit bus.
I don't see how you, on a desktop, could reach the limit of 2^64.
2^64 is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
It is 4,294,967,296 times bigger than 2^32 (4,294,967,296).
That's 2 , places past where I know the highest decimal prefix number (trillion). It's 18.5 exabytes, where an exabyte is 1024 petabytes (each of with is 1024 terabytes, each of which is 1024 gigabytes).
The IE for Macintosh is actually supperior due to its better handling of standards tests pages. IE for Solaris is officially deprecated, and has become abandonware.
Once you move beyond a 4.5billion, into the realm of 18.5 (two orders of magnitude past trillion), you can address anything for the forseable future (since you can count each year until the heatdeath of the universe this way, for example).
For vector operations, 64bit words make for some fast math operations, since you can pack more 32-bit integer components into each bus transfer.
For floating point, it means you have greater precision in hardware (allowing things like real physics and shapes to be modelled without noticable issues caused by subtle number creep). Since most systems use IEE-784 (64bit double precision floating point), it means a speedup to that software since you're not working with it as 2 32-bit operations.
In terms of storage space, it means you can address more than 2,199,023,255,552 bytes (~2 terabytes) of disk space (assuming a 512-byte sector). This is important for people with big RAID arrays today, and people with ludicrously big Maxtor drives 3-4 years from now.
For RAM, it means you don't have to worry about your server topping out at 4 gigabytes of RAM. It also means that your VM space has no effective limitation for the forseable future (very useful for people working on large projects, trying memory-intensive algorithmic approachs to traditionally NP-hard problems, or distributed computing problems).
I'm sure I missed a lot of the benefits even with this list. As you can see, 64-bit is not just a number game. It is 32 orders of magnitude larger than 2^32, meaning our grandchildren will probably still be using 64bit machines with no limitions being apparent (unlike 16-bit to 32-bit, which only moved from 65k to 4.5 billion in terms of addressable amounts of something).
POWER OUTAGE! You have no control over them. Even with the 1500VA UPS I use, if the power is out long enuogh, my systems will suddenly find the floor dropped out from below them into the void of not-running-land. I haven't setup auto-shutdown based on UPS feedback, either, so it would be a crash-like situation.
I don't want to recover from a 4-hour power outage (and comensurate loss of service) with a 3-hour fsck, nor do I have the money to buy a generator and redo the electricity setup for the server room for the megalong power outage problem.
Plus, for my RAID5 array, the journalling does batch up writes (allowing the RAID card to keep more spindles active).
Sacrificing stability, better consistency in the worst-case scenario, and a general faster startup time in case of problems for a slighly faster best-case scenario (which evaporates in most common server configs, since the VFS cache layer does most of the work anyways on my gig-ram fileservers, webservers, and so on), is not a win. The choice between speed and quality is no choice at all.
But you have to question it. While it may seem cool to do things like factor polynomials with one instruction, or do TCP packet header filling, how useful is this?
Because you need much more die space for decoding of instructions, it becomes harder to ramp CISC up to higher clock speeds. That's why RISC was introduced.
Now, unless you've been asleep for 12 years, you know that modern x86 CPUs are a combination: CISC instruction set (and benefits thereof) with a fast-path decoder for most commonly used instructions, with a slower conversion for more complex/less used x86 instructions, all of which are crunched through a RISC core which has more registers and other bits to aid parallel pipelining of instructions. So far this has proven to be really great. Transmeta's even taking it a step further by introducing codemorphing, which lets the entire CPU just be a JIT x86 environment running on a VLIW core.
Why are they going this way? It doesn't really seem to make sense compared to the traditional trends in computer processor design.
Please tell me these better ways, I've been thinking that avoiding a couple of hours FSCKing a RAID 5 300gb array for 30 seconds of journal checking was great! The performance hit doesn't really matter, since I'm not doing DV-streaming from raw capture over the network..
I like to be able to comfortably read my content, and I find that setting a minimum font size or 20 or 22pt on a 19" monitor (at 1152x864) works out well. Mozilla is, IIRC, the only browser to have this option.
If you are using local stylesheets, you should always include the !important attribute as well. IE is broken if it lets remote stylesheets override the user stylesheet, but it never hurts to try another approach:)
They've restructured. OSDN makes money. If you don't believe me, wait a year to see if they're still around. They should've folded about a year ago if they hadn't done their restructuring starting January 2001.
