Re:I think you jumped the gun a little.
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
That's not true at all. I skipped work this morning to watch it with friends, and I've never read the book (though of course I've known about it for years). So, here's my take (in rough cuts):
It was long, but for the most part it didn't drag. There were definitely some plodding bits, but I didn't check my watch until the 2 hour mark.
The action was generally really good, though I thought the bones-breaking-through-skin aspect was a little overdone. I didn't enjoy the gore.
The storyline was totally coherent to me - Maybe knowing the full backstory makes it seem like they give certain things short shrift, but from my perspective it held together well.
Holy crap, Rorschach is a badass. "You're locked in here with me"? Best line of the movie. Also, umm, there sure was a lot of dong.
As far as negatives go: The makeup for some of the characters was absolutely awful. Man. The biggest thing to me, though, is if Dr. Manhattan can manipulate matter at the atomic level, why doesn't he just take the cancer out of his ex-girlfriend and be done with it? Instead he flees to mars and lets her die. Weird choice.
The ending with the egyptian temple motif and all that felt pretty hokey - I don't know how else to put it. Ozymandias was supposed to be some sort of superb ultra-nemesis, but he really just seemed sort of flouncy and lame (except for being fast, apparently). The tiger-thing at the end was also really dissonant. We hadn't been shown a world with that sort of engineering, so it was strange to see it with no explanation at all.
I guess that's really the only other major negative; Nothing about their tech or their abilities is explained, except for Dr. M. Wtf kind of mask is Rorschach wearing? Does it respond to his emotions or something? It looks like cloth, but the blood comes out... wtf? How are they all such amazing fighting machines? Owl guy is out of it for a couple years, getting flabby and out of practice, but in an alley he beats the snot out of an entire gang. How?
All in all, I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a well-done film, for the most part, except for the bad makeup here and there. I know they had to compress a long storyline, which is where I assume explanations for abilities and equipment went, but if there were critical plot elements cut I didn't notice the gaps.
I live in New York, and we have a term for the end effect of all this strain. We call it 'sidewalk stare'. I've walked not two feet from someone I know on the sidewalk, and had to reach out and touch their arm to get them to notice me. It's not that they were staring at the concrete, their eyes simply pass over your face and they don't recognize you.
Think about it this way; Understanding expression consumes an enormous amount of processing power. Taking a sub-second glance at a person's face and intuiting their mood, which you do without trying, chews up calories and other cerebral resources. If you stand on the corner of 18th and 6th Ave. around lunchtime for a minute, you're likely to see literally hundreds of human expressions. You can't stop your mind from distilling all those mental states, because human animals' minds are built to do exactly that. It's exhausting, though you don't always notice it.
Moving around in a crowded city is mentally and emotionally taxing. Some people thrive on that, and some people are seriously impaired by it. I don't know of a selection criterion other than moving to the city and seeing if you like it, but I think if nothing else it's easier when you're younger. When people talk about being 'tired of the city', I think it's a side-effect of the aging process. All that background effort is, overall, more taxing than it was.
An interesting corollary: The more money you have, the less of this you have to deal with. Hired cars, large apartments, spacious offices, and frequent vacations all keep this from having as much of an effect.
It's impopssible for superfluid helium to 'go nova'. This impossibility is well understood by theory - It's not that there's a miniscule-but-nonzero chance, as there is that the LHC could spontaneously produce tiny dragons - In this case it's *impossible*.
Here's the explanation: http://anticrackpot.blogspot.com/2008/09/there-will-be-no-bose-novae-at-lhc.html
And a personal request: Take a second to look some of this stuff up before you post an article like this that fuels unfounded (indeed, indefensible) fears.
How heavily compressed is the air in the storage tank, and how rugged will the tank be? Think about the consequences for both cars if this thing gets rear-ended or sideswiped hard enough to rupture the tank...
I disagree with you that Blu-Ray is more catchy, though it might not be if DVD wasn't so well-known. It really comes down to a question of how the terms are used. To the average non-tech customer, a "DVD" is the disk and the "DVD Player" is the machine that plays the "DVDs". It's very simple, and very straightforward. Nobody thinks of DVD as a format name anymore, because the acronym as been thoroughly nouned, just like CD has been.
DVD had the advantage of following CD, which got people used to the idea, but no matter how it happened people are totally comfortable with the idea of putting the DVD in the player and watching a movie. Asking them to call a physical disk which looks exactly like their DVDs a "Blu Ray" or a "Ray" or a "BR" or anything else is, frankly, a little awkward. Contrast that with asking people to look at something with all the same physical characteristics of a DVD, that plays movies like a DVD (except in Hi-Def) and call it an HD-DVD. What is it? It's a High-Def DVD, duh. Formats win for reasons like this, and I thing HD-DVD will win in the long run because people will walk into the store wanting a High-Definition DVD player, and pick up HD-DVD.
