You can grab an instrument and jam outside the Prancing Pony. Pretty avatars of other people stand around to listen, dance and make comments. Hard to resist that sometimes. Killer idea; allow players to rate performances. The game has me thinking.
Turbine has some good IP to work with. They've done it some credit. Work with the right NPC vendors enough and you'll learn scraps of Elvish. I've no doubt after sufficient play one will have a grasp of Middle Earth geography. It is certain that the effort placed on combat is matched elsewhere.
Tanks (guys with thick necks covered in metal) are functional. Champions own melee. Hunters don't. Hunters rely on a Legolas style repeating rifle called a Bow. Paper, scissors, rock.
Lag abounds occasionally. If I'm feeling it I know others are; plenty of hardware and bandwidth here. Not into WOW myself but by all evidence Blizzard has scalability figured out. I sense that LOTRO has some work to do there. If the game is a big hit they'll get it right.
The GUI needs some heavy lifting; it's confined by a lack of re-sizable windows. Perhaps customization will eventually permit it.
The complaints that I have heard largely relate to issues stemming from the fact that in the beta you can't level over 30, so much of the game has yet to be experienced. The current beta caps your level at 15. Perhaps earlier test intervals allowed higher levels. I don't know. These games tend to change radically in higher level play, yet leveling here appears to be carefully progressive. I know the developers are working hard. I can feel it. Their still finishing some of the higher level content and deadlines have mounted.
Like other online fantasy games, it requires a commitment in time. If I find that I can walk away for a few weeks and still have fun when I get around to playing I'll be playing for years. If not well, there is always Warhammer.
Many of us, including me, have been asking for a long time for a distribution that fucking works. One that does things, out of the box, that every other operating system does. Fucking works has my vote.
And we frankly don't care if that means that we have to run closed software today. Because as we have seen, the existence of closed software on Linux does not prevent people from working on open alternatives to it. The existence of free-as-in-beer Java hasn't stopped people from working on free-as-in-speech implementations (and as you point out, Java is on its way to Freedom.) The existence of the free-as-in-beer nVidia drivers isn't stopping work on an alternative. Well I do, in fact, care. I just... care different. I watched Netscape take control of its fate by turning to open source. Then I saw Trolltech decide not to become irrelevant by adopting an open license. Recently we have observed Sun conclude the decade long debate about the disposition of Java. The secret to winning this fight is not to appeal to the better natures of businesses that covet their source code; that doesn't exist. You must appeal to their profit motive.
I have this vision that one day, when Linux actually holds something approaching 50% of the market, Stallman will speak of free software and the planet with ring at the sound of his voice. I dream of the day when hardware vendors, such as Dell and HP, make decisions about what components to use based on the license they must adopt, because their millions of paying customers insist. The day when NVidia et al must choose between 50 million units and squat because they refuse to do The Right Thing (tm). The day when basically everything computing is built with Linux as a priority.
The idealists, as always, place the cart before the horse; integrity, then success. Pragmatists know that integrity is expensive. Ubuntu, as far as I can see after participating in all of this for 13 odd years, is the current best hope of actually achieving this. A little strategic pragmatism has its place as well.
Did anyone see this coming? Yes. Two reasons: a.) flash is dominating online video because it's lightweight and cross platform and b.) Firefox can no longer be ignored.
I know a is true because (probably) like you, I'm watching a lot of online video, and I'm much more likely to do so if it's flash. I know b is true because clients of the company I'm contracting for have just (yesterday) decided to shift priorities and get a port of an existing ActiveX control running in Firefox, rather than develop the next release of the IE software.
Microsoft doesn't want WMV to become irrelevant simply because it doesn't work without IE. It doesn't address the cross platform issue but at least Firefox+Windows users won't be hindered.
We just saw a story here about Firefox holding 25% of the European market. You can't walk away from that when Adobe is lunching on your market share. No way.
Been looking forward to boards that don't have obsolete parallel connectors all over. Manufacturers; you can stop putting these connectors on new designs altogether. Don't even bother with some deprecated non-bootable vestige connectors. Just drop them. You could probably have stopped two years ago, although SATA DVD/CD-ROM drives did take a while to become widely available.
As for those who choose to insist on nursing obsolete drives; older designs will continue to remain available for what should be sufficient time. If you're really bent on running old drives with new motherboards you can also get a PCI adapter. You can also get PATA-to-SATA adapters. Don't bother; fast, reliable SATA drives are so cheap today you really shouldn't be puttering around with obsolete drives.
This is tiring. Do we need one of these for every single science story posted to slashdot?