Thankfully so do a lot of other people, so I was able to use a nice random-login generator to retrieve it:
Site for the Truly Geeky Makes a Few Bucks By JOHN SCHWARTZ
The front door to the office of Slashdot bears a nerdy little joke. A computer key is glued to the door: "Enter." The other side of the door has an old "Return" key.
That's the geeky essence of Slashdot.org, an online publication with a fanatical community of millions of readers that combines a rich view of technology with quick, off-kilter wit.
Could it be that this is the 21st-century model for Internet publishing?
The highest-flying print publications of the dot-com bubble burbled about technology and the businesses that it fertilized. But now they and their glossy paper have fallen to earth. Just last week, Forbes ASAP and Upside joined the once-fat Industry Standard in the glossies' graveyard. "There is no market for a dedicated new-economy publication," said Monie Begley, a spokeswoman for Forbes.
But far away from the buzz and the glamour, Slashdot survives and thrives. Run out of a basement office in a suburb of Ann Arbor, Mich., Slashdot has remained true to the slogan: "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."
The secret to the online publication's moderate success? "They didn't buy a Super Bowl ad," joked Sean Bergeron, a fan from Virginia.
It's a little more complicated than that, but not much. The company keeps its expenses low. Its creators write about what interests them. And -- here's where the business model may not be everyone's cup of Bawls Guarana energy drink -- they don't seem to care if the operation actually makes any money.
Publishing without paper is cheap and cheap is good, said Richard Seltzer, an Internet entrepreneur and author of "Web Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet Lessons for Managers, Entrepreneurs and Professionals" (Wiley, 2002). He said online publications like Slashdot could flourish "in a down market, and especially when the market for online advertising is in disastrous shape."
Slashdot persists as a must-read publication for the wizardly set, and especially those within the community of developers and fans of "open source" software like Linux, which is created and improved by legions of volunteers. The Web site provides the technically inclined a place to keep up with news, submit articles on their own, and discuss it all at length that can make a neophyte's head throb. The 25-year-old creators of the site, Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, estimate that in their five years online they have published 30,000 articles, served 500 million pages and amassed an audience estimated at 2 million people -- including some 50,000 who regularly enter the continuing conversation at least once a month.
"Slashdot is the best site in the world for techies that want to know," said Daniel Hedblom, a reader in Sweden.
The site's editors look for news and interesting sites, and cull hundreds of daily free submissions from readers and then edit and post a dozen or so articles each day. Those pieces are short, rarely more than 200 words, and offer links to other Web sites or news reports. The discussions then can go on for hundreds and even thousands of postings by readers, offering comment, argument and further research. Those who want to post without using their names are allowed to, but the system automatically gives them the user name "anonymous coward."
And, of course, there is the goofy stuff. Along with arcane discussions of software technology and licensing schemes, the editors post gleeful critiques of Microsoft and its wares, and approving commentary on pop/nerd culture, including Natalie Portman, Aibo robot dogs, Lego projects and fun science projects.
The creators also let pictures substitute for a thousand words. Small icons are attached to each item, including a much-used image of Bill Gates made up to look like a Star Trek Borg -- a race of half-man, half-machine beings that spreads across the universe and whose members drone: "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." It conveys everything that the geekerati think about the software mogul Mr. Gates.
"They have this fun combination of total geek cred and a good editor's eye for the weird and interesting and compelling," said Michael Hirschorn, senior vice president of news and production at the cable channel VH1, and co-founder of the late Inside.com, which was an online report on the world of media.
Mr. Hirschorn applauded Slashdot's "very smart balancing act," which he characterized as "appealing in a very intimate, direct way with its core audience and figuring out a way to branch out into other topics, like intellectual property, that would appeal to a broader audience."
He suggested, however, that any comparison between large business efforts like his Inside site and Slashdot were misleading. Slashdot's creators don't really "measure themselves as a business. They can meaure themselves as a cause," he said. "The fact that it's turned out to be a modest business is a happy surprise."
Does Slashdot, in fact, make money? Its owners say, yes, sort of. The site is owned by Open Source Development Network Inc., a subsidiary of the VA Software Corporation. Open Source runs a number of technology-related Web sites and an online store, ThinkGeek.
