but show one schlong or some boobies, and that makes the movie off limits.
OTOH, we don't even start to become sexual beings until the early teen years. (Later, in cultures that aren't so sex-saturated as the US.)
Seeing genitals or secondary sexual characteristics will not affect a non-sexual being in any way seeing any other body part would. The only people who pay any attention to naked breasts are those who desire to suck them, either because they're hungry babies or because they're all grown up:).
... you've been playing too much Grand Theft Auto, and he hasn't.
More likely, the grandparent has actually read Watchmen and the great-grandparent hasn't. I mean, seriously: how could anyone expect a movie based on that comic to be anything but brutal ?
Sunshine has a habit of melting bad legislation: the good of posting these secret lists far outweighs the evil of some perverts getting their jollies.
One might argue that perverts getting their jollies from pornography would be far better than the alternative, at least for the children if not for moral overlords.
Bugger! Mistyped a tag. The UK government's parody-defying "anti-terrorism" posters are here.
You know, I would probably consider someone going through my trash pretty bloody suspicious. And be sure to call the Terror Hotline every time you happen to look at a CCTV camera and let them know it was a mistake, so they don't waste resources investigating. Tell your friends to do likewise; it's your patriotic duty.
But seriously: what kind of moron came up with these? I can understand trying to build a police state on fear - that's the oldest trick in the book - but how can anyone be so bloody incompetent at it? Or is it an attempt to make everything "suspicious behaviour"?
When you modify a block, you write a new block and then deallocate the old block. This is the way ZFS works, and it will also be used in btrfs. Aside from the obvious reliability improvement, it also can allow better optimization in RAID-5 configurations, as if you always flush an entire stripe you don't need to do a read-before-write to update the checksum data.
What happens if I don't have a RAID-5 configuration? It seems to me that this is a sure way to get the file fragmented beyond believe.
Application developers hence were indirectly educated to not use fsync(), because apparently a filesystem giving anything other than the ext3 ordered mode guarantees is just unreasonable, and ext3 fsync() performance really sucks. (The reason why you don't actually *want* what fsync implies has been explained in the previous ext4 data-loss posts).
I agree. POSIX needs filesystem transactions API; failing that, it at the very least needs a fbarrier() call which ensures that all modifications made by the thread calling it before it was called are logged to permanent storage before any of the modifications done after it are, but doesn't guarantee or even suggest that any of the modifications are written when fbarrier() returns.
This would allow application writers to requests explicit ordering when needed without being forced to also request a performance-killing cache flush simultaneously, and allow the filesystem to reorder the writes for performance at other times.
Just look at how many people have mental issues, be it emotional, learning, or developmental issues with "properly functioning" neurons but are lacking one of a hundred chemicals that make them all work together as a whole.
And let's not forget the fact that human brain isn't just a lump of neurons. It has structure, which is vital for its proper operation. It's exactly like how it's not enough to simply throw a few million transistors together to have a functional computer; they must also be connected just right. The good old Pentium demonstrated this nicely.
Similar to a parent of two children ranting at them without taking time to think first. Calling them morons is just going to get them growing up to be dysfunctional at best.
See, they're not really children. They're grown men (or women), and should be able to handle being called idiots when they are. The grandparent merely used an analogy to explain why Torvalds didn't refer to them by name: to let them save face.
Did this clear it up? Feel free to ask if it's still unclear.
No wonder the world has a dim view of the "geek" community.
It doesn't, actually. Just the idiot geeks who write a filesystem which corrupts their files.
OK, but it would have to be hot relative to the surroundings in order to gain any worthwhile energy. I would say it would have to be really really hot. So hot as not NOT be able to do in a basic chemistry lab on a table top in a glass beaker.
Normally, the rate of fusion reaction depends very highly on temperature. The reason is that two atomic nucleus need to be brought very close to each other in order for the strong force to join them together, and because said nucleus have positive charge, they repel each other; the normal way to overcome that is to simply slam them together at tremendous speed; and having the particles move fast is the very definition of heat.
Now, cold fusion is based on the hypothesis that there's some clever way of "tricking" the atoms together. For example, there might be a way of "screening" their charges from each other until it's too late; or it might be possible to use some weird standing wave thingamajing to simply pack them so tightly (pressure) they can't help but fuse.
However, no matter how fusion is achieved, it still releases tremendous amount of energy. "Cold fusion" means that hydrogen starts out cold, not that it stays that way. If you can get it working, you can easily boil water with it; heck, you can boil iron.
