Propaganda is the act of making the truth unthinkable.

Nine words. Everything else follows from that assertion.

Discuss.

Motherhood is not a great accomplishment and it never has been. Animals have perfected the art of procreation, for God’s sake. Why should we become egotistical about something an insect can do?

I could not agree more. Because, you know what is really meritorious? Being a mother to an industrious, happy individual that contributes to a healthy society, instead of going around performing the impulses from his primitive reptile brain.

Oh, the above truism was “borrowed” from Violent Acres. Go read it — the rest of the article is fantastic as well.

Come to think of it, the things V say are so elementarily true that they clash with contemporary stupidity. The simple act of pointing these things out in this dystopian society seem subversive. And for that… I dunno whether to laugh or cry anymore.

- Most of it doesn’t matter
- The greatest source of misery and hatred in this world is clinging to past hurts
- Waiting to do something until you can be sure of doing it exactly right means waiting for ever
- Following the latest fashion, in work or in life, is spiritual and intellectual suicide
- If people complain that you’re too fond of going your own way and aren’t fitting in, you must be on the right track
- If you make your work your life, you’re making your life into hard work
- The quickest and simplest way to wreck any relationship is to listen to gossip
- Trying to please other people is largely a futile activity
- Every winner is destined to be a loser in due course
- You can rarely, if ever, please, placate, change, or mollify an asshole
- Everything takes twice as long as you plan for and produces results about half as good as you hoped
- People are oddly consistent
- However hard you try, you can’t avoid being yourself
- When it comes to blatant lies, there are none more egregious than budget figures
- The loudest noise in the world is the sound of people whining

Go see the full, in-depth list.

A continuous 8 hour work day is a relic of the past. It makes sense for physical labor and manufacturing work, but with information workers it doesn’t account for the mental energy cycle. The ability of a factory worker to think analytically is irrelevant, he’s either cranking widgets or he isn’t.

In the case of the modern information worker, nearly all tasks involve creative or strategic thinking. The way someone answers an email or interprets a piece of information can differ drastically depending on his or her energy level. Nobody does their best work 5:30 in the afternoon after they’ve been sucking down coffee all day to stay awake.

Now, I do have the ability to work, fully concentrated, for 18-hour stretches (once I did a 40-hour stretch!), and I don’t get anxious like John says he does in his article. However, that fact only reinforces the idea that 9-to-5 simply doesn’t work for information workers.

Information technology leaders clued in on this a long time ago: witness the 24/7 continuous operation and open-door policy of leading information companies, like Google.

It’s only a matter of time before people in the IT sector start acknowledging a 9-to-5 shift as a reason not to work at companies who practice it.

One-person businesses are the new boom. Instead of having organizational structures that bear the weight of large amounts of people, the new economy thrives on having decentralized responsibilities in the form of one-person businesses.

Paul Kedrosky says it well on his latest post The Rise of the People-Less Business, when he quotes:

Personal businesses are a surprisingly large part of the Americaneconomy. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, at the end of 2004 almost20 million Americans operated businesses with no employees. Businesseswithout a payroll make up over 70% of the nation’s businesses, andalmost one million new businesses without payrolls were added in 2004(the latest available data).

This trend is not only circumscribed to America.

Oh, I found this interesting tidbit of information through LinuxToday.

Sí, soy feliz.

Tengo amigos. Tengo más de los necesarios para no encontrarme solo, si yo así lo escojo.

Ando con mujeres. Si me lo propongo, puedo ejecutar un one-night-stand perfecto. Tengo algo de experiencia. Y estoy 100% seguro de haber tomado la ruta correcta, cuando he terminado con todas mis exes.

Pero, de vez en cuando, Amarok toca esa canción. Los recuerdos me asaltan.

Y me descubro suspirando.