Richard French, senior vice president and general manager for Open Source, declined to break out the income of any one component of the company, except to say, "Slashdot works from a cost point of view and from a revenue perspective."
In fact, he acknowledged, "If you took any one of them on their own, probably none of them would be profitable," he said of Open Source's various Web sites.
But because many of the sites use the same hardy, low-maintenance software developed by Mr. Malda and his team, and because the Internet resources are pooled, the company says it is able to squeeze out a profit from the cluster, and makes further profits from sites that it sets up for businesses.
The sites have a combined audience of some six million people, Mr. French said, and a sizable number of those visitors go to ThinkGeek. The store offers a range of goods that techies love, including T-shirts with the logos of Slashdot and other affiliated sites, like Freshmeat and SourceForge, as well as shirts and caps that bear representations of the chemical structure of caffeine; caffeine-spiked candies; and even caffeine-saturated soap.
"Apparently, our readers need caffeinated soap," Mr. Malda said.
The arrangement works, Mr. French said, because the corporate owners do not interfere in the editorial decisions of the Slashdotters. "I don't go down and say, `Rob I want you to write about this,' " he said. "Rob understands his community."
Mr. Malda added: "I still think of it as my personal soapbox. If I decide next Thursday that `It's all about Windows!' I don't know if Slashdot would follow that -- but I would keep posting it and posting it until they fire me."
Mr. Malda and Mr. Bates met in high school in Holland, Mich., and went on to attend the local Hope College, where Mr. Malda created the site. He was soon joined in the effort by Mr. Bates, the way that kids in the old Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movies put on a show with friends. They were stunned by the site's popularity, and even more stunned when it actually made money.
They once had visions of dot-com wealth of their own, and had immense paper profits when their site was bought in 1999 by the Open Source Development Network, then known as Andover.net. Open Source was then sold the next year to VA Linux (which later changed its name to VA Software). The 2000 transaction was, for a heady moment, valued at $975 million. That's when the company's stock was worth nearly $250 a share. These days, VA Software's stock trades for around 75 cents a share.
Mr. Bates said his stock did not make him rich, but he was able to sell some shares.
"Not as many as I would have liked," he said, "but that's the nature of lockup" -- the clauses that restrict a corporate insider's ability to sell newly acquired stock. "At the end of the day, I was able to buy a house, and hey, I'm not going to complain about that."
Fans of the site are ready, even impatient, for more.
One of the messages posted to the discussion of passing the five-year mark last month was a simple three words: "O.K., now what?"
Maybe teenaged themed. I don't think many people over the age of 16 seriously consider a life of crime as a real career. Unless you count my one friend whose sole ambition in life is to work at a job where he can take money from the til everyday. He dropped out of high school for a reason.
If it's really so dangerous, what's to stop a terrorist from walking through customs with a normal cellphone, demonstrate that it is fact NOT a bomb, then leave it on when they get on the plane!
What's easier is not what's best. What's best will reduce the amount of non-terrorist passenger stress, and remove the possibly of abuse by real terrorists.
But the US continues to follow the path of least resistance, rather than imposing regulations that would actually increase airline saftey without abusing normal passengers.
That rather than design aircraft to be resistant to things (interference, via proper shielding; terrorism, via a separate cockpit cabin), people feel the need to legislate problems away.
I doubt that cell phones interfere with planes. In fact, many pilots will use them on planes (mainly smaller ones) as a replacement for their radio if they break.
This doesn't even touch on how unhappy airline staff are to see a PalmPilot turned on (which emits the same RF as my digital camera that they don't care about).
Slashdot Mirror
Windows "finds" it again and again.
Trust me. I've looked. There are a lot of BIOSes which "show" a floppy drive + controller to the OS, despite one not being there, and other settings being set as such. Because Win9x would crash hard if there was no floppy controller + drive in many common configurations.
Perhaps we should name it after something simple, yet powerful...
Perhaps a Norse god, or legendary Scandinavian warrior?
Wintendo has no floppy device, and I have disabled the floppy controller in the BIOS. Accidently clicking it in explorer makes the A750 into a paperweight for a few minutes, as I have to deal with Windows trying to work with what isn't there. It's probably partially the BIOS's fault, but the entire thing is a cluster fuck that should've been fixed back in the days of Win95.
