Correct. To be specific, 17 USC 512(g), which is the DMCA section on counternotification, is specifically mentioned in the email the blogger got from YouTube. The email requests that any counternotification be sent to the address "DMCA Complaints, YouTube, Inc.," etc.
poot_rootbeer asks why all the comments are in one table, when the data access pattern is such that 90% of our hits are on only the most recent entries in that table.
The answer is that we used to do it this way but it's a huge pain. In 2000 we converted from having two tables for 'stories', recent and archived, and merged them together. The performance hit was not big, and it made the code so much simpler it was a no-brainer.
It's the database's job to cache properly whether we split the table or not, and the database does that just fine. The only performance problem could be when there is a rush of inserts, or updates to the same sets of rows, spanning both newer and older portions of the table, and that just doesn't happen.
If we did want to do this we wouldn't split the tables manually; the code complexity is too high a price to pay. In MySQL 5.0 we would use a MERGE engine, which has issues of its own but would involve smaller changes to our code. That's still not worth it for us. What we're probably going to do is wait for MySQL 5.1 to get out of beta and then do some performance testing on tables partitioned by date and see if that gains us anything. For example, a SELECT on our comments table could be limited with a WHERE clause to only retrieve rows with a date >= the discussion object's date, which for 90% of our queries MySQL 5.1 could optimize to only look at the most recent partition. If the gains turn out to be significant, then since partitioning involves very limited code changes, we'll probably do that. Generally speaking, though, database performance is not a problem for us. So far our main bottlenecks have been CPU and RAM on the webheads. As long as we don't do anything stupid our database performance has been fine, though, as today proves, we are quite capable of being stupid.
Some of you are asking which comment it was that got the cid 16,777,216. The answer is that none did. For redundancy, Slashdot is now running multiple-master replication which skips values for auto-increment. Our db-1 assigns odd-numbered primary key IDs, and db-2 assigns even-numbered. Right now writes are going to db-1 so newly created rows will have only odd IDs.
The comment that got 2**24-1 was this one, if anyone cares:)
Sorry about the inconvenience, everyone.
Re:/. should fix the tagging system or trash it
on
10 Reasons To Buy a DSLR
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As our tags FAQ makes clear, abuse of tags will result in that user's tags having lessened or zero impact on our system. By the time you read this, the silly tags should be purged from this story and the silly taggers' ability to affect our system reduced.
If so, it kind of makes the case that Alexa data is less than useful.
But that's not all that's going on. In Nov-Dec 2005 it shows Slashdot's traffic roughly tripling, then settling down to roughly double its previous level, in the space of about a month. I have our traffic logs from that time. They were basically flat. All of the variance was Alexa anomalies.
That sounds nice in theory, but it would annoy so many of our moderators that they would waste their mod points just to get back to normal viewing. Or would uncheck the "willing to moderate" checkbox or just wouldn't log in at all.
AutoCAD (1982) - This is the program that replaced the drafting board. Huge increase in productivity. Ever ink in a drawing by hand? Redraw a drawing to make changes? Engineering companies used to have acres of people doing that stuff. No more.
Robert Heinlein anticipated this in "The Door Into Summer" (1956/7), by the way. Here's the narrator's description of what ended up being called "Drafting Dan":
By the time I got to Miles's house I was whistling. I had quit worrying about that precious pair and had worked out in my head, in the last fifteen miles, two brand-new gadgets, either one of which could make me rich. One was a drafting machine, to be operated like an electric typewriter. I guessed that there must be easily fifty thousand engineers in the U.S. alone bending over drafting boards every day and hating it, because it gets you in your kidneys and ruins your eyes. Not that they didn't want to design -- they did want to -- but physically it was much too hard work.
This gismo would let them sit down in a big easy chair and tap keys and have the picture unfold on an easel above the keyboard. Depress three keys simultaneously and have a horizontal line appear just where you want it; depress another key and you fillet it in with a vertical line; depress two keys and then two more in succecssion and draw a line at an exact slant.
Cripes, for a small additional cost as an accessory, I could add a second easel, let an architect design in isometric (the only easy way to design), and have the second picture come out in perfect perspective rendering without his even looking at it. Why, I could even set the thing to pull floor plans and elevations right out of the isometric.
