Data mining is analysis of trends across many data points (and "dimensions", but that's going a bit too far in). Scanning for keywords in a single message and fetching related ads, then forgetting about them, is about as much data mining as grep is. Actually less, since grep would work across multiple files, and gmail ads don't.
I find the notion a tad creepy, yes, but I've used gmail over a year and I've actually noticed the ads maybe once. This is far better than yahoo's garbage. Yes, I could adblock them, but I believe in letting them operate as they choose, and letting myself choose someone different for that. That said, I might toss yahoo twenty bucks for a year of a 2g mailbox, since I do like their address book better than google's.
> As someone who has little knowledge in this area, what is "too much", "too little", and "decent?"
With radar: anything you can measure.
With audio: anything you can hear.
If you're recording, you might want to go gonzo, get balanced line drivers and so forth (face it, the cable ain't gonna do much). If you're just listening to music, the only thing that matters is what you can hear. I suffered some pretty bad mid-to-high-range hearing loss in my 20's (untreated ear infection), so I can generally cheap out on audio. If you think of yourself as having a golden ear the envy of mortal men, go pamper yourself with magic cables if you care to. If you have normal hearing, then get normal cables.
This advice was free... even though I probably could have charged consulting or speaking fees if I just added more verbosity to it.
> That means nothing. If the heatsinking is good enough, you can get it below 0C
If your house is below 0C, yes. I think you mean active cooling like a heatpump or peltier junction. Anyway, know what happens when you get your CPU that cool? Condensation. CPUs dont like water.
> What if its the point-in-time recovery that is broken/buggy? As a DBA, who do you want to deal with?
If I'm doing a million bucks an hour, I damn well had better be running a replica, so let's add that to the solution menu too. pgsql's replication ain't terrific either. Works, but not too flexible. Score another for Oracle.
Anyway, if Oracle's PITR is broken/buggy, you are screwed screwed screwed. First, let's forget the fanciful notion that you can sue them. Now you're part of the support machine, the wheels of which grind exceedingly slowly and roughly.
I don't often like to plug source access because it's extremely overrated, but as a last resort, if you can instrument your database startup with a debugger and trace the point of failure, you now have an advantage FAR greater than that Oracle is going to give you once while your trouble ticket clears through the dozen support techs who repeat the same useless advice and tie up your time.
I also don't like to sling the term "FUD" around, because it's so often this shibboleth of the open source crowd, anything they disagree with, but what Oracle employs against solutions like PostgreSQL is often pure FUD. "Who you gonna call? Who's behind your data? What will you do WHEN it breaks? Scary scary scary, you just don't knooooowwww!!" I could probably turn around to an Oracle rep and say "right, that's about the same sort of feeling I get when dealing with YOUR support organization as well."
If I'm doing a million bucks an hour, I'm probably picking Oracle too, because it's had more years to shake out PITR, hot backup, and clustering than pgsql has, so there's more of a body of knowledge accumulated on it. I just don't like the climate of fear going around when there's plenty of Oracle disasters to look at and learn from as well.
> Is your companies website essentially read-only page loading? If so, why not just go with MySQL.
MyISAM can't handle a database of larger than 2 gigs. Once you switch to another table backend, MySQL's vaunted performance advantage pretty much evaporates.
> Peak volume, company is making $1M/hour in sales on the web, db dies and won't come up....who you gonna call?
My DBA, assuming I'm running point-in-time recovery. That's all Oracle is going to tell you to do. The unemployment office if I'm not. Although PITR in pgsql is something of a PITA, which just might go to recommend Oracle for the time being.
One level of symlinks. Again, I fail to see how any competent unix admin can't handle it or grok the organizational scheme./etc/profile.d also uses a bunch of separate scripts as well.
Sure, runlevels 3-5 should be wiped out -- if you need them, you know how to create them. But files don't scare me, neither do symbolic links. This is unix after all, files are what it's about.
Forget it though, it's like trying to explain nonmodal editing to people who think vi is the pinnacle of user interfaces (and no, I don't think emacs is either).
At my local starkbutts, I bought a pound of coffee and waited for the pen. and after an awkward pause, was told by the cashier that no signature was required any longer for purchases under $25...she was not even going to give me anything to sign.
No-signature is an option that merchants pay extra for. It's not some starbucks thing.
Anyway, do you REALLY think that if someone stole your card that they would encounter any difficulty in just scribbling your initials and a couple squiggles? Do you also think the CC company will discover the signature mismatch and invalidate your card right there?
Think of it this way: you're not giving the cashier a sample of your signature.