Go look at http://members.aol.com/axcel216/lastweek.htm:
;-)
"MessageBackColor=8 To specify the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) background (screen) color. Default is blue (1). See "BLUE (OR ANY OTHER COLOR) SCREEN OF DEATH", also in TIPS95.TXT [part of W95-11D.ZIP], or in MYTIPS31.TXT [part of W31-11D.ZIP], for complete details.
MessageTextColor=C To specify the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) foreground (text) color. Default is bright white (F). See "BLUE (OR ANY OTHER COLOR) SCREEN OF DEATH", also in TIPS95.TXT [part of W95-11D.ZIP], or in MYTIPS31.TXT [part of W31-11D.ZIP], for complete details."
Oh well, nice attempt
DOS had stateless device access. Until you tried to look at a device, DOS would not touch the device (floppy drive, hd, or CDROM drive). But when you did change to the device, it would try and read in its base directory and bootsector.
..." as the kernel catches a block layer exception. This can be worked around by adding drive locks every time the drive is accessed, but it's generally considered to be a hairy problem best solved by having a smarter user.
Windows emulates its behaviour towards floppy disk drives, as you will find out very painfully if you click on the A: on a computer without a floppy drive (which, for me, is all of them), or without a disk in the drive.
Automount only works on hardware that gives feedback on when media is inserted (such as a CDROM drive). To prevent Badness (TM) in the blocklayer, the automount has traditionally been eschewed in favour of explicit mount. Why? Try removing a CD that's being read from in Win9x, and watch the blue-screen "Please insert CD labelled
Of course, many distributions include the (separate) automount patch anyways, and people who want this behaviour won't be rolling their own kernels any time soon.
MS to Australia: This is the Xbox, the most powerful gaming console. But you can't rent games for it, you can't buy games for it. Heck, you can't even buy the console itself in your country. You're lucky we show you this amazingy thing at all! Just remember, you can't play it!
For those of us who like having a motherboard we can place into a system and not have to worry about parts failing on it, the wonderfully solid-state nature of passive cooling is impossible to beat. If I want more performance, I'll either pay more or wait a little while longer, thanks. I want stability and a minimization of moving parts in my PC, because moving parts = failing parts. Failing parts are expensive!
How many active-cooling north bridge motherboards have you owned? I owned one. Its north bridge fan failed after only 3 months of constant use. Compared to every other motherboard I own, none of which require a fan (most don't even require a heatsink, and they power 1Ghz systems!), it was a terrible mistake purchase. I've since replaced it with a motherboard bought specifically because its north brigde used passive cooling. It's given no problems in the year+ of service it's given.
An aside:
You're going to be old and infirm someday. Don't believe the lies that you'll actually be able to live off of your government pension (since it started as a senior-vote-buying measure, and will end when it runs out of money or leads to huge defecits once the boomers all retire), because you will be screwed. The first thing you should do is go and buy this book, then read it. Follow its advice.
Once you have a secure financial base, go ahead and explore the world, get married, etc. Do whatever your heart desires, but do not get started without some money saved away for your retirement, or you will be screwed when you're older.
Back to the question at hand:
If you really speak a variety of languages, see what it takes to get a work visa there. Often it's a lot of work, but it can be really fun to live somewhere for a year and do whatever it is you're skilled at doing (good non-tech ones are teaching english, cooking, bartending, etc). You can't just go to a country and work there legally unless you have a work visa, so be sure to get that squared away first.
Another thing to do would be to save up money, and backpack across Europe (or somewhere else that's population dense). It's fairly easy to do, there are plenty of youth hostels, and transportation between locales is cheap if you hitch-it. Heck, if you're feeling daring, you could even try to do it while carting along a small appliance.
Rich with mythology, or rich with widely-believed lies?
Don't shave, your hair will grow faster!
I'm aware of Usa (pronouced OO-sah). If you read their pages, you'll see they even include references at the end of their pages. Their credibility is firmly established in my mind, yours is not.
Snopes is the calm voice of reason that people seem to ignore, in HTML form. People who are way too gullible for their own good will believe practically anything told to them by "trusted friends" (who, in turn heard it from "another friend"), even if it contradicts logic, facts, and everything else. They sum it all up in an easy-to-read format.
