Comment Re:Obligitory Hackers reference... (Score 1) 119
RISC architecture is going to change everything.
Dogs Can Be Pessimistic 99
Not that it will change anything, but researchers at Bristol University say that your dog might be a gloom-monger. In addition to the downer dogs, the study also found a few that seemed happy no matter how uncaring the world around them was. "We know that people's emotional states affect their judgments and that happy people are more likely to judge an ambiguous situation positively. What our study has shown is that this applies similarly to dogs," said professor Mike Mendl, an author of the study and head of animal welfare and behavior at Bristol University.
Comment Re:Perverting the course of justice. (Score 2, Insightful) 448
>and ignoring that order would still escalate the matter to criminal levels
There you go. Possession isn't illegal, ignoring the court order not to delete it is. Simply having a picture on your computer where the model failed to sign a release won't ever land you in prison. This is a workable system that avoids the complications of ruining innocent people's lives.
I've been falsely accused of things although never had to fight the justice system for my freedom, and I've known plenty of people whose lives have been turned upside down after they were falsely accused by overzealous child protective service workers. I've known plenty of law enforcement people who I wouldn't trust to do the right thing in any of these cases. This is scary shit.
Comment Wow! (Score 1) 119
It's almost as if someone invented a disposable Brita water filter!
Comment Re:Kernel shared memory (Score 1) 129
This is an interesting approach, especially across hosts in a cluster. Is it safe to assume you expect your hosts and interconnect to be very reliable?
I'm curious about the methods you use to mitigate the problems that would seem to result if you clone VM 1 from Host A onto VM's 2-10 on hosts B-E, and Host A dies before the entirety of VM 1's memory is copied elsewhere. Can you shed any light on this?
I'm curious about the methods you use to mitigate the problems that would seem to result if you clone VM 1 from Host A onto VM's 2-10 on hosts B-E, and Host A dies before the entirety of VM 1's memory is copied elsewhere. Can you shed any light on this?
Comment Re:HTML, Notepad (Score 1) 346
Shoot, sorry to reply to myself, but the alternative to MySQL is PostgreSQL, and it's much, much better. Trust me on that. Nobody gets it at first, but anyone who spends any significant amount of time using RDBM's properly will end up wondering why MySQL even exists.
Comment HTML, Notepad (Score 2, Insightful) 346
Odds are you'll never have enough time to learn programming at the depth that someone who is very good at it knows it.
Start small. Learn how to write a static web page using nothing but Notepad in Windows. Then, when you've mastered that, try using CSS to change the way it looks.
At this point, you can get into Javascript, which is a fantastic language for learning. Try to make something on the web page change when you mouse over it. Experiment with changing text fields in Javascript.
Then, write a simple "desktop" calculator as a web page.
This will likely take you a few months or weeks if you spend a lot of time at it. Remember, use Notepad only. Don't worry about making it work in anything but Internet Explorer (or your browser of choice) because that will make you insane.
When you can write Tetris, then you're ready to work with databases and servers.
Don't use MySQL, it's an abomination. If you have Microsoft Access, start with that. Make a project in that that real people will use. If maintaining it becomes difficult, it's because you don't know enough database theory. Figure out on your own why you want data to be fully normalized and only flattened with many saved SELECT queries. Try to figure out how to write the queries in SQL using the (excellent) query editor. Write UNION queries.
Now you're ready for a server and web site.
Comment Re:11,000 times on 700 volunteers (Score 1) 299
You're assuming they tested it on one person at a time. More realistically, they would fire it on a much larger group to test its crowd control capability.
So really, this paints the picture of a group of 100 people getting hit with the ray, standing up and cheering, "FUCK YEAH! Hit us AGAIN! WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" about 1000 times.
I'm thinking they tested it on drunk frat boys.
Comment Re:Dear aunt, (Score 2, Informative) 221
by making informed guesses based on context, which a computer program cannot do.
The Perl interpreter can.
Education Official Says Bad Teachers Can Be Good For Students 279
Zenna Atkins, the chairman of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), has raised some eyebrows by saying that, "every school should have a useless teacher." She stresses that schools shouldn't seek out or tolerate bad teaching, but thinks bad teachers provide a valuable life-lesson. From the article: "... on Sunday Ms Atkins told the BBC that schools needed to reflect society, especially at primary level. 'In society there are people you don't like, there are people who are incompetent and there are often people above you in authority who you think are incompetent, and learning that ability to deal with that and, actually surviving that environment can be an advantage.'"
Comment Re:Perspective vs. Tunnel Vision (Score 4, Interesting) 284
Lyx is cool, but I like LaTeX by hand because it's just faster. Anything repetitive I write my own definitions (i.e. macros) for, so it's a huge time saver.
I really dislike WYSIWYG. I want to type, never use a mouse, and have the program format it for me.
Comment Re:Perspective vs. Tunnel Vision (Score 4, Interesting) 284
I did my thesis in LaTeX; in fact I learned LaTeX to do the thesis so I wouldn't have to use MS Word. I probably didn't save any time since I was starting from scratch with LaTeX and had to update the school's age-old LaTeX template to work with the newer versions, but man, when I saw everyone else struggling with Word and whatever awful math plugin they had to use, I was glad I took the extra time.
Now I use LaTeX whenever I can since the output is so beautiful and I can type lists and tables a lot faster than I can mouse them in in Word.
I highly recommend it.
Comment Re:Vitual center (Score 1) 183
Perhaps not, depending on the other load the system is working on. Because of the way VCPUs are scheduled (at least in VMWare) that 8-vCPU VM won't get a time-slice until such time as there are 8 real cores available for the duration of that slice.
While this was true in ESX 2.x (which introduced virtual SMP), this is no longer the case. This limitation was largely removed with the introduction of relaxed coscheduling in ESX 3.x (2006-ish). More information is available in this document.
Comment Re:Rather a Poor Metric (Score 1) 659
Plato's quote is especially hilarious when considered in light of Athen's continued dominance as a world cultural and military power.
Comment Fats are the key! (Score 2, Informative) 763
It should be cooked until the fats have just liquefied, for optimal juiciness and flavor. In my experience, most good restaurants call this "rare". At most other restaurants, it's a complete crapshoot, which is why I typically prefer to cook steaks at home.
Start with high heat to sear, move to lower heat to finish if necessary, and don't forget to let it rest before you serve/eat it. Rubs are an exercise left to the reader, but kosher salt & fresh-cracked pepper make a good place to start.
Enjoy!
Start with high heat to sear, move to lower heat to finish if necessary, and don't forget to let it rest before you serve/eat it. Rubs are an exercise left to the reader, but kosher salt & fresh-cracked pepper make a good place to start.
Enjoy!
