CSA == "Superior Audiovisual Council" wtf, who made this up? Didn't strike them as sounding somwhat peculiar ?
Audiovisual High Council would make more sense.
I don't check in to/. much any more, although from time to time an article on the daily mail recap catches my attention and I click in. These days I'm pretty impressed by the signal/noise ratio. Most of the trolls seem to have moved on to greener pastures. So anyway, thanks for everything.
Hypocricy? I don't think this word means what you think it means. Could you explain what you think is so hypocritical about this design decision?
From what I understand, the Perl6 operators were chosen according to Huffman compression principles. Frequently used operators became shorter, less frequently used operators became longer.
The bare colon operator turned out to be much more useful elsewhere. The dash-arrow operator was initially borrowed from C++, but these days, most dynamic languages all use dot for the same purpose.
This sound more like pragmatism than anything else.
ok, in that case I wouldn't blame them if they lifted the minimum TTL that they choose to honor to be an hour. But the OP is talking about 2 weeks. That's abusing it big time.
More to the point, if some people set their TTLs to 5 minutes, who cares? If, to a first approximation, you never query them, each time a request comes in you'll have to go and fetch it anyway.
/me notes in passing that Google's TTL is a mere 2 hours...
You were right the first time. Desmond Bagley wrote "The Enemy" and it featured a model railway that computed genetic manipulations.
It was bought by the main character at an auction, for 31000 pounds. When his boss heard that he had bought a train set for such an ungodly amount of money he said "You expect me to be able to clear that through Expenses?" To which the character replied "Call it by its real name, a computing device."
'Twas a fine yarn that story. Nearly as good as Running Blind.
heh, I misread what you wrote. If Australian weather information is anything like the rest of the world, I parsed that sentence as
blockquote> because in Australia most weather information is fact free
Last week I wrote some Perl to process an mbox mail folder. I just wanted a quick and dirty way to view its contents in a web page. A couple of CPAN modules and a few dozen lines of code and thing was done. Then I started to get fancy and dealing with stuff like embedded MIME-encoded GIF images. This was pretty simple to do, but I made a mistake. Once I had the decoded GIF data lying around, I wrote it to the HTML file of the current e-mail message, rather than writing it to a seperate file and writting <img src="foo.gif"> in the HTML file.
I was viewing the results with Firefox 0.10.1. When it got to a message with an embedded GIF, with a big slodge of GIF binary data sitting in the middle of the page, Firefox either just sat there spinning its hourglass, or crashed and burned.
Then I looked at the same file with IE, and the GIF image showed up. I was puzzled for a while until I noticed that in the directory where I had created the file, no GIF files had been created. It is of course arguable that IE should not have attempted to render the GIF image from the binary data sitting in the middle of the page, but it did so without complaint. Not rendering it would also be acceptable.
Firefox, on the other hand, has a number of better alternatives to crashing or hanging. Should it display gibberish (like when you forget to set up your bz2 association correctly) or nothing, or the image? I don't know, and don't particularly care about which course of action is taken. Anything is better than crashing, especially when IE doesn't.
Here's one thing Postgres lacks: table space management. You can arrange to put you index files on one filesystem, and your data files on another. This is a good thing for performance.
But in Postgres, you can't create a table or index and specify where you want the backing file to go. You have to create it, then halt the database, move the files over, adjust the config, and start the db again. This does not scale. And remember, it is only in recent versions of Pg that let you ALTER COLUMN. That's a vital feature for 24x7x365 operations.
And then there's the issue of partitioning tables across different devices. I don't think that's doable in any way today with Pg. But hey, it's a great DB other than that. I know people using it with tables containing 60 billion records and it runs just fine.
There are already reference libraries available that work with 64 bit time values, such as TAI (Temps Atomique International). See libtai for more info. I like the following quote: "Under many cosmological theories, the integers under 2^63 are adequate to cover the entire expected lifetime of the universe; in this case no extensions will be necessary."
The main problem is crossing the before/after boundary of converting from 32- to 64-bit times. All of a sudden you need two sets of programs to deal with data, depending on whether it was written before or after the switch. Think backups. Think binary database dumps. Panic.
Actually, according to my stats, just about nothing. Oh sure, I get a lot of spam, and a lot of it appears to come from AOL, but it doesn't.