As for his/her post not being a response, I'd say you're wrong. It was a response to the fact that this person was repeating a lie like it was a fact. Stopping the spread of lies, and general enlightenment, is something that everyone in society should try to do. By ending stupidmemes like the girl who masturbated with a lobster dieing with baby-lobsters in a sensitive place, you make the society a better place to be.
It's been a while since I worked so directly with the processor that I'd know that :) Another bonus of 64-bit is that a 100Mhz 64-bit bus will do the memory related work for those operands as quickly as a 200Mhz 32-bit bus.
I mean centuries.
I don't see how you, on a desktop, could reach the limit of 2^64.
2^64 is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
It is 4,294,967,296 times bigger than 2^32 (4,294,967,296).
That's 2 , places past where I know the highest decimal prefix number (trillion). It's 18.5 exabytes, where an exabyte is 1024 petabytes (each of with is 1024 terabytes, each of which is 1024 gigabytes).
It's really, really, really big.
The IE for Macintosh is actually supperior due to its better handling of standards tests pages. IE for Solaris is officially deprecated, and has become abandonware.
Yes.
;))
(Anything that doesn't do syntax highlighting and brace winking is useless
Once you move beyond a 4.5billion, into the realm of 18.5 (two orders of magnitude past trillion), you can address anything for the forseable future (since you can count each year until the heatdeath of the universe this way, for example).
For vector operations, 64bit words make for some fast math operations, since you can pack more 32-bit integer components into each bus transfer.
For floating point, it means you have greater precision in hardware (allowing things like real physics and shapes to be modelled without noticable issues caused by subtle number creep). Since most systems use IEE-784 (64bit double precision floating point), it means a speedup to that software since you're not working with it as 2 32-bit operations.
In terms of storage space, it means you can address more than 2,199,023,255,552 bytes (~2 terabytes) of disk space (assuming a 512-byte sector). This is important for people with big RAID arrays today, and people with ludicrously big Maxtor drives 3-4 years from now.
For RAM, it means you don't have to worry about your server topping out at 4 gigabytes of RAM. It also means that your VM space has no effective limitation for the forseable future (very useful for people working on large projects, trying memory-intensive algorithmic approachs to traditionally NP-hard problems, or distributed computing problems).
I'm sure I missed a lot of the benefits even with this list. As you can see, 64-bit is not just a number game. It is 32 orders of magnitude larger than 2^32, meaning our grandchildren will probably still be using 64bit machines with no limitions being apparent (unlike 16-bit to 32-bit, which only moved from 65k to 4.5 billion in terms of addressable amounts of something).
POWER OUTAGE! You have no control over them. Even with the 1500VA UPS I use, if the power is out long enuogh, my systems will suddenly find the floor dropped out from below them into the void of not-running-land. I haven't setup auto-shutdown based on UPS feedback, either, so it would be a crash-like situation.
I don't want to recover from a 4-hour power outage (and comensurate loss of service) with a 3-hour fsck, nor do I have the money to buy a generator and redo the electricity setup for the server room for the megalong power outage problem.
Plus, for my RAID5 array, the journalling does batch up writes (allowing the RAID card to keep more spindles active).
Sacrificing stability, better consistency in the worst-case scenario, and a general faster startup time in case of problems for a slighly faster best-case scenario (which evaporates in most common server configs, since the VFS cache layer does most of the work anyways on my gig-ram fileservers, webservers, and so on), is not a win. The choice between speed and quality is no choice at all.
But you have to question it. While it may seem cool to do things like factor polynomials with one instruction, or do TCP packet header filling, how useful is this?
Because you need much more die space for decoding of instructions, it becomes harder to ramp CISC up to higher clock speeds. That's why RISC was introduced.
Now, unless you've been asleep for 12 years, you know that modern x86 CPUs are a combination: CISC instruction set (and benefits thereof) with a fast-path decoder for most commonly used instructions, with a slower conversion for more complex/less used x86 instructions, all of which are crunched through a RISC core which has more registers and other bits to aid parallel pipelining of instructions. So far this has proven to be really great. Transmeta's even taking it a step further by introducing codemorphing, which lets the entire CPU just be a JIT x86 environment running on a VLIW core.
Why are they going this way? It doesn't really seem to make sense compared to the traditional trends in computer processor design.
