Thanks for the education Alan. I think the further north(or south) you live from the equator the more you appreciate the sun when it comes back. I live in Canada and here we get 6-8 hours of sun in the winter. while not extreme, people who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder have a hard time. I always wanted to visit antarctica, but I think I suffer that fate.

From 'You Are All Diseased':

Where did this sudden fear of germs come from in this country? Have you noticed this? The media constantly running stories about all the latest infections? Salmonella, E-coli, hanta virus, bird flu, and Americans will panic easily so everybody's running around scrubbing this and spraying that and overcooking their food and repeatedly washing their hands, trying to avoid all contact with germs. It's ridiculous and it goes to ridiculous lengths.

In prisons, before they give you lethal injection, they swab your arm with ALCOHOL. Wouldn't want some guy to go to hell AND be sick.Fear of germs, why these fuckin' pussies. You can't even get a decent hamburger anymore they cook the shit out of everything now 'cause everyone's afraid of FOOD POISONING! Hey, wheres you sense of adventure? Take a fuckin' chance will you? Hey you know how many people die of food poisoning in this country? Nine thousand, thats all, its a minor risk.

Take a fuckin' chance bunch of goddamn pussies.Besides, what d'ya think you have an immune system for? It's for killing germs! But it needs practice, it needs germs to practice on. So if you kill all the germs around you, and live a completely sterile life, then when germs do come along, you're not gonna be prepared. And never mind ordinary germs, what are you gonna do when some super virus comes along that turns your vital organs into liquid shit?! I'll tell you what your gonna do ... you're gonna get sick. You're gonna die and your gonna deserve it because you're fucking weak and you got a fuckin' weak immune system!

Let me tell you a true story about immunization ok. When I was a little boy in New York city in the nineteen-forties, we swam in the Hudson river. And it was filled with raw sewage! OK? We swam in raw sewage, you know, to cool off. And at that time the big fear was polio. Thousands of kids died from polio every year. But you know something? In my neighborhood no one ever got polio. No one! EVER! You know why? Cause WE SWAM IN RAW SEWAGE! It strengthened our immune system, the polio never had a prayer. We were tempered in raw shit!

So personally I never take any precautions against germs. I don't shy away from people who sneeze and cough. I don't wipe off the telephone, I don't cover the toilet seat, and if I drop food on the floor I pick it up and eat it!Even if I'm at side walk cafe! IN CALCUTTA! THE POOR SECTION! ON NEW YEARS MORNING DURING A SOCCER RIOT! And you know something? In spite of all the so called "risky behavior ".... I never get infections. I don't get em. I don't get colds, I don't get flu, I don't get headaches, I don't get upset stomach, And you know why? Cause I got a good strong immune system! And it gets a lot of practice!

My immune system is equipped with the biological equivalent of fully automatic military assault rifles, with night vision and laser scopes. And we have recently acquired phosphorous grenades, cluster bombs and anti personnel fragmentation mines.

So, when my white blood cells are on patrol reconnoitering my blood stream seeking out strangers and other undesirables, and if they see any, ANY, suspicious looking germs of any kind, THEY DON'T. FUCK. AROUND. They whip out the weapons, they wax the motherfucker and deposit the unlucky fellow directly into my colon! Into my colon. There's no nonsense! There's no miranda warning, there's none of that three strikes and your out bullshit. First defense, BAM! Into the colon you go!

The problem with the Adam Smith view of the market is they assume everyone is 1) rational and 2) completely informed. When you add in incomplete information, i.e. the person is rational about what he knows but he can only see 3 or 4 levels of transactions, then you get the 1/f power curve which demonstrates continual fluctuations at all scales, including huge economic bubbles and depressions. a lot like real life,

Nice try. Blame the FoxNews astroturf movement for misappropriating the term. Then take responsibility for not grasping even the most basic of civic principles. And then take your lumps for the irony of the story you link to in your sig. Yeah, that's right, consumeraffairs.com/news04/2009/09/asthma_hfa05.htmlis a gleaming example of why the insurance and health care industries are in desperate need of regulation. Setting aside, for the moment, the whole "astham inhalers are destroying the ozone layer" argument (because it's absurd, owing to the relatively infinitesimal contribution to total CFC release they represent), it should be noted that the "new and improved green inhalers" qualify under corporate welfare rules as a "new" forumlation. So instead of the commodity pricing on an older, and yet in this case more effective, generic formulation, the drug company sells it for 10 times as much.
Do we even need to go into the fact that the protagonist's has suddenly found herself without health insurance? Sounds like a death-panel to me.

...not taking shower can be harmful to your social life ;)

I'm not sure what you're arguing against. Apps can include local copies of frameworks just fine on the app store, and the iPhone OS provides frameworks that apps use. It wouldn't work at all without those.

What is specifically not allowed is using external frameworks distributed separately, or internal OS frameworks.

You might be interested in molly-guard (available in Debian/Ubuntu, and presumably others):

The package installs a shell script that overrides the existing shutdown/reboot/halt/poweroff commands and first runs a set of scripts, which all have to exit
  successfully, before molly-guard invokes the real command.

