Posts by Trevor_Pott

@Jerome 0

Because the Linux VM was significantly faster than Richcopy in single-threaded mode.

Richcopy is faster in multi-threaded mode, but leaves the system fragmented. In single-threaded mode, using the Linux VM was about 20% faster. As to *why* the Linux VM would be that much faster...you got me there. (Maybe because it's not preserving permissions?) In my case I wasn't worried about permissions. I just needed the files moved. (We were resetting permissions on entire trees upon arrival anyways. Domain change and all that...)

I only tried the Linux VM on a lark: I happened to have a web server which had CIFS mounts pointing to both machines. I figured “what the heck, let’s see what it does.”

Imagine my surprise ½ hour later when I clocked how far it had gotten down the miserable “many small files” directory. Farther than Rich copy in the same time, I assure you.

Also: no, I wasn’t running the tests concurrently.

Longer Telomeres - bah

Live fast, die young, leave an interesting crater. You can have your elf-like life.

I want orbital skydiving.

@Ned Ludd

I think that jerks exist everywhere. I live in Edmonton, but am engaged to a small town girl. I grew up on the absolute edge of the city: my community had a military base to the north, and farms in every other direction. . To the south a long ways the actual city began. I currently live in the burbs here in Edmonton. I spend a lot of time out in the bush, have a cabin out by Barrhead and get to see a lot of the province.

By an large I’ve personally found the country folk to be far more pleasant than city folk from almost anywhere. The difference between country folk and city folk even in Alberta is noticeable: the city folk are self-centered, self-focused and lacking in many common courtesies.

Still, even the city folk from Alberta are generally a far cry from V-Town or T.O. Both cities seem filled with contemptuous, snobby, elitist, entitled, self-absorbed yuppies. I find these people far, FAR more difficult to deal with than any hick I’ve ever met. My last visit to V-Town in fact involved running into some of the most blatant and over-the-top racism I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. I left that city ashamed to be of the same nationality as those folks.

I can’t speak to your experience, but in my own personal experience every time I see someone out in the bush wrecking someone else’s property, driving recklessly or otherwise doing whatever the heck they want with no regard for anyone else it’s city folk. The attitude of absolute entitlement that the younger city folk seems to be hugely at play when they head out into the bush for “fun” and cause all sorts of chaos.

The yokels on the other hand, while terribly backward in oh so many ways…they seem to have the common courtesies down pat. If I was in a spot of trouble and needed help, I’d sooner knock on the door of a farmer than random Joe from the city. The farmer would, in my experience, help first and ask questions later. The fellow from the city would wonder why it’s his problem, kick you out of the way and then drive to work whilst texting, admiring himself in the mirror and drinking his latte.

Of course, these are all stereotypes, and they can’t possibly be applied with an absolute brush. There are certainly some real scumbags in the country, and there are some real great people in the city. My point is that overall I trust the country folk to “do the right thing” far more than I would the city folk. Certainly far more than I would someone from V-Town or T.O. Yeah, the country folk might be stuck in their little religiosity of choice…and that might lead a smallish % of them to be real doucehbags. Overall though, even when you clearly don’t agree with their bit of religion, political leaning or what not…I find the rednecks ‘round here are the people to turn to.

if you really are from rural Alberta, I can only recommend you go spend some time in some of the bigger cities. V-Town, T.O., NY, LA…what have you. Spend a few weeks in each, and take public transit everywhere. Observe people. Learn from them, and see how they interact. I think that after that, you might well just look back on the quaint and backwards world of rural Alberta with some fondness. We might be stuck in the past…but at least most of us are nice people.

@Graham Marsden

"We are definitely in the position of "Too many Chiefs" whose main job is to warm seats and shuffle lots of paperwork (usually in the form of "reports") to make it look as if they are indispensible which the poor bloody infantry (or equivalent) are trying to do more and more with less and less and new recruits are harder and harder to get because the resources are just not there to support them and train them to do the jobs that are desperately required."

Are you talking here about the military, or corporations? You just described almost every company I have ever encountered. Similarly, I think you also just described (almost) every public bureaucracy I have ever encountered. (Social Services and Health Care in many parts of my province would be exempt. They went through a senior-level culling not to long ago and never regenerated the lost chiefs.)

Seriously though…PERFECT description of most mid-large corporations I’ve had the misfortune of dealing with.