Unfortunately, yes. The fact is there are a lot of delusional people 'speaking in tongues' every Sunday at their local congregation, readily absorbing whatever anti-intellectual claptrap is thrown their way. Ridicule provides mutual assurance among the rest of us that this thinking is aberrant. That keeps mainstream politicians from pandering to it in overt ways. Organized religion no longer has any effective means of moderating the worst of the Benny Hinn's or the fools that keep him on his pedestal, so it's left to the rest of us. Well aimed ridicule is highly effective and I suspect the alternative, pretending respect, could easily end up being less non-violent.
Optimizing for low noise and cost based on off-the-shelf parts led me to this setup. It isn't the lowest power setup I can imagine, but noise and power are directly proportional in most cases. My goal was a very low noise, low cost always-on headless server running Linux with fault tolerant storage, at least one Gb NIC and enough processor and RAM to use for common development tasks. Based on measurements performed here and some guess work I estimate this is pulling 40W at idle and I can't hear it a beyond a meter.
MB: ASUS M2NPV-VM. AM2 socket with on-board Nvidia video, SATA etc. Not running a discrete video card is a large power savings.
CPU: Athlon 64 3500+ AM2 Lima core. This is a recent single core CPU from AMD. Easily obtainable from Newegg et al. The nice thing about it is the low TDP of 45W. This approaches portable CPUs while not costing so much. Stable at 1.2V (perhaps lower if I tried) and works well with cpufreq.
Case: Antec NSK3300 MicroATX. Small and quiet. Uses a high efficiency 300W power supply with a non-standard form factor. I doubt this machine can pull enough juice to get the fan moving at full rate. It's silent 99% of the time.
The rest: 1GB of "value ram", a pair of quiet 250GB WD disks and a Intel Gb PCI NIC I got somewhere. If you want to save more power run 1 disk, cut the RAM in half and don't add a fast NIC. Probably just under 30W at that point.
Ya but is it 100% compatible with MS Office. Cause if its not I can see why a lot of companies would think twice about making the switch.
While I agree with you about companies not switching, remember that there are other vectors for OO success. Where I am, in the world of VC funded startups and contractors, OO has become a defacto standard; nobody here pisses away money on word processors or spreadsheets. It all leads to PDF anyhow. Microsoft's stuff is too expensive, isolated to one platform and a security problem. OO is cheap, fast, portable and more than sufficient.
Yeah, and if you look at the history of this index, you'll see that the US has been on top 3 times during the 6 years this report has been published. Three times in six years... First, I can't help but be proud of that, even if I find the whole matter suspect. Second, they must be using some rather short term metrics; certainly not sufficient to detect an actual trend. Yet how is it billed? US No Longer Technology King. What happened there? Airbus close a big sale two weeks before they closed the books?
Pft.
I must have missed the other three headlines: US Remains Technology King
o_O
you're saying that means this story belongs under Politics? Yes, of course. The WEF is an international pressure group run by politicians and wealthy institutions for political ends. Anything coming from the WEF, the G8, ASF, WTO, etc. should by definition be automatically filed under politics. My assertion that politics is the correct label was separated from the rest for a reason; to prevent those with poor reading comprehension from wrongly conflating it with my/sarcasm. Clearly your reach for some contradiction in my case got you there despite my effort.
Isn't it a lot more likely that their Windows boxe(s|n) just got zombified?
You're probably right; spammers are among the most aggressive attackers and most of the F1000 have large distributed networks where a (hopefully) small number of systems are going to be vulnerable at any moment. On the other hand, these companies can and do pay for high quality and high capacity pipes. They are also far less suspect as a source of spam, and the ISPs will certainly be reluctant ($$) to take unilateral action to deal with suspect traffic (as some do with their residential customers.)
For all of these reasons F1000 hosts are many times more effective as spam zombies than your average asymmetric DSL host, so I have no problem with people exposing carelessness or neglect among these companies. They have the resources and talent to prevent this sort of abuse. If they're not, a little bad press might help. Earlier today we all learned that some 40+ million credit/debit card accounts got downloaded from commercial IT systems. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that those same companies have a long history of unwittingly contributing bandwidth to spammers.
Speaking only for myself, if that really were the case then I'd want no part of it.
The American Dream as I understand it... There aren't any philosophers making employment decisions at Circuit City; they're bean counters counting beans and I know they aren't anticipating the consequences of all this. They're trying to reduce costs and stumbled on a clever technique; mass purge of anyone making more than the minimum the market will bear and get new, cheaper floor drones. I'm betting others will quickly follow suit.
