Posts by Trevor_Pott

"Consider it this way: if you have $100 to spend will you spend all $100 on a general anti-religion (or anti-dogma) stance, or will you spend $10 on Christianity, $10 on Judaism, $20 on Islam, and $70 on religion (or dogma) generally?"

None of the above. I'd put all $100 into anti-extremism. Encouraging a culture where we question authority, teach critical thinking and make extremism socially unacceptable. Whether that extremism be in the form of Randian economic asshattery, unbridled Nationalism or caustic religious fuckwittery.

Treat the disease, not the symptom. Radical protestants and radical Muslims are merely catchpoints for crazies. What we need to do is give these people no acceptable place to hide. If they're that far gone they need to be in hospital. It shouldn't be acceptable for them to claim "religion" and have a get-out-of-Arkham-free card.

Your problem is that you feel targeting specific religions is acceptable. It's really not. It will just create resentment and martyrs and more problems down the road. If you must target religions, you target them all equally. By the same token, however, know your enemy. Learn about them, and know how to tailor your propaganda and education so that you can slowly make their messages clearly anti-social and massively reduce the influx of people willing to champion their cause.

It's psychological warfare, mate. Do go making new enemies whilst fighting the ones you already have.

Re: it's not the Catholics that are the problem. It's extremist protestants.

Sure, but by the same token the problem isn't "Muslims", it's a small subset of "batshit crazy whacko Muslims."

The issue here is that in both cases - Muslims and Protestants - there exist at the present time a bunch of really hard-core extremist beliefs being espoused by charismatic leaders and forming their own organized micro religions. At the present time they are the biggest threat.

I am perfectly aware that the majority of Protestants are completely loony tunes (disregarding the who "they believe in a sky fairy" part for the moment; that's actually somewhat normal, sadly.) I am equally aware that the majority of Muslims are not blood thirsty whack jobs.

For now, however, the extremist elements of both collections of micro-religions are attracting a disproportionate amount of crazies and causing disproportionate amounts of harm.

Re: Not again! (Exactly Trevor, Not again)

I'm afraid I don't see how. I correctly and rationally took issue with the implicit assumption that we would all know local abbreviations for things like "state names" or - as was the context in question - "political shortcuts relevant only to Americans".

I have no idea why that was any bearing on the inability of some Brit to grok proper english. "The company caved to demands" is something that - at at quick check in my fairly well populated international chat rooms - folks from .in, .us, .ca, .nz, .au and .za all got without question. Bonus element, they also got that "caved in" means "the damned thing falls on you."

Which leads me to the inescapable conclusion that the inability to understand the reference is some isolated quirk of Britishness. It's not a "local colloquialism". It's recognized usage by the bulk of the international community that speaks this language.

That we should basically ignore the haplessness of the minority in this case in no way contradicts my previous dislike of using regional-only abbreviations with the expectation that the rest of the world will understand them.

Maybe you should check your meds mate. Nationalism is a disease. Are you entirely certain yours is under adequate control?

Re: Not again!

"Bottom-line, Canadians speak very strange "variants" of languages, if you ask me."

Must disagree completely. It's you lot that can't speak our languages properly. We're the correct, normal ones. You're the creepy ones what gets the words wrong and have the bizarre spellings.

No doot aboot it, eh?

Re: it's not the Catholics that are the problem. It's extremist protestants.

Aye, but we don't have the resources to fight all battles at the same time. Sort out the most dangerous of the lot first. Then move on.

Re: What nonsense

I have easily read it at least 100 times, cover to cover in the course of my 14 years of religious schooling. I signed the petition with alacrity.

Perhaps, sir, your presumptions are in error. I submit that those who dislike the bible do so because of their familiarity with it. Otherwise, why care?

Yaaarrrrr, I be joining ye scurvy dogs! Ramen!

Re: Does that incude the materialist religions ?

@Denarius: Religion is a lie, regardless of what deity you choose to worship. Materialist religions absolutely can be crazy arsebags too. Look at the Randians, or the Sceintologists. They've both done some horrible things in the name of their beliefs.