@Jon Massey

AFAIK, KVM only supports hardware-assisted full virtualisation. While the paravirtualisation is being worked on, my understanding was that this had yet to be fully incorporated into the mainline.

I honestly can’t recall with 100% clarity, but I believe that the paravirtualisation was being talked about for inclusion in RHEL 6. We aren’t there yet; it’s still in beta.

@AC

Million and million of companies. None of which matter. Most of those companies are tiny. Drops of water in a bucket. The bigger the company is, the more likely it is to be beholden to it's shareholders. To whom, I might add, they are LEGALLY REQUIRED to do everything possible to maximise shareholder value. Missing an opportunity to screw over someone else in order to increase shareholder value leads to a shareholder lawsuit. One the company will most likely lose.

We are not talking about a few companies in Africa. We’re talking about the top 5000 companies in the world. From poisoning your cat food/baby food by cutting corners to using slave labour to dozens of other violations. These companies aren’t actually doing anything illegal in the jurisdictions they are operating their manufacturing plants etc. They simply operate their plants in places that don’t respect human rights.

Corporations are not people. You will /never/ convince me they should have the same rights. The right not to be punished in a cruel an unusual way? Why should they have that? If they do something outrageous, crucify them as an example to other companies. We are not talking about PEOPLE here. We are talking about an social agreement. Corporations are not people, they are social agreements that allow the people who own and work for them to legally abstract consequences from the actions they perform.

Corporations deserve SOME rights. Otherwise they would not be able to function. Those rights should NEVER be called “human rights.” If you require a nicy catchy phrase, call them “corporate rights.” A specific subset of rights aimed at corporations that in NO WAY implies those corporations are legally considered persons.

If you start considering corporations as persons then you are one step closer to giving corporations the vote and effectively completely changing the dynamic of our society. Shareholders already have the right to loot and pillage the lives of ordinary working folk. I absolute WILL NOT ABIDE corporations being given personhood.

There is no dispassionate consideration. Corporations are not people. They are a way for people to escape responsibility. People (most of them) have consciences. They would see things like firing hundred of staff, cutting back customer support and cutting corners on the products you produce just to get a slightly bigger round of executive bonuses and increased shareholder to be /wrong/. To a corporation this isn’t only perfectly acceptable, you’ll get sued into oblivion by someone if you don’t.

Corporations don’t have a conscience. Corporations are not people.

I will be damned if I will ever stand by and let them be considered as such.

And another thing...

Have you READ the comments in this forum? Are you not capable of processing what you read from the perspective of someone who doesn’t live and breathe open source? I make a statement that the wider Linux community is hostile to newcomers. Essentially that the arrogant and condescending attitude that you find amongst the knowledgeable Linux Elite is exceptionally off-putting to those seeking to learn about the OS and make the transition.

What is the response? “We’re not arrogant and condescending, how DARE you? Do you not know who I am?” This is mixed in with “if you don’t already know the answer to the question you are seeking, you shouldn’t be working in computers, you useless waste of base elements.” Don’t forget the healthy dose of “if you don’t learn to play by our very exacting set of rules all the time and never break decorum then you are obviously not serious about your job and you suck.”

Disregard that these rules are different for every group of nerds and the fact that Linux nerds enjoy nothing more than running little Jihads against anyone and everyone who disagrees with them…including other Linux nerds.

But surely, the Linux community isn’t hostile. Surely it’s not condescending. Everyone is simply READING IT WRONG.

Are you kidding me? Really? Are you, and the rest of the fire-breathing folk in this thread actually completely incapable of seeing the condescension, arrogance and hostility dripping from the very posts you guys are making to try to tell the world the bulk of the proselytizers of Linux AREN’T condescending and arrogant? It’s like talking to a schizophrenic. It all makes sense to them, somehow…but other people look in and go “WTF?”

Listen, I’ve been working with Linux for about 15 years. I would even consider myself an evangelist of its use where appropriate. But it’s not a way of life. It’s not a religion. It’s a TOOL. It is no more or less important than Windows, or a blackberry…a hammer or a goddamend SPOON. For the right job, it’s the bees knees. For the inappropriate job, it’s simply not useful.

