A long, long time ago, I messed up while updating my (Arch) work box,
and ended-up deleting /etc/fstab. Oops. Having to get back to work, I
just hacked the two lines absolutely necessary to boot the box---the
mounts for /home and /---and made a mental note to fix it properly
later. I should have known better.
Predictably enough, I
ended up never doing it---until now. Why? Well, because I use stable,
and for a long time there had been no kernel updates---until now.
Because /boot was unmounted, from the update process' point of view, it
was a regular folder, so all the files that were modified were just
dumped in there. Worse, because the /boot line did not exist in /etc/fstab,
the system had no idea that /boot is where the boot partition is
supposed to be mounted---otherwise during the upgrade process a very
visible warning would have been displayed (I confirmed this specifically
re-testing this scenario). And the day after, I turn on the box, only
to discover that it boots just fine, but that's about it. After booting,
in X, no keyboard, no mouse, no anything---because the system has the wrong modules loaded! (it has the ones that correspond to the kernel in the /boot folder, rather than the /boot partition, which is the one that is actually running, i.e. loaded during the boot process).
And so I had to borrow 5 minutes at a colleague's computer,
to browse for the solution, so I can boot, so I can downgrade the
kernel, fix fstab, re-upgrade the kernel, and finally get back to work.
Murphy, I effing hate you!
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Thursday, 10 November 2011
Saturday, 22 October 2011
On selling
Selling is exchanging something---anything---for money. Now, there's not much point in selling something that nobody cares to buy. And, from the consumer's ("buyer")
point of view, there's absolutely no point in buying something that you
either don't want, or if you do want it, that you can make it yourself.
In other words, for that exchange to take place, there must be "something in it" for the seller, as well as for the buyer.
This model has stood the test of time: it is as old as business itself. Underlying it, is a fundamental assumption: that after some good has been exchanged for some amount of money, just as the buyer is no longer in possession of that amount of money, the seller is no longer in possession of the good that has been sold. This works well specially when what's being sold either can't be copied, or when doing so would have a higher cost to the buyer than the seller's price. But what happens when what's being sold is something as ethereal as, say, information?
Information might be ethereal, but we, humans, are not. Therefore, with the possible exception of when we're thinking about it, we have to bind information to some material support. Before digital technology, that binding use to be definitive: once you've printed a book, you cannot use the same ink and paper to print a different book. But when someone sells a book, he's not selling just the material support, or just the information on it---he's selling the whole bundle. And while it's true that to the buyer of a book, the information is more valuable than the support it exists on, it is not less true that information without some kind of support is largely useless. Except for the lottery numbers, or the code to arm a nuclear warhead, nobody buys information without some physical support (just imagine what it would be like to sell the contents of The Da Vinci Code, in its platonic ethereal form---a true Mission Impossible). And for this reason, there is not much point in selling information, per se. Or is there?
Enter digital technology, and some years later, the internet. Of the many changes, good and bad, that these two advances in technology brought to society, the one that is clear beyond the shadow of a doubt, is that information is no longer bound to some material support, and irreversibly so. We still need some form of support to interact with information, viz. screens and keyboards, etc. but we no longer have to transmit the support in order to transmit the information. Furthermore, when we say transmit, we actually mean copy: after I send something to you, we both have it. Now it is paramount to understand the magnitude and the implications of such a change. If before the internet age selling a book (or a newspaper) could be considered a way to transmit information (and to fund the work needed to compile and organize that information), afterwords, selling information is, at best, a one time deal. Because that first buyer can then spread that information world wide, with essentially no effort or additional cost. Obviously, that would have been impossible before the internet age. This poses an enormous challenge to the enterprises that base their business models on distributing information when it was permanently bound to some material medium---paper, plastic slabs, magnetic tape, or whatever else. But it does not change the fact it makes no sense to sell information in and on itself. Also note that after that first sale, both the seller and the buyer are now in possession of the information that was sold.
To explain this from another angle: what justifies that first sale is that the information has value to the buyer, and that's why he pays for it to the seller. I.e. he pays for the work needed to produce that information. But nobody will pay the seller for the distribution of copies the information he produced, because the internet has removed all economic value from the process of distribution (because now anyone can do it, hence nobody is going to pay for it). This has always been the case with mathematics and physics: as any book written about those subjects (no matter how valuable to science) is unlikely to become a best seller, funding could not come from distribution. Given that now distribution brings ever more dwindling revenues, such a scenario will become more widespread.
But we're going astray. My contention here is that you cannot sell information in and on itself. And that is not because information is somehow special: you cannot sell anything that the buyer can easily do or copy himself, because, well, he's going to do or copy it himself. There's no added value. In the case of information, there is (a lot) of added value in producing it, and so people will pay for it (yours truly here included), but there is absolutely no value in retail selling it, for the reasons set forth above.
