Posts made by asuffield
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RE: Still seeing a whole lotta red here ...
@alegr said:
My guess is that it's all red because it's just a few large files that have grown at the same time, interleaving each other.
My bet is that it's one big-arse paging file, scattered throughout all the free space gaps.
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RE: Nietzsche Interviews... WTF?
@Veritas said:
Gallup-style assessment
I'm going to assume that you don't mean telephoning people randomly, so that leaves us with showing them a mirror and seeing if they recognise their own reflection. Original, but I don't see what it will accomplish.
@Veritas said:
get into the office this morning to find the following diatribe:
<snip>
Impressive how somebody can talk at such length without saying anything that's really wrong, and still be a complete prat. It seems that he knows more or less what he's talking about but has absolutely no idea what you were saying - some kind of solipsism fetish?
Definitely belongs in a university's philosophy department.
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RE: Speaking of unstable databases....
@Aaron said:
For the benefit of those who are not doing it right, could you please share what the right way is?
There is no golden hammer for this. It depends on what you're doing. It frequently involves an event loop and some different calls to the OS API.
To pick an example at random, let's say you were writing a tcp server in something congruent to C+POSIX. You could do it by having one thread sitting in a loop around an accept() call, and spawning a new thread for each session that connects. The right way, however, would be to set the O_NONBLOCK flag on the socket and build an event dispatch loop around a select() or poll() call.
The performance difference will usually be somewhere between 25% and 200%, depending on workload and operating system (Linux towards the low end, Windows is the worst).
@Aaron said:
the concepts of worker threads and callbacks were devised precisely for the purpose of eliminating the need for idle-event processing
No. They were devised precisely for the purpose of SMP. IO has nothing to do with it, and it never did. If you wanted to make the above server use multiple processors, you would put some worker threads in that the event loop dispatches jobs to, just like in any other SMP application.
@Aaron said:
when the performance difference becomes negligible (as it generally is for long-running worker threads)
Where did you get that idea? The performance difference is dictated by the amount of synchronisation required, and it does not normally change over the lifespan of the thread. You take about a 5%-10% hit from overloading the scheduler, and a massive hit every time cross-thread synchronisation is required.
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RE: Speaking of unstable databases....
@Outlaw Programmer said:
It's probably conceptually simpler to spawn a new thread (or use something like java.util.Timer that uses a separate thread behind the scenes) than try to shoehorn this into your main work thread. No real performance gain or loss, here. The idea is that it's easier to understand that 2 seperate things are going on at the same time. Of course, now you'll have to make sure your objects are thread-safe, but...
While in theory this should work, and you can contrive examples of it, I have never seen a real-world case where it was simpler to make the application thread-safe than it was to implement an event dispatch loop.
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RE: Speaking of unstable databases....
@PSWorx said:
As opposed to using the actual threading functions of the operating system. But from what I've heard on this board, those are merely horrors of the past.
The language doesn't care; Sun Java can do it either way nowadays, and other implementations vary.
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RE: Ingredients of a Roast Beef Sandwich
@RayS said:
Yes, but you might find the per-user licensing scheme too bothersome.But do you think I would enjoy Pancakes 2000 Enterprise Edition better?
The new 2008 edition is licensed by chewing time, and if you chew it for too long or it loses internet access to the licensing server, or your left front incisor is missing and you haven't applied the service pack, it turns into sand in your mouth.
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RE: Trying to avoid a database design WTF
@swaj said:
generally faster access (especially when indexed)
ITYM "only when indexed", and even then only for certain workloads.
An unindexed table in an RDBMS is somewhere between ten and a hundred times slower than a flat file. The only time that an RDBMS is justified on performance grounds is when you can say "It will require less effort to develop the system by using the RDBMSes indexing logic than by writing our own" - and that is not universally true.
Flexibility and reduced development costs are the main reasons for using RDBMSes. Performance is the main cost of using them, in most scenarios.
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RE: Ingredients of a Roast Beef Sandwich
@shadowman said:
Roast Beef isn't processed food, it's just, well, roasted beef.
