I realize that everyone’s probably already sick to death of hearing about Chrome, but I thought I’d chime in anyway.
Here’s a memory usage shot of Chrome versus Opera.
Click the image to see the big picture
It’s not really a fair comparison, as the same things aren’t open, but I realized that with the way I have Opera configured, it couldn’t be a fair comparison anyway. I have around 50 RSS feeds, one mail account, and at least one IRC channel which all contribute to the overall memory load Opera exerts on my system. That said, this shot was taken with 3 actual web page tabs open in Opera, and 3 browser extra tabs open (IRC, details for one feed, and the transfers window), and only Gmail and the about:memory pages open in Chrome.
Opera in this instance is using less memory. (WHOOO VICTORY!) Hardly a scathing indictment of Chrome’s use of system resources, as if I had Gmail open in Opera the memory usage stats would undoubtedly be much in favor of Chrome. Which in my mind is simply a strong argument in support of the idea that browser speed is absolutely predicated by the way the browser is used. A new install of Firefox will always be faster than one with plugins added. A new install of Opera should be faster before all the extra features are configured. IE will be faster without toolbars. Etc, etc. The base speed tests and resource usage tests that browser superiority enthusiasts look to for support of their favorite browser (in theory) only indicates the speed or resource usage of the browser at its optimum settings, meaning regular users may never notice a difference between browser speeds or system burden.
The operating system certainly plays a factor as well. Having played with Opera on Ubuntu lately, I noticed that the Windows version of Opera (9.52/9.51) is more stable and less demanding than it is on Ubuntu (7.10, Gnome). If anyone has an advice on how to make Opera and Ubuntu (or more to the point, Flash, Opera and Ubuntu) play nicer together, I’m open to suggestion. I’m actually rather new to this “linux” thing.
A clear and flagrant disrespect for all things was extruded from the two young men chatting back and forth on the mostly empty train car and left the air palpably unclean. Crisp suits, slick and greasy hair, shifty bright eyes, and utter animal stupidity were readily apparent upon a quick glance. Typical upper-class white boys with no sense of purpose beyond where their dicks will be by the end of the night or who they can roll under the bus to get the next raise. No love except the long-since-abandoned love for mother, and a lust for money and the status associated with it that they assume is love. Read the rest of this entry »
Tales written for discerning young ladies with a keen admiration of the manliness of the male half of the species, this volume deals with heart-pounding tales of men performing stunning feats of self-surgery and suffering such injuries as would surely destroy men of lesser manliness. Yet never fear! For these manly men always get the better of every trial and tribulation that comes their way! Read on for more exciting stories of the manliness of men!
Mark was a willowy, handsome young lad, with shoulder length flaxen hair which he brushed into his pale, rosy-cheeked face often to cover his sparkling, glassy blue eyes in impish defiance of social mores.
One fine summer’s day he sat on his back porch, clad in his favorite jean shorts. This in and of itself was nothing significant. Yet the story behind his reason for sitting thus when there was action, adventure and, yes, even danger to be had out in the wide world is indeed a stirring tale.
Being as clever and crafty as he was, Mark had made these shorts himself when his favorite pants finally ripped so significantly that his girlfriend at the time had insisted with the venom only a lifelong student of modern fashions could that he do away with them. Yet young Mark would not be denied pants so well-worn that they had become something akin to a companion. Indeed, many was the week which had passed without him parting with them long enough even to wash them. He simply couldn’t bear to part with these pants! No, this was a man of deep concerns in his life who simply would not give up the familiar comforts of the threadbare pockets, nor the subtle sophistication which came with the various inked designs which turned the faded denim into a black and blue patina which echoed his triumphant past’s loves, hopes, and outstanding feats of stunning bravery. It was as grave a sin as asking an honored crusader to part with the finely wrought chain mail which had saved him from savage and ignominious death through countless battles with fierce and pitiless Moors and Turks!
So passionate had our young Mark been when confronted with the possibility of losing this treasure, he had snatched up a sizable blade from the kitchen counter in heated desire for swift yet just resolution to this disgraceful feud between aesthetic schools of thought, and with such fervor did he hack away at the offending lower portion of his beloved jeans that it caused him several injuries. Indeed, he was not mindful of such lacerations! An impassioned and bold man such as this could have no room for outward manifestations of pain when there was a battle of wit and craft at hand.
So deep was his anguish at the mutilation of this jewel of his possessions that he hurled the remnants of the pants - along with the now crimson-stained blade - as far as his slim, tight-muscled arms could manage with a pained howl escaping his chest. Regrettably his then-girlfriend hadn’t the presence of mind to clear herself from the path of the flying objects, and suffered a nasty shock as sharpened metal pierced the drywall beside her head.
