>What if you could only ejaculate a >finite number of times in your life?
What do you mean, "what if"? You won't live forever. You just don't know what the finite number is yet. Sorry, just nit-picking.
But more to your point, what if you had to carry around a little meter that displayed the number of remaining rounds you had left in the old ammo cartridge? The honeys would know your mission status pretty well.
Software should run forever. If it doesn't, regular rebooting hides problems that ought to be fixed, rather than worked around by you. You should already know anything you can discover on a reboot.
Part of the confusion on this seems to be a difference between people running production, multiuser systems and those running noncritical single-user ones. Production admins generally try to make their changes first on testbed machines to catch the whoppers.
In your case, how would regular rebooting have solved your problem? You recompiled modules and didn't try to reload them. Unless you rebooted right then, ie, performed a live test, you'd be just as clueless about the cause of the problem on your regular reboot as on a random one.
No, reboot only when you must, such as when loading a new OS version or changing hardware.
There are better ways to check the integrity of a running system than stopping it to see if it starts again. There are many tools that make CRC or MD5 signatures of binaries, configuration files, and startup scripts, allowing you to know what has changed since your last reboot.
Yeesh, what a stupid idea. Unless there's some monthly hardware maintenance that has to be done in power-off for safety reasons, that is.
Software should run forever. If it doesn't, rebooting every month hides problems that ought to be fixed, rather than worked around by the users.
As far as teenage manhood comparisons go, I could never manage more than average uptime. O'course, what you do with it while it's up is what's important.
dropped by positively beaming and let me know he had noticed that luna (the server) had not been rebooted for a long time so over the weekend he had rebooted it for us!
Oh, man, I'm sorry. You were well on your way to the hallowed 2-year mark, too.
What strikes me about your anecdote is your comment "Universes collide!". I was trained on Big Iron, IBM and Amdahl mainframes in the early 80's. Those things only went down when they were replaced.
Before 4BSD, ca 1980, Unix had MTBF of less than a day. Gradually, things got better, until by the late 80's Unix had real uptime ability. Unfortunately, at about that time the Unix Wars were in full swing, but that's a different story.
Windows suffers from two problems: its history as a single-user OS and its utter dominance of that category for so long. The mindset that accepts rebooting the OS as a matter of course, and even the amazing "best practice" recommendation to reboot on a regular basis, ultimately stem from its history.
What happened to our ideals? I was taught that educating people, filling their heads with knowledge, also filled their hearts with respect for the society doing the teaching.
That's traditionally why military officers went to college.
And it's true: a professor stands in front of the class giving his political opinion between items in the subject matter. Students absorb it readily, since their guard is down - it has to be, or they won't be able to ace that test on Thursday.
I wonder if it's a side-effect of the reputation American academia has for expressing anti-American sentiment. If colleges and universities were known for talking up the US as the Land of the Free and the Home of the, etc., do you think the government would be trying to limit foreign citizens from exposure to it?
As it is, trying to regulate which people can learn what in the age of the Internet is like trying to control where the rain comes from or which way the wind blows when it leaves.
Hah! You read in much more than I said. I'm perfectly happy with the idea that some jobs pay more, because fewer people can do those jobs (or they're more risky, or whatever).
But at the same time, I couldn't be a waiter or a secretary. I'm way too ADD for that.
james_couzens crawls out from under a rock and spews:
...The biggest problem is that the IT industry was flooded with fucking asshats interested in it only for the money. I recall quite clearly a former friend who was a landscaper. I didn't see him for a couple of years and then ran into him downtown where he told me he was learning C++ and Java, at which point I suddenly felt the urge to vommit.
Every job or position is just as hard as every other. Say that to yourself over and over, because you're obviously a snob who needs to get over an assinine, overinflated sense of your own importance.
A car salesman needs to know about sales technique, trends in the industry, demographics, and the technical details of how cars work. A grocery store manager has 10,000 items to remember, including watching their popularity and knowing their proper use, so that when a customer asks him he can give a ready answer. And a landscaper needs to know which plants are best for which soil, shade, and design criteria.