This model has stood the test of time: it is as old as business itself. Underlying it, is a fundamental assumption: that after some good has been exchanged for some amount of money, just as the buyer is no longer in possession of that amount of money, the seller is no longer in possession of the good that has been sold. This works well specially when what's being sold either can't be copied, or when doing so would have a higher cost to the buyer than the seller's price. But what happens when what's being sold is something as ethereal as, say, information?
Information might be ethereal, but we, humans, are not. Therefore, with the possible exception of when we're thinking about it, we have to bind information to some material support. Before digital technology, that binding use to be definitive: once you've printed a book, you cannot use the same ink and paper to print a different book. But when someone sells a book, he's not selling just the material support, or just the information on it---he's selling the whole bundle. And while it's true that to the buyer of a book, the information is more valuable than the support it exists on, it is not less true that information without some kind of support is largely useless. Except for the lottery numbers, or the code to arm a nuclear warhead, nobody buys information without some physical support (just imagine what it would be like to sell the contents of The Da Vinci Code, in its platonic ethereal form---a true Mission Impossible). And for this reason, there is not much point in selling information, per se. Or is there?
Enter digital technology, and some years later, the internet. Of the many changes, good and bad, that these two advances in technology brought to society, the one that is clear beyond the shadow of a doubt, is that information is no longer bound to some material support, and irreversibly so. We still need some form of support to interact with information, viz. screens and keyboards, etc. but we no longer have to transmit the support in order to transmit the information. Furthermore, when we say transmit, we actually mean copy: after I send something to you, we both have it. Now it is paramount to understand the magnitude and the implications of such a change. If before the internet age selling a book (or a newspaper) could be considered a way to transmit information (and to fund the work needed to compile and organize that information), afterwords, selling information is, at best, a one time deal. Because that first buyer can then spread that information world wide, with essentially no effort or additional cost. Obviously, that would have been impossible before the internet age. This poses an enormous challenge to the enterprises that base their business models on distributing information when it was permanently bound to some material medium---paper, plastic slabs, magnetic tape, or whatever else. But it does not change the fact it makes no sense to sell information in and on itself. Also note that after that first sale, both the seller and the buyer are now in possession of the information that was sold.
To explain this from another angle: what justifies that first sale is that the information has value to the buyer, and that's why he pays for it to the seller. I.e. he pays for the work needed to produce that information. But nobody will pay the seller for the distribution of copies the information he produced, because the internet has removed all economic value from the process of distribution (because now anyone can do it, hence nobody is going to pay for it). This has always been the case with mathematics and physics: as any book written about those subjects (no matter how valuable to science) is unlikely to become a best seller, funding could not come from distribution. Given that now distribution brings ever more dwindling revenues, such a scenario will become more widespread.
But we're going astray. My contention here is that you cannot sell information in and on itself. And that is not because information is somehow special: you cannot sell anything that the buyer can easily do or copy himself, because, well, he's going to do or copy it himself. There's no added value. In the case of information, there is (a lot) of added value in producing it, and so people will pay for it (yours truly here included), but there is absolutely no value in retail selling it, for the reasons set forth above.
Wednesday, 21 September 2011
Not Google+
An excellent parody of G+, and, indirectly, of all other social networks. Also, if you can read portuguese, this is a very good reading (the video embedded was in one of the comments).
Thursday, 4 August 2011
GPU toaster!
So, to make a long story short, I finally decided to try to make my desktop computer jet engine a bit more quiet. Much to my astonishment, I discovered, with the help of the folks at MBit, that the cause of the jet engine noise was my no longer manufactured Asus nVidia Geforce 9500GT. Or more precisely, its smaller-than-a-cookie fan. Seriously. So I flipped my mental insanity bit to logical 1, and decided to turn it off (I did add another larger fan on the lateral wall of my case).
The result? My GPU's idle temperature is now at a nice and cool 77ºC :P Watching a 20 minute anime raised it to 83ºC. Well, at least now I have a pc that's much, MUCH more silent! Anyway, if anyone knows a silent, (preferably fanless) nVidia GPU with enough horsepower to play FullHD movies, feel free to drop a comment ;-)
Note: I'm not a gamer, so basic 3D render and FullHD is about all I require from a GPU.
EDIT TO ADD: the way to discover where the noise is coming from, is to stop each fan, one at a time, and see which one yields the biggest noise reduction. The proper way to stop a fan is to press your finger against its central spindle, until it stops. It's painless, for both the fan and your finger! ;-)
The result? My GPU's idle temperature is now at a nice and cool 77ºC :P Watching a 20 minute anime raised it to 83ºC. Well, at least now I have a pc that's much, MUCH more silent! Anyway, if anyone knows a silent, (preferably fanless) nVidia GPU with enough horsepower to play FullHD movies, feel free to drop a comment ;-)Note: I'm not a gamer, so basic 3D render and FullHD is about all I require from a GPU.
EDIT TO ADD: the way to discover where the noise is coming from, is to stop each fan, one at a time, and see which one yields the biggest noise reduction. The proper way to stop a fan is to press your finger against its central spindle, until it stops. It's painless, for both the fan and your finger! ;-)
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