People invent bogus From lines, forge Return-Paths, add fake Received lines, set up PTR records in the DNS of their own netblock to resolve to AOL names.
For instance, one of the latest so-called AOL spams in my spamdump looks like this:
From: "Clement Crow" <o8utyszvc0n@aol.com>
Subject: Buy Phentermine, Viagra & more with NO PRESCRIPTION! US doctors and pharmacies! Overnight Shipping!
The only Received line I trust comes from my own MTA, and it says
Received: from host73.200-82-37.telecom.net.ar (unknown [200.82.37.73]) by {myhost.mydomain} (Postfix) with SMTP id DCFF8ADC4 for {me@mydomain}; Thu, 6 Mar 2003 02:44:15
So this is some clown sending me stuff from Argentina trying to pass themselves off as AOL. Not that I'm trying to defend them, but they're convientient shields (along with hotmail.com and yahoo.com) for spammers to hide behind.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have check out Tarproxy to see about integrating it into my inflict-pain-on-spammers setup.
That's not quite true. Is is a fact that many Australian trees have seed pods that need the flash of fire to open them up. The layer of ash on the ground helps the seedling on its way.
But in a firestorm of this intensity, as with most recent Australian bushfires, there is nothing left, no seed, no pod, no tree... it's all turned to ash.
Added to this the fact that the intense heat literally sterilises the soil down through a couple of centimetres, wiping out all organic life, means that recovery takes a long, long time.
Quite literally, after such an event, things are never the same again. Different species recolonise the newly-razed land, and the original species don't have a chance.
Talking about failed technically superior products, does anyone here remember National Semiconductor's 32032 and 32332 chips?
I had a friend who's brother bought one on an expansion card for his IBM PC-XT. I think it was made by Microway, but my memory is a bit hazy now. Man that thing could fly. The architecture was a thing of beauty... writing assembler was a really enjoyable experience. Everything was just... right.
Unfortunately they had bad problems with reliabilty and bugs in the first couple of iterations, and by the time they ramped up to cruising speed the market had passed them by.
I learnt assembler, Fortran and C on that board, and it took me years to see its performance matched by Intel's 80386.
This is standard MRTG operating procedure. If MRTG can't log information from a device, it will continue to emit the last good value it received. This is on the principle that a long horizontal line in the middle of the Y-axis will be far more noticeable (and therefore nudge you to do something about it), more so than a line that can't be distinguished from the origin.
So what you're seeing is the correct behaviour: MRTG is indicating that it can't communicate with the device. You can of course configure this to make the line drop to zero, but in practice when you've used MRTG for a while you learn to appreciate this feature.
The worst problem about Diesel engines is the
noise. At cruising speed the racket is terrible.
They're ideal for agricultural vehicles, but not
for the casual road user.
Soot remains the big problem. Sure, this can be
reduced by using things like selenium-based filters,
but the jury is still out as to whether the cure is
worse than what it sets out to fix. (What does
widespread selenium dispersal mean to the environment?
Diesel motors were originally a handy method for
disposing of all the garbage at the end of the refinery
process that is uneconomically viable to deal with. The
European motor companies have spent a small fortune over
the past couple of decades improving the Diesel engine.
Peugeot is a
company that springs to mind. They have invested billions,
and have successfully lobbied the French government to
keep taxes low on distillate so that they may sell more
engines and thus recoup the investments.
They have been so successful in promoting Diesel
technology that France currently has a deficit in distillate
production and is obliged to import the damned stuff in order
to cover domestic demand.
Another problem is that in order to get high performance
out of a Diesel engine the engineers have long resorted to
adding turbochargers... which adds to the complexity of the
engine. Even without a turbo, Diesel engines remain complex,
finicky beasts to maintain. Even with subsidised fuel
prices, you have to rack up a lot of mileage for it to
be economically viable.
A better alternative? Liquid Petroleum Gas (a.k.a.
LPG).
These figures are pretty impressive. [...] 8 miles per second.
8 miles a second.
That's not unusual. Just remember, the thing
that Voyager 10 flew very close to a planet or two that weighed several trillion trillion trillion tons. In the gravitational interaction between Voyager and, say, Jupiter, some of Jupiter's momentum was lost, which was Voyager's gain. The loss is not measurable by any equipment we have yet devised, but the effect on Voyager was spectacular, accelerating it to.... fancy that... around 8 miles a second. Go Newton!