Not everyone finds their calling in high school. Some people know their calling, but don't get the breaks to get there.
I knew when I was 14 that I wanted to program computers when I grew up. That's what I do now, almost 30 years later, but it took me the first 10 years or so to arrange it.
Before that I was a
high school jock (and a mediocre one, at that)
college student who partied too much
convenience store clerk
homeless hitchhiker
grocery bagger (got fired for eating cookies from the vendor restock bin)
young marine (and a lousy one)
pizza deliverer (delivering to former high school classmates I could tell were pleased that they were more successful than I was)
If you asked one of the people who knew me in one of those other roles, they might tell you I'd be a landscaper by now.
I gotta tell you, some days I consider it.
By the way, that former friend of yours probably would make an excellent contact for you the next time you're downsized or simply fired for being a jerk.
A really smart, pricey, air-cooled, diesel-powered, politically correct skateboard... that floats!
A driverless car. Wow, that's kinda cool.
I wish I had more, but I kinda ran out of gas. Really I should have hit the brakes after the first one, but once I'm in gear I can't stop until I crash and burn.
Too Microsofty. Yuck. TFA says they have a database of sites that are either good or bad. I hope the phishers don't learn how to use disposable domains! (What's that you say? That's what they do now?)
But this may appeal to someone. Let's see: they have to be clueful enough to want something other than IE, and clueless enough not to want Firefox or Opera. Pretty slim pickings.
I guess there's still something left to the Netscape name as a brand, but they're quickly killing it.
You're probably one of those guys who thinks you can accidentally detonate a nuclear warhead by knocking it over.
When you're dropping it from orbit, you don't have to detonate it.
The reports I heard said the plan was to take a big chunk of U-238 and drop it on the target. That means the satellite would be designed exactly not to "burn up in the atmosphere" as you suggest.
Our ICBMs are not up in the sky already. We can guard them. We can't guard a satellite. It could get hit by space debris (likely only to disable it), shot with a missile or another satellite, or it could become the object of a takeover mission.
If anything does go wrong, a satellite is in the wrong place. We can't get to it to fix it, and we can't stop it from falling. Yeah, odds are pretty good it would land on water or in an uninhabited area.
Or tie a bungie cord to the treadmill your lazy self should be on, hook the shoes to either end, and give them a jolt now and then. Every commercial or so ought to be enough.
>that sounds a lot like the fall of any >democracy/meritocracy.
I think that was sort of the point, that the Biblical story of how Israel got a king can be read as a principle of human nature. "Be careful what you wish for", that sort of thing. Whether it happened as the Bible says (and I have no reason to think it didn't), or if it's just a myth, it's descriptive of many situations.
Youth should be taught safe drinking. They should learn to know their limits, and what alcohol can do to them.
After all, they're going to drink, so let's make sure they do it properly.
It's time for a drinker's license, just as there are driver's licenses and hunting licenses. You should have to pass a test (with both written and practical components), or you shouldn't get to drink.
In the absence of a drinker's license, kids will learn their drinking skills from peers and young adults, often those with the worst drinking skills. Bartenders, while often highly trained professionals, seldom have the time to instruct young novice drinkers on the finer points such as:
which drinks can get you hammered quickest
proper chugging technique
how to fake being drunk to avoid awkward social circumstances
how to fake being sober to avoid awkward legal circumstances
how to select the proper drink regimen to avoid blowing chunks
the proper use of "beer goggles", and how to act in the morning when they no longer work
Until we properly attend to the needs of our youth, we won't be sure of the kind of society we'll become. The future of drinking, and our civilization built on its mighty foundation, is too important to be left to random chance.
Sometimes web designers fall in love with their own creativity and forget that the content is what matters. It's surprising to me that more HTML coders (or CSS coders or autogenerators) don't do this the "right" way:
<table border=0 width="99%"> .... </table>
With a percentage-width tag, the box forms to the width of the window and you avoid a lot of problems.
