11/12   Global recession is here.               -recession swami
        \_ How do you define recession? Two quarters of negative GDP in a row?
           \_ Recession is currently defined as a price drop in Google stock
              of more than 10%
           \_ All the signs are here. Barrel of oil price is very high,
              oil demand is up. We're at the plateau of oil peak. This
              will have domino effects on the economy, which is oil
              driven. We're running out of the capacity to fuel our
              needs for oil. Global recession is here.  -recession swami
              \_ you sound more like PEAK OIL SWAMI to me.

11/12   Removing CO2 from our oceans: http://www.planktos.com
        \_ Um, not quite.  The idea is to drop iron filings in iron-poor areas
           of the ocean to stimulate plankton growth, which draws CO2 from the
           *air* not the ocean.  When the plankton die, they sink to the
           bottom, sequestering the CO2.  Only problem is that CO2 doesn't
           cause warming, it's the result.  Oh, and I'm sure this will work out
           just like the artificial reefs made out of tires.  Oh wait...
           \_ Wait, so, you're claiming that atmospheric CO2 this time is the
              result of warming, not the cause?  You know that 90% or more
              of atmospheric scientists disagree with you?
              \_ No, I'm pretty sure everyone's been pointing to Al Gore's
                 graph and noting that CO2 follows warming.
                 http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-09/uosc-cdd092507.php
        \_ A lot of scientists are dubious about this plan; it's a good
           example of the problem with carbon credits, because there's
           basically no regulation.  This company would be getting money
           via carbon credits to do something with an extremely questionable
           environmental impact.  -tom
           \_ Actually, they're doing pilot studies to make sure that they're
              not creating harm or not really sequestering the carbon.  So
              they're being made to show it as a desirable scheme before
              they get into the carbon credit market.  As such, it is worth
              looking at.
              \_ It's really hard to do pilot studies on environmental change.
                 This one has the law of unintended consequences written all
                 over it.  -tom
                 \_ Exactly.  I envision giant armies of mechanized plankton
                    rising out the ocean and destroying us with their
                    carbon weapons.
        \_ dropping tons of sulfur in the black sea is going to create a lot of
           carbon offset opportunity
           \_ really?  how so?
        \_ I read an article about this in the early 90s - some kook had the
           idea that the indian ocean was lacking plankton due to iron deficiency
           (despite a relative abundance of nitrogen), spread out iron dust
           from a huge ship, and measured the results.  What happened?  He
           was right about iron being a necessary prereq to plant growth, but
           the CO2 benefits were nil because all those happy little plankton
           were fed upon by happy little krill, who offset the CO2 sequestration
           and released it back into the atmosphere.  I think the article was
           in Discover, and the title mentioned something about "the Ironman".

11/13   Can I have a hospital room without monkeys?
        http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=071113065725.yech1gw9&show_article=1
        \_ One monkey is useless. Lots of monkeys... FEAR.
           It's a good thing cats don't cooperate. Otherwise, mankind
           would be doomed already.
           \_ Fluffy's Master Plan For World Domination!