Compassion and decency towards your fellow man is not the province of religion, and certainly not the province of only one particular religion. It's just what the majority of people do by default.

Unfortunately, the world is run by the "squeaky wheel", and they are almost universally extremist asshats out to do as much harm as humanly possible, all to frequently in the name of fuzzy sky fairy. Whether that sky fairy be the god of Abraham, the invisible hand of the market or anything else, it's nothing but harming others to fill some void in yourself that your desperately clung to beliefs have been unable to fulfill.

This world will not improve until we make radical religion - all of it - socially unacceptable. Critical thinking and evidence-based science are the only rational means to govern ourselves and our societies.

Dogmatic adherence to any belief results in nothing more than violent immorality in the name of an individual's faith. There is nothing more dishonorable than killing in the name of "god" or "the invisible hand of the market" or Buddha, or...

If you want to kill a man, be honest about why. Be honest with him, with yourself, with others.

"I am killing you because I want your stuff" or "I am killing you because what you say angers me" or "I am killing you because I am angry all the time and I am hoping this will make the voices stop for a while" at least have a shred of honour. "God says so" is bullshit. Bullshit of the highest order.

And that applies just as much to "god hates homosexuals" or "god says shun rape victims" or "god says get a job, ya bum".

Take some fucking responsibility for your own beliefs and your own actions. If you're going to be an asshole, don't hide behind a sky fairy that doesn't exist. if your actions make you so ashamed you need metaphysical permission then don't perform those actions. Learn to walk the fuck away and let others live their lives.

God is never a reason. God is nothing more than an excuse. Now, then, and forevermore.

You're an idiot.

The issue isn't "which version of bullshit hocus pocus is believed", it's extremists and evangelists of any religion.

In the case of certain sects of the Muslim population, there is a sad truth that many of the religious leaders are encouraging radicalization and violence. Just like with extremist Protestant groups. Both of these need to be targeted for deletion. That fact that you kill in Jesus' name rather than Muhammad's doesn't make you any more righteous. You both need to be stopped.

We're fortunate that today very, very few Catholics are radicalizing people and pushing them to violence. Historically, they've been among the worse of the worst. If Catholics can move more towards a moderate, accepting religion then that's good for a huge chunk of the planet.

Unfortunately, Protestants and Muslims are both a massive problem. Too easily are whackos attracted to these religions, because they are fundamentalist and literalist in their interpretation of the scrawlings of the relevant madmen.

In the case of the protestants, we're quite lucky that most of them live in the middle of the goddamned desert and simply ferment a hatred of their federal government and shoot people who come on their land. It could be a lot worse. Sometimes - all too often, in fact, - it is worse.

The protestants don't own a whole country. They are tempered by their fellow citizens. But more than enough times they have pushed for unholy havoc to be wrought on their religious rivals.

Sadly, the Muslim radicals have more power at the moment. That makes them a more immediate threat...but it is only the immediacy of the treat that is different. Given enough time, the fringe Protestants will be riding on tanks killing the non-believers too.

Any religion that views killing those who are different as not only okay, but justified needs to be brought to an end. Fortunately, it's typically the radical elements of a religion that believe that...not the mainstream.

Unfortunately, making a dent in the fact that people believe in s ridiculous sky fairy at all is taking forever. We need to push back against all religion. The fewer people who believe in sky fairies of any kind, the fewer will become radicalized on the name of one of them.

Instead, let's teach compassion, acceptance and critical thinking. If you want to believe in a religion, that's fine...up to a point. You can believe lies if you wish, but the instant you advocate - or attempt - the restriction of the rights of others in the name of your religion, the rights to advocate and practice your religion need to end.

Regardless of whether the sky fairy you worship is Jesus, Mohammad, Yaweh, or Barney the motherfucking dinosaur.

Re: Not again!

In Canada, "caved in" means "the damned thing collapsed on top of you. Conversely, in Canada "caved" is a colloquialism for "acceded to the demands of the plaintants."

Re: GTA V is a blast

@Nate: honestly, chances are it's a vsync issue. I hate the same problem with "twitch" games for a while, until I forced vsync at the video card. Headaches went away.