…remember the promise you made…

Яudd-O: dude relationships are easy

Яudd-O: it’s the fighting that’s hard

Яudd-O: I know that sounded sophistically easy

Яudd-O: but it’s the truth

Яudd-O: starting a relationship takes effort

Яudd-O: from then on, it all works itself out on its own

Яudd-O: why? cuz solving a problem is EASY if the two involved want to solve it

Яudd-O: it’s conversely HARD to solve if only one of them (or none) wants to solve it

Яudd-O: and if that’s the case, then why go on? it would be an exercise in futility

Яudd-O: the precondition to make a relationship survive is, thus, the WANT of two people to solve an impasse

Яudd-O: (tangentially to this conversation, there are certain things, in my opinion, that simply DON’T warrant even trying to solve, such as cheating for example)

Яudd-O: once there’s a mutual WILL, everything else falls into place

Яudd-O: so you see, the important part of a relationship is maintaining the WILL

Яudd-O: and how do you maintain the WILL? simply through CHALLENGE

nono, you misunderstood the concept of challenge

Яudd-O: challenge is all about making the other person want you, value you and miss you

Яudd-O: sure there’s nothing wrong with sharing, but in order for her to SHARE with you, she needs to WANT to SHARE with you first

So, there you have it. Feel free to believe this.

Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.

I don’t exactly agree with Ayn Rand on some subjects, but I have to concede this: Show me the woman a man sleeps with, and I, too, will tell you what he thinks of him.

The idea that college guarantees financial security is the most detrimental myth we could possibly tell our children. There are so many degrees out there that won’t even get you a management job Kmart, let alone a comfortable existence. General studies? Philosophy? What the hell do you expect to do with that degree? Clean toilets?

It is not. ACAP brings nothing to the table that isn’t already there and accessible for “content providers” (read: Web page owners). In theory, ACAP would solve two issues:

1. AJAX-powered Web sites
2. Caching on Web search engines as a method to “steal content”

##The truth about AJAX and ACAP

Have an AJAX-powered Web site? Then you probably know search engines aren’t indexing your site properly.

The crux of the issue is rather simple: hyperlinks that point to javascript: actions don’t get followed by search engines. ACAP is advertised (on the aforementioned article) as a solution to this problem.

It’s not the right one. The right solution is for Web site builders to build sites that take advantage of AJAX, but don’t rely on it. This does not only benefit search engine users, but mobile users as well, since their devices usually can’t handle heavy AJAX. Hey, I own a Palm T|X and I know what I’m talking about.

Forms should POST and GET to valid locations. Form results should generate entire pages, unless a special argument is passed to request JSON or XML results through an XMLHttpRequest object. Hyperlinks should point to real pages, and be trapped.

Modern Web building toolkits like Django and Ruby on Rails provide the facilities to make this kind of development seamless. In the face of a correctly built Web site, ACAP brings nothing new.

##Content caching: the “root of all evil”?

ACAP is also advertised as a way to let search engines and Web sites broker over which contents they should cache. As a marketing strategy, ACAP thus appeals to Web site owners who fear reduced visits because of search engine caches, and owners who suddenly yank lots of content from the Web to place it behind a paywall.

Hello? If you fear search engine caches, you need to look no further than to the humble META tag called NOCACHE!

And if you wanted only search engines to index your content, you’ve always been able to do this! Your publishing engine should already include measures to detect user agents, and you can combine this with “known good” search engine crawler IP lists.

Again, indexing of well-authored pages has never been a problem. Evven for greedy Web site operators.

##The wrapup

All in all, ACAP is bad. It brings new complexity to the already complex Web. Furthermore, it is an opportunity for fraudulent Web sites to manifest fraudulent content that the users won’t find when they go to these sites. It should be stabbed in the back and left for dead.

Brother, ¿ya probaste el nuevo Windows Vista? ¡Está bacansísimo!

Mi respuesta: no, compadre, no me interesa usar cosas obsoletas que valen verga.

Los fanboys de Microsoft se deslechan cuando MS saca algo nuevo. Están felices con su “Honda Accent”, porque no conocen otra cosa. Pena ajena: los arrechos manejamos de 8 cilindros para arriba. Es decir, Linux.