From what I understand, even the faux experiment didn't succeed in boiling water.
A spark isn't going to boil much water either, but it can ignite a firestorm.
If you don't boil water, I'd guess that it's not hot enough.
To nitpick, you can extract energy from any heat difference; however, for all practical purposes you are correct.
I can only guess that the assumption was that if this experiment was truly a success, that it could be scaled up dramatically.
Forced participation is my main complaint; I don't like being forced to do anything. That's the opposite of freedom.
Very few people like being forced to do anything. However, the price of living in a society is that you can't always have your own way. And I notice you have certainly used the opportunities provided by said society to, for example, gather $500,000 in a bank account.
That's the problem with libertarians and their ilk: they want all the benefits of a society, but don't want to pay the price. You'd think Somalia would attract them like flies, if they were really serious about not wanting any government.
This is purely psychological. The fact that the populous get to pick one of two potential dictators doesn't mean that they have any say in the running of the country.
This gets us to the wonderful concept of division of powers, which exists precisely to ensure that no one gets dictatorial power. You know, the thing about Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches of government being separate?
And don't complain about having only two choices. Nothing stops you from nominating a third, fourth or even fifth candidate. You might not get much support for them, especially if they're from the lunatic fringe, but that's the nasty thing about living in a free society: people might make the decisions they want, rather than the ones you want. The damn sheep!
They just think they do because they had the option to vote, and so they don't feel entitled to muster up a coup when the government screws them over.
The whole point of elections is to have a bloodless coup every few years. You don't have to do the whole storm the castle with torches and pitchforks -thing, because you can simply vote against the incumbent come election day. It's much cleaner that way.
Of course, in order to get the incumbent out of office, you have to have popular support for someone else; but that's generally true of revolutions. He stays in power after elections? Well, then you never had any chance of dethroning him with violence either, unless you figured you'd capture power from a well-liked governor and bestowed it onto someone you wanted instead - in other words, became a dictator yourself.
Still, continuous monitoring of your heart rate is far more useful. You could have a serious heart condition and your pulse will still look normal in most random tests. When it starts to show abnormalities is when you want to be alerted and that's what an implant would do.
I dunno, my pulse is unsteady, yet I seem to be in fine shape. Bum-bum-BUM-bum--bum-BUM-bum-bum... It's annoying sometimes late at night, when I can feel it switch from one rate to another without bothering to speed up or slow down gradually. So, basically, one of these would be throwing alerts constantly.
Besides, you don't need an implant to monitor your heart rate; even some wristwatches nowadays come with pulse monitoring.
I tried to get my university physics lecturers to explain how they got from "the formula breaks if we try to do anything infinitely precisely" to "everything exists in a magic state of maybe unless we look at it at which point it makes up its mind".
Wikipedia to the rescue:). The second and third paragraph explain the physical mechanism.
But you are way better off figuring out exactly what is slowing the program down, rather than randomly throwing parallelization at the problem. In most cases it is not actually a problem of not having enough CPU power, it's a problem with disk latency, or something else.
Actually, no. What you want is to have the UI react as fast as possible to user input. The easiest way to do that is to have the UI use a thread of its own, which does nothing but block on reading user input (or a screen redraw request) and upon receiving it immediately gives feedback by updating the relevant part of the screen. The alternative is to have the program interrupt any long-running task every n microseconds to check for user input, which is not only more complicated but also needlessly wastes time when no such input is available.
In the rare cases that the bottleneck is various tasks waiting on the CPU when there is another one available, only then is it acceptable to parallelize things.
The issue isn't about execution time, it's about latency. The term "bottleneck" isn't applicable here. What we want is that the UI input function gets called as soon as possible when new input arrives; it is impossible to beat a thread that's blocking on read on that regard. It is also the simplest solution which achieves low latency, at least for any program with long-running background tasks. So I'd say that it's not using a separate UI thread that requires justification.
Often when people try to optimize without using a profiler or without understanding the problem, they just waste time while solving nothing (or making things worse).
The problem is that it's nigh-impossible to guarantee that the execution time of a (sub)task has an upper bound.
This is what Knuth meant when he said, "premature optimization is the root of all evil."
This isn't a matter of optimization, it's about designing the program correctly from the start.
If you're doing it in java, the multi-threading is essentially free - it's built in.