Here in the UK we have an explicitly written law that says things called "Beef" must contain at least 60%* actual cow parts.
The fact that anybody thought it necessary to legislate this pretty much says it all.
(* - may not be the actual number, varied depending on the animal involved, +/- 10%)
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RE: Getting fired
@Lysis said:
Also, no one cares about references.
Companies are not really allowed to give references that say anything more than confirming that the person did work there between two given dates. Any other commentary gets them sued.
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RE: Getting fired
@vt_mruhlin said:
Either I misread something or your laws are different than ours though. I read that part about getting the form to mean "you're fired as of now", which seems to indicate that you're not entitled to get paid for the rest of the month (unless you have that many unused vacation days to pay out).
It depends on the exact details of the contract, but he was probably entitled to be paid up to the end of the month. However, this should have come from the company that gave him the P45, not the new one. (In the event of a part of one company being sold to another, the new company may pay that amount to the old company as part of the deal, but it's the old company who has an obligation to pay the workers - they're the ones you sue if necessary)
That doesn't mean it would have been worth the hassle of extracting that money. Depends what he was getting paid.
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RE: Speaking of unstable databases....
@dlikhten said:
The goal of multi threading is that if one thread is waiting due to I/O of any sort, another thread is running and doing all it needs to do while the frist thread is waiting.
<font size="+2">NO. THIS IS WRONG. WHERE DID YOU GET THIS IDEA? STOP IT.</font>
Threading is not, never has been, and never will be any kind of solution to IO problems. Threading for IO will make your application slower than doing it right.
There is one and only one reason for threads, and that is SMP.
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RE: Speaking of unstable databases....
$ time ./multicore_test 1 real 0m1.344s $ time ./multicore_test 4 real 0m1.351s $ time ./multicore_test 80 real 0m1.490s
Exactly as predicted. Threading makes performance slightly worse except in one specific scenario, as I described.
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RE: Speaking of unstable databases....
@superjer said:
Automatic parallelization is very limited in scope. In a ray-tracer, for example, which is highly parallelizable, the compiler is not going to make it parallel for you. You have to do it yourself with threads. It's the only way to do it.
Actually, researchers have been producing compilers that can do just this for the past couple of decades - it's quite possible (and ray tracers are a popular example for them to demonstrate it with). It's just that people don't use those compilers.
There is no particularly good reason for this state of affairs, although everybody involved can come up with a plausible-sounding explanation of why it is not their fault.
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RE: Speaking of unstable databases....
@superjer said:
I'm not even sure what to say to you guys... but multithreading can vastly improve "perceived performance" in certain situations. Right now I'm working on an app that completes 3.99 times faster with 4 threads than with just one. We're talking 4 hours down to 1 hour.
This indicates a bug or design flaw in the application, if all those threads are running on the same processor. You could have done it even faster with a single thread. The fact that you didn't do this does not mean anything.
@LoztInSpace said:
Multithreading works well when you have blocking IO combined with CPU work. Like, for example, a database, an operating system, a web server to name a few. Any application that exhibits the IO+CPU+IO will typically benefit from MT.
This one falls under the heading of "popular but wrong beliefs". Any application of this form will benefit vastly more from being written by somebody who understands how to do it right in a single thread. This is because the number of threads required in order to unjam the system when using braimdamaged IO will always vastly exceed the number of available processors by several orders of magnitude.
Early versions of Java are largely responsible for propagating this belief, because their OS interface library was too broken to support doing it right. This was fixed years ago.
There is precisely one situation in which threading is fundamentally the right solution, and that is to utilise multiple processors in an SMP system. Under any other circumstances there is a faster and better way, even if you don't know what it is.
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RE: What is the current year?
@MarcB said:
No, copyright is automatic once you slap on the (c) tag and associated text. AT&T found that out the hard way when they sued Berkeley over Unix for copyright violations. The old copyright act required explicity (c) tags, and AT&T Unix source had none, so it became public domain by default.
The "old copyright act" that you're referring to is the series of US-specific laws that ceased to apply in 1988. Unless you're living in some kind of bizarre relativistic time fold, this has not been true for the past twenty years. The case that you are referring to deals with software written in the period 1978-1988, so it is no longer relevant.