The beauty of it was that it could be made almost entirely with standard parts, most of them available at radio shops and camera stores. All but the control board, that is, and I was sure I could bread-board a rig for that by buying an electric typewriter, tearing its guts out, and hooking the keys to operate these other circuits. A month to make a primitive model, six weeks more to chase bugs...
Proprietary-loving? OK, just for the record, of Google Code Hosting and Slash, which is open-source?:)
(That is so not fair of me. Google would probably love to open-source Hosting, but, as described in the session a little while ago, in order to make it as tightly integrated with Bigtable and search and mail and everything, they really can't release it without releasing a ton of their core proprietary code too. Which obviously they can't.)
Doc Searls gave a tutorial yesterday that I wanted to go to but had a conflict (darnit). I haven't actually read anything of his on this, but the idea of treating your markets more like conversations makes a lot of sense to me...
Good point, thanks. I updated that part of the story to link to your comment. As I understand it, Flickr is refusing to send data to Zooomr because Zooomr hasn't committed to allowing its users to send data back to Flickr. Maybe that kind of reciprocity (which is the term Tim O'Reilly used in his keynote a couple of hours ago) should be part of what we think of as "open services" -- in which case it's Zooomr who's not being friendly!
That's a good point, I could have been more precise. What I am worried about could come to pass if Mono becomes a popular platform for significant Linux applications. Microsoft could suddenly "realize" that it violates patents, and shut it down with the threat of lawsuits. The applications would go away, creating powerful incentive for people to switch from Linux to Windows (both for the functionality at the time, and because Linux would be perceived as a less certain and viable operating system). Microsoft may not have a direct interest in Mono but it could certainly have a financial incentive to cripple Linux on the desktop.
Bad: Minutes before final impact, the astronauts blow up the second comet, and we are treated to a spectacular light show.
Good: Aaaaarrgg! This was the Biggest Baddest Astronomy in the movie. Blowing up a comet does no good at all, and might even make matters worse. Just because the pieces are smaller doesn't mean you have changed anything. If every piece still impacts the Earth (by that I mean actually is stopped by the Earth or its atmosphere) you are still dumping all the kinetic energy of The Comet into the Earth's atmosphere! That's a HUGE amount of energy, dumped in practically all at once. It would still create a massive explosion, dwarfing all of our nuclear bombs combined. Even if you could somehow soften the blow, all that heat would wreak havoc with our weather. Some people actually think it might be better to simply let a big one hit rather than blow it up, because the Earth itself can absorb the energy of impact better than the atmosphere can. This is still argued, though. I'd prefer not to try any experiments!
That's true. I'd hope the "men" in the space stations would be able to shatter the asteroid a very long ways from Earth. In that case the pebble-sized chunks would be widely dispersed by the time their expanding orbits intersected Earth's orbit, and perhaps only a small percentage of the asteroid's original mass would burn up in our atmosphere. One could be generous and assume Asimov meant this when he wrote "even if [the pebbles] continued on course..."
Hey, I'm glad I helped inspire you and your kid. I think "Asimov on Science," "Asimov on Chemistry," and this book inspired me to look at science as something wonderful to enjoy. By the time "Cosmos" came along a few years later, Asimov had already coaxed me into that world.
The other day I was skimming through a book I very much enjoyed as a boy: Asimov on Astronomy.
Chapter 2 is about asteroids and comets that may impact the Earth, and how much damage they would do. He concludes with:
In the future, perhaps, things may be different. The men in the space stations that will eventually be set up about the Earth may find themselves, among other things, on the watch for the Earth-grazers, something like the iceberg watch conducted in northern waters since the sinking of the Titanic (but much more difficult of course).
The rocks, boulders, and mountains of space may be painstakingly tagged and numbered. Their changing orbits may be kept under steady watch. Then, a hundred years from now, perhaps, or a thousand, some computer on such a station will sound the alarm: "Collision orbit!"
Then a counterattack, kept in waiting for all that time would be set in motion. The dangerous rock would be met with an H-bomb (or, by that time, something more appropriate) designer to trigger off on collision. The rock would glow and vaporize and change from a boulder to a conglomeration of pebbles.