WalMart has been doing this for years; sneeze at the wrong moment and you're gone. One at a time. The churn keeps the payroll cheap. It's the same thing but the lack of headline grabbing mass firings may be part of the reason Circuit City does $11G a year in revenue and WalMart is up around a quarter trillion.
The service sector in the US has never managed to get organized. I suspect more than a few of the simultaneously unemployed Circuit City folks might decide they could do well to spend some of their free time at something productive, like have a meeting. Once Best Buy's stakeholders compel that business to follow Circuit City's example, those "expensive" former employees might discover they aren't alone.
Working a sales floor in a Circuit City doesn't involve much talent, but you must have a reasonable grasp of English. These jobs can't just be outsourced to India or filled by fresh immigrants that can't expound on the life changing benefits of Blue Ray. The day the mob figures this out I believe we'll see the return of organized labor, in force. These things work in cycles and, outside of Government, unions have been waining for about three decades in the US. If this happens the Elois among us that take low service sector wages for granted will fund it through higher prices. Reality has a way of confounding wealthy philosophers.
Seems like a pastime for TROTW; carefully craft a set of criteria tailored to accentuate some Asian or European nation's characteristics and then measure the US against it. A Geneva-based foundation attended primarily by European intellectuals, European media, the Leaders and representatives of European nations and assorted activists organizations conclude the US is now technologically inferior to selected EU nations.
Yawn.
Whatever happened to the notion that technological prowess was somehow a poor measure of true progress? I thought we had determined that social justice, economic fairness, non-Christian ratio, dietary fat, etc. were far better measures. I guess now that others are approaching or, indeed, surpassing the US technologically we'll be shedding that rubric.
Oh, and ScuttleMonkey, this tripe belongs under Politics, mkay? Thanks.
For those unwilling to read the forums (or who block all MS sites at their router), the problem relates to Vista making thumbnails of files, and trying to continue making them even when you have told it to delete a file, its not a transfer speed problem, and can be VERY easily stop gapped by disabling thumbnail views in the folder view settings:) Why must all GUI desktop vendors (and it's not just MS; Nautilus follows suit) default to this behavior? I really don't want every file "thumbnailed" by default. I turn this silly sh*t off the moment I discover it. These operations are slow, intrusive, error prone, annoying and a lovely vector for attacks as the simple presence of a obscure but known file type allows an attacker to exercise a spectrum of weaknesses. Who the **** is responsible for this? It has been going on at least a decade among GUI desktops and I'd like to know where it is written that the default behavior MUST be as retarded and defective as possible.
I understand thumbnails are extremely useful for handling images, marketing material etc. I rarely use it (maybe 5 times in as many years) but respect the value others place in it. I just need to know; would it really be too much to expect operators to explicitly turn on thumbnails for specific folders, rather than default to thumbs for everything? Do you really shotgun the entire file system with bits of media you later hunt down by panning around with your scrollbars?
Java is capable of runtime optimisations (sic) not possible with statically compiled languages like C++
Java VMs can't optimize away the cost of reference counting a garbage collected heap. The inability of Java to allocate objects on the stack (and avoid other costs) for short lived objects is also painful. The need to optimize GC performance leads to a large working set, which limits scalability (20MB hello world, etc.) The real world also tends to find ways of suffering poor startup performance, because a surprising amount of software does not actually work well from within a J2EE container.
Java isn't as efficient as C or C++. That's the cold, hard truth. I wish it were. I really, really do. It just isn't, and I won't play to its weakness. Instead, I play to its strengths, like this:
Java provides a Sandbox. That's one of the features Oxford is leveraging for its x86 emulator. Yes, you really can safely run and x86 emulator as an applet inside a browser. DOS inside a browser.
Java is portable. As of now, anything with a sufficient JVM can emulate x86. You can just take that for granted.
See? Far more pleasant. Ignore the trolls, use the right tool for the job, and enjoy low blood pressure.
The "we would have won if not for all the hippies" argument is not one that has ever held any water.
I've heard a few "hippies" take credit for ending the very conflict you use to make your case. So either they are right and it holds water, or you are right. In latter case the "hippies" are either confused or misguided, because they certainly seem to believe it.
I have no claim to the truth. I suspect those who claim they have. You appear to have a collection of answers you've stumbled on. Please, continue.
I have to agree; there is not enough information given to reach a credible conclusion. My read of the article and subsequent posts from pnutjam indicate that not enough data has been gathered. For instance, an SNMP query called "disk load" is too general to isolate specific performance bottlenecks.