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RE: Just in: Microsoft preps hostile takeover of Yahoo
@dlikhten said:
you can live off the dividents they give
Microsoft is notorious for not paying them, which makes some people (notably economics researchers) wonder why exactly the shares are worth anything. They only started a couple of years ago, and haven't really paid out that much money.
@dlikhten said:
The person has money invested in other companies by having stocks/bonds/etc
And for some people that might even be true. But Gates didn't put any money in and can't really get much out, so calling it an "investment" is, at best, creative.
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RE: Don't forget to check your logs
@ince said:
Was there no way for the users to inform you, or whoever was responsible for the website at the time, about it?
When I find my way to some web store and it doesn't work immediately, I certainly don't waste time trying to contact anybody, I move on to the next google hit.
Whatever you're selling, there's ten more guys down the street who are selling it too.
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RE: Redneck company
@DaEagle said:
I read when reasearching my last monitor that wide screens are cheaper to produce than traditional 4:3 ratio monitors.
I bet that's "cheaper" in the sense of "it lets us sell another display to somebody who already had one, as an 'upgrade' to 'widescreen' 'for movies' at an inflated price", rather than meaning something like "it costs less to produce so we'll sell it to your for less".
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RE: Apple WTF
The first time I saw an iLamp, I laughed, and laughed, and laughed, until they took it away again.
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RE: Making a (non-WTF) commercial website
@MarcB said:
There's plenty of free/opensource/commercial e-commerce systems out there.
Well, about three ones of note, anyway. And oscommerce is what pretty much everybody uses these days (ever notice that there's more than a few thousand web stores out there which all look more or less the same? That's oscommerce running the default theme. It's everywhere)
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RE: Redneck company
@Lingerance said:
They're nice in two situations: one you view allot movies in wide-screen format
A widescreen movie is exactly the same size when displayed on a monitor of the same width but full height.
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RE: Making a (non-WTF) commercial website
It's almost funny how somebody can quote that marketing gunk with a straight face as if they almost believed what they were saying. I particularly like the way he suggested writing a web application in C++. Only a marketdroid could come up with that one.
How many professional games do you know that are written in Python on FreeBSD using Emacs? Lets get serious. Visual C++ is the standard and is a Microsoft product.
All serious game development companies know that the MSVC compiler is a piece of shit which generates slow code, which is why most of them use Intel's compiler.
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RE: Redneck company
@El_Heffe said:
But the cheaper/simpler programs are missing key features and have lots of design WTFs (ie GIMP).
While the GIMP is not exactly a paragon of great software engineering, I do have to say that Photoshop is not really all that much better. They're both large, clumsy, crufty, and more than a little buggy.
@OperatorBastardusInfernalis said:
GIMP's user interface clearly sucks
Photoshop isn't really that much better, especially on Windows. GIMP has a significant advantage on its native X, where the window manager actually works properly.
I find them both quite unpleasant - but there's nothing else that can do what they do. And it is hard to justify the price tag on Photoshop, when its only major advantage is the CYMK colour model. Maybe if it cost about a quarter of what it does...
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RE: Making a (non-WTF) commercial website
Oh look, MS marketing spiel. I bet it's the same shilling company.
The platform you're deploying to is the web. Windows is irrelevant.
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RE: Just in: Microsoft preps hostile takeover of Yahoo
@seaturnip said:
Screw your exclamation mark. Punctuation as part of a name is never proper.
Somebody already had a trademark on the word "yahoo". They !ed it to evade that and get their own.
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RE: Oh I'm pissed..... is this the right forum???
@dhromed said:
@asuffield said:
if you work in the tech industry long enough, you either find Dilbert funny, or you find a chainsaw.
Time for a career change.
That's what I tell everybody who asks what kind of job they should get. They never seem to pay attention.
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RE: Question for World of Warcraft players...
@Ice^^Heat said:
I am even more curious on how they do it at EVE-Online, where there is only 1 persistent world.
It's a bunch of independent persistant worlds connected by magic gates. Pretty obvious that they'll be running on separate servers.