"there are better ways to recover from failures,"
Please tell me these better ways, I've been thinking that avoiding a couple of hours FSCKing a RAID 5 300gb array for 30 seconds of journal checking was great! The performance hit doesn't really matter, since I'm not doing DV-streaming from raw capture over the network..
I like to be able to comfortably read my content, and I find that setting a minimum font size or 20 or 22pt on a 19" monitor (at 1152x864) works out well. Mozilla is, IIRC, the only browser to have this option.
:)
If you are using local stylesheets, you should always include the !important attribute as well. IE is broken if it lets remote stylesheets override the user stylesheet, but it never hurts to try another approach
They've restructured. OSDN makes money. If you don't believe me, wait a year to see if they're still around. They should've folded about a year ago if they hadn't done their restructuring starting January 2001.
Thankfully so do a lot of other people, so I was able to use a nice random-login generator to retrieve it:
Site for the Truly Geeky Makes a Few Bucks
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
The front door to the office of Slashdot bears a nerdy little joke. A computer key is glued to the door: "Enter." The other side of the door has an old "Return" key.
That's the geeky essence of Slashdot.org, an online publication with a fanatical community of millions of readers that combines a rich view of technology with quick, off-kilter wit.
Could it be that this is the 21st-century model for Internet publishing?
The highest-flying print publications of the dot-com bubble burbled about technology and the businesses that it fertilized. But now they and their glossy paper have fallen to earth. Just last week, Forbes ASAP and Upside joined the once-fat Industry Standard in the glossies' graveyard. "There is no market for a dedicated new-economy publication," said Monie Begley, a spokeswoman for Forbes.
But far away from the buzz and the glamour, Slashdot survives and thrives. Run out of a basement office in a suburb of Ann Arbor, Mich., Slashdot has remained true to the slogan: "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."
The secret to the online publication's moderate success? "They didn't buy a Super Bowl ad," joked Sean Bergeron, a fan from Virginia.
It's a little more complicated than that, but not much. The company keeps its expenses low. Its creators write about what interests them. And -- here's where the business model may not be everyone's cup of Bawls Guarana energy drink -- they don't seem to care if the operation actually makes any money.
Publishing without paper is cheap and cheap is good, said Richard Seltzer, an Internet entrepreneur and author of "Web Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet Lessons for Managers, Entrepreneurs and Professionals" (Wiley, 2002). He said online publications like Slashdot could flourish "in a down market, and especially when the market for online advertising is in disastrous shape."
Slashdot persists as a must-read publication for the wizardly set, and especially those within the community of developers and fans of "open source" software like Linux, which is created and improved by legions of volunteers. The Web site provides the technically inclined a place to keep up with news, submit articles on their own, and discuss it all at length that can make a neophyte's head throb. The 25-year-old creators of the site, Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, estimate that in their five years online they have published 30,000 articles, served 500 million pages and amassed an audience estimated at 2 million people -- including some 50,000 who regularly enter the continuing conversation at least once a month.
"Slashdot is the best site in the world for techies that want to know," said Daniel Hedblom, a reader in Sweden.
The site's editors look for news and interesting sites, and cull hundreds of daily free submissions from readers and then edit and post a dozen or so articles each day. Those pieces are short, rarely more than 200 words, and offer links to other Web sites or news reports. The discussions then can go on for hundreds and even thousands of postings by readers, offering comment, argument and further research. Those who want to post without using their names are allowed to, but the system automatically gives them the user name "anonymous coward."
And, of course, there is the goofy stuff. Along with arcane discussions of software technology and licensing schemes, the editors post gleeful critiques of Microsoft and its wares, and approving commentary on pop/nerd culture, including Natalie Portman, Aibo robot dogs, Lego projects and fun science projects.
The creators also let pictures substitute for a thousand words. Small icons are attached to each item, including a much-used image of Bill Gates made up to look like a Star Trek Borg -- a race of half-man, half-machine beings that spreads across the universe and whose members drone: "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." It conveys everything that the geekerati think about the software mogul Mr. Gates.
"They have this fun combination of total geek cred and a good editor's eye for the weird and interesting and compelling," said Michael Hirschorn, senior vice president of news and production at the cable channel VH1, and co-founder of the late Inside.com, which was an online report on the world of media.