Monitor and analyze a few common metrics on your servers. Physical Disk IO Bytes/sec can help you determine whether the FC HBAs are a bottleneck; a 2Gb/s HBA is good for (at most) 200MB/s either direction; are you actually seeing that rate? Is the server spending it's time waiting for the SAN to catch up? Observe the queue length to find out. Transfers/sec; how many IOPS are your servers demanding? A modern SAS disk is good for perhaps 150 IOPS. This is an optimum; various RAID configurations will serve to lower this, and SAN device caches obscure it further. Nevertheless, if you observe ~3000 physical IOPS across 20 fast disks (20 * 150) then you might conclude you lack sufficient spindles for your workload.
I dunno what "Big Sister" is and I'd suggest you probably need to look beyond it to find the bottleneck(s). Frankly I have yet to encounter IO performance problems with small system like this that don't yield to the built in monitoring tools your OS vendors provide; perfmon is sufficient for Windows, iostat (usually a part of a package called sysstat) on Linux. You can also aggregate these figures remotely. Configure these tools to gather meaningful data, then watch and think hard.
BTW, SAN isn't "overkill" for a dozen servers. Fault tolerance via clustering is only the most obvious reason why someone employ a SAN among a dozen servers. Not stranding large amounts of storage among multiple discrete, neglected SCSI devices is another. If you embrace and leverage the platform you'll probably discover you miss it when, for whatever reason, you're no longer working with it.
Not really interested in OEM installation of any specific distro. They'll do it wrong or pollute it as they do Windows. What good is that?
What I want is machines designed with components that are supported by mature Linux drivers. For almost any given component there are implementations that have good Linux driver support and others that don't. Select only components with good driver support, explicitly advertise this policy with adequate technical information, charge a modest premium for it if you must and give me the same hardware warranty as your other products. Seems fairly simple to me.
That's all I want. You can stop fussing about distros now. That and support lines for Linux; I won't be calling unless your hardware fails.
Can we please stop smuggling politics in via "Science" or YROL? Slashdot has a section for politics. It shouldn't but it does, and it is intended for this sort of story. Yes, many of us do opt out of Slashdot's politics section, so your pet issue will not get as many eyeballs. Please, accept it; this is not Science.
Why not save $$ and put either a PATA or SATA 1 controller?
What, precisely, makes you think also supplying PATA or an older SATA device would be cheaper? Perhaps it is cheaper for a manufacturer to not bother with multiple different SATAs, or fiddly, obsolete parallel buses and simply adopt one device across the board. In terms of R&D, supply chain, manufacturing and QA it is rather easy to imagine that obviating older standards is actually cheaper, but I don't know, because I don't manufacture millions of disks every year. How about you?
NASA leases facilities and performs contract work routinely. This is how they keep valuable people and justify maintaining plant and equipment for which they have no immediate need. The classic case is wind tunnel time; both the facility and the staff can be leased by private parties.
Griffen was recently lobbying Congress (see pages 7-8) about this; apparently he would like some red tape cut to permit NASA to do this with certain Shuttle facilities where it currently isn't allowed.
License OS X to all comers. If Microsoft can get $399 for it's bloatware, Apple can get it too, and I'd pay it, as would a lot of you, even sans support. I can imagine by 2010 more than half the geek desktops on Earth running it as primary. At that point all the doors open.
I am not buying Apple's (or anyone else's) proprietary stack. Reread that last sentence until it registers. It applies even if the platform is only proprietary in the legal sense, as is mostly the case with Apple's hardware. The full stack chip to terminal business model declined sometime in the mid 80s and it is not coming back. It persists in some boutique niches, where Apple lives today, and that is as far as it will ever get.
No one vendor can scale well enough to satisfy the entire world of computing. AMD exists to make x86 scale to the market. Nvidia and ATI carry on because the market wants options. There has always been a plethora of storage vendors and that isn't going to change, because that is what the market insists on. The market has no trouble finding room for multiple competitive, successful game console vendors. The epiphany required to regress all of this back to the days of the One True Vendor is fantasy.
There has never been a better time for a rebel to chuck a sledgehammer through the screen. Vista sucks and few of us really want it. Less than a quarter of Apple's revenue comes from desktop/laptop hardware (linky). Why not risk some of that hardware revenue and take 50% of Microsoft's OS market?
Re-evaluate this. I got your re-evaluation right here.
Months on end in an orbiting chunk of aerospace hardware, flickering lights, fans and radios... Imagine living inside your computer. Someone slops a little food on the wall and the bureaucrats call a meeting.
Let them have their foil wrapped treats. It is worth the risks. I'd rather have someone who would insist on it instead of roll over. Someone eating wasabi on the space station; how cool is that?
...and who the hell do you need stealth to fight anyway?
Why not ask the Eurofighter folks; they claim some degree of stealth design.