  One of the scripts checks for existing SSH sessions. If any of the four commands are called interactively over an SSH session, the shell script prompts you to enter the name of the host you wish to shut down. This should adequately prevent you from accidental shutdowns and reboots.

  This shell script passes through the commands to the respective binaries in /sbin and should thus not get in the way if called non-interactively, or locally.

22:56:13 rock:~ > sudo shutdown -r 5
W: molly-guard: SSH session detected!
Please type in hostname of the machine to shutdown: box
Good thing I asked; I won't shutdown rock ...
W: aborting shutdown due to 30-query-hostname exiting with code 1.

(I only have it installed on my server, so getting the question is enough to make me hit ^C. Also, my prompt is yellow on my home PC, red on my work PC, cyan on servers, and includes the hostname, so I'd need to be really tired to make a mistake.)

The amount of latency is not really an issue as much as the consistency of latency. There's nothing more frustrating than getting fragged because YOUR input was processed late because of too much going on, or for any other reason. I recall missing tons of jumps in Megaman 2 because of this, so it's hardly a new problem.

"take your comic books, light them on fire and shove them up your faggot ass."

While that's a wee bit harsh, we don't have even the slightest immediate need for manned missions.

Robots are what we should be developing. Sending people to do a machines job so others can live out Buck Rogers fantasies is an appropriate task for COMMERCIAL space outfits. Learning about space is an appropriate use for robots, which we will require to exploit the resources that are the main reason for going offworld in the first place.

Hey now, my copy of Unreal Tournament 2k4 runs AWESOME on Ubuntu! If it were not for the fact that Stalker (SOC and CS...but could we hope for a Linux-release of Call of Pripyat?...not likely) won't run on Linux, I would never use a Windows variant again.

-Oz

I've just gone through the process of setting up a pair of servers (HP DL380s) for Linux/Postgres. Our measurements show that the Intel X25-E SSDs beat regular 10k rpm SAS drives by a factor of about 12 for fdatasync() speed. This is important for a database system, as a transaction cannot COMMIT until the data has really, really hit permanent storage. [It's unsafe to use the regular disk's write cache, and personally, I don't trust a battery-backed write cache on the RAID controller much either. So not having to wait for a mechanical seek is really useful. Read speeds are also better (10x less latency), and the sustained throughput is about 2x as good.

So, yes, SSDs are a good idea for database loads, where the interaction is with the real world, and where once a transaction has completed, some other real-world process has happened. BUT, most supercomputer workloads are, in principle, re-startable (i.e. if you lose an hour's work due to a hardware failure, you can just re-run the simulation code, and throw away the intermediate state).

So, for simulations, the cost of dataloss is an hour of re-work, not irretrievable information. Given that, we can get much better performance by storing everything in RAM, enabling all the write-caches, and sticking with standard SATA, provided that, every so often, the data is flushed out to disk. If something goes wrong, just revert to the last savepoint, which could be an hour ago, rather than having to be 10ms ago.

[BTW, HP "don't support" SSDs in their servers, but the Intel SSD X25-E disks do work just fine. Though I did, unfortunately, have to buy some of HP's cheapest SAS drives ($250 each) just to obtain the mounting kits for the SSDs.]

The article on Arstechnica about Snow Leopard goes into some detail about the advantages of Obj-C being a dynamic language... primarily due to the new inclusion of Closures aka functions assigned to variables so that you can pass a function to another function with dynamic arguments.

This makes for not necessarily a better performing language but an easier, more efficient and less buggy language.

It's still likely a personal coding preference of course.

A serial console needs for your kernel to come up,

That's horrendously idiotic.

You don't configure the kernel for a serial console, you CONFIGURE THE BOOT LOADER for it:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/configure-boot-loader.html

It also needs a second computer to connect the serial line to.

Yes, and managing the system over the network needs a second computer to make the connection as well... What's your point?

With serial-port management, you can have a single PC connecting to an unlimited number of headless machines. On the low-end, a few USB-Serial adapters can give even a low-end PC dozens of serial ports these days. A bit higher-end are console servers (which you telnet/ssh into), or serial port muxes (which give a machine dozens, if not hundreds of REAL serial ports to use).

I have been doing something similar for half a decade now

How very sad that in all those years you couldn't spend a couple minutes searching the web, or asking anyone who knows ANYTHING about the subject. Either one of which would have quickly resolved your problem. This is beginner stuff.

I must suggest you refrain from giving advice to anyone, ever again, since you apparently speak authoritatively on subjects you know next to NOTHING about...

Hum...
How do you think people debug the kernel with windows?

Of course the public that have to debug the windows kernel over a serial connection is the same demographics that need to debug the linux kernel (device driver authors)

Only in the ports that the PC gets from the consoles (or even ones that happen to be released on both systems) do I notice the horrible latency. It's awful in Oblivion, Fallout 3, Bioshock, and plenty of others. Part of it has to do with V-Sync, but turning that off doesn't eliminate all of it. I can't believe that 133ms is the norm. I've grown up a PC gamer, and that's definitely one of the top reasons I *hate* console FPS games.