Funny thing is, I clicked on the link and was greeted by a blank page. Checked the source, and there's loads of Javascript code in it. Guess I won't be ready the article then. No way I'm enabling Javascript for something so trivial as a news article.
Hello? Where did you buy your brain? We are talking about 4000 PCs here. Do the maths.
If a PC fails, on average, more frequently than once every 10 years and 11 months, then you are going to be replacing one machine each day, and three on Mondays, unless you also work Saturdays and Sundays.
But it is a cluster of 4000 PCs which means if one goes down the whole system keeps working. If you have one big Sun and it goes down you have no redundancy and no backup. Reliability and up time for websites is make or break.
Did you say that with a straight face?
Assuming you depreciate a machine over three years (and that's really stretching things in the Real World), you're replacing a machine every just over every six and a half hours. Plus all the effort gets skewed down the the end of the three years. It would almost be economical to throw the door-key away and start afresh.
When you buy a Sun the damned thing just doesn't fall down unless you have a system mangler who keeps dicking around with it. And if a single Sun could not address the problem, then maybe it's time to buy some real iron, like a maxed out S/390. When you have a terabyte of data to process, you have to start paying a little more attention to things like I/O.
4000 PCs cannot be a viable economic replacement. That amount of hardware would require as highly a specialised environment as that of a mainframe (cooling and electricity), and certainly much more real estate. And they have really shitty I/O. If Google has money and space to piss away, well good for them, but it's hardly a wise business practice that anyone over 30 would recommend.
If you want to play with Linux, by all means invent some statistics that show that your MIPS/$ is better than the competition. Statistics can say anything you want them to. I, however, would like to know how they derived such figures. Ignorant readers of the article might otherwise be mislead into pursuing foolish choices in computing platforms.
Oh, and BTW, your regex is suboptimal, the split is entirely redundant and you shouldn't use double-quoted strings in Perl if you're not interpolating anything.
Slashdot Mirror
CSA == "Superior Audiovisual Council" wtf, who made this up? Didn't strike them as sounding somwhat peculiar ? Audiovisual High Council would make more sense.
I don't check in to /. much any more, although from time to time an article on the daily mail recap catches my attention and I click in. These days I'm pretty impressed by the signal/noise ratio. Most of the trolls seem to have moved on to greener pastures. So anyway, thanks for everything.
120k/yr isn't just merely what you pocket. When hiring you, the company has costs other than your salary to pay.
Hypocricy? I don't think this word means what you think it means. Could you explain what you think is so hypocritical about this design decision?
From what I understand, the Perl6 operators were chosen according to Huffman compression principles. Frequently used operators became shorter, less frequently used operators became longer.
The bare colon operator turned out to be much more useful elsewhere. The dash-arrow operator was initially borrowed from C++, but these days, most dynamic languages all use dot for the same purpose.
This sound more like pragmatism than anything else.
ok, in that case I wouldn't blame them if they lifted the minimum TTL that they choose to honor to be an hour. But the OP is talking about 2 weeks. That's abusing it big time.
More to the point, if some people set their TTLs to 5 minutes, who cares? If, to a first approximation, you never query them, each time a request comes in you'll have to go and fetch it anyway.
You were right the first time. Desmond Bagley wrote "The Enemy" and it featured a model railway that computed genetic manipulations.
It was bought by the main character at an auction, for 31000 pounds. When his boss heard that he had bought a train set for such an ungodly amount of money he said "You expect me to be able to clear that through Expenses?" To which the character replied "Call it by its real name, a computing device."
'Twas a fine yarn that story. Nearly as good as Running Blind.
heh, I misread what you wrote. If Australian weather information is anything like the rest of the world, I parsed that sentence as blockquote> because in Australia most weather information is fact free
... which makes a whole lot more sense to me.
Case in point.
Last week I wrote some Perl to process an mbox mail folder. I just wanted a quick and dirty way to view its contents in a web page. A couple of CPAN modules and a few dozen lines of code and thing was done. Then I started to get fancy and dealing with stuff like embedded MIME-encoded GIF images. This was pretty simple to do, but I made a mistake. Once I had the decoded GIF data lying around, I wrote it to the HTML file of the current e-mail message, rather than writing it to a seperate file and writting <img src="foo.gif"> in the HTML file.