Stealth increases the difficulty of detecting a war plane. Whomever acquires the enemy first has a large advantage. All modern military aircraft must at least consider observability; this is hardly unique to the F-22.
Expecting the France to try and invasion any day now or something?
If history is any teacher, F-22s will be used to defend France.
Performance isn't everything, but then again, when you are 400 times slower than Java..
400 times slower? Still too efficient. Consider a Ruby implementation on the JVM and multiply inefficiencies! Should be thousands of times slower for those same benchmarks.
About JRuby; Sun recently hired two (both?) of the JRuby developers and progress has accelerated. The promise is a highly capable Ruby implementation running on a JVM. This, coupled with very recent changes to the JVM to facilitate scripting languages could lead to an interesting future. Sun is also leveraging the JVM for other language projects such as Fortress.
Apparently Sun isn't content to let Microsoft's CLR become the de facto standard bytecode runtime platform. I don't know whether it's possible to make Ruby performance on the JVM competitive with native implementations, but I am hoping.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a redundant way of saying 'HD-DVD'. In fact HD-DVD and Blue-ray use similar 405 nm 'blue' lasers.
Videophile hysteria preemption: yes, I know they aren't the same. Go take your meds.
You can grab an instrument and jam outside the Prancing Pony. Pretty avatars of other people stand around to listen, dance and make comments. Hard to resist that sometimes. Killer idea; allow players to rate performances. The game has me thinking.
Turbine has some good IP to work with. They've done it some credit. Work with the right NPC vendors enough and you'll learn scraps of Elvish. I've no doubt after sufficient play one will have a grasp of Middle Earth geography. It is certain that the effort placed on combat is matched elsewhere.
Tanks (guys with thick necks covered in metal) are functional. Champions own melee. Hunters don't. Hunters rely on a Legolas style repeating rifle called a Bow. Paper, scissors, rock.
Lag abounds occasionally. If I'm feeling it I know others are; plenty of hardware and bandwidth here. Not into WOW myself but by all evidence Blizzard has scalability figured out. I sense that LOTRO has some work to do there. If the game is a big hit they'll get it right.
The GUI needs some heavy lifting; it's confined by a lack of re-sizable windows. Perhaps customization will eventually permit it. The complaints that I have heard largely relate to issues stemming from the fact that in the beta you can't level over 30, so much of the game has yet to be experienced. The current beta caps your level at 15. Perhaps earlier test intervals allowed higher levels. I don't know. These games tend to change radically in higher level play, yet leveling here appears to be carefully progressive. I know the developers are working hard. I can feel it. Their still finishing some of the higher level content and deadlines have mounted.
Like other online fantasy games, it requires a commitment in time. If I find that I can walk away for a few weeks and still have fun when I get around to playing I'll be playing for years. If not well, there is always Warhammer.
I have this vision that one day, when Linux actually holds something approaching 50% of the market, Stallman will speak of free software and the planet with ring at the sound of his voice. I dream of the day when hardware vendors, such as Dell and HP, make decisions about what components to use based on the license they must adopt, because their millions of paying customers insist. The day when NVidia et al must choose between 50 million units and squat because they refuse to do The Right Thing (tm). The day when basically everything computing is built with Linux as a priority.
The idealists, as always, place the cart before the horse; integrity, then success. Pragmatists know that integrity is expensive. Ubuntu, as far as I can see after participating in all of this for 13 odd years, is the current best hope of actually achieving this. A little strategic pragmatism has its place as well.
I know a is true because (probably) like you, I'm watching a lot of online video, and I'm much more likely to do so if it's flash. I know b is true because clients of the company I'm contracting for have just (yesterday) decided to shift priorities and get a port of an existing ActiveX control running in Firefox, rather than develop the next release of the IE software.
Microsoft doesn't want WMV to become irrelevant simply because it doesn't work without IE. It doesn't address the cross platform issue but at least Firefox+Windows users won't be hindered.
We just saw a story here about Firefox holding 25% of the European market. You can't walk away from that when Adobe is lunching on your market share. No way.
Been looking forward to boards that don't have obsolete parallel connectors all over. Manufacturers; you can stop putting these connectors on new designs altogether. Don't even bother with some deprecated non-bootable vestige connectors. Just drop them. You could probably have stopped two years ago, although SATA DVD/CD-ROM drives did take a while to become widely available.
As for those who choose to insist on nursing obsolete drives; older designs will continue to remain available for what should be sufficient time. If you're really bent on running old drives with new motherboards you can also get a PCI adapter. You can also get PATA-to-SATA adapters. Don't bother; fast, reliable SATA drives are so cheap today you really shouldn't be puttering around with obsolete drives.