Java's multithreading support is about the same as pthreads in C/C++ - easy to use, but make a single mistake in synchronization and it'll either deadlock or corrupt data.
If you can't get your head around threads, your only other option is stateless code - might as well just learn php and write web apps.
But a banking app is inherently stateful - your account has a certain balance, for example. Database can help with synchronizing, but that too requires you to understand the possible problem areas - and that, in my experience, is where the biggest problems happen: people simply don't comprehend that there could possibly be a problem in whatever "clever" synchronization-avoiding solution they come up with.
That's what causes the most problems in multithreaded apps (and perhaps in apps in general): some programmer thinks he's being very clever, and being very wrong.
The reason is either predetermined, or random, or a combination. My actions based on that reason are the same. In effect, I do not choose what to choose, I do not decide on what decision to make, my personal control is not under my personal control.
Of course you do. You make your choises freely. It's simply that you are a predictable person;).
I disagree with that. I believe that in order to know all the factors in a deterministic system, one must be outside the closed system looking in. And there is nothing outside the system. Basically, the truth is out there, but it is unknowable.
Which is the whole point of quantum mechanics, and why classical determinism is wrong.
Nothing forced me to eat against my will because my will itself was predetermined. It is not a case of you wanting to do one thing while your body does another. It is a case of you having no control over what you want.
Of course you do. It's simply that someone who knows you well enough can predict what you'll want to want in a given situation. Your will might be be predetermined, but that doesn't change the fact that it is indeed your will.
The the sequence of neurons firing in my brain etc. directly resulted in the perceived decision to pick up the apple and take a bite.
Indeed they did. That doesn't change the fact that you decided to eat the apple. The sequence of neurons firing in your brain didn't force you to decide to eat the apple; the sequence of neurons firing in your brain was your decision to eat the apple.
Or, to put it in another way: mixing philosophical concepts with fundamental physics isn't likely to lead to coherent results. The concept of free will simply doesn't exist in the same level of reality that electrons or physical determinism does. Saying that a person has free will is meaningful, saying that an electron does is not.
Except they do -- fsync, as above, since they have no way of detecting whether the filesystem behaves properly.
And as also noted, fsync will bring the whole system to its knees if lots of applications begin using it. The interaction between fsync and GUI is especially nasty - fsync by definition blocks until a (slow) disk write has been done, and GUI requires responding as soon as possible. This pretty much requires a multithreaded program, and those are notoriously difficult to write.
That is: The application might update file a, and then update file b only if file a succeeded. Or a different application might update file b based on information read from file a. This means the OS has to either order all transactions, or somehow detect which transactions depend on others.
This isn't a problem. All you have to do is make sure that transactions are written to permanent storage in the same order they called commit - that is, if transaction A called commit before transaction B, transaction B will not be logged if the transaction A won't, and might be visible if transaction A is.
Simply steal this one from the database guys - they've been working on it for decades.
And of course we have no more choice in the way we justify anything, than in any other "decision" we make.
Of course you do. It's just that you aren't doing decisions randomly, you have reason to choose the way you do. Classical determinism states that it is possible to know all your reasons - everything that might influence your decision in any way - to arbitrary degree, and thus it is possible to predict what you will choose with an arbitrary certainty. Quantum mechanics state that there's a limit to how much you can know, and thus there's some element of randomness in the decision process; however, it doesn't make any difference for you, who are making the choice.
Or, to put it in another way, determinism simply means that one thing leads to another in a logical fashion. You ate because you wanted to eat because you were hungry because your stomach was empty. Nothing forced you to eat against your will; it's simply that someone who knows the state of you and your environment can predict exactly when you will want to eat.
That's why I cringe each time I hear a scientist mention free will; what follows is inevitably a discussion about ill-defined topic which will start going further downhill once someone mentions Quantum Mysticism.
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing genitals or secondary sexual characteristics will not affect a non-sexual being in any way seeing any other body part would. The only people who pay any attention to naked breasts are those who desire to suck them, either because they're hungry babies or because they're all grown up :).
More likely, the grandparent has actually read Watchmen and the great-grandparent hasn't. I mean, seriously: how could anyone expect a movie based on that comic to be anything but brutal ?
Obviously he didn't manage the boredom of his current job, since he was looking for a new one.
More likely she's simply been handling them with her bare hands or without a hairnet.
Well, no. Nowadays it's terrorists rather than communists who get into the black list.