Even if they continued on course, the threat would be lifted. Earth would merely be treated to a spectacular (and harmless) shower of shooting stars.
Asimov was writing in 1966 but still should have known better. The kinetic energy of a shattered object is the same as the intact object. The only difference is that the energy will all be shed in the atmosphere instead of mostly in the lithosphere. Human suffering might be ameliorated somewhat but unless the trajectory of the pebbles is changed, the atmosphere is still getting superheated with disasterous local, and possibly global, effects. If you're standing under the shooting-star display, then like any nearby sand, you're getting cooked.
Yes, this ruined the ending of Deep Impact for me. Yes, I'm a geek.
We had to make a change to our 'comments' table schema that would have locked up the site if we had allowed full access. At over 15M rows, this takes some time. Sorry about that.
Huh? No, the "bridge to nowhere" would go from Ketchikan (population 8,000) to Gravina Island (population less than 50). If agriculture on Gravina Island has anything to do with it, that's news to me; the officially defined need says nothing about farming the island's mountain ranges. What probably is related is that your governor's wife owns 33 acres on that island. I can understand why you might be unaware of that fact -- he failed to disclose it as required by state law.
Alaskan politicians may be working on a useless Anchorage-Wasilla bridge also, but that's not that famous "bridge to nowhere."
Slashdot Mirror
Correct. To be specific, 17 USC 512(g), which is the DMCA section on counternotification, is specifically mentioned in the email the blogger got from YouTube. The email requests that any counternotification be sent to the address "DMCA Complaints, YouTube, Inc.," etc.
poot_rootbeer asks why all the comments are in one table, when the data access pattern is such that 90% of our hits are on only the most recent entries in that table.
The answer is that we used to do it this way but it's a huge pain. In 2000 we converted from having two tables for 'stories', recent and archived, and merged them together. The performance hit was not big, and it made the code so much simpler it was a no-brainer.
It's the database's job to cache properly whether we split the table or not, and the database does that just fine. The only performance problem could be when there is a rush of inserts, or updates to the same sets of rows, spanning both newer and older portions of the table, and that just doesn't happen.
If we did want to do this we wouldn't split the tables manually; the code complexity is too high a price to pay. In MySQL 5.0 we would use a MERGE engine, which has issues of its own but would involve smaller changes to our code. That's still not worth it for us. What we're probably going to do is wait for MySQL 5.1 to get out of beta and then do some performance testing on tables partitioned by date and see if that gains us anything. For example, a SELECT on our comments table could be limited with a WHERE clause to only retrieve rows with a date >= the discussion object's date, which for 90% of our queries MySQL 5.1 could optimize to only look at the most recent partition. If the gains turn out to be significant, then since partitioning involves very limited code changes, we'll probably do that. Generally speaking, though, database performance is not a problem for us. So far our main bottlenecks have been CPU and RAM on the webheads. As long as we don't do anything stupid our database performance has been fine, though, as today proves, we are quite capable of being stupid.
[ Parent ]
Some of you are asking which comment it was that got the cid 16,777,216. The answer is that none did. For redundancy, Slashdot is now running multiple-master replication which skips values for auto-increment. Our db-1 assigns odd-numbered primary key IDs, and db-2 assigns even-numbered. Right now writes are going to db-1 so newly created rows will have only odd IDs.
The comment that got 2**24-1 was this one, if anyone cares :)
Sorry about the inconvenience, everyone.
As our tags FAQ makes clear, abuse of tags will result in that user's tags having lessened or zero impact on our system. By the time you read this, the silly tags should be purged from this story and the silly taggers' ability to affect our system reduced.
Incorrect, there's an audit of that. Watch the overview, esp. the 2nd part of introduction and "security."
If so, it kind of makes the case that Alexa data is less than useful.
But that's not all that's going on. In Nov-Dec 2005 it shows Slashdot's traffic roughly tripling, then settling down to roughly double its previous level, in the space of about a month. I have our traffic logs from that time. They were basically flat. All of the variance was Alexa anomalies.