Perhaps it's because there's an episode of the Pirates franchise in theaters now and we're being bombarded with its associated marketing campaigns, while nobody's thought much about The Matrix in the past few years.
The more complete formulation of the i-before-e-rule is this: "I before E, except after C, or when sounding like 'ay' as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh', and on weekends and holidays, and all through May, and you'll likely be wrong no matter what you say. Also, remember that weird is weird."
Internet radio had such promise, but the medium is getting destroyed just as it started to get off the ground. The recording industry seems to be quite adept at trying to stop anything that would please their customers but damage their industry. Rather then trying to adapt it just tries to kill anything that it perceives as a threat.
Well... yes. This is just one more example of an established industry strangling innovation in its crib in an attempt to hold on to an outdated business model. Verizon's patent suit against Vonage is another instance of the same process. The fact is that the legal landscape is tilted so heavily toward incumbent players that small, innovative businesses simply have no chance. Now that it's largely gone beyond challenges to the legality of their core businesses the small guys, who like most small businesses operate on thin margins, will simply be crushed by unfair economic burdens. It doesn't matter if Verizon's patents are overbroadly applied; Vonage can't survive the revenue hit from the injunctions. It doesn't matter that internet radio has a per-listener operation cost (bandwidth) that terrestrial radio doesn't need to consider; The additional royalty crushes a distribution stream that isn't owned by the current dominant middleman.
Once again, large companies pay to protect their failing business models in court, and in the process decimate an entire industry. It's scorched-earth business, and when these groups inevitably fall apart in the face of a customer base with changing interests we'll be left with a wasteland instead of a vibrant marketplace full of interesting choices.
I love Wierd Al. The first tape I ever paid for from my own allowance money was Dare to Be Stupid. I've seen him live, and agree that he deserves every ounce of success he's had (and more on top of that as well). However, I don't follow VH1. It's a worthless nonstop celebrity reality train wreck which means so little to me that I turn the TV off rather than check out what they're playing. That said, I was given the link to this video by a friend, loved it, and have been telling people about it for days. I know for a fact that I would never have known Wierd Al even had a new album out, nor would I have even been able to point people toward the video (what would I say? "Watch VH1 long enough and eventually you'll see it!") unless it had been leaked.
It does matter how much power the phone uses. Your phone using 1/10th the power, which is ultimately from the same source as all your domestic energy, means almost nothing; A million, 10 million, or 100 million phone users all using 1/10th the power, well... it adds up. Sure your use profile isn't going to change, but you get the same utility for less power. That's basically the modern definition of Good.
Incorrect - In ancient latin virus operated more or less like 'water' does in english for pluralization. Modern usage has made virus into a singular noun by using it to refer to discrete particles, therefore a pluralization of the modern form is required. That plural form is 'viruses'.
I'm not an irrational person. I'm not an inherently aggressive person. I can't lie to you, though: This idea arouses an image of physical destruction, specifically me throwing canned vegetables at these screens. I find grocery shopping to be a chore in the first place, something which I have to concentrate on in order to do well. I don't want a screen in constant view trying to change my attitudes about my brand of butter.
Do today what you want to be doing later on. Your skills grow in the position you're at, so if you want to be doing advanced system and network programming, get a job doing that. Make sure you can pay your bills, but salary's less important than what you're doing. I've taken paycuts for better work, and I'm glad I did it.
You ask if I would not buy a magazine with too many ads? Absolutely. There have been and continue to be magazines that I find generally interesting, but simply won't buy because of the way ads are placed - The articles are broken up by adspace, ads are cut from slightly different weight stock (when flipping through the magazine is more likely to fall open on an ad), and on and on. It's the same with many cable networks. Even if I love the movie some low-rate network like SpikeTV is playing, I simply won't watch when there's a commercial break every 10 minutes. It's not done out of some heavy moral objection, it's just a boring waste of time.
I want to know what "type of server" it tunes... (db, www, file, etc...)
It says right there in the title: "Linux". I understand that this sounds flippant, but the distinction between www, db, file, and other servers is entirely artificial. There's no such thing as a "www server" - It's a linux server running an http server application.
The book isn't a list of recipies for different server roles, along the lines of "Set the max number of shared memory segments to X for mysql, and Y for oracle". It's a description of the mechanics of the core of a linux system and how to tune its behavior.