What woman can understand the true nature of such manly displays, when the depth of feeling must manifest itself in a true man’s course of action? Few can, and alas this was the last he ever saw of or heard from that young lady. Indeed, though he had won a victory over an intractable situation, she simply couldn’t understand the depth of his sincere heartbreak, nor his truer, sentimental nature. In his woeful mourning over losing both his love interest and a significant portion of his most treasured pants, he neglected to care for himself and the injuries he sustained during the confrontation.
As a result, he found himself sitting on the back porch of his home in a grim and pensive state. He had moments before prepared himself for the task which lay before him in that golden afternoon. The slanting sunlight pierced the smoky air around him and cast a beam better than a surgeon’s lamp on the site of his concern. One of the the wounds he had sustained during his heart wrenching episode of confrontational tailoring had taken a turn for the worse. Such a strong believer in independence was he that Mark was not employed and could not provide the sum necessary to visit a trained medical professional. Nor did he believe in such ridiculousness. As a true student of manliness he felt strongly that anything which could be accomplished by his own hand should be! Oft was he praised for such, and oft chided by those who did not understand. Nevertheless he was prepared for the task ahead of him. His anesthetic of choice was taking hold, calming him adequately for the work ahead.
The wound in question was a clean slice whose depth had allowed all manner of dirt in, and despite having been liberally (albeit indirectly and not deliberately) splashed with cleansing alcohol during the last two weeks it was now a very angry shade of red. The protective layer of dried blood was flecked with dirt and a clear fluid leaked from beneath it with only the slightest pressure. If it was painful to look at, it was surely more painful to actually have and feel, yet young Mark showed no pain or fear. With a trusty pocket knife in hand, he paused only once to take a deep breath and hold it in before exhaling in a great rush. A sagely expression came over him, making his heavy-lidded eyes seem cloudy and distant. With a dazzling quickness he sliced open the hardened surface of his grave injury and Oh! what happened then! A rush of milky fluid rushed forth, gleaming wetly under the light of the afternoon sun. Unfazed by such Mark quickly wiped it away and proceeded to squeeze with the all the somber detachment of a true warrior. Once the rupture in his smooth skin was running with the pure crimson of a clean cut, he wiped his hands off on the comforting cloth of his shortened jeans and simply sat. Clearly this quiet contemplation was his way of cleansing his spirit as well as the site of his bodily harm.
His phone rang and with all the unhurried grace of a seasoned general, Mark reached in his pocket, saw that the name on the phone simply said “Cunty Whore That Dumped Me” and thumbed the silencer with unperturbed ease.
This concludes our first installment of Heart-Pounding Tales of The Manliness of Men Vol. 1: Wound and Infection Treatment Stories! Won’t you join us next time for more thrilling, fascinating and stirring tales of manly men and their aplomb in the face of mortal wounding and dire infections?
The Daily Kos has provided a link to the list of committee members who will be dealing directly with this bill in their lengthy commentary. I have no idea why only the Democrats have outbound links.
As with any law-related item, it is strongly encouraged to read the proposed bill yourself prior to espousing your thoughts to a positive or negative. With that in mind, here is a small portion of the opening statement. Those with little tolerance for religion, and those who are disinclined to see our government’s time wasted with trifling arguements for meaningless memorials would do well to take a few deep breaths first.
Affirming the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation’s founding and subsequent history and expressing support for designation of the first week in May as `American Religious History Week’ for the appreciation of and education on America’s history of religious faith.
Whereas religious faith was not only important in official American life during the periods of discovery, exploration, colonization, and growth but has also been acknowledged and incorporated into all 3 branches of American Federal government from their very beginning;
Whereas the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed this self-evident fact in a unanimous ruling declaring `This is a religious people … From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation’;
Whereas political scientists have documented that the most frequently-cited source in the political period known as The Founding Era was the Bible;
Whereas the first act of America’s first Congress in 1774 was to ask a minister to open with prayer and to lead Congress in the reading of 4 chapters of the Bible;
Whereas Congress regularly attended church and Divine service together en masse;
My thoughts? It’s a waste of human resources to even consider talking about this. This bill strikes me as demonstrating no effort at honoring “American Religious History” so much as it wishes to remind everyone how important Christian religion has been in the history of this country. Regardless of that observation, to approve any bill citing any one faith as essential or preferred in this nation’s past is to imply that it is essential to its present; in short, the bill flies in the face of separation of church and state and is therefore simply not acceptable. I absolutely respect the rights of citizens to practice and celebrate and share their religious beliefs - up to and including sharing their beliefs on how their faith may have shaped this nation’s history and practices - but I cannot and will not condone signing anything into law which then places the state’s official position as one of direct endorsement of a specific group’s personal beliefs. Focusing in such a manner belittles the historical significance and current cultural relevance of all other theological positions, and engenders ill will between differing faiths by inciting heated debate as to why one religion is preferable in the eyes of the government.