I did not feel comforted by that...my stolen wallets have always been used to by gas because of the no-signature-pay-at-the-pump option. anyone else encountered this?
>.rpm is totally non interactive.debs can ask questions
debconf can be told to take all the defaults or even be preconfigured to give specific answers for some packages. How this is done is not exactly clear... it really should be. I've had dist-upgrades on a server held up and leaving the system in a broken state because it was waiting on a dialog. There should at least be an inactivity timeout for debconf -- that would be the best of both worlds.
Well, sort of. I mean, I like feeling actually challenged to write cogently, use a spell checker, and actually be made to have the discipline to review the actual material. I mean most of the review went:
Foonux: Well it was sorta like slow, and pretty tough and stuff and I didn't really like it.
Yaddanix: Lots of RAM, and it was slow and the package tool was tough but it has all kinds of stuff that Arch doesn't have but it's still kinda lame and all.
Oh yeah, but the review was about Arch, right? Ok, um, well here's a laundry list of things that suck about it. But it really rocks because it's Slack and it's all 0ldsk00l and stuff lol!
> So far as I can tell, there is no significant debate the dpkg is the best, most robust package format out there
Really? I say that ports is the best, and since I won't listen to any dissenting opinion or bother doing any research, I guess there's no significant debate.
> I've never had the sort of dependency hell I had with RPM, and upgrading my Debian and Debian based boxes is trivially easy.
Guess you were never around when they broke perl in stable. I run Debian now, but I prefer truthful accounting of weaknesses..deb only JUST started supporting package signatures, for one. Still no repository signatures like rpm.
Also note that apt is orthogonal to.deb. RPM distros routinely use apt.
My main reason for sticking with Slackware is I cannot abide SysV-style/etc/rc.d with it's mess'o'symlinks. I vastly prefer BSD style/etc/rc.d/rc.whatever, and AFAIK, Slackware is the only Linux distro this way. Arch does not appear to be.
Indeed, even most of the BSD's support separate init scripts, and only uses rc to set configuration.
"mess o' symlinks" is/etc/alternatives. If you can't handle the concept of a SINGLE symbolic link from/etc/rcX.d to/etc/init.d, you have no business having the root password. You can even delete all the symlinks and write your own script if you really want all that "by hand" goodness.
The sentence was poorly written... I meant it as you described (i.e. "legal systems, e.g. that of France, not based on the common law"). Interestingly, the state of Louisiana supposedly has a similar system. Never having seen how their courts work, I couldn't say for sure.
Neither of those becomes definitive, if there is controverisy, then simply both points of view are explained. Its called Neutral Point of View.
That is about as NPOV as Crossfire is. It's two points of view, with no neutrality between them. There is no dialectic synthesis going on here, just a lot of noise drowning out any signal. Certainly we need debate, and need to have fora for all points of view. It's just the height of pretension to call such a collection an encyclopedia of facts.
Because he can't. He's a pathetic washed-up has-been, creatively speaking. But yunno, if I were him, and could snort coke off a supermodel's backside on the 4th floor of my third summer mansion every night, I could probably sleep at night too. Well, except for the coke that is. And the supermodel. But you get the idea.
Just be glad he hasn't butchered American Graffiti. Yet.
Frankly, the moderation system isn't even very good. Hard cap at +5 and -2 means the fanboy effect keeps irrelevant junk at +5, equal with highly interesting/informative/insightful. It basically makes it a flat space. This isn't necessarily so bad for posts, since the effect isn't there, but it would be immediately apparent for article moderation.
And frankly, I don't even see a reason for the moderation categories. Just mod up or down, that's really all it needs. The categories are just pretension at actual meaning, they don't actually convey it.
People have submitted many a fix to slashcode to introduce things like proper HTML with CSS (which would cut/.'s bandwidth bill in half), but it's usually been rejected. It's quite clear that maintaining slashcode or slashdot itself is beyond the abilities and/or interest of the current staff of anyone at slashdot or OSTG.
Hell, they haven't even rustled up the interest to tweak the logo or anything just to offer something slightly fresh. Still using nasty drop shadows around the icons, even. Well, there's the frightfully garish color schemes, yes.
That would be caught by the limits on virtual memory usage. As I said, what resource are you thinking of that a decent system administrator couldn't limit to prevent a normal user from exhausting resources?
The log is a big one. Of course it can take a lot of time to fill up a log partition of a mere 10 gigs, at which time someone is likely to notice. Security against malicious attacks is at root about controlling human behavior. When a human controls the attack, at some point a human may have to get involved in the defense. The appropriate technical measure in this case is the slay command.