As far as distributions go, the kernel's the kernel, excepting patches the distributor applies./proc is/proc, and gnu ps is gnu ps, no matter what distro you're on. There most useful information in the linux world is vendor-neutral.
I agree with your general point; It's not just technical people, it's a general failure to train people in the proper use of the language.
I've always found it intriguing that a programmer who could master several arcane computer languages (especially since computers are notably intolerant of errors), could fail so utterly to master his own native human language.
I'd like to point out, though, that programmers are as exact as they have to be. We're forced by compilers and the rules of formal technical languages to be very precise in formulating what we say to the machine. Programmers' english if often atrocious because it simply doesn't have to be excellent to be understood. The human language parser's forgiving nature allows inexact formulations to succeed, but gcc does not; Hence when writing for humans, less rigor is required than when writing for the compiler.
It's possible that it was a mechanical technique picked up during the late pre-cambrian, where gamete exchange occured in a shared medium (the sea) and exclusion mechanisms were weak. Many marine invertibrates still reproduce by freely releasing gametes, and it's possible that the cause of the cambrian explosion was the massive increase in gene exchange produced before organisms developed the mechanics to prevent cross-species fertilization.
It seems to me that some of the sort-term disadvantages to sexual reproduction are eliminated if your gametes can successfully mix (if not successfully survive) with almost any organism. That period where the disadvantage of single-species compatability wasn't present might have been long enough for the processes of sexual reproduction to establish long-term success rates.
The samba-tng project forked because of disagreement over how the samba team was handling a core design decision (named pipes). Samba-tng became capable of serving as a windows PDC, and the samba project took whatever code looked good. Relations between the groups have been strained at times, but their experience sounds like a pretty close parallel to what you're seeing.
At the end, though, GPL code is GPL code. If it's under the GPL, you can use it, and there's really nothing the author can do. I think most people would agree that the's nothing wrong with using open source code - That's what it's there for.
To answer your actual question, whether or not the linux kernel's software RAID implementation is safe... "yes". I used it in production for NFS fileservers as far back as the 2.2 series; it performed wonderfully under high load then and has worked just as well when I've used it off and on since, both in production and on test systems. There are lots of suggestions elsewhere in the thread about things to avoid - multiple devices on the same IDE channel is the big gotcha: don't do it, its performance is particularly horrific during array reconstruction, just when you need it to run as fast as it possibly can. Keep those suggestions in mind when you build the system, but you can categorize the RAID implementation itself as more than sufficiently reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not true at all. I skipped work this morning to watch it with friends, and I've never read the book (though of course I've known about it for years). So, here's my take (in rough cuts):
It was long, but for the most part it didn't drag. There were definitely some plodding bits, but I didn't check my watch until the 2 hour mark.
The action was generally really good, though I thought the bones-breaking-through-skin aspect was a little overdone. I didn't enjoy the gore.
The storyline was totally coherent to me - Maybe knowing the full backstory makes it seem like they give certain things short shrift, but from my perspective it held together well.
Holy crap, Rorschach is a badass. "You're locked in here with me"? Best line of the movie. Also, umm, there sure was a lot of dong.
As far as negatives go: The makeup for some of the characters was absolutely awful. Man. The biggest thing to me, though, is if Dr. Manhattan can manipulate matter at the atomic level, why doesn't he just take the cancer out of his ex-girlfriend and be done with it? Instead he flees to mars and lets her die. Weird choice.
The ending with the egyptian temple motif and all that felt pretty hokey - I don't know how else to put it. Ozymandias was supposed to be some sort of superb ultra-nemesis, but he really just seemed sort of flouncy and lame (except for being fast, apparently). The tiger-thing at the end was also really dissonant. We hadn't been shown a world with that sort of engineering, so it was strange to see it with no explanation at all.
I guess that's really the only other major negative; Nothing about their tech or their abilities is explained, except for Dr. M. Wtf kind of mask is Rorschach wearing? Does it respond to his emotions or something? It looks like cloth, but the blood comes out... wtf? How are they all such amazing fighting machines? Owl guy is out of it for a couple years, getting flabby and out of practice, but in an alley he beats the snot out of an entire gang. How?
All in all, I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a well-done film, for the most part, except for the bad makeup here and there. I know they had to compress a long storyline, which is where I assume explanations for abilities and equipment went, but if there were critical plot elements cut I didn't notice the gaps.
I live in New York, and we have a term for the end effect of all this strain. We call it 'sidewalk stare'. I've walked not two feet from someone I know on the sidewalk, and had to reach out and touch their arm to get them to notice me. It's not that they were staring at the concrete, their eyes simply pass over your face and they don't recognize you.