11/13   If I have a application on machine foo sending data really fast to
        an application on machine bar via TCP, and the bar applications job
        is write that to disk as fast as possible, what happens if the
        network stream is faster than the disk writes?
        \_ Look up the differences between TCP/IP flow control and
           congestion control. The answer is in front of you.
           http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_control
           http://web.mit.edu/~6.033/www/papers/Networks-5-FlowCongestion.pdf
           By the way I hope we're not doing your EE122 homework.
        \_ bar starts blocking on i/o and the requests will queue up.
           Eventually the disk queue will fill up and how bar handles this
           depends on the o/s.
           \_ Basically all the backlog ends up in the memory of bar, right?
            \_ It depends on 100's of things.  Is this a single threaded
               "read, write, repeat" application?  If so your tcp buffers
               on bar will eventually fill up, yes.  How exactly depends on
               the os you are using.  Once that happens it will stop acking
               packets and that means your buffers on foo will start to
               fill up.  Once the buffers on foo fill up (once again how/when
               is going to depend on the os) your app on foo will probably
               start blocking or returning an error because it would block.
               Guess what, all that sort of behavior is also os dependant.
           \_ Does send() start returning errors?  Thx.  -- !OP
            \_ Depends on how you set up your socket.  It will probably
               block instead.
               \_ Your socket will either block until it can send the data
                  or the send() will return errors, usually of either
                  EWOULDBLOCK or ENOMEM. -ERic
           \_ I know syslog is udp, but how does syslogd handle a scenario
              like this?
              \_ dropped logs.  Such is the nature of using udp... -ERic
               \_ And it's intentional.  When everything is going to hell
                  you don't want your syslogs adding to that hell by
                  forcing resends of tons of packets.  Syslog needs to
                  fail without taking down the rest of the system.
        \_ You really need to read Stevens.  This stuff will be 100x clearer
           then.
           \_ I agree, though a word of warning about Stevens.  It is (well,
              they are) an excellent foundation text(s), but it will steer you
              wrong if you're trying to write servers that can serve thousands
              of javascript blocks embedding images and videos to social
              networks like the market leader http://Slide.com, you can't use select.
              The most common alternative I've seen is to use non-blocking
              sockets, and poll them manually.  And, yes, I know that CS 162
              teaches you that polling is bad.  The class lies. -dans
              wrong if you're trying to write servers that can scale to
              handle thousands of connections, you can't use select.  The most
              common alternative I've seen is to use non-blocking sockets, and
              poll them manually.  And, yes, I know that CS 162 teaches you
              that polling is bad.  The class lies. -dans
              \_ Well, in the common case polling is bad.  Occasionally it's
                 the right thing to do.  No undergrad class is going to be
                 able to cover such a broad subject completely. -jrleek
                 \_ I agree it's a broad subject, but I disagree with teaching
                    ideas that are theoretically sound, but break down in
                    practice.  Indeed, poll vs. select is subtle and probably
                    not something that needs be convered in CS 162, but I am,
                    nonetheless frustrated at the range of crippled products I
                    keep seeing because so many people just copy paste the
                    select loop from Stevens.  I find it more appalling that
                    we encourage undergrads to use threads since a) most
                    people can't write working threaded code and b) the
                    performance hit for more than n threads is appalling
                    (typically n is 8, but it depends on your hardware). -dans
                    \- (the collective you) may want to look at the papers by
                       Gaurav Banga and Jeffrey Mogul and various coauthors
                       for a good low level discussion about select/poll.
                       influential papers. --psb
                       if you are not familar with kqueues, the kqueue paper
                       is also good. influential papers. --psb
                       \_ Thanks, I'll check those out.  A lot of my thinking
                          on network performance is shaped by periodic
                          conversations with a handful of senior Cisco
                          engineers who keep leaving Cisco to found companies
                          and keep ending up back there because Cisco keeps
                          buying their companies. -dans
                          \_ Kqueues are awesome, and anyone who makes
                             makes recomendations about how to handle 1000s
                             of concurrent sockets but doesn't know about
                             kqueues (or other like implmentations) proves
                             just how usless his advice his.
                             \_ Do you have any Senior Cisco Engineers to
                                back you up?
                          \_ It's consistent with past performance but still
                             kind of amazing you could turn a journal reference
                             into something about you and your cool world of
                             high tech finance.
                             \_ Please take your meds.  Your delusions are
                                getting the better of you. -dans
        \_ oh lay off, dans' obnoxiousness at least makes the motd slightly
           interesting.  we need all the activity we can get, new undergrads
           dont even know what vi is these days.

11/13   How planets cause the sun's activity to change.
        http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=bfeddc8e-90d7-4f54-9ca7-1f56fadc7c2b
        \_ and he's predicting we are going into a 30 year 'cold' cycle...
           \_ And at least he's making a prediction that will be testable in
              our lifetime.
              \_ Not his, though, since he retired in 1982 and died in 2006.
                 This is just Lawrence Solomon digging up old research and
                 presenting it as if it hasn't already been debunked.  -tom
                 \_ URL?

11/12   emacs masters with macbooks, why do my arrow keys in emacs + Terminal
        not work?