Yes, yes... I'm a junior sysadmin who can make recommendations for new builds. What does UL do for me? My gf is a non-gaming home user. What does UL do for her? It seems to me that UL sounds simply like Debian's commercial arm. If that's so, then yes, I can see how Debian is putting it in the deepfreeze...
Fully Open-Source distributions won't make a profit over the long term. You have to hold something back like certification or bug reports. And when you do that, the result is something less than Open Source.
Certifications seem rather orthogonal to source. In fact, it's the very sort of value-add service that F/OSS advocates from RMS to ESR seem to advocate.
> I can see the need for keeping ahead of security bugs, but to change for change's sake is just silly.
Of course it is. But when it comes time that you have to upgrade a particular major system, and you find that dozens of packages from the rest of your system have to be dragged kicking and screaming with it, it's nice to know that the transition won't be so abrupt and brutal that it breaks god knows what because the packages from today don't integrate with what's left from 3, going on 4 years ago. Source distributions have less problems with this, but they're not immune either. Debian does an incredible job at keeping the migration path smooth, but the longer they wait, the worse it's going to be.
> But at least a fucking "Java is trying to load, let it run?" message box would help.
If they ever got together and unified their site-specific preferences into one dialog, maybe we could whitelist and blacklist java and flash and so forth by domain.
I have to pop up four different freakin dialogs specific to each function to change the permissions of them to use popups, images, cookies, or XPI's. They all say only "allowed sites" in the titlebar, even though most of the entries I use say "block". And of course the dialog is modal.
Even IE has zones. Lousy as they are, at least you can edit the zone's permissions all in one place.
Slashdot Mirror
Data mining is analysis of trends across many data points (and "dimensions", but that's going a bit too far in). Scanning for keywords in a single message and fetching related ads, then forgetting about them, is about as much data mining as grep is. Actually less, since grep would work across multiple files, and gmail ads don't.
I find the notion a tad creepy, yes, but I've used gmail over a year and I've actually noticed the ads maybe once. This is far better than yahoo's garbage. Yes, I could adblock them, but I believe in letting them operate as they choose, and letting myself choose someone different for that. That said, I might toss yahoo twenty bucks for a year of a 2g mailbox, since I do like their address book better than google's.
> As someone who has little knowledge in this area, what is "too much", "too little", and "decent?"
... even though I probably could have charged consulting or speaking fees if I just added more verbosity to it.
With radar: anything you can measure.
With audio: anything you can hear.
If you're recording, you might want to go gonzo, get balanced line drivers and so forth (face it, the cable ain't gonna do much). If you're just listening to music, the only thing that matters is what you can hear. I suffered some pretty bad mid-to-high-range hearing loss in my 20's (untreated ear infection), so I can generally cheap out on audio. If you think of yourself as having a golden ear the envy of mortal men, go pamper yourself with magic cables if you care to. If you have normal hearing, then get normal cables.
This advice was free
> For god's sakes, can everyone just please get over their small-dick big-dick contest and use a LISP dialect?
I agree. mzScheme runs on every major platform, too.
How's that 64 bit port of CMUCL going, eh? I guess it's not all that portable and flexible under the hood now, is it?
> That means nothing. If the heatsinking is good enough, you can get it below 0C
If your house is below 0C, yes. I think you mean active cooling like a heatpump or peltier junction. Anyway, know what happens when you get your CPU that cool? Condensation. CPUs dont like water.
1) I stand corrected. I was reading old documentation, it applied to table size, and it's probably tied to word size on the machine.
2) "FUD" is not a synonym for "wrong".
3) I have a raft of other reasons MySQL is inadequate, including data integrity ones.
> What if its the point-in-time recovery that is broken/buggy? As a DBA, who do you want to deal with?
If I'm doing a million bucks an hour, I damn well had better be running a replica, so let's add that to the solution menu too. pgsql's replication ain't terrific either. Works, but not too flexible. Score another for Oracle.
Anyway, if Oracle's PITR is broken/buggy, you are screwed screwed screwed. First, let's forget the fanciful notion that you can sue them. Now you're part of the support machine, the wheels of which grind exceedingly slowly and roughly.
I don't often like to plug source access because it's extremely overrated, but as a last resort, if you can instrument your database startup with a debugger and trace the point of failure, you now have an advantage FAR greater than that Oracle is going to give you once while your trouble ticket clears through the dozen support techs who repeat the same useless advice and tie up your time.