Think about it this way; Understanding expression consumes an enormous amount of processing power. Taking a sub-second glance at a person's face and intuiting their mood, which you do without trying, chews up calories and other cerebral resources. If you stand on the corner of 18th and 6th Ave. around lunchtime for a minute, you're likely to see literally hundreds of human expressions. You can't stop your mind from distilling all those mental states, because human animals' minds are built to do exactly that. It's exhausting, though you don't always notice it.
Moving around in a crowded city is mentally and emotionally taxing. Some people thrive on that, and some people are seriously impaired by it. I don't know of a selection criterion other than moving to the city and seeing if you like it, but I think if nothing else it's easier when you're younger. When people talk about being 'tired of the city', I think it's a side-effect of the aging process. All that background effort is, overall, more taxing than it was.
An interesting corollary: The more money you have, the less of this you have to deal with. Hired cars, large apartments, spacious offices, and frequent vacations all keep this from having as much of an effect.
It's impopssible for superfluid helium to 'go nova'. This impossibility is well understood by theory - It's not that there's a miniscule-but-nonzero chance, as there is that the LHC could spontaneously produce tiny dragons - In this case it's *impossible*.
Here's the explanation:
http://anticrackpot.blogspot.com/2008/09/there-will-be-no-bose-novae-at-lhc.html
And a personal request: Take a second to look some of this stuff up before you post an article like this that fuels unfounded (indeed, indefensible) fears.
How heavily compressed is the air in the storage tank, and how rugged will the tank be? Think about the consequences for both cars if this thing gets rear-ended or sideswiped hard enough to rupture the tank...
I disagree with you that Blu-Ray is more catchy, though it might not be if DVD wasn't so well-known. It really comes down to a question of how the terms are used. To the average non-tech customer, a "DVD" is the disk and the "DVD Player" is the machine that plays the "DVDs". It's very simple, and very straightforward. Nobody thinks of DVD as a format name anymore, because the acronym as been thoroughly nouned, just like CD has been.
DVD had the advantage of following CD, which got people used to the idea, but no matter how it happened people are totally comfortable with the idea of putting the DVD in the player and watching a movie. Asking them to call a physical disk which looks exactly like their DVDs a "Blu Ray" or a "Ray" or a "BR" or anything else is, frankly, a little awkward. Contrast that with asking people to look at something with all the same physical characteristics of a DVD, that plays movies like a DVD (except in Hi-Def) and call it an HD-DVD. What is it? It's a High-Def DVD, duh. Formats win for reasons like this, and I thing HD-DVD will win in the long run because people will walk into the store wanting a High-Definition DVD player, and pick up HD-DVD.
Seriously. Come on.
Perhaps it's because there's an episode of the Pirates franchise in theaters now and we're being bombarded with its associated marketing campaigns, while nobody's thought much about The Matrix in the past few years.
The more complete formulation of the i-before-e-rule is this: "I before E, except after C, or when sounding like 'ay' as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh', and on weekends and holidays, and all through May, and you'll likely be wrong no matter what you say. Also, remember that weird is weird."
Once again, large companies pay to protect their failing business models in court, and in the process decimate an entire industry. It's scorched-earth business, and when these groups inevitably fall apart in the face of a customer base with changing interests we'll be left with a wasteland instead of a vibrant marketplace full of interesting choices.
On the other hand...
I love Wierd Al. The first tape I ever paid for from my own allowance money was Dare to Be Stupid. I've seen him live, and agree that he deserves every ounce of success he's had (and more on top of that as well). However, I don't follow VH1. It's a worthless nonstop celebrity reality train wreck which means so little to me that I turn the TV off rather than check out what they're playing. That said, I was given the link to this video by a friend, loved it, and have been telling people about it for days. I know for a fact that I would never have known Wierd Al even had a new album out, nor would I have even been able to point people toward the video (what would I say? "Watch VH1 long enough and eventually you'll see it!") unless it had been leaked.
The original disclaimer is funny. The "internet" disclaimer is tedious. Shockingly so.
It does matter how much power the phone uses. Your phone using 1/10th the power, which is ultimately from the same source as all your domestic energy, means almost nothing; A million, 10 million, or 100 million phone users all using 1/10th the power, well... it adds up. Sure your use profile isn't going to change, but you get the same utility for less power. That's basically the modern definition of Good.
Incorrect - In ancient latin virus operated more or less like 'water' does in english for pluralization. Modern usage has made virus into a singular noun by using it to refer to discrete particles, therefore a pluralization of the modern form is required. That plural form is 'viruses'.