This is tiring. Do we need one of these for every single science story posted to slashdot?
Unfortunately, yes. The fact is there are a lot of delusional people 'speaking in tongues' every Sunday at their local congregation, readily absorbing whatever anti-intellectual claptrap is thrown their way. Ridicule provides mutual assurance among the rest of us that this thinking is aberrant. That keeps mainstream politicians from pandering to it in overt ways. Organized religion no longer has any effective means of moderating the worst of the Benny Hinn's or the fools that keep him on his pedestal, so it's left to the rest of us. Well aimed ridicule is highly effective and I suspect the alternative, pretending respect, could easily end up being less non-violent.
Optimizing for low noise and cost based on off-the-shelf parts led me to this setup. It isn't the lowest power setup I can imagine, but noise and power are directly proportional in most cases. My goal was a very low noise, low cost always-on headless server running Linux with fault tolerant storage, at least one Gb NIC and enough processor and RAM to use for common development tasks. Based on measurements performed here and some guess work I estimate this is pulling 40W at idle and I can't hear it a beyond a meter.
MB: ASUS M2NPV-VM. AM2 socket with on-board Nvidia video, SATA etc. Not running a discrete video card is a large power savings.
CPU: Athlon 64 3500+ AM2 Lima core. This is a recent single core CPU from AMD. Easily obtainable from Newegg et al. The nice thing about it is the low TDP of 45W. This approaches portable CPUs while not costing so much. Stable at 1.2V (perhaps lower if I tried) and works well with cpufreq.
Case: Antec NSK3300 MicroATX. Small and quiet. Uses a high efficiency 300W power supply with a non-standard form factor. I doubt this machine can pull enough juice to get the fan moving at full rate. It's silent 99% of the time.
The rest: 1GB of "value ram", a pair of quiet 250GB WD disks and a Intel Gb PCI NIC I got somewhere. If you want to save more power run 1 disk, cut the RAM in half and don't add a fast NIC. Probably just under 30W at that point.
Ya but is it 100% compatible with MS Office. Cause if its not I can see why a lot of companies would think twice about making the switch.
While I agree with you about companies not switching, remember that there are other vectors for OO success. Where I am, in the world of VC funded startups and contractors, OO has become a defacto standard; nobody here pisses away money on word processors or spreadsheets. It all leads to PDF anyhow. Microsoft's stuff is too expensive, isolated to one platform and a security problem. OO is cheap, fast, portable and more than sufficient.
Pft.
I must have missed the other three headlines: US Remains Technology King
o_O you're saying that means this story belongs under Politics? Yes, of course. The WEF is an international pressure group run by politicians and wealthy institutions for political ends. Anything coming from the WEF, the G8, ASF, WTO, etc. should by definition be automatically filed under politics. My assertion that politics is the correct label was separated from the rest for a reason; to prevent those with poor reading comprehension from wrongly conflating it with my
Isn't it a lot more likely that their Windows boxe(s|n) just got zombified?
You're probably right; spammers are among the most aggressive attackers and most of the F1000 have large distributed networks where a (hopefully) small number of systems are going to be vulnerable at any moment. On the other hand, these companies can and do pay for high quality and high capacity pipes. They are also far less suspect as a source of spam, and the ISPs will certainly be reluctant ($$) to take unilateral action to deal with suspect traffic (as some do with their residential customers.)
For all of these reasons F1000 hosts are many times more effective as spam zombies than your average asymmetric DSL host, so I have no problem with people exposing carelessness or neglect among these companies. They have the resources and talent to prevent this sort of abuse. If they're not, a little bad press might help. Earlier today we all learned that some 40+ million credit/debit card accounts got downloaded from commercial IT systems. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that those same companies have a long history of unwittingly contributing bandwidth to spammers.
The American Dream as I understand it... There aren't any philosophers making employment decisions at Circuit City; they're bean counters counting beans and I know they aren't anticipating the consequences of all this. They're trying to reduce costs and stumbled on a clever technique; mass purge of anyone making more than the minimum the market will bear and get new, cheaper floor drones. I'm betting others will quickly follow suit.
WalMart has been doing this for years; sneeze at the wrong moment and you're gone. One at a time. The churn keeps the payroll cheap. It's the same thing but the lack of headline grabbing mass firings may be part of the reason Circuit City does $11G a year in revenue and WalMart is up around a quarter trillion.
The service sector in the US has never managed to get organized. I suspect more than a few of the simultaneously unemployed Circuit City folks might decide they could do well to spend some of their free time at something productive, like have a meeting. Once Best Buy's stakeholders compel that business to follow Circuit City's example, those "expensive" former employees might discover they aren't alone.