I support separation of church and state. I support the equal exchange of ideas. I support the pursuit of history, unbaised by the agendas of the few. Please share your thoughts with me, and more importantly, please share your thoughts with the representatives of the committee if you feel strongly about this issue (one way or the other).
I never thought I would be able to turn to a webcomic to astutely sum up the values of restraint and respecting others perspectives (regardless of what you may think of them.
I just discovered WE THE ROBOTS, a thrice-weekly strip in ye old internet, a little earlier.
While skimming through the backlog from the current strip, I spotted a few that made me chuckle and whatnot, then I spotted this one.
In six panels, it not only adequately sums up my extreme distaste for professional sports, but also beautifully embodies why it is not necessarily a good idea to tell people exactly what you think. Give it a peek and discuss.
Is it better to say what you think, regardless of tact, or keep quiet if you think you might insult someone?
I came across an article in The Register a little while ago about one mom’s fight to keep a 29 second video clip of her son dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” up on YouTube.
In summary: The PA resident, Stephanie Lenz, had placed a 29 second clip of her dancing baby boy up on YouTube in order to share with family and friends. Universal (Prince’s label) contacted YouTube purportedly at the artist’s behest, citing the DMCA
Momma contacted the EFF and also filed a suit against the record label, Universal Music Group, to get the clip put back up as well as damages.
Current the clip is back up on YouTube, but as of the Register’s October 30th article, the lawsuit is still underway.
Without further ado, the “objectionable” clip.
I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this. I personally feel like the artist and recording company have lost face with this action, and that the more public this becomes, the worse it will look for the two of them. The mother has nothing to lose but time, and possibly some serious lawyer’s fees. In my mind this is not a landmark case in terms of establishing laws, but in enforcing them. And of course the neverending “Corporate vs. Consumer” idea that pervades the culture these days.
Author’s Note: The information below is based upon reports which were handed to me during the incident through various sources. I am well aware that at this point there are inaccuracies. I intend to maintain this post as-is to serve as a record of what occurs when information is not disseminated in an organized fashion. For a full report on what happened, there are several sources, but it may be best to go with Rackspace’s finished report on the incident. Once again I appreciate all the feedback, and I am glad that I was able to provide some insights to at least a few people during this business crisis. Thank you.
Just heard from my head IT guy at my office:
Rackspace had a major power outage in its Dallas location due to a truck which crashed into a utility pole, causing it to crash into a transformer, causing it to explode a huge ruckus resulting in a transformer blowing up.
There are backup generators which kicked in immediately to prevent serious data loss and server damage, but it wasn’t enough to power the heating and cooling.
They realized that the infrastructure of generators wasn’t enough to handle it all when the temps were going up in the data center so they shut back down.
So what did they do? They trucked in several (around 6-10) 100 kilowatt large generators to power the HVAC.
These are being hooked up presently and service should be restored soon. They’re flipping servers back online one at a time to ensure maximum hardware integrity.
It’s estimated that it will take around 12 hours to restore the transformer. This means that Rackspace will be running on generators for a while. Could ge interesting.
Key update from my techie!
Unfortunately, the report I was given at 9:19pm stating that the site would be back up within 5 to 10 minutes was not accurate. According to Rackspace, they are still working to restore power-and as of right now they do not have a time estimate for restored service. The tech I spoke to felt that it would be at least two more hours until service was restored.
And we’re back! 10:55pm EST
Laughingsquid and the company I work for are back up and running. Saw another green light over at the digg page for this article. However it appears at this time that 37signals is still down for the count. I’ll provide more insight from my IT connection if Rackspace has provided any.
11:30pm EST - Well, 37signals is definitely back to life. Still no word from my IT connection. Knowing him, he’s probably locked himself in the server room to avoid a bombardment of sales people asking questions about the situation. Translation: I probably won’t hear a lick of new info until tomorrow. Keeping my fingers crossed. In the meantime, Valleywag’s numerous sources will undoubtedly have one among them with their finger on the pulse of the situation.
11:45pm - heard from my IT dude again. got clarification on the original report (see above), but nothing super-new.
Nov. 12th 9:30PM CST — As of 8:45 p.m. CST, temperatures are stabilizing in the DFW data center. In cases of servers that were proactively shut down to avoid overheating, we are starting the process of bringing the affected machines back online in a phased, gradual way. We are sorry for service disruptions caused by these events and understand how critical this is for your business. Throughout this process, we are making every effort to minimize impact on customer environments and return affected machines back to service as quickly and smoothly as possible.
