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Comment Speed is indeed important (Score 1) 6

Not everyone has a brand-new computer; The manuscript of the book I'm about to publish is in Open Office Word, about 400 pages and full of large images, and autosave is a real pain because it takes minutes to save the file.

Like another commenter said, I wouldn't make it the most important thing, overall efficiency is. But software speed is important to anyone with an older computer, especially a Windows computer, because the computer slows as the registry grows, and the registry never gets smaller, only bigger.

Comment Re:What were they thinking? (Score 1) 177

You nailed it.

We're subjected constantly to rules and laws that make no sense and most of them aren't enforced; Even the cops often don't know what the laws are and they're supposed to enforce them. It makes me think of the cop who was writing tickets to everyone with a GPS. It was a stupid law but he decided to enforce it and caught hell for it, but isn't that what we want? Don't we want cops to enforce the actual laws regardless of their own opinions? But instead, we've all come to accept an environment where it's practically impossible to follow all the laws all the time, not to mention all the rules. We're literally being trained to ignore the rules.

And of course, people act like the solution is to make more rules.

Observe all warning signs.

Comment Re:For people who don't speak buzzwords (Score 2) 54

I remember and it was terrible! The OS was never designed to keep applications from talking to other applications on the system. (As an AS/400 novitiate and SE adherent, I should say "practically never.")

OS application management is something that is not as secure as a virtual machine or a jail or a container, so if you miss the days when the OS was doing it, you didn't have the problems these things are designed to solve.

Containers aren't just virtual machines running a single application either. VMs are a full OS with all the overhead that comes with it, including hardware abstraction layers, boot times and a bunch of stuff you don't need for your application but you get anyway because you need it to run a full OS.

Ideally you should be able to have a virtual machine that only needs a sliver of resources because you only need it running one thing but that's not what VMs provide. (Though Xen came closer than most and I miss it.) An ideal VM should be fast to spin up, but with VMs you were typically booting a whole OS.

Jails on the other hand... Well jails are what you wish a VM running a single application would be. A jail gives you an application and only what it actually needs in order to run in an isolated package. You don't get the benefits of having an image you can snapshot or move around like you do with virtual machines, but it dramatically cuts down on resource requirements.

Containers are basically what people want from jails and what they want from virtual machines with desirable features of each and without the drawbacks of either. They're not the solution to every problem and they're not a replacement for chroot jails or virtual machine servers, but they do have their place.

Comment Re:Financial harm to innocent storage users (Score 1) 301

You're asking the wrong question. The right question isn't:
"Why should I pay.. will [never] relate to them?"
or even "How do we fight this stupid decision?"

The *right* question is: How do I get a business model where everybody is taxed to pay me?

Note: this post assumes you aren't already a politician and that you don't have ethics.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Number Five 2

I just sent off for the fifth and, I hope, last pre-publication copy of Yesterday's Tomorrows. I was sure it would be finished a month ago, but there were problems printing it due to some of the illustrations being too high of a resolution. It took a month to get the fourth printed.

Social Networks

US Teen Pleads Guilty To Teaching ISIS About Bitcoin Via Twitter 312

jfruh writes: Ali Shukri Amin, a 17-year-old from Virginia, has pleaded guilty to charges that he aided ISIS by giving the group advice about using bitcoin. An odd and potentially troubling aspect of the charges is that this all took place in public — he Tweeted out links to an article on his blog about how bitcoin and Darknet could help jihadi groups, making it difficult to say whether he was publishing information protected under free speech or was directly advising the terrorist organization. Free speech qua speech isn't the only relevant charge, though: Amin "also admitted facilitating the travel of another teenager, 18-year-old Reza Niknejad, to Syria to join IS. Amin faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison if convicted."

Comment Re:Poor animals (Score 5, Informative) 212

I have no doubt that there are plenty of people who would dope a horse to win a race, but every loser would want to prove the winner had been doped if they could. So while there may be motivation to dope horses, there is intense testing and motivation to prevent it as well.

Lasix is commonly used to prevent EIPH (Exercise Induced Pulmonary Hemorrhage.) Basically race horses bleed from broken capillaries in their lungs due to the tremendous increase in blood pressure they exhibit during a race. (It happens in people and other animals too, but most things I've read are about it happening in horses, particularly race horses.) Essentially horses have been bred to run fast as a primary objective and success comes with health consequences.

So giving Lasix to horses may come with a performance benefit, (since the diuretic causes them to be several pounds lighter) but not giving it to them comes with a known health detriment. Not everyone believes that the bleeding is something that should be treated that way and some horse owners choose not to use it, but there is no doubt that it is an effective treatment to prevent a common ailment. Since Lasix also acts as a diuretic, the counter argument is that the dehydration it causes is worse than the ailment it prevents.

There's an interesting parallel in human olympic athletes: asthma inhalers. They are allowed by the Olympics because they've been exhaustively studied and found to not give performance gains, despite the fact that more and more athletes have been using them and performing better. It turns out that humans at extreme exercise levels also tend to experience issues with their lungs, so top performers can benefit from something to counteract the damages their extreme performances cause.

Comment Re:Fear (Score 2) 535

Makes this spring to mind:

"The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. 'Make it evil,' he'd been told. 'Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with.'"

RIP Mr. Adams.

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