I was viewing the results with Firefox 0.10.1. When it got to a message with an embedded GIF, with a big slodge of GIF binary data sitting in the middle of the page, Firefox either just sat there spinning its hourglass, or crashed and burned.
Then I looked at the same file with IE, and the GIF image showed up. I was puzzled for a while until I noticed that in the directory where I had created the file, no GIF files had been created. It is of course arguable that IE should not have attempted to render the GIF image from the binary data sitting in the middle of the page, but it did so without complaint. Not rendering it would also be acceptable.
Firefox, on the other hand, has a number of better alternatives to crashing or hanging. Should it display gibberish (like when you forget to set up your bz2 association correctly) or nothing, or the image? I don't know, and don't particularly care about which course of action is taken. Anything is better than crashing, especially when IE doesn't.
Anyway, I fixed the Perl code, and all is well.
The End
_domainkey?
Is that underscore really meant to be there? Because _ is not supposed to be an allowable character for names in the DNS.
I hope that this is not Yet Another Impoverishment of internet standards...
Here's one thing Postgres lacks: table space management. You can arrange to put you index files on one filesystem, and your data files on another. This is a good thing for performance.
But in Postgres, you can't create a table or index and specify where you want the backing file to go. You have to create it, then halt the database, move the files over, adjust the config, and start the db again. This does not scale. And remember, it is only in recent versions of Pg that let you ALTER COLUMN. That's a vital feature for 24x7x365 operations.
And then there's the issue of partitioning tables across different devices. I don't think that's doable in any way today with Pg. But hey, it's a great DB other than that. I know people using it with tables containing 60 billion records and it runs just fine.
There are already reference libraries available that work with 64 bit time values, such as TAI (Temps Atomique International). See libtai for more info. I like the following quote: "Under many cosmological theories, the integers under 2^63 are adequate to cover the entire expected lifetime of the universe; in this case no extensions will be necessary."
The main problem is crossing the before/after boundary of converting from 32- to 64-bit times. All of a sudden you need two sets of programs to deal with data, depending on whether it was written before or after the switch. Think backups. Think binary database dumps. Panic.
Actually, according to my stats, just about nothing. Oh sure, I get a lot of spam, and a lot of it appears to come from AOL, but it doesn't.
People invent bogus From lines, forge Return-Paths, add fake Received lines, set up PTR records in the DNS of their own netblock to resolve to AOL names.
For instance, one of the latest so-called AOL spams in my spamdump looks like this:
From: "Clement Crow" <o8utyszvc0n@aol.com>
Subject: Buy Phentermine, Viagra & more with NO PRESCRIPTION! US doctors and pharmacies! Overnight Shipping!
The only Received line I trust comes from my own MTA, and it says
Received: from host73.200-82-37.telecom.net.ar (unknown [200.82.37.73]) by {myhost.mydomain} (Postfix) with SMTP id DCFF8ADC4 for {me@mydomain}; Thu, 6 Mar 2003 02:44:15
So this is some clown sending me stuff from Argentina trying to pass themselves off as AOL. Not that I'm trying to defend them, but they're convientient shields (along with hotmail.com and yahoo.com) for spammers to hide behind.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have check out Tarproxy to see about integrating it into my inflict-pain-on-spammers setup.
That's not quite true. Is is a fact that many Australian trees have seed pods that need the flash of fire to open them up. The layer of ash on the ground helps the seedling on its way.
But in a firestorm of this intensity, as with most recent Australian bushfires, there is nothing left, no seed, no pod, no tree... it's all turned to ash.
Added to this the fact that the intense heat literally sterilises the soil down through a couple of centimetres, wiping out all organic life, means that recovery takes a long, long time.
Quite literally, after such an event, things are never the same again. Different species recolonise the newly-razed land, and the original species don't have a chance.
Talking about failed technically superior products, does anyone here remember National Semiconductor's 32032 and 32332 chips?
I had a friend who's brother bought one on an expansion card for his IBM PC-XT. I think it was made by Microway, but my memory is a bit hazy now. Man that thing could fly. The architecture was a thing of beauty... writing assembler was a really enjoyable experience. Everything was just... right.
Unfortunately they had bad problems with reliabilty and bugs in the first couple of iterations, and by the time they ramped up to cruising speed the market had passed them by.
I learnt assembler, Fortran and C on that board, and it took me years to see its performance matched by Intel's 80386.