In Nazi Germany, the police raids you!
One might argue that perverts getting their jollies from pornography would be far better than the alternative, at least for the children if not for moral overlords.
You know, I would probably consider someone going through my trash pretty bloody suspicious. And be sure to call the Terror Hotline every time you happen to look at a CCTV camera and let them know it was a mistake, so they don't waste resources investigating. Tell your friends to do likewise; it's your patriotic duty.
But seriously: what kind of moron came up with these? I can understand trying to build a police state on fear - that's the oldest trick in the book - but how can anyone be so bloody incompetent at it? Or is it an attempt to make everything "suspicious behaviour"?
What happens if I don't have a RAID-5 configuration? It seems to me that this is a sure way to get the file fragmented beyond believe.
I agree. POSIX needs filesystem transactions API; failing that, it at the very least needs a fbarrier() call which ensures that all modifications made by the thread calling it before it was called are logged to permanent storage before any of the modifications done after it are, but doesn't guarantee or even suggest that any of the modifications are written when fbarrier() returns.
This would allow application writers to requests explicit ordering when needed without being forced to also request a performance-killing cache flush simultaneously, and allow the filesystem to reorder the writes for performance at other times.
POSIX API is simply incomplete here.
It's even faster to buffer both data and metadata, unblock the process, and write the data and metadata in the background in that order.
This sounds suspiciously similar to the recent ext4 bug; if it is, the fix is the same.
And let's not forget the fact that human brain isn't just a lump of neurons. It has structure, which is vital for its proper operation. It's exactly like how it's not enough to simply throw a few million transistors together to have a functional computer; they must also be connected just right. The good old Pentium demonstrated this nicely.
See, they're not really children. They're grown men (or women), and should be able to handle being called idiots when they are. The grandparent merely used an analogy to explain why Torvalds didn't refer to them by name: to let them save face.
Did this clear it up? Feel free to ask if it's still unclear.
It doesn't, actually. Just the idiot geeks who write a filesystem which corrupts their files.
What would a nerd need Viagra for ?^)
Normally, the rate of fusion reaction depends very highly on temperature. The reason is that two atomic nucleus need to be brought very close to each other in order for the strong force to join them together, and because said nucleus have positive charge, they repel each other; the normal way to overcome that is to simply slam them together at tremendous speed; and having the particles move fast is the very definition of heat.
Now, cold fusion is based on the hypothesis that there's some clever way of "tricking" the atoms together. For example, there might be a way of "screening" their charges from each other until it's too late; or it might be possible to use some weird standing wave thingamajing to simply pack them so tightly (pressure) they can't help but fuse.
However, no matter how fusion is achieved, it still releases tremendous amount of energy. "Cold fusion" means that hydrogen starts out cold, not that it stays that way. If you can get it working, you can easily boil water with it; heck, you can boil iron.
A spark isn't going to boil much water either, but it can ignite a firestorm.
To nitpick, you can extract energy from any heat difference; however, for all practical purposes you are correct.
Yes.
A database management system is nothing but a fancy filesystem with structured files, yet they are often used in servers and perform just fine.
Good.
Hurt yourself if you must, but don't expect sympathy when you are prevented from doing something likely to hurt others.
In any case, I'm not too crazy about having my biometrics sent to some Three-Letter Agency, but I'd be more than happy to have them available to me.
Very few people like being forced to do anything. However, the price of living in a society is that you can't always have your own way. And I notice you have certainly used the opportunities provided by said society to, for example, gather $500,000 in a bank account.
That's the problem with libertarians and their ilk: they want all the benefits of a society, but don't want to pay the price. You'd think Somalia would attract them like flies, if they were really serious about not wanting any government.
This gets us to the wonderful concept of division of powers, which exists precisely to ensure that no one gets dictatorial power. You know, the thing about Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches of government being separate?
And don't complain about having only two choices. Nothing stops you from nominating a third, fourth or even fifth candidate. You might not get much support for them, especially if they're from the lunatic fringe, but that's the nasty thing about living in a free society: people might make the decisions they want, rather than the ones you want. The damn sheep!
The whole point of elections is to have a bloodless coup every few years. You don't have to do the whole storm the castle with torches and pitchforks -thing, because you can simply vote against the incumbent come election day. It's much cleaner that way.