Laying a thick layer of condescension on people ask questions according to some unbelievably convoluted social code whose sole purpose seems to be to weed out those who don’t think like you do or use exactly the same tools in the same manner you do, is what’s known as HOSTILE. “Lusers are idiots.” “Windows admins are idiots.” “People who use $distro instead of $otherdistro are idiots.” “People who use emacs/vi/whatever are idiots” and on and on and on…

Right. This is BENEFICIAL. This is MOVING LINUX FORWARD. It’s helping it be embraced by new people who are a little bit afraid of stepping into foreign waters. Re-read this thread, sir. Read it from the point of view of a Windows guy who has heard 15 years of “Linux is hard.” Someone who wants to learn, but doesn’t quite know where to start.

Now, make that guy a slightly overworked junior numpty in an IT shop somewhere that is largely Windows-only, surrounded by folks resistant to its introduction. Put him in a situation where he doesn’t have unlimited resources (personally or professionally) nor unlimited time to futz with things. He needs a solution and he needs it quickly…he’s counting on a little bit of help and sympathy to get him to make that first step into a brave new world.

Yeah, from that perspective you would stay the HELL AWAY from Linux reading this thread, or any of literally thousands like it across the wide, wolly web. Being pressed for time or backed against a wall doesn’t mean you aren’t trying to learn. Starting from zero and trying to find a specific solution shouldn’t require that you basically absorb everything there is to know about an operating system before someone will treat you like a human being.

I wish the whole lot of the condescending arrogant twats on all the various threads in all the forums across the whole internet would take a moment to get off their damned high horses and wallow in the muck for a while. Not everyone has the luxury of time and infinite resources that apparently the “gods of the internet” possess. It was not to long ago that I was a wet-behind-the-ears Windows admin seeking information on Linux and trying very hard to wrap my mind around the differences. I watch my friends go through that process now and wince in sympathy.

If someone came to me and asked me “what’s the best way to wield this hammer” I wouldn’t laugh in their face, call them an idiot and tell them they are wasting my time unless they’d built at least three test houses and read a dozen best practice manuals on hammer holding. I’d ask “well, what are you trying to do with that hammer?” Then I’d give them my honest advice on how best to hold it to accomplish that specific task.

I wouldn’t condescend and say “until you get a different type of hammer, I won’t help you.” “What do you mean you are trying to use a hammer to accomplish that job. A rubber mallet is the tool you need, go get one of those.” “You hammer has a BLUE handle? What that’s your first mistake. And the nails you’re using are ALL wrong…”

Really? REALLY?!?!?

Dude has a hammer. He ONLY has a hammer. That ONE hammer. He’s got to get a nail that’s in an inconvenient place struck in, and is unsure how best to do it. He already abased himself to you by asking for help. (This is difficult enough for many people to do, why kick them while they’re down.) If you can’t help, then say that. If you won’t help, then just walk away. There’s no need for the kind of elitist crap that this thread is slathered in.

It’s a TOOL. You are CRAFTSMEN. It’s not a religion, and someone trying to use that tool in an unfamiliar way isn’t a blasphemer.

@#()*$&)@(#*$)&#@(*$&#@)(*#@&)(8709870987<carrier lost>

@Mike Kamermans

Hear, hear!

The modern polymath is a myth. It is not humanely possible to learn EVERYTHING there is to learn. Of course that doesn’t stop people on the internet for taking the piss out of everyone else int eh entire world for not knowing what they personally already know.

You’d think we were some sort of interdependent society of individuals somehow. One that evolved to have different individuals with different skill sets in order to ensure complete skills coverage rather than a race of gods who knew all and had access to all resources at all times.

The ones I really love are the ones who nerd rage about how everyone needs to learn the command line for every little task or they aren’t a real sysadmin. It goes completely past them that there are plenty of people in this world (especially in small business) for whom systems administration is not their day job. It might be one of literally hundreds of tasks they are expected to do. Or they may be a small business owner trying to do everything themselves to keep costs down, or any of a dozen different things.

Instead the expectation seems to be that everyone who ever touches a computer for whatever reason has the time, skill, patience and resources to learn everything there is to learn about that computer before even turning it on. Even more insane, some of these folk would have it be a legal requirement, if they could. The part where it is just a tool, no more important to 99.9% of people than a fax machine or stapler doesn’t seem to matter in the least.

I still don’t understand exactly how that demon fax machine works. Nor do I care to. I wrote a sticky note telling me which side the writing on the fax goes, and what sequence of numbers I need to press in order to get it to send. I do NOT need to dream about its bloody bytecode and issue custom patches for a small flaw in the modem firmware. I just need the bloody thing to work.