I also don't like to sling the term "FUD" around, because it's so often this shibboleth of the open source crowd, anything they disagree with, but what Oracle employs against solutions like PostgreSQL is often pure FUD. "Who you gonna call? Who's behind your data? What will you do WHEN it breaks? Scary scary scary, you just don't knooooowwww!!" I could probably turn around to an Oracle rep and say "right, that's about the same sort of feeling I get when dealing with YOUR support organization as well."
If I'm doing a million bucks an hour, I'm probably picking Oracle too, because it's had more years to shake out PITR, hot backup, and clustering than pgsql has, so there's more of a body of knowledge accumulated on it. I just don't like the climate of fear going around when there's plenty of Oracle disasters to look at and learn from as well.
> Is your companies website essentially read-only page loading? If so, why not just go with MySQL.
MyISAM can't handle a database of larger than 2 gigs. Once you switch to another table backend, MySQL's vaunted performance advantage pretty much evaporates.
> Peak volume, company is making $1M/hour in sales on the web, db dies and won't come up....who you gonna call?
My DBA, assuming I'm running point-in-time recovery. That's all Oracle is going to tell you to do. The unemployment office if I'm not. Although PITR in pgsql is something of a PITA, which just might go to recommend Oracle for the time being.
SPI, the authoritative .org registrar, and Afilias, the authoritative .info registrar both use PostgreSQL for their registration databases.
One level of symlinks. Again, I fail to see how any competent unix admin can't handle it or grok the organizational scheme. /etc/profile.d also uses a bunch of separate scripts as well.
Sure, runlevels 3-5 should be wiped out -- if you need them, you know how to create them. But files don't scare me, neither do symbolic links. This is unix after all, files are what it's about.
Forget it though, it's like trying to explain nonmodal editing to people who think vi is the pinnacle of user interfaces (and no, I don't think emacs is either).
At my local starkbutts, I bought a pound of coffee and waited for the pen. and after an awkward pause, was told by the cashier that no signature was required any longer for purchases under $25...she was not even going to give me anything to sign.
No-signature is an option that merchants pay extra for. It's not some starbucks thing.
Anyway, do you REALLY think that if someone stole your card that they would encounter any difficulty in just scribbling your initials and a couple squiggles? Do you also think the CC company will discover the signature mismatch and invalidate your card right there?
Think of it this way: you're not giving the cashier a sample of your signature.
I did not feel comforted by that...my stolen wallets have always been used to by gas because of the no-signature-pay-at-the-pump option. anyone else encountered this?
No, because I actually reported my card missing.
> .rpm is totally non interactive .debs can ask questions
... it really should be. I've had dist-upgrades on a server held up and leaving the system in a broken state because it was waiting on a dialog. There should at least be an inactivity timeout for debconf -- that would be the best of both worlds.
debconf can be told to take all the defaults or even be preconfigured to give specific answers for some packages. How this is done is not exactly clear
"Wow, I wish I had Eugenia's job"
Well, sort of. I mean, I like feeling actually challenged to write cogently, use a spell checker, and actually be made to have the discipline to review the actual material. I mean most of the review went:
Foonux: Well it was sorta like slow, and pretty tough and stuff and I didn't really like it.
Yaddanix: Lots of RAM, and it was slow and the package tool was tough but it has all kinds of stuff that Arch doesn't have but it's still kinda lame and all.
Oh yeah, but the review was about Arch, right? Ok, um, well here's a laundry list of things that suck about it. But it really rocks because it's Slack and it's all 0ldsk00l and stuff lol!
> So far as I can tell, there is no significant debate the dpkg is the best, most robust package format out there
.deb only JUST started supporting package signatures, for one. Still no repository signatures like rpm.
.deb. RPM distros routinely use apt.
Really? I say that ports is the best, and since I won't listen to any dissenting opinion or bother doing any research, I guess there's no significant debate.
> I've never had the sort of dependency hell I had with RPM, and upgrading my Debian and Debian based boxes is trivially easy.
Guess you were never around when they broke perl in stable. I run Debian now, but I prefer truthful accounting of weaknesses.
Also note that apt is orthogonal to
My main reason for sticking with Slackware is I cannot abide SysV-style /etc/rc.d with it's mess'o'symlinks. I vastly prefer BSD style /etc/rc.d/rc.whatever, and AFAIK, Slackware is the only Linux distro this way. Arch does not appear to be.
/etc/alternatives. If you can't handle the concept of a SINGLE symbolic link from /etc/rcX.d to /etc/init.d, you have no business having the root password. You can even delete all the symlinks and write your own script if you really want all that "by hand" goodness.