Of course, in order to get the incumbent out of office, you have to have popular support for someone else; but that's generally true of revolutions. He stays in power after elections? Well, then you never had any chance of dethroning him with violence either, unless you figured you'd capture power from a well-liked governor and bestowed it onto someone you wanted instead - in other words, became a dictator yourself.
TL;DR: grow up.
I dunno, my pulse is unsteady, yet I seem to be in fine shape. Bum-bum-BUM-bum--bum-BUM-bum-bum... It's annoying sometimes late at night, when I can feel it switch from one rate to another without bothering to speed up or slow down gradually. So, basically, one of these would be throwing alerts constantly.
Besides, you don't need an implant to monitor your heart rate; even some wristwatches nowadays come with pulse monitoring.
Wikipedia to the rescue :). The second and third paragraph explain the physical mechanism.
Actually, no. What you want is to have the UI react as fast as possible to user input. The easiest way to do that is to have the UI use a thread of its own, which does nothing but block on reading user input (or a screen redraw request) and upon receiving it immediately gives feedback by updating the relevant part of the screen. The alternative is to have the program interrupt any long-running task every n microseconds to check for user input, which is not only more complicated but also needlessly wastes time when no such input is available.
The issue isn't about execution time, it's about latency. The term "bottleneck" isn't applicable here. What we want is that the UI input function gets called as soon as possible when new input arrives; it is impossible to beat a thread that's blocking on read on that regard. It is also the simplest solution which achieves low latency, at least for any program with long-running background tasks. So I'd say that it's not using a separate UI thread that requires justification.
The problem is that it's nigh-impossible to guarantee that the execution time of a (sub)task has an upper bound.
This isn't a matter of optimization, it's about designing the program correctly from the start.
Java's multithreading support is about the same as pthreads in C/C++ - easy to use, but make a single mistake in synchronization and it'll either deadlock or corrupt data.
But a banking app is inherently stateful - your account has a certain balance, for example. Database can help with synchronizing, but that too requires you to understand the possible problem areas - and that, in my experience, is where the biggest problems happen: people simply don't comprehend that there could possibly be a problem in whatever "clever" synchronization-avoiding solution they come up with.
That's what causes the most problems in multithreaded apps (and perhaps in apps in general): some programmer thinks he's being very clever, and being very wrong.
Of course you do. You make your choises freely. It's simply that you are a predictable person ;).
Which is the whole point of quantum mechanics, and why classical determinism is wrong.
Of course you do. It's simply that someone who knows you well enough can predict what you'll want to want in a given situation. Your will might be be predetermined, but that doesn't change the fact that it is indeed your will.
Indeed they did. That doesn't change the fact that you decided to eat the apple. The sequence of neurons firing in your brain didn't force you to decide to eat the apple; the sequence of neurons firing in your brain was your decision to eat the apple.
Or, to put it in another way: mixing philosophical concepts with fundamental physics isn't likely to lead to coherent results. The concept of free will simply doesn't exist in the same level of reality that electrons or physical determinism does. Saying that a person has free will is meaningful, saying that an electron does is not.
And as also noted, fsync will bring the whole system to its knees if lots of applications begin using it. The interaction between fsync and GUI is especially nasty - fsync by definition blocks until a (slow) disk write has been done, and GUI requires responding as soon as possible. This pretty much requires a multithreaded program, and those are notoriously difficult to write.
This isn't a problem. All you have to do is make sure that transactions are written to permanent storage in the same order they called commit - that is, if transaction A called commit before transaction B, transaction B will not be logged if the transaction A won't, and might be visible if transaction A is.
Simply steal this one from the database guys - they've been working on it for decades.
Of course you do. It's just that you aren't doing decisions randomly, you have reason to choose the way you do. Classical determinism states that it is possible to know all your reasons - everything that might influence your decision in any way - to arbitrary degree, and thus it is possible to predict what you will choose with an arbitrary certainty. Quantum mechanics state that there's a limit to how much you can know, and thus there's some element of randomness in the decision process; however, it doesn't make any difference for you, who are making the choice.
Or, to put it in another way, determinism simply means that one thing leads to another in a logical fashion. You ate because you wanted to eat because you were hungry because your stomach was empty. Nothing forced you to eat against your will; it's simply that someone who knows the state of you and your environment can predict exactly when you will want to eat.
That's why I cringe each time I hear a scientist mention free will; what follows is inevitably a discussion about ill-defined topic which will start going further downhill once someone mentions Quantum Mysticism.