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RE: Reformatting Question
@Spectre said:
maybe it's the chipset driver
If your "chipset" driver pack happens to include a new IDE driver, that would do the trick, because the problem is that the IDE driver shipped with Windows is out of date. The rest of the system doesn't care.
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RE: Oh I'm pissed..... is this the right forum???
@dhromed said:
But let's not ramble on the subjectivity of humour -- apparently plenty of people find Dilbert really funny.
The thing about Dilbert is: if you work in the tech industry long enough, you either find Dilbert funny, or you find a chainsaw.
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RE: Making a (non-WTF) commercial website
@Faxmachinen said:
Now, the only reason I'm going with MySQL is because I've heard about it, it's free, and it's better than MSSQL. Are there other alternatives, and how suitable would they be?
If there is a golden hammer for database problems, it's postgres. mysql would be the golden shoe; it's a passable network storage server, and a lousy RDBMS.
The right solution to your problem is probably to deploy oscommerce. The world does not need yet another half-arsed custom-built web storefront.
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RE: Just in: Microsoft preps hostile takeover of Yahoo
@dlikhten said:
Its only a few billion shy of Bill Gates net worth. It is odd to think that there is a single man who is worth more than some companies.
After 100 million dollars you are at the stage of building your own Dynasty, caz I don't know how any sane person can spend over 100 million in their lives and not be satisfied.You're assigning a too-literal interpretation to this measurement of the value of a person.
The way people work this one is: you take the current price at which people are trading shares in the company; call this X. Let Y be the number of shares owned by the person you are measuring. Claim that the net worth of the person is X * Y.
The problem with this is that it's complete bollocks. It's based on the assumption that the person could sell all of their shares at the current market rate, which is clearly not true if you actually think about it.
The reason why people use this stupid measurement is because it lets them claim Gates or some other media baby is the "wealthiest" person. If you use a saner measure than the book value of share assets, such as the total amount of financial power that a person can exert (though liquid or semi-liquid assets) then you'll find that it's the banking families who have it.
All of which is predicated on the notion that the value of a person is measured by their posessions.
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RE: Reformatting Question
@belgariontheking said:
When I originally installed the big hard drive, I had to download something special from Microsoft so that Windows would recognize more than 127 GB of the hard drive. Apparently that's the limit of what Windows can address with its (I'm guessing) 32-bit integer address.
It's the 28-bit limit of the older ATA addressing mechanism. All newer software and hardware should support LBA48 mode, with a limit of 128Pb.
Should I have any trouble trying to use the existing partitions on the 300 GB hard drive, assuming I install the special Microsoft crap before I try to use the 300 GB hard drive?
No. It has nothing to do with the data on the drive, it's purely a question of the interface to the ATA controller.
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RE: You should need a license before being allowed to use a computer
@pianohacker said:
The only bad part is that this guy also believes that Linux, atheists and liberals are all the spawns of Satan.
I mean, I've been partial to the first part after spending three hours trying to get X11 to work, but honestly.
X11 predates Linux by four years, and I don't think anybody would seriously defend it (except maybe the ones smoking the x.org crack pipe). It's a pile of crap, it's just that everything else out there that does the same job is worse.
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RE: Redneck company
@Renan_S2 said:
Same with me. I have been using GIMP since 1.x too, and never had any major problems with it on Windows, but it does take a while to get used to.
Pretty much every large, complicated application takes a while to get used to. I don't know why people would expect anything different.
I am particularly amused by people who know nothing about image editing and have never done it before, who try using gimp (or photoshop) and then complain that it's "too hard". Artwork is hard, doofus. That's why people study for years to learn how to do it.
Why do so many people have no respect for the concept of specialisations? They seem to honesly believe that every conceivable task should be no harder than banging a nail with a rock.
Grrr.
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RE: Oh I'm pissed..... is this the right forum???
@PJH said:
Relevant? to programmers.
No. As Tycho would put it, "what the fuck are you on?"
It is quite obviously about gaming. Nobody could possibly mistake it for anything else.