This is standard MRTG operating procedure. If MRTG can't log information from a device, it will continue to emit the last good value it received. This is on the principle that a long horizontal line in the middle of the Y-axis will be far more noticeable (and therefore nudge you to do something about it), more so than a line that can't be distinguished from the origin.
So what you're seeing is the correct behaviour: MRTG is indicating that it can't communicate with the device. You can of course configure this to make the line drop to zero, but in practice when you've used MRTG for a while you learn to appreciate this feature.
The worst problem about Diesel engines is the noise. At cruising speed the racket is terrible. They're ideal for agricultural vehicles, but not for the casual road user.
Soot remains the big problem. Sure, this can be reduced by using things like selenium-based filters, but the jury is still out as to whether the cure is worse than what it sets out to fix. (What does widespread selenium dispersal mean to the environment?
Diesel motors were originally a handy method for disposing of all the garbage at the end of the refinery process that is uneconomically viable to deal with. The European motor companies have spent a small fortune over the past couple of decades improving the Diesel engine.
Peugeot is a company that springs to mind. They have invested billions, and have successfully lobbied the French government to keep taxes low on distillate so that they may sell more engines and thus recoup the investments.
They have been so successful in promoting Diesel technology that France currently has a deficit in distillate production and is obliged to import the damned stuff in order to cover domestic demand.
Another problem is that in order to get high performance out of a Diesel engine the engineers have long resorted to adding turbochargers... which adds to the complexity of the engine. Even without a turbo, Diesel engines remain complex, finicky beasts to maintain. Even with subsidised fuel prices, you have to rack up a lot of mileage for it to be economically viable.
A better alternative? Liquid Petroleum Gas (a.k.a. LPG).
8 miles a second.
That's not unusual. Just remember, the thing that Voyager 10 flew very close to a planet or two that weighed several trillion trillion trillion tons. In the gravitational interaction between Voyager and, say, Jupiter, some of Jupiter's momentum was lost, which was Voyager's gain. The loss is not measurable by any equipment we have yet devised, but the effect on Voyager was spectacular, accelerating it to.... fancy that... around 8 miles a second. Go Newton!
Hey Cliff!
/. out of whack.
How about adding a </i> to end of the story? You're throwing the rest of
What Dr. Who debacle? Did they throw away some episodes? That's terrible, terrible news.
I thought the KMP search allows you to search for multiple strings, not just one, à la B-M. In which case we're not comparing the same kind of task.
Funny thing is, I clicked on the link and was greeted by a blank page. Checked the source, and there's loads of Javascript code in it. Guess I won't be ready the article then. No way I'm enabling Javascript for something so trivial as a news article.
Of course not.
Then again, I have yet to see my first dead Sun.
On the other hand, every place I've ever worked has had a room set aside named the cemetary, where old PCs are left to rot.
Now why would you want to do a thing like that?
Hello? Where did you buy your brain? We are talking about 4000 PCs here. Do the maths.
If a PC fails, on average, more frequently than once every 10 years and 11 months, then you are going to be replacing one machine each day, and three on Mondays, unless you also work Saturdays and Sundays.
Talk about job satisfaction.
Did you say that with a straight face?
Assuming you depreciate a machine over three years (and that's really stretching things in the Real World), you're replacing a machine every just over every six and a half hours. Plus all the effort gets skewed down the the end of the three years. It would almost be economical to throw the door-key away and start afresh.
When you buy a Sun the damned thing just doesn't fall down unless you have a system mangler who keeps dicking around with it. And if a single Sun could not address the problem, then maybe it's time to buy some real iron, like a maxed out S/390. When you have a terabyte of data to process, you have to start paying a little more attention to things like I/O.
4000 PCs cannot be a viable economic replacement. That amount of hardware would require as highly a specialised environment as that of a mainframe (cooling and electricity), and certainly much more real estate. And they have really shitty I/O. If Google has money and space to piss away, well good for them, but it's hardly a wise business practice that anyone over 30 would recommend.
If you want to play with Linux, by all means invent some statistics that show that your MIPS/$ is better than the competition. Statistics can say anything you want them to. I, however, would like to know how they derived such figures. Ignorant readers of the article might otherwise be mislead into pursuing foolish choices in computing platforms.
Oh, and BTW, your regex is suboptimal, the split is entirely redundant and you shouldn't use double-quoted strings in Perl if you're not interpolating anything.