Then, of course, is the question of why there has to be a box at all.
My customer base is primarily engineering design firms - CAD. CAD software companies love Redhat, apparently, and they won't talk to you unless you're running it.
It seems weird until you think about it, but many of them support Redhat 7.2 and all of its problems, but not Debian and its etched-in-stone stability.
Blech. Sometimes I want to drop all this computer crap and sell strawberries or something.
Customers don't think about their power bills when they're buying computers, typically. They think about how fast their browsers come up or their screens refresh.
Engineers don't think about overall power efficiency when designing a computer, typically. They think about getting the heat out of the components or out of the case, depending on what part of the problem they're tackling.
If the customers wanted more watt-efficient computers, the engineers would optimize for that.
On the other hand, this seems like a great spot for someone to begin selling a thermocouple-based server rack cooler. It's not a perfect solution, but you could probably make a thermocouple cooler powerful enough to run its own LEDs or something:-).
"Monolithic" and "microkernel" refer to the structure of the kernel program, not to how it's loaded.
Linux drivers (and other "modules") are stored as separate files on disk, or can be compiled in to the kernel. Either way, once they are loaded they form part of the kernel, with all of the rights they need to do whatever they want to your system.
In microkernel architectures, the OS has many layers and a mechanism for keeping them separate, so that the disk driver can't write directly to the screen or affect user processes.
The Linux kernel uses programmer resources liberally to keep separation. There is more and more modularity in Linux as time goes on, but Linus won't ever go fully microkernel because it takes too much away from performance. Better to use "free" programmer time than slow down Linux.
FUD: a Linux module could be or could contain a virus that would have full access to your machine.
Reality: a malware module might mess up your machine, but it would need a really sneaky method of propagation to move to another machine. It basically would have to be part of some distibution to make it onto a significant number of computers.
The malware module problem is also partly why kernel modules should be open source. If you can't see the source, you really don't know what it's doing.
Slashdot Mirror
>What if you could only ejaculate a
>finite number of times in your life?
What do you mean, "what if"? You won't live forever. You just don't know what the finite number is yet. Sorry, just nit-picking.
But more to your point, what if you had to carry around a little meter that displayed the number of remaining rounds you had left in the old ammo cartridge? The honeys would know your mission status pretty well.
Software should run forever. If it doesn't, regular rebooting hides problems that ought to be fixed, rather than worked around by you. You should already know anything you can discover on a reboot.
Part of the confusion on this seems to be a difference between people running production, multiuser systems and those running noncritical single-user ones. Production admins generally try to make their changes first on testbed machines to catch the whoppers.
In your case, how would regular rebooting have solved your problem? You recompiled modules and didn't try to reload them. Unless you rebooted right then, ie, performed a live test, you'd be just as clueless about the cause of the problem on your regular reboot as on a random one.
No, reboot only when you must, such as when loading a new OS version or changing hardware.
There are better ways to check the integrity of a running system than stopping it to see if it starts again. There are many tools that make CRC or MD5 signatures of binaries, configuration files, and startup scripts, allowing you to know what has changed since your last reboot.
>where the mainframes are rebooted
Yeesh, what a stupid idea. Unless there's some monthly hardware maintenance that has to be done in power-off for safety reasons, that is.
Software should run forever. If it doesn't, rebooting every month hides problems that ought to be fixed, rather than worked around by the users.
As far as teenage manhood comparisons go, I could never manage more than average uptime. O'course, what you do with it while it's up is what's important.
Oh, man, I'm sorry. You were well on your way to the hallowed 2-year mark, too.
What strikes me about your anecdote is your comment "Universes collide!". I was trained on Big Iron, IBM and Amdahl mainframes in the early 80's. Those things only went down when they were replaced.