Working a sales floor in a Circuit City doesn't involve much talent, but you must have a reasonable grasp of English. These jobs can't just be outsourced to India or filled by fresh immigrants that can't expound on the life changing benefits of Blue Ray. The day the mob figures this out I believe we'll see the return of organized labor, in force. These things work in cycles and, outside of Government, unions have been waining for about three decades in the US. If this happens the Elois among us that take low service sector wages for granted will fund it through higher prices. Reality has a way of confounding wealthy philosophers.
Seems like a pastime for TROTW; carefully craft a set of criteria tailored to accentuate some Asian or European nation's characteristics and then measure the US against it. A Geneva-based foundation attended primarily by European intellectuals, European media, the Leaders and representatives of European nations and assorted activists organizations conclude the US is now technologically inferior to selected EU nations.
Yawn.
Whatever happened to the notion that technological prowess was somehow a poor measure of true progress? I thought we had determined that social justice, economic fairness, non-Christian ratio, dietary fat, etc. were far better measures. I guess now that others are approaching or, indeed, surpassing the US technologically we'll be shedding that rubric.
Oh, and ScuttleMonkey, this tripe belongs under Politics, mkay? Thanks.
I understand thumbnails are extremely useful for handling images, marketing material etc. I rarely use it (maybe 5 times in as many years) but respect the value others place in it. I just need to know; would it really be too much to expect operators to explicitly turn on thumbnails for specific folders, rather than default to thumbs for everything? Do you really shotgun the entire file system with bits of media you later hunt down by panning around with your scrollbars?
Really?
Java is capable of runtime optimisations (sic) not possible with statically compiled languages like C++
Java VMs can't optimize away the cost of reference counting a garbage collected heap. The inability of Java to allocate objects on the stack (and avoid other costs) for short lived objects is also painful. The need to optimize GC performance leads to a large working set, which limits scalability (20MB hello world, etc.) The real world also tends to find ways of suffering poor startup performance, because a surprising amount of software does not actually work well from within a J2EE container.
Java isn't as efficient as C or C++. That's the cold, hard truth. I wish it were. I really, really do. It just isn't, and I won't play to its weakness. Instead, I play to its strengths, like this:
Java provides a Sandbox. That's one of the features Oxford is leveraging for its x86 emulator. Yes, you really can safely run and x86 emulator as an applet inside a browser. DOS inside a browser.
Java is portable. As of now, anything with a sufficient JVM can emulate x86. You can just take that for granted.
See? Far more pleasant. Ignore the trolls, use the right tool for the job, and enjoy low blood pressure.
The "we would have won if not for all the hippies" argument is not one that has ever held any water.
I've heard a few "hippies" take credit for ending the very conflict you use to make your case. So either they are right and it holds water, or you are right. In latter case the "hippies" are either confused or misguided, because they certainly seem to believe it.
I have no claim to the truth. I suspect those who claim they have. You appear to have a collection of answers you've stumbled on. Please, continue.
I have to agree; there is not enough information given to reach a credible conclusion. My read of the article and subsequent posts from pnutjam indicate that not enough data has been gathered. For instance, an SNMP query called "disk load" is too general to isolate specific performance bottlenecks.
Monitor and analyze a few common metrics on your servers. Physical Disk IO Bytes/sec can help you determine whether the FC HBAs are a bottleneck; a 2Gb/s HBA is good for (at most) 200MB/s either direction; are you actually seeing that rate? Is the server spending it's time waiting for the SAN to catch up? Observe the queue length to find out. Transfers/sec; how many IOPS are your servers demanding? A modern SAS disk is good for perhaps 150 IOPS. This is an optimum; various RAID configurations will serve to lower this, and SAN device caches obscure it further. Nevertheless, if you observe ~3000 physical IOPS across 20 fast disks (20 * 150) then you might conclude you lack sufficient spindles for your workload.
I dunno what "Big Sister" is and I'd suggest you probably need to look beyond it to find the bottleneck(s). Frankly I have yet to encounter IO performance problems with small system like this that don't yield to the built in monitoring tools your OS vendors provide; perfmon is sufficient for Windows, iostat (usually a part of a package called sysstat) on Linux. You can also aggregate these figures remotely. Configure these tools to gather meaningful data, then watch and think hard.
BTW, SAN isn't "overkill" for a dozen servers. Fault tolerance via clustering is only the most obvious reason why someone employ a SAN among a dozen servers. Not stranding large amounts of storage among multiple discrete, neglected SCSI devices is another. If you embrace and leverage the platform you'll probably discover you miss it when, for whatever reason, you're no longer working with it.