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RE: I feel so dirty right now
@PJH said:
@cooldud said:
We seem to have an inordinate amount of trolls around at this time of year.Stop bragging about how awesome you are.
Lesson of the day: "troll" is not a synonym for "idiot". This guy is an idiot. He does not appear to be a troll.
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RE: Nested AD Groups
@SteveB said:
It turns out that for some crazy reason AD allows you to make a group a member of itself.
Old, well-known one. This feature was introduced for no reason other than to break compatibility with all existing unix/ldap systems, which would otherwise have been able to interoperate seamlessly with windows domains. Took a couple of years for samba to come up with a compatibility layer for it.
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RE: Hungarian Hungarian Hippos.
@cconroy said:
How do you know it's Hungarian?
It ate a Hungarian dude, that is presumably close enough. Or at least, nobody wanted to argue with it. Hippos are big.
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RE: Hungarian Hungarian Hippos.
@AbbydonKrafts said:
@galgorah said:
Thank you. You've satisfied my inner child. I used to play this game as a kid. As I recall it was terrible
I used to as well. Now, I can't stand to be near it. Almost the loudest damn thing to let loose in a house.
I believe that is pretty much the point of the game. Haven't you noticed that children between the ages of 6 and 10 are greatly amused by making a loud noise for no particular reason?
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RE: No Quack.. er, I mean "the steamer"
@Critter said:
The objective is to poison the corpi in a naïve Bayes filter, so that it loses its ability to discern spam from ham.
Any naive Bayes implementation on which this actually works is COMPLETELY BROKEN and it's amazing that it ever worked at all.
Seriously, the part of the algorithm that eliminates that problem is part of every undergrad course and textbook, and it always has been. Does anybody actually have a filter which leaves it out for some inexplicable reason? Or are the spammers just throwing monkey shit at airplanes?
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RE: Siemens T-OUCH
@AbbydonKrafts said:
The local 24-hour gas station has pumps like that. Most of the exterior plastic over the LCD displays are cracked or completely busted out. I don't know why people insist on making it almost impossible for others to read the numbers at the pumps.
Some of it is regular vandalism. Some of it is because the idiot pump manufacturer didn't check to see that hey, this kind of plastic is destroyed by petrol fumes (the cheapest, most common kind of hard transparent plastic almost dissolves in the presence of petrol).
I don't know how these people remain employed.
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RE: Committing in TortoiseSVN - When is a good time/What is a good way?
@dhromed said:
So why does it suck?
CVS sucks because it was created to be a mechanism for storing a single sequence of diffs to a bunch of files, onto which branching was very crudely grafted with no real thought, by people who were not very good software engineers (in fact, it's researcher code that crawled out of the lab and ran away).
Were you expecting some complex story? It's just regular suckage.
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RE: Apple WTF
@Cap'n Steve said:
If you really think that not a single OSX virus exists (which I really doubt)
The first ever macosx virus is discovered at a rate of roughly two or three times a year.
This is not because it's harder to create viruses for macosx. This is because once you've created a virus for windows, you really don't need to bother with any other platforms - your botnet is already large enough to take over the internet by force and proclaim yourself king, why would you need any more?
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RE: Room Heating
@m0ffx said:
Thermostatic radiator valves should be easy to retrofit to all but the most archaic of central heating systems.
FSVO "easy". You have to drain the system to do it, which means if you don't own the building, it probably isn't going to get done.
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RE: Form letter inanity
Adding injury to insult, when the package finally arrived, somebody had taken the perfectly adequate standard-issue fedex shipping container, and put it inside a large, unsealed plastic bag, which served only to collect the rain and thoroughly soak the package.
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RE: Room Heating
@HonoreDB said:
So apparently, the heating system in my building works as follows. The temperature in each room is measured. The highest temperature is taken, and then all the individual heaters/air conditioners are adjusted according to that temperature. There is apparently no way to deal with rooms that are exceptionally hot or cold relative to the rest of the building. Is this common? It's a serious problem when your room is apparently 15 degrees or so colder than the hottest room and it's a cold winter night.
This is usually because the only control the heating system has is to switch the boiler on or off - most older residential heating systems don't have individually controlled valves for each room.