Before 4BSD, ca 1980, Unix had MTBF of less than a day. Gradually, things got better, until by the late 80's Unix had real uptime ability. Unfortunately, at about that time the Unix Wars were in full swing, but that's a different story.
Windows suffers from two problems: its history as a single-user OS and its utter dominance of that category for so long. The mindset that accepts rebooting the OS as a matter of course, and even the amazing "best practice" recommendation to reboot on a regular basis, ultimately stem from its history.
But you knew all of that.
This same group came out with the story '"Mid-Sized Companies Not Interested in Linux - Microsoft Still Dominates, Study Says" - April 5, 2005'.
It looks like the same "study".
Thanks, Slashdot, for giving the lame "study" more legs and contributing to Linux FUD.
Actually, I'm willing to concede some power to whatever government it takes to keep billboards out of my sky.
I've thought it over, and I'd rather be enslaved to the government some more than have the stars defaced by orbital spam.
As long is it's not moving down.
Incredible.
What happened to our ideals? I was taught that educating people, filling their heads with knowledge, also filled their hearts with respect for the society doing the teaching.
That's traditionally why military officers went to college.
And it's true: a professor stands in front of the class giving his political opinion between items in the subject matter. Students absorb it readily, since their guard is down - it has to be, or they won't be able to ace that test on Thursday.
I wonder if it's a side-effect of the reputation American academia has for expressing anti-American sentiment. If colleges and universities were known for talking up the US as the Land of the Free and the Home of the, etc., do you think the government would be trying to limit foreign citizens from exposure to it?
As it is, trying to regulate which people can learn what in the age of the Internet is like trying to control where the rain comes from or which way the wind blows when it leaves.
-
Eat at Wendy's
-
Order the Chili
-
Use that thumb
[/ob]>politically correct bullshit
Hah! You read in much more than I said. I'm perfectly happy with the idea that some jobs pay more, because fewer people can do those jobs (or they're more risky, or whatever).
But at the same time, I couldn't be a waiter or a secretary. I'm way too ADD for that.
Every job or position is just as hard as every other. Say that to yourself over and over, because you're obviously a snob who needs to get over an assinine, overinflated sense of your own importance.
A car salesman needs to know about sales technique, trends in the industry, demographics, and the technical details of how cars work. A grocery store manager has 10,000 items to remember, including watching their popularity and knowing their proper use, so that when a customer asks him he can give a ready answer. And a landscaper needs to know which plants are best for which soil, shade, and design criteria.
Not everyone finds their calling in high school. Some people know their calling, but don't get the breaks to get there.
I knew when I was 14 that I wanted to program computers when I grew up. That's what I do now, almost 30 years later, but it took me the first 10 years or so to arrange it.
Before that I was a
If you asked one of the people who knew me in one of those other roles, they might tell you I'd be a landscaper by now.
I gotta tell you, some days I consider it.
By the way, that former friend of yours probably would make an excellent contact for you the next time you're downsized or simply fired for being a jerk.
>the color red
Oh. How gay.
I wish I had more, but I kinda ran out of gas. Really I should have hit the brakes after the first one, but once I'm in gear I can't stop until I crash and burn.
Too Microsofty. Yuck. TFA says they have a database of sites that are either good or bad. I hope the phishers don't learn how to use disposable domains! (What's that you say? That's what they do now?)
But this may appeal to someone. Let's see: they have to be clueful enough to want something other than IE, and clueless enough not to want Firefox or Opera. Pretty slim pickings.
I guess there's still something left to the Netscape name as a brand, but they're quickly killing it.
When you're dropping it from orbit, you don't have to detonate it.
The reports I heard said the plan was to take a big chunk of U-238 and drop it on the target. That means the satellite would be designed exactly not to "burn up in the atmosphere" as you suggest.
Our ICBMs are not up in the sky already. We can guard them. We can't guard a satellite. It could get hit by space debris (likely only to disable it), shot with a missile or another satellite, or it could become the object of a takeover mission.