Then I discovered I liked simpler games anyways (CoH, Gratuitous Space Battles, FTL, Space Pirates and Zombies, etc.) Something about 2D games makes it easier to disconnect after 15 minutes and go do something productive. Not because of headaches, but because they're more...episodic?

Well, except Civ. One...more...turn...

"Events for which the Church of Rome were the moral and intellectual foundation"

Except that - in modern times at least - it's not the Catholics that are the problem. It's extremist protestants. And I can think of (of the top of my head) at least 300 people whoa re now dead because of extremist protestants wigging the fuck out about their religion (or the perceived lack of it/inadequacy of it in others). And that's just my memory, without Google, and confined to North America.

That's not even touching organized religious warfare, driving people to suicide (thanks, Westboro Baptist Church!), or getting into far more controversial topics like "babies who died from neglect because they were born to mothers who shouldn't have been having kids, but didn't use contraception because God." Or how about "babies who died en masse due to starvation/AIDS because an entire fucking continent has been hoodwinked into no contraception because God."

You know, I'm going to go waaaaaaaaaay out on a limb here and say "deaths/rapes due to GTA influence" are way the hell lower than atrocities committed in the name of God. And that's just the Christian god. Let's not open the can of worms that is "the Abrahamic sky fairy is really the same sky fairy for a number of religions"...

Re: Enterprisey?

I have, in fact. Same issue. Also tried out my Dell, and about 15 minutes ago I verified that it exhibits the exact same behavior with a Juniper.

Re: Tcp offloading

Oh, been up and down that one. No effect. Same with "are you using vmxnet3 virtual NICs" and every other standard item. It's not the offloading. It's not chimney. It's not anything obvious. It's the damned drivers.

If ever anyone wanted to know what elements of "vendor fingerpointing instead of actually working to solve the problem" drive me mad, Intel/VMware over this issue makes Trevor something something...

Re: Rendered obsolete by miniature mongrel poodles

Be honest with yourself here, mate: do you see "Dave's Apache Highmem Config, Optimised for 50,000 user Wordpress installs including OOB integration with Cloudflare and automated Dropbox Backups" ever coming to the Microsoft Store? Really?

Because that's exactly the sort of package that makes Docker attractive. And it's exactly the sort of package I have a hard time believing will show up in Microsoft's App Store.

Re: Rendered obsolete by miniature mongrel poodles

Sysadmins can't do anything about it. Every major new tech that comes out with a significant ease of use change means fewer sysadmins are required than were before. That's why ease of use matters; it gets rid of the need for priests to tend the temple and allows a single contracted janitorial team to handle hundreds of companies as they do their rounds every night.

If you're looking for "how can docker make me, as an Ops guy, better off" the chances are that it won't. Oh, if you master it, you could probably become a "containerization consultant" and be one of the janitors tending multiple businesses, but since it is the equivalent of moving from "having to carefully manage each install of each app separately" to "click install in the app store", it removes a lot of why you might need to be there.

And that, right there, is why it is valuable to business. Unfortunately, in this instance, "good for the business" is "bad for the ops guys".

Re: Enjoying this series

Merci!

Re: The Lannisters sends their regards...

RedHat are any better? VMware? Oracle? Google?

Not a lot of honour amongst IT companies.

Re: Rendered obsolete by miniature mongrel poodles

Think of Docker as being "Steam for enterprise applications and web development platforms" and you might begin to grok what it's bringing to the table. Stop thinking of things in terms of "I'm a sysadmin with a strong ops background who can figure this out if you pay me" and start thinking of it from the standpoint of business owners and developers who don't want to have to pay ops guys at all.

I gotta be honest when I say I can't picture actually using IIS in production. I just can't. Apache is ground into my bones. I've redone those configs so many times that I don't even need the comments in httpd.conf anymore.

That said, I have seen what httpd.conf does to newbies. It's about what IIS does to me. So whenever I picture starting Apache from scratch I imagine someone asking me to take all my websites and move them to IIS. Then I quickly think of something else before that becomes a desire to self-harm.