11/12   What is diff between SAN and NAS?
         \_ NAS=Network Attached Storage.  Appliance which provides disk
             to servers/clients via file-based protocols (NFS, CIFS, iSCSI).
            SAN=Storage Area Netwoork.  Provides direct fiber connections from
             multiple servers to a single storage array.  -tom
            \_ Here is another way to explain It: They're very similar in that
               they are both technologies to have storage separate from the
               server. However with NAS, the storage protocols run over the
               server's normal network interfaces.  With SAN they go over
               special 'dedicated' storage-only connections, typically fiber.
               Furthermore, SAN uses a different storage-optimized protocol,
               whereas NAS typically operates over general network protocols
               such as IP. -ERic

11/12   Do the Barbi Twins still have enormous breast implants?
        \_ I once read an article saying that if the Barbie is scaled to real-
           life height, its (her) measurements would be 38-13-34.
           \_ Wrong 'barbie'
              \_ http://images.google.com gives me the same pics for "Barbi Twins"
                 and "Barbie Twins".
                 \_ not at home, can't check your data.

11/13   okay maggots.. free facebook hosting for 1 year
        to first 3500 facebook developers .. joyent
        http://www.joyent.com/developers/facebook
        \_ This sounds interesting.  If anyone uses it, I'd be curious to hear
           about your experience, particularly if you can compare and contrast
           to Amazon's S3/E2C services.  Also, if you're an indie app
           developer with a cool app, check out:
           http://www.unethicalblogger.com/indie_app_promotion_on_top_friends
           Basically, Slide promotes indie-apps on Top Friends for free.
           -dans
           \_ why do we need another middle man? fbml is enough
              \_ I don't think you understand what's being offered.  Top
                 Friends has over 20M users, and we will cross-promote your
                 indie app free of charge.  I don't see how that makes us a
                 middle man.  I suppose you could *pay* our competitor lots of
                 money to do the same thing. -dans
           \_ Can the motd have a "no blatant pimping of your company"
              rule?
              \_ Why?  To protect your unsullied playground of juvenile crap?
                 To promote more anonymous pimping of companies? -dans
                 \_ We got the message about your company.  I'd rather
                    see more unsullied juvenile crap than see the motd turn
                    into a giant dotcom ad zone.  Let it go.  Anyone who was
                    going to apply already has.  Now you just look desperate,
                    and that's always ugly.  Hire a technical recruiter. -!pp
                    \_ We have a technical recruiter.  She's really cool.  Not
                       everyone reads the motd every day or even every week.
                       If pimping companies bothers you so much, why didn't
                       you bitch about someone pimping facebook and joyent?
                       Also, how the hell do you read a statement that
                       effectively says, "Hey, we will promote your app for
                       free", as "Come work for us?" -dans
                       \_ I think the difference is: (a) you are extremely
                          annoying, and (b) sheer fucking volume: a huge
                          chunk of the motd was devoted to you going on and on
                          about that startup.  Nobody cares. -- ilyas
                          \_ This is precisely my point.  The issue has
                             nothing to do with promotion; its entirely
                             personal.  In a nutshell, I piss off certain
                                                         \_ Piss off is
                                   (surprise surprise) taking yourself far
                                   too seriously.  Eye rolling derision is
                                   probably much closer to how people feel
                                   about you.
                                   \_ Really?  Explain the vitriol? -dans
                             motd.personalities, they will flame me regardless
                             of the content of what I post, and I don't care.
                             P.S. Who made you (or tom or psb, etc, etc.) the
                             arbiter of who does and does not care? -dans
                             \_ Good marketing isn't annoying.
                             \_ Since tom, ilyas, and psb account for a
                                majority of motd posters, I'd say they are
                                the arbiters of who does and does not care.
                                Just how many people do you think really
                                read this stuff anyway?
                                \_ You do realize that there are lots of
                                   people who lurk on the motd, but don't
                                   actually post?  As far as I know, neither
                                   tom nor psb write code.  This being the
                                   Computer Science Undergraduate Association,
                                   not the Computer Sysadmin Undergraduate
                                   Association, I don't take alumni who
                                   graduated (or neglected to graduate) over a
                                   decade ago, work for the UC or one of its
                                   research affiliates, and don't write code
                                   too seriously.  At least, not when it comes
                                   to hiring software developers in private
                                   industry. -dans
                             \_ How many resumes have you gotten from CSUA
                                people in the last month or so? Or do I need
                                to join your company and sign an NDA to get
                                that information?
                                \_ Enough to make the effort worthwhile.  And,
                                   seriously, do you know any company startup
                                   or otherwise that publishes detailed stats
                                   on its recruiting efforts?  Seriously, are
                                   you insane? -dans
                \_ your app build on an app that is built upon a platform
                 that is on the internet.. ceases to be viral.. cancer-
                 nuttin but large tumor growing...