Mr. Hirschorn applauded Slashdot's "very smart balancing act," which he characterized as "appealing in a very intimate, direct way with its core audience and figuring out a way to branch out into other topics, like intellectual property, that would appeal to a broader audience."
He suggested, however, that any comparison between large business efforts like his Inside site and Slashdot were misleading. Slashdot's creators don't really "measure themselves as a business. They can meaure themselves as a cause," he said. "The fact that it's turned out to be a modest business is a happy surprise."
Does Slashdot, in fact, make money? Its owners say, yes, sort of. The site is owned by Open Source Development Network Inc., a subsidiary of the VA Software Corporation. Open Source runs a number of technology-related Web sites and an online store, ThinkGeek.
Richard French, senior vice president and general manager for Open Source, declined to break out the income of any one component of the company, except to say, "Slashdot works from a cost point of view and from a revenue perspective."
In fact, he acknowledged, "If you took any one of them on their own, probably none of them would be profitable," he said of Open Source's various Web sites.
But because many of the sites use the same hardy, low-maintenance software developed by Mr. Malda and his team, and because the Internet resources are pooled, the company says it is able to squeeze out a profit from the cluster, and makes further profits from sites that it sets up for businesses.
The sites have a combined audience of some six million people, Mr. French said, and a sizable number of those visitors go to ThinkGeek. The store offers a range of goods that techies love, including T-shirts with the logos of Slashdot and other affiliated sites, like Freshmeat and SourceForge, as well as shirts and caps that bear representations of the chemical structure of caffeine; caffeine-spiked candies; and even caffeine-saturated soap.
"Apparently, our readers need caffeinated soap," Mr. Malda said.
The arrangement works, Mr. French said, because the corporate owners do not interfere in the editorial decisions of the Slashdotters. "I don't go down and say, `Rob I want you to write about this,' " he said. "Rob understands his community."
Mr. Malda added: "I still think of it as my personal soapbox. If I decide next Thursday that `It's all about Windows!' I don't know if Slashdot would follow that -- but I would keep posting it and posting it until they fire me."
Mr. Malda and Mr. Bates met in high school in Holland, Mich., and went on to attend the local Hope College, where Mr. Malda created the site. He was soon joined in the effort by Mr. Bates, the way that kids in the old Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movies put on a show with friends. They were stunned by the site's popularity, and even more stunned when it actually made money.
They once had visions of dot-com wealth of their own, and had immense paper profits when their site was bought in 1999 by the Open Source Development Network, then known as Andover.net. Open Source was then sold the next year to VA Linux (which later changed its name to VA Software). The 2000 transaction was, for a heady moment, valued at $975 million. That's when the company's stock was worth nearly $250 a share. These days, VA Software's stock trades for around 75 cents a share.
Mr. Bates said his stock did not make him rich, but he was able to sell some shares.
"Not as many as I would have liked," he said, "but that's the nature of lockup" -- the clauses that restrict a corporate insider's ability to sell newly acquired stock. "At the end of the day, I was able to buy a house, and hey, I'm not going to complain about that."
Fans of the site are ready, even impatient, for more.
One of the messages posted to the discussion of passing the five-year mark last month was a simple three words: "O.K., now what?"
Maybe teenaged themed. I don't think many people over the age of 16 seriously consider a life of crime as a real career. Unless you count my one friend whose sole ambition in life is to work at a job where he can take money from the til everyday. He dropped out of high school for a reason.
Someone would think they're good to go on a murdering spree?
Look no further than the dreck media.
If it's really so dangerous, what's to stop a terrorist from walking through customs with a normal cellphone, demonstrate that it is fact NOT a bomb, then leave it on when they get on the plane!
What's easier is not what's best. What's best will reduce the amount of non-terrorist passenger stress, and remove the possibly of abuse by real terrorists.
But the US continues to follow the path of least resistance, rather than imposing regulations that would actually increase airline saftey without abusing normal passengers.
That rather than design aircraft to be resistant to things (interference, via proper shielding; terrorism, via a separate cockpit cabin), people feel the need to legislate problems away.
I doubt that cell phones interfere with planes. In fact, many pilots will use them on planes (mainly smaller ones) as a replacement for their radio if they break.
This doesn't even touch on how unhappy airline staff are to see a PalmPilot turned on (which emits the same RF as my digital camera that they don't care about).