:/

Re: What about illuminos Zones

Don't forget OpenIndianna. Or BSD Jails. Or Virtuozzo. Or OpenVZ. Or Rocket. Or...

Just because you have a containerization tech doesn't mean you have momentum, hype, a community, backing, industry support, an "app store", community input to that "app store", cloud provider adoption, etc. etc. etc.

Docker does.

That makes Docker quantitatively as well as qualitatively different from any of the other containerization techs that have gone before. Technology doesn't matter here nearly so much as politics, damned politics and "moolah, moolah, moolah, moo-la-haaaaaaaaaaa..."

Parallels has virty tech, they aren't a threat to VMware. Virtualbox is groovy, nobody runs a large datacenter on it. Solairs/OpenIndianna/Illuminos jails are awesome and even have enterprise support...but there isn't a heck of a lot of cloud provider adoption, hype or community support.

That isn't to say it couldn't happen. It's just that these are projects by engineers, for engineers. And that means they likely won't succeed where the marketdroids and moneymen walk.

Re: Very nice

@Khaptain your mother smelt of elderberries.

"Just like sexual assault, rape, and other exploitative or sexual crimes against a person, it is both bad form and highly prejudicial to engage in even the tiniest amount of victim-blaming. In cases were there is doubt, the jury should return a Not Guilty verdict, and that would include situations where the only evidence of wrongdoing is hearsay or conflicting accounts lacking in any evidence that will given credibility to one side or the other."

I agree that victim blaming is bad. By the same token, I don't have any faith whatsoever that a jury will return a verdict of Not Guilty if a fellow is not guilty. What's more, merely being accused of such crimes can ruin someone's life. And there absolutely, 100% are vicious, mean-spirited harpies out there who will drag a man down to hell for some imagined slight. I can introduce you to a few, if you'd like. The results of their hell-hatched plans of ruination are mighty tales in and of themselves.

It's funny, you never read in the newspaper about the guy let out of jail after 3 months when new evidence comes to light if the reason he was banged up was supposed spousal abuse. But if a guy is found not guilty, well, he's hounded by the press ad aeternum and presumed to be "guilty, but let off via the old boys' club."

When sex or sexuality is involved, justice is anything but blind.

Re: Compass points

Hey, sorry about that. Maybe this story will help some?

I...I don't think you understand how these work? Especially how they're installed in enterprises.

As a general rule, enterprises used to buy hardware dedicated to a specific project or workload. Each DB had it's own SAN, it's own servers, etc. But then we found that this was spectacularly inefficient and led to massive underutilisation of resources. Private clouds - or at least virtualisation setups that were closeish - began to become the order of the day.

Resources began to be purchased and pooled based on cumulative predicted need, not based on the individual project or workload. Now the question has become "how best to maintain these sorts of environments."

Something like a Nutanix or VSAN cluster rarely goes beyond 16 nodes, sometimes to 32. You get multiple clusters in a virtual datacenter. You are highly unlikely to have nodes in the cluster that are different speeds/capabilities because clusters tend to live and die as a group. We've seen that even in non-VSAN clusters thus far. Clusters are born, they live and they die as one.

But in the rare instance where clustered are mixed - I run a mixed cluster myself - sysadmins can simply tell workloads to keep the copies on "like" nodes. If you have PCI-E storage on nodes A-D and only SAS storage on nodes E-H, then you can "segregate" the cluster into two.

In theory, you could end up with a workload split along the storage plane, but only if you'd lost enough of one type of node that rebuilding would cause it to put the second copy on the other class of node. As soon as you've repaired the server sin question, policies would take over and make sure your workloads go where they are supposed to.

If your assertion is somehow that server SANs are unable to support SQL or OLTP workloads, well...you're just wrong. You're wronger than wrong.

Believe it or not, server SANs have been around long enough to evolve to handle the concept of diversity in workloads...and to handle workloads that are as demanding as anything you could throw at a traditional SAN. Indeed, I'd challenge a traditional SAN to keep up with the all-flash server SANs. The MCS setups in particular are utterly spectacular.

Re: Storage or data governance

Exactly why data governance is the new hotness, and new ways to get disks into the datacenter are not. :)