We continue to work with vendors to re-establish utility power to the facility and will keep providing updates here in the portal.
Nov. 12th 11:30PM CST — As of 10:50 p.m. CST, all DFW servers that were proactively powered down earlier this evening, to avoid overheating, have now been powered back up. The Data Center Engineering team has been working to resolve the power issues caused by tonight’s traffic incident. The team is preparing to transfer machines affected by tonight’s power outage from generator power back to utility power. The servers and devices that were affected by the unrelated event over this past weekend will remain on generator power. We anticipate transferring the machines affected this evening back to utility power within the hour and expect the transfer to be non-disruptive to customer environments. We apologize again for the inconvenience these events have caused and have all hands on deck working fanatically to minimize the impact on your business.
Final Update: with everything that’s gone on in the past day regarding this rackspace outage, I just couldn’t keep up with all the info, and I certainly didn’t want to harrass the company’s RS rep into coughing up more info. I provided what knowledge I had at the time, some of which has been rightfully refuted by further, better information. (As pointed out in some of the comments below.) At this point, news on the accident which queued off this chain of events is available at Valleywag.
The best news is that the person who had the accident is okay. Everything after that is debate over guarantees, serious reputation management challenges for Rackspace, and damage assessment for those who lost time and money.
This Words To Know is being brought to you today by “why the hell not?” and also by “not formatted anything like the other ones”. Now with 99% less Wikipedia and 100% more link mouseover info. This makes it sort of revolutionary among its brethren, and also somewhat of a jerk.
First thing's first. With the recent pet food scare, and me owning a kitty of which I have yet to take pictures, I decided it was time to find out what kitty ought to be eating. There were a lot of resources out there, but the best has to be this recipe for a “raw food” catfood. More on how that works out later.
One of the suggested ingredients in there is a whole rabbit (minus skin and fur of course). That's not a euphamism for kibble, either. That's the real deal, 1 whole Peter Cottontail, 1 whole Benjamin Bunny, 1 whole hexen hase[2]. I myself am going to settle for the chicken option, it's a lot more accessible and ultimately much more afforadable.
That's just one of several things I've managed to suss up lately. I've gotten into a lot of bizzare philosophical debates on IRC lately, and one of the most recent involved average IQ. (Intelligence has been on my mind a lot lately, particularly the calling into question of my own. Which is a patently ridiculous scenario, I realize.) Of course, show me a person with a truly average IQ and I'll probably be so stricken by the unlikelihood of it all that I'll spontaneously develop bizzare psychic powers to not be outdone in the oddity department.
Speaking of the oddity department, and discoveries, I've decided that I'm intensely enamored of the whole “Gothic Lolita” fashion style. The lovely Annalee over at ToM pointed out the store site for Baby, The Stars Shine Bright. I spent a while browsing there and then struck out on my own, looking for moresuper-fun visual styles in that vein. It is of course by no means practical, but it's so enjoyably artful that I can't help but be fascinated by it.
This leads to my last little bit, which like most of the rest of this post will be less of an proper WTK and more of a personal aside. At some point while gushing over how adorable a bunch of cosplayers were I quipped something to the effect of “quick, everybody gimme me money so I can buy a Suiseisekicostume!” However, my attempt to be funny went slightly off-center with someone and I wound up being donated $15 through PayPal. …so now I intend to hold that money aside and put it towards buying real hosting for my site as I mentioned wanting to months ago. I guess I am willing to take other donations but I'm not really all that keen on the idea since it feels sort of absurd to take handouts for something as simple as hosting. What I will accept with open arms are suggestions on a low-cost, stable hosting solution that will support wordpress.
http://www.churchhopping.com/ten-verses-never-preached-on/Which only goes to show that historical* works are pretty fucked up. Or at least the bible certainly seems that way.
My question though, is why not build a speech around verses like these? No matter how much of a messed-up fundie some folks might be these days, you have to figure that most of their behavior is leagues better than what is depicted in these biblical quotes. Doesn’t justify some of today’s hateful ways in the name of biblical sanctity by a long shot, but it does provide a pretty interesting glimpse of what it could have been instead, or what it may have been like in the past.
So build a speech around a verse that says “god will send killer bears after rude children”. Spin it like a christian tale of bad karma, perhaps.
What would you do with the more shocking biblical material out there?
*Relatively speaking. There’s a lot of room for debate with a statement like that, I know.
Some kids play in the sandbox. We play in the.... litterbox??? The RKNet staff is pleased that you decided to stop by. Currently this is a multi-author project, with a rotating cast of totally kooky characters. Contact giania [at symbol] gmail [dot] com if you'd like to play here too.