Not really interested in OEM installation of any specific distro. They'll do it wrong or pollute it as they do Windows. What good is that?
What I want is machines designed with components that are supported by mature Linux drivers. For almost any given component there are implementations that have good Linux driver support and others that don't. Select only components with good driver support, explicitly advertise this policy with adequate technical information, charge a modest premium for it if you must and give me the same hardware warranty as your other products. Seems fairly simple to me.
That's all I want. You can stop fussing about distros now. That and support lines for Linux; I won't be calling unless your hardware fails.
He may mean our interpretation is cartoonish, but it doesn't parse that way.
Can we please stop smuggling politics in via "Science" or YROL? Slashdot has a section for politics. It shouldn't but it does, and it is intended for this sort of story. Yes, many of us do opt out of Slashdot's politics section, so your pet issue will not get as many eyeballs. Please, accept it; this is not Science.
Why not save $$ and put either a PATA or SATA 1 controller?
What, precisely, makes you think also supplying PATA or an older SATA device would be cheaper? Perhaps it is cheaper for a manufacturer to not bother with multiple different SATAs, or fiddly, obsolete parallel buses and simply adopt one device across the board. In terms of R&D, supply chain, manufacturing and QA it is rather easy to imagine that obviating older standards is actually cheaper, but I don't know, because I don't manufacture millions of disks every year. How about you?
NASA leases facilities and performs contract work routinely. This is how they keep valuable people and justify maintaining plant and equipment for which they have no immediate need. The classic case is wind tunnel time; both the facility and the staff can be leased by private parties.
Griffen was recently lobbying Congress (see pages 7-8) about this; apparently he would like some red tape cut to permit NASA to do this with certain Shuttle facilities where it currently isn't allowed.
License OS X to all comers. If Microsoft can get $399 for it's bloatware, Apple can get it too, and I'd pay it, as would a lot of you, even sans support. I can imagine by 2010 more than half the geek desktops on Earth running it as primary. At that point all the doors open.
I am not buying Apple's (or anyone else's) proprietary stack. Reread that last sentence until it registers. It applies even if the platform is only proprietary in the legal sense, as is mostly the case with Apple's hardware. The full stack chip to terminal business model declined sometime in the mid 80s and it is not coming back. It persists in some boutique niches, where Apple lives today, and that is as far as it will ever get.
No one vendor can scale well enough to satisfy the entire world of computing. AMD exists to make x86 scale to the market. Nvidia and ATI carry on because the market wants options. There has always been a plethora of storage vendors and that isn't going to change, because that is what the market insists on. The market has no trouble finding room for multiple competitive, successful game console vendors. The epiphany required to regress all of this back to the days of the One True Vendor is fantasy.
There has never been a better time for a rebel to chuck a sledgehammer through the screen. Vista sucks and few of us really want it. Less than a quarter of Apple's revenue comes from desktop/laptop hardware (linky). Why not risk some of that hardware revenue and take 50% of Microsoft's OS market?
Re-evaluate this. I got your re-evaluation right here.
Months on end in an orbiting chunk of aerospace hardware, flickering lights, fans and radios... Imagine living inside your computer. Someone slops a little food on the wall and the bureaucrats call a meeting.
Let them have their foil wrapped treats. It is worth the risks. I'd rather have someone who would insist on it instead of roll over. Someone eating wasabi on the space station; how cool is that?
Happy Friday.
We will happily sell y'all Eurofighters...
...and who the hell do you need stealth to fight anyway?
Why not ask the Eurofighter folks; they claim some degree of stealth design.
Stealth increases the difficulty of detecting a war plane. Whomever acquires the enemy first has a large advantage. All modern military aircraft must at least consider observability; this is hardly unique to the F-22.
Expecting the France to try and invasion any day now or something?
If history is any teacher, F-22s will be used to defend France.
Performance isn't everything, but then again, when you are 400 times slower than Java..
400 times slower? Still too efficient. Consider a Ruby implementation on the JVM and multiply inefficiencies! Should be thousands of times slower for those same benchmarks.
About JRuby; Sun recently hired two (both?) of the JRuby developers and progress has accelerated. The promise is a highly capable Ruby implementation running on a JVM. This, coupled with very recent changes to the JVM to facilitate scripting languages could lead to an interesting future. Sun is also leveraging the JVM for other language projects such as Fortress.
Apparently Sun isn't content to let Microsoft's CLR become the de facto standard bytecode runtime platform. I don't know whether it's possible to make Ruby performance on the JVM competitive with native implementations, but I am hoping.