It sadly a revelation, shock, and demoralising blow to a several people when they discover that there are millions (if not billions) of people who look at computers they same way. Who cares what OS it runs, or why…so long as the tool does the job it was created for and we know how to use it, then roll on…

Oh, but that’s blasphemy to speak. Watch the thumbsdowns I get for having the termidity to mention that the emperor has no clothes…

@/dev/null

The Kin phone and the danger crew were GOOD. At least initially. The issue was that there was some warring fiefdom crap going on between the Windows Phone 7 crew and the Kin crew. Remember that had they priced the Kin at anything approaching a reasonable amount, it would have sold like hotcakes, despite not being a full-on smartphone. http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/07/a-post-mortem-of-kins-tragic-demise.ars

Microsoft can do AMAZING things. They have BRILLIANT people. What they absolutely suck at is MANAGING them. The company has shattered into little warring clumps each focused on their own little piece and perfectly willing to throw other groups under the bus. If Microsoft snapped up a group of Linux engineers (and MANAGED THEM PROPERLY) they could bring all sorts of great things to Microsoft. Otherwise, they would develop something FANTASTIC whilst operating essentially in a vacuum, then have it squashed by one of the other tribes because it threatened their baby.

All of these management problems can be laid at no other door than he who is in charge of the company. It’s his job to ensure exactly these sorts of problems don’t occur. Ballmer needs to go. NOW.

err...

"I know that Apache's use of "virtual servers" came about before the x86 revolution"

Change to "x86 virtualisation revolution."

@Keith T

Foreigners and any non-human that could be proven to be both sentient and sapient. (Elephants fit into that category most certainly, as do many higher primates. New Caledonian Crows and possibly other Corvids as well. Some Cetaceans.) I would apply the same rights to any sentient and sapient individual regardless of species (or even planet or origin) that was capable of meeting a certain set of rigorous tests. Those tests not to be determined by myself, natch. I do however have a pretty good understanding of what they would probably consist of.

Fear of death. Desire for freedom. Ability to learn complex tasks related tool use. (Most specifically ability to learn to use new tools.) Ability to recognise one's self and ability to distinguish (and remember) other individuals from multiple species. Ability to learn any form of language. (Sign language does count: not all species have a larynx structured as we do.) Mourning the dead/funeral rituals. Demonstrated ability amongst at least some members of hte species to observe the use of tools by another individual (of their own or another species) and adapt a tool for use from that observation. (And/or ability to refine an existing tool to be more precise for a given task.)

On the other hand, I would NOT, EVER grant human rights to corporations. I also know that granting human rights to non-human animals would be a huge no-no politically...at least initially. A protected non-voting status in our society would be a great start. I know we are arrogant enough as a species (overall) to think we are unique in the universe; the only “sentient species” that exists. I happen to disagree. Still though, until we can even agree that OTHER HUMANS deserve the same rights as us, what chance that we will stop wiping out other species that have the potential to develop at least as far as we have?

So is cloudmin

Enough with the spoilers though...

Good catch

Nope, can't call mistype on that one. I've been using my HTC Desire for answering *all* posts to my personal articles, but only a very, very few of them that aren't my own articles. (It's my way of comparing the usefulness of the onboard keyboard of the device.) The error rate is significantly higher on the Desire, but it doesn’t compensate for the fact that I am one of those individuals who primarily utilise non-linguistic cognition. “Werdz r hard.”

I have to admit to being dependant on spell check to catch most of the obvious spelling errors, but we all know it’s mostly useless for grammar and homonyms. That’s where proof reading comes in and where I generally fail. I can proof read my own posts or articles a dozen times, but if I am proof reading them within a space of about an hour or so from when they are written then I seem to miss a lot of grammar. Most especially I miss the homonyms.

It’s something I’ve struggled with as far back as I can remember. Give me two pictures, and I can point out almost pixel-level differences between them. Give me an audio recording to compare and I can find minute differences. Language, tactile information or chemo-senses are all areas that never remotely developed to their full potential in me.

I’ve been keeping a log of all mistypes over the past five months. I go back and re-read my comments to find them. Additionally commenters are always helpful in pointing them out. Apart from the obvious ones, (no sleep, no coffee, typing a comment whilst distracted by other things) I haven’t really run across a commonality in what causes me to make these little linguistic faux pas.