¿Cuándo entenderán?

The regular monitoring application suite is just not enough. top only analyzes CPU usage. vmstat and iostat only present summaries, but can’t find culprits. strace is too low-level and doesn’t allow to visualize proportions of disk accesses among processes. But pinpointing the exact application or daemon that’s taxing computer resources, whether it’s for short or long times, that’s currently impossible.

Therefore, I propose someone very clever creates these two applications, which should close the gap.

##Application 1: psnettop

We need a combo between top and iftop. I should be able to fire up an application that shows me network usage, not by port or by interface, but by process. That way, I can quickly diagnose whether it’s BitTorrent or Firefox. Network admins could remotely log onto users’ computers and inspect which applications are sucking their Internet links.

It should also let me collapse statistics per-application or per-PID.

On Windows land, there’s the fantastic NetLimiter which, apart from setting network bandwidth limits per-process, automatically shows you the instantanteous bandwidth per-process. We need this.

##Application 2: disktop

We also need an application, top-style, that shows us disk transactions per application. Not just disk accesses, but real major page faults (swap-ins) and disk reads/writes, bypassing the disk cache. One column for page faults. Another for blocks read. A third for blocks written. They should be reported as they happen, on hardware, so the caches should be ignored. Thus, system admins can identify applications that are:

- causing memory pressure to increase
- sucking up disk bandwidth with excessive swapins/outs
- exercising the disk by loading files not in the cache

strace does not cut it, because it doesn’t show which accesses caused actual disk hardware operations, and because it only monitors a single process.

It should also let me collapse statistics per-application or per-PID.

##Extra wishes

If these applications or monitoreables could be taken advantage of in the following ways, it’d be even greater.

###KSysGuard integration

As much of a fan I am of the command line, I’ve grown very accustomed to the great KSysGuard. If these monitoreables could be integrated in a graphical console, then it would be very easy to spot problems at a glance.

###Logging à là sar

Those of us who have used sar know it’s a valuable way to make assessments on a timeline. If periodic logging of these monitoreables were incorporated into the system, we could quickly diagnose problems that have occurred in the past, and share log files with debuggers and developers everywhere. Thus we wouldn’t rely on anecdotic evidence and hearsay when it comes to discussing naughty applications.

##Please help!

Sadly, I don’t have the skillset required to do this. I’m hoping someone in the Free Software community can help us in this sense. I understand that clever work can use SystemTap to derive these values. So there’s a start.

Have a great day!

When Nazi Germany marched into Poland it was an act of war despite there perverted self justiffication The mass hispanic invasion into the US is no less. Wake up and smell the torteas you wont have a country you regognize to come back to when you have had enough of socialist europe

Look, Fred:

Nazi Germany marched into Poland with rifles and planes (die Luftwaffe); Blitzkrieg, remember?. I studied it very well during 10th grade (it turns out that I went to and graduated in a Humboldt German school). After that, the Polish people were gassed en masse.

The latin immigrants (I refuse to use “hispanic” as it is “politically correct”) marched into the U.S. with, perhaps, a bottle of water and a couple of potato chips ni their pockets, leaving their families behind and risking almost certain death. I still don’t see any cases of latin people gassing U.S. residents.

I really don’t see how you could compare both phenomenons other than to say they’re dramatically different. It’s not that it’s “less” or “is no less”. I find it morally reprehensible to compare scavengers looking for jobs that you americans can’t (from an economically perspective, efficiently) do, against the Third Reich. Especially when, in times of war, you guys were the major destination for Jew escapees.

For better or worse, you should start growing some empathy and get used to the idea that the U.S. is now a country with a large minority of latin immigrants, whether legal or illegal. Get over the xenophobia and the prejudice, whip out a book on economics, and learn why immigration (whether illegal or not) is actually beneficial for you and your family.

By the way, I’m talking about Germany, not Bratislava. I don’t see how you could say it’s “socialist”, seeing as it’s one of the largest democracies and free market economies.