... zero
That sounds nice in theory, but it would annoy so many of our moderators that they would waste their mod points just to get back to normal viewing. Or would uncheck the "willing to moderate" checkbox or just wouldn't log in at all.
See slashdot.org/tags for one look at how people are tagging sitewide. And there'll be more with tags coming...
It's an old joke. Not even a joke. More sort of a thing that some computer programmers say sometimes and nod wisely to make their point.
Robert Heinlein anticipated this in "The Door Into Summer" (1956/7), by the way. Here's the narrator's description of what ended up being called "Drafting Dan":
...what will mother very tenderly make a jelly sandwich under none of?
Calling Ceres a planet Bode's well.
Yes! Oh, the humanity!
Proprietary-loving? OK, just for the record, of Google Code Hosting and Slash, which is open-source? :)
(That is so not fair of me. Google would probably love to open-source Hosting, but, as described in the session a little while ago, in order to make it as tightly integrated with Bigtable and search and mail and everything, they really can't release it without releasing a ton of their core proprietary code too. Which obviously they can't.)
Hi. I'm sitting in the room with you :)
Nobody yet :)
Doc Searls gave a tutorial yesterday that I wanted to go to but had a conflict (darnit). I haven't actually read anything of his on this, but the idea of treating your markets more like conversations makes a lot of sense to me...
Good point, thanks. I updated that part of the story to link to your comment. As I understand it, Flickr is refusing to send data to Zooomr because Zooomr hasn't committed to allowing its users to send data back to Flickr. Maybe that kind of reciprocity (which is the term Tim O'Reilly used in his keynote a couple of hours ago) should be part of what we think of as "open services" -- in which case it's Zooomr who's not being friendly!
That's a good point, I could have been more precise. What I am worried about could come to pass if Mono becomes a popular platform for significant Linux applications. Microsoft could suddenly "realize" that it violates patents, and shut it down with the threat of lawsuits. The applications would go away, creating powerful incentive for people to switch from Linux to Windows (both for the functionality at the time, and because Linux would be perceived as a less certain and viable operating system). Microsoft may not have a direct interest in Mono but it could certainly have a financial incentive to cripple Linux on the desktop.
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy: SPOILERS: Review: Deep Impact
That's true. I'd hope the "men" in the space stations would be able to shatter the asteroid a very long ways from Earth. In that case the pebble-sized chunks would be widely dispersed by the time their expanding orbits intersected Earth's orbit, and perhaps only a small percentage of the asteroid's original mass would burn up in our atmosphere. One could be generous and assume Asimov meant this when he wrote "even if [the pebbles] continued on course..."
Hey, I'm glad I helped inspire you and your kid. I think "Asimov on Science," "Asimov on Chemistry," and this book inspired me to look at science as something wonderful to enjoy. By the time "Cosmos" came along a few years later, Asimov had already coaxed me into that world.
The other day I was skimming through a book I very much enjoyed as a boy: Asimov on Astronomy.
Chapter 2 is about asteroids and comets that may impact the Earth, and how much damage they would do. He concludes with:
Asimov was writing in 1966 but still should have known better. The kinetic energy of a shattered object is the same as the intact object. The only difference is that the energy will all be shed in the atmosphere instead of mostly in the lithosphere. Human suffering might be ameliorated somewhat but unless the trajectory of the pebbles is changed, the atmosphere is still getting superheated with disasterous local, and possibly global, effects. If you're standing under the shooting-star display, then like any nearby sand, you're getting cooked.
Yes, this ruined the ending of Deep Impact for me. Yes, I'm a geek.
We had to make a change to our 'comments' table schema that would have locked up the site if we had allowed full access. At over 15M rows, this takes some time. Sorry about that.
Ever seen Cinema Paradiso?
Huh? No, the "bridge to nowhere" would go from Ketchikan (population 8,000) to Gravina Island (population less than 50). If agriculture on Gravina Island has anything to do with it, that's news to me; the officially defined need says nothing about farming the island's mountain ranges. What probably is related is that your governor's wife owns 33 acres on that island. I can understand why you might be unaware of that fact -- he failed to disclose it as required by state law.
Alaskan politicians may be working on a useless Anchorage-Wasilla bridge also, but that's not that famous "bridge to nowhere."