Repeat after me: "The plural of 'virus' is 'viruses'."
t ml
The classic explanation:
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.h
I'm not an irrational person. I'm not an inherently aggressive person. I can't lie to you, though: This idea arouses an image of physical destruction, specifically me throwing canned vegetables at these screens. I find grocery shopping to be a chore in the first place, something which I have to concentrate on in order to do well. I don't want a screen in constant view trying to change my attitudes about my brand of butter.
Do today what you want to be doing later on. Your skills grow in the position you're at, so if you want to be doing advanced system and network programming, get a job doing that. Make sure you can pay your bills, but salary's less important than what you're doing. I've taken paycuts for better work, and I'm glad I did it.
This is what happens when you have big ACs working a small room and one of them fails:
http://www.jurney.org/temp_mountain.png
You ask if I would not buy a magazine with too many ads? Absolutely. There have been and continue to be magazines that I find generally interesting, but simply won't buy because of the way ads are placed - The articles are broken up by adspace, ads are cut from slightly different weight stock (when flipping through the magazine is more likely to fall open on an ad), and on and on. It's the same with many cable networks. Even if I love the movie some low-rate network like SpikeTV is playing, I simply won't watch when there's a commercial break every 10 minutes. It's not done out of some heavy moral objection, it's just a boring waste of time.
Look at the date of the application. It was filed before ED was released.
I want to know what "type of server" it tunes... (db, www, file, etc...)
/proc is /proc, and gnu ps is gnu ps, no matter what distro you're on. There most useful information in the linux world is vendor-neutral.
It says right there in the title: "Linux". I understand that this sounds flippant, but the distinction between www, db, file, and other servers is entirely artificial. There's no such thing as a "www server" - It's a linux server running an http server application.
The book isn't a list of recipies for different server roles, along the lines of "Set the max number of shared memory segments to X for mysql, and Y for oracle". It's a description of the mechanics of the core of a linux system and how to tune its behavior.
As far as distributions go, the kernel's the kernel, excepting patches the distributor applies.
Volume Seven, Issue Forty-Nine
File 06 of 16
[ Project Loki ]
whitepaper by daemon9 AKA route
sourcecode by daemon9 && alhambra
for Phrack Magazine
August 1996 Guild Productions, kid
comments to route@infonexus.com/alhambra@infonexus.com
http://www.phrack.org/phrack/49/P49-06
I agree with your general point; It's not just technical people, it's a general failure to train people in the proper use of the language.
I've always found it intriguing that a programmer who could master several arcane computer languages (especially since computers are notably intolerant of errors), could fail so utterly to master his own native human language.
I'd like to point out, though, that programmers are as exact as they have to be. We're forced by compilers and the rules of formal technical languages to be very precise in formulating what we say to the machine. Programmers' english if often atrocious because it simply doesn't have to be excellent to be understood. The human language parser's forgiving nature allows inexact formulations to succeed, but gcc does not; Hence when writing for humans, less rigor is required than when writing for the compiler.
It's possible that it was a mechanical technique picked up during the late pre-cambrian, where gamete exchange occured in a shared medium (the sea) and exclusion mechanisms were weak. Many marine invertibrates still reproduce by freely releasing gametes, and it's possible that the cause of the cambrian explosion was the massive increase in gene exchange produced before organisms developed the mechanics to prevent cross-species fertilization.
It seems to me that some of the sort-term disadvantages to sexual reproduction are eliminated if your gametes can successfully mix (if not successfully survive) with almost any organism. That period where the disadvantage of single-species compatability wasn't present might have been long enough for the processes of sexual reproduction to establish long-term success rates.
The samba-tng project forked because of disagreement over how the samba team was handling a core design decision (named pipes). Samba-tng became capable of serving as a windows PDC, and the samba project took whatever code looked good. Relations between the groups have been strained at times, but their experience sounds like a pretty close parallel to what you're seeing.
At the end, though, GPL code is GPL code. If it's under the GPL, you can use it, and there's really nothing the author can do. I think most people would agree that the's nothing wrong with using open source code - That's what it's there for.
To answer your actual question, whether or not the linux kernel's software RAID implementation is safe... "yes". I used it in production for NFS fileservers as far back as the 2.2 series; it performed wonderfully under high load then and has worked just as well when I've used it off and on since, both in production and on test systems. There are lots of suggestions elsewhere in the thread about things to avoid - multiple devices on the same IDE channel is the big gotcha: don't do it, its performance is particularly horrific during array reconstruction, just when you need it to run as fast as it possibly can. Keep those suggestions in mind when you build the system, but you can categorize the RAID implementation itself as more than sufficiently reliable.