Indeed, longer comments such as this one I “sign off on,” having reread and rechecked the post several times before submitting. (I don’t reread any post shorter than about 2 paragraphs.) It’s interesting because at the time, my brain honestly can’t spot the errors. As I read the text, it seems to translate “what I actually wrote” into “the concepts that underlie what I meant to say” without fully conscious access to the underlying text itself.

The truth is that I just don’t ‘think’ in words. I think in objects. A word is nothing more than a property associated with that “object concept.” Unfortunately, the actual text of the word seems to be stored with the auditory representation of the word rather than being the key indexed item. My mind seems to use phonetic rather than typographical representations of words as the indexed item. Thus it is a pointer to the phonetic (rather than textual) representation of a word that is stored with a concept. To get to the textual representation of a concept I need to go concept -> phonetic linguistic representation of that concept -> textual linguistic representation -> textual linguistic representation in $language.

It’s a fascinating study. To me at least, though I recognise it would probably bore normal people. I think it’s because my entire family are shrinks. Psychologists, Psychiatrists, Psychiatric Nurses, the odd Social Worker…and the one or two black sheep of the family like me who work in IT. Whilst I have no desire to have my brain picked at by anyone I’m actually related to, I do admit that I find the entire study of “how we think,” especially as relates to the conceptualisation and manipulation of thought to be fascinating enough to wish that I could be part of a larger study of exactly these processes. One performed by a professional in the field, of course.

I can’t help but look at my brain from an IT perspective; information storage, processing, etc. As near as I can tell, I truly have a completely non-linguistic, object oriented thought process.

I think I have also determined why we need sleep. For lack of a better way to explain it…our brains suck at indexing. We write a raw copy of the day’s experiences to a buffer. That buffer has a finite capacity. Once we fill it up, we get tired. When we sleep, our brains perform a /massive/ deduplication of the information in the buffer. This is how we can store so many memories in such a small space (the human brain, IIRC, is thought to only store a few tens of terabytes of information in total, whilst our eyes provide visual input at something like 10Mbit/sec.)

That deduplication is the key. It’s why certain sensory input dominates a given memory; it was probably unique enough not to have been de-duplicatable. There’s a certain amount of fuzzing involved too; the smell of a particular batch of cookies is stored in our memory as identical to similar batches, despite that being essentially impossible. Our brains have a built-in “close enough” algorithm when deduplicating the day’s information.

I believe that this is also why, when you start to get really tired, you can remember everything before a given magical point of tiredness, but everything after becomes a blank (or a blur). We become “tired” at a given point before the buffer is truly full. Once the buffer is completely full, the brain simply won’t write anything more to the buffer. The exception being if it triggers fight-or-flight. That information seems to overwrite other information stored in the buffer (probably being deemed super-critical by the brain, more so than any information that might be stored representing the trivial aspects of your day.) It’s why when we are truly exhausted we can forget even critical details of what we were working on the next day…but if someone were to hit us in the face in whilst that state we would most certainly remember it.

Again, all conjecture; but it’s a theory I have been working on for quite some time. Yes, it does relate (as per the beginning of this long post) to spelling, grammar, and why certain people miss these things more than others. I believe that /how/ we think is truly different depending on the person. Some people seem to think in words (linguistic cognition.) In fact MOST people seem to think in this manner. A smaller percentage think in objects, some in pictures, some in sound. Those who don’t think in words (non-linguistic cognition) often have a more miserable time translating their thoughts into a given language.

Add this to the fact that my default mental language is actually French and I think it is at least part of the reason why I miss so many of these errors, even when I am putting the effort in to proof read. It’s not all of the reason, nor is it a cure…but I’m working on it.

The experiment with the Desire is interesting mostly because it shows the differences in my raw, uncorrected error rate as opposed to using a notebook where I have an opportunity to type up my comments in Word, spell check them, and review them on a real screen. Comments typed for my own articles over the past month are essentially my brain’s raw output…compounded by the shitty keyboard. Mistakes made in these threads are my brain’s corrected output: something I have no excuse for, but find fascinating nonetheless.

I think it's safe to say...

...El Reg won't be getting an invite...

Buying votes.

"Do Americans perceive this as buying votes or is it possible for a candidate to win based purely on being a good person with good intentions and ability to enact their promises?"

Pay some attention to who these folks elect and how frequently their politicians ever keep their promises. I think you'll realise that image is everything in America. Substance is nothing.