Indeed, even most of the BSD's support separate init scripts, and only uses rc to set configuration.
"mess o' symlinks" is
The sentence was poorly written ... I meant it as you described (i.e. "legal systems, e.g. that of France, not based on the common law"). Interestingly, the state of Louisiana supposedly has a similar system. Never having seen how their courts work, I couldn't say for sure.
2) Because they KNEW they could easily keep google from doing that using robots.txt and NEVER sent a C&D, it's going to be really hard to get damages.
How do you know they didn't? Most companies don't publicize the C&D letters they get, unlike individuals with a spotlight/soapbox/forum...
I'm wondering why "cow" is even in Wikipedia at all when it's clearly a dictionary article.
Neither of those becomes definitive, if there is controverisy, then simply both points of view are explained. Its called Neutral Point of View.
That is about as NPOV as Crossfire is. It's two points of view, with no neutrality between them. There is no dialectic synthesis going on here, just a lot of noise drowning out any signal. Certainly we need debate, and need to have fora for all points of view. It's just the height of pretension to call such a collection an encyclopedia of facts.
If you were really bragging, you'd have given just one example and defied us to find the rest.
You bore me.
> Why doesn't he try to do something new
Because he can't. He's a pathetic washed-up has-been, creatively speaking. But yunno, if I were him, and could snort coke off a supermodel's backside on the 4th floor of my third summer mansion every night, I could probably sleep at night too. Well, except for the coke that is. And the supermodel. But you get the idea.
Just be glad he hasn't butchered American Graffiti. Yet.
Frankly, the moderation system isn't even very good. Hard cap at +5 and -2 means the fanboy effect keeps irrelevant junk at +5, equal with highly interesting/informative/insightful. It basically makes it a flat space. This isn't necessarily so bad for posts, since the effect isn't there, but it would be immediately apparent for article moderation.
/.'s bandwidth bill in half), but it's usually been rejected. It's quite clear that maintaining slashcode or slashdot itself is beyond the abilities and/or interest of the current staff of anyone at slashdot or OSTG.
And frankly, I don't even see a reason for the moderation categories. Just mod up or down, that's really all it needs. The categories are just pretension at actual meaning, they don't actually convey it.
People have submitted many a fix to slashcode to introduce things like proper HTML with CSS (which would cut
Hell, they haven't even rustled up the interest to tweak the logo or anything just to offer something slightly fresh. Still using nasty drop shadows around the icons, even. Well, there's the frightfully garish color schemes, yes.
That would be caught by the limits on virtual memory usage. As I said, what resource are you thinking of that a decent system administrator couldn't limit to prevent a normal user from exhausting resources?
The log is a big one. Of course it can take a lot of time to fill up a log partition of a mere 10 gigs, at which time someone is likely to notice. Security against malicious attacks is at root about controlling human behavior. When a human controls the attack, at some point a human may have to get involved in the defense. The appropriate technical measure in this case is the slay command.
Yes, yes ... I'm a junior sysadmin who can make recommendations for new builds. What does UL do for me? My gf is a non-gaming home user. What does UL do for her? It seems to me that UL sounds simply like Debian's commercial arm. If that's so, then yes, I can see how Debian is putting it in the deepfreeze...
Fully Open-Source distributions won't make a profit over the long term. You have to hold something back like certification or bug reports. And when you do that, the result is something less than Open Source.
Certifications seem rather orthogonal to source. In fact, it's the very sort of value-add service that F/OSS advocates from RMS to ESR seem to advocate.
> I can see the need for keeping ahead of security bugs, but to change for change's sake is just silly.
Of course it is. But when it comes time that you have to upgrade a particular major system, and you find that dozens of packages from the rest of your system have to be dragged kicking and screaming with it, it's nice to know that the transition won't be so abrupt and brutal that it breaks god knows what because the packages from today don't integrate with what's left from 3, going on 4 years ago. Source distributions have less problems with this, but they're not immune either. Debian does an incredible job at keeping the migration path smooth, but the longer they wait, the worse it's going to be.
> But at least a fucking "Java is trying to load, let it run?" message box would help.
If they ever got together and unified their site-specific preferences into one dialog, maybe we could whitelist and blacklist java and flash and so forth by domain.
I have to pop up four different freakin dialogs specific to each function to change the permissions of them to use popups, images, cookies, or XPI's. They all say only "allowed sites" in the titlebar, even though most of the entries I use say "block". And of course the dialog is modal.
Even IE has zones. Lousy as they are, at least you can edit the zone's permissions all in one place.