If anything does go wrong, a satellite is in the wrong place. We can't get to it to fix it, and we can't stop it from falling. Yeah, odds are pretty good it would land on water or in an uninhabited area.
Or it could hit your roof.
that doesn't require Frankensteinian cleverness.
Play "air drums" with the shoes.
Or tie a bungie cord to the treadmill your lazy self should be on, hook the shoes to either end, and give them a jolt now and then. Every commercial or so ought to be enough.
You'd better not make a mistake with one.
You'd better hope their orbits are stable.
You'd better hope their orbits don't decay
What if one gets fired by accident or software bug?
The basic problem is that once the weapon is deployed into orbit, it's already half fired.
>that sounds a lot like the fall of any
>democracy/meritocracy.
I think that was sort of the point, that the Biblical story of how Israel got a king can be read as a principle of human nature. "Be careful what you wish for", that sort of thing. Whether it happened as the Bible says (and I have no reason to think it didn't), or if it's just a myth, it's descriptive of many situations.
Youth should be taught safe drinking. They should learn to know their limits, and what alcohol can do to them.
After all, they're going to drink, so let's make sure they do it properly.
It's time for a drinker's license, just as there are driver's licenses and hunting licenses. You should have to pass a test (with both written and practical components), or you shouldn't get to drink.
In the absence of a drinker's license, kids will learn their drinking skills from peers and young adults, often those with the worst drinking skills. Bartenders, while often highly trained professionals, seldom have the time to instruct young novice drinkers on the finer points such as:
Until we properly attend to the needs of our youth, we won't be sure of the kind of society we'll become. The future of drinking, and our civilization built on its mighty foundation, is too important to be left to random chance.
>extra 1%
Nuthin. It's margin. "100%" is ok, too, but I like a little space between the window edge and the text.
Sometimes web designers fall in love with their own creativity and forget that the content is what matters. It's surprising to me that more HTML coders (or CSS coders or autogenerators) don't do this the "right" way:
With a percentage-width tag, the box forms to the width of the window and you avoid a lot of problems.Then, of course, is the question of why there has to be a box at all.
My customer base is primarily engineering design firms - CAD. CAD software companies love Redhat, apparently, and they won't talk to you unless you're running it.
It seems weird until you think about it, but many of them support Redhat 7.2 and all of its problems, but not Debian and its etched-in-stone stability.
Blech. Sometimes I want to drop all this computer crap and sell strawberries or something.
Customers don't think about their power bills when they're buying computers, typically. They think about how fast their browsers come up or their screens refresh.
:-).
Engineers don't think about overall power efficiency when designing a computer, typically. They think about getting the heat out of the components or out of the case, depending on what part of the problem they're tackling.
If the customers wanted more watt-efficient computers, the engineers would optimize for that.
On the other hand, this seems like a great spot for someone to begin selling a thermocouple-based server rack cooler. It's not a perfect solution, but you could probably make a thermocouple cooler powerful enough to run its own LEDs or something
"Monolithic" and "microkernel" refer to the structure of the kernel program, not to how it's loaded.
Linux drivers (and other "modules") are stored as separate files on disk, or can be compiled in to the kernel. Either way, once they are loaded they form part of the kernel, with all of the rights they need to do whatever they want to your system.
In microkernel architectures, the OS has many layers and a mechanism for keeping them separate, so that the disk driver can't write directly to the screen or affect user processes.
The Linux kernel uses programmer resources liberally to keep separation. There is more and more modularity in Linux as time goes on, but Linus won't ever go fully microkernel because it takes too much away from performance. Better to use "free" programmer time than slow down Linux.
FUD: a Linux module could be or could contain a virus that would have full access to your machine.
Reality: a malware module might mess up your machine, but it would need a really sneaky method of propagation to move to another machine. It basically would have to be part of some distibution to make it onto a significant number of computers.
The malware module problem is also partly why kernel modules should be open source. If you can't see the source, you really don't know what it's doing.