1941

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Time does not exist.

« on: October 12, 2014, 03:07:06 AM »

I notice you are all ignoring my argument that renders the OP both correct and superfluous. Is that because my case is too compelling for you to counter?

1942

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Time does not exist.

« on: October 11, 2014, 08:27:24 PM »

Nothing can be proven to exist outside of the human mind, due to the fact that all observations must pass into the mind before we are aware of their existence. Case closed.

1943

Arts & Entertainment / Re: The Pink Floyd discography listen-through

« on: October 11, 2014, 03:37:58 PM »

Wish You Were Here
Studio album


Recorded: January - July 1975
Released: 12 September 1975

Band lineup

Roger Waters (bass)
David Gilmour (guitar)
Richard Wright (keyboards)
Nick Mason (drums)

Dick Parry (saxophone solo on "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" part V)
Roy Harper (lead vocal on "Have a Cigar")

All lyrics written by Roger Waters.

Side A

1. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (parts I-V) (Waters, Gilmour, Wright) (13:38)
2. Welcome To the Machine (Waters) (7:30)

Side B

1. Have a Cigar (Waters) (5:24)
2. Wish You Were Here (Waters, Gilmour) (5:17)
3. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (parts VI-IX) (Waters, Gilmour, Wright) (12:29)

Review

In the wake of the enormous commercial success of The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd produced a second concept album with two concurrent and related themes. First, the album and the very long "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" which makes up more than half of its length are calls out to Syd, who was very put off by commercial success. Second, the remaining tracks explore the harsh realities of the music industry, and the fact that success has its pitfalls.

The music used to convey these themes is a lot darker than anything Pink Floyd did previously. We begin with the first half of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, a 14-minute track containing two verses about Syd Barrett's short but bright music career, sung by Roger, but otherwise instrumental. The instrumentation is much more structured than Floyd's previous jams, though; the track is clearly separated into alternating guitar solos from David and synth solos from Rick. David's solos are bluesy as usual, while Rick's are very simple and reflective. Finally, Dick Parry takes a sax solo after the vocals. It's good, but the solos get repetitive fast without band members being able to bounce ideas off each other like they used to.

Dick's solo fades out to end the opening track. It's a long, slow fade-out, and it actually gives the impression that the music is getting further away, not just quieter. This actually turns out to be a cross-fade into Welcome To the Machine, which opens with a steady, mechanical drone. Some clunking and whirring later, David begins singing about "the machine", a symbol of the music business churning young musicians into commercial products. It even goes so far as to say "it's alright, we told you what to dream", criticising popular media for reinforcing the idea that commercial success is something to strive for.

Side A ends with another slow synth solo from Rick, maintaining the aural presence of a machine throughout the 7-minute song, until finally a mechanical click stops the solo abruptly and the song ends with the faint sound of a crowd of people laughing. It's not one of my favourite Floyd songs, but it certainly conveys its message extremely well.

Have a Cigar is a slow, bluesy, almost sleazy number about a greedy record company executive who cares more for money and record sales than for the music itself, sung by Roy Harper. Like Welcome To the Machine, this song contains some fairly direct criticism of the music industry, ending with the sentiment "did we tell you the name of the game, boy? We call it riding the gravy train."

The segue from Have a Cigar into Wish You Were Here is one of my favourites. The guitar solo that closes Have a Cigar cuts to the sound of a radio, continuing to play Have a Cigar. Someone then tunes the radio through a few short sound bytes, including some which run with the general theme of the album, including a woman saying "now would you take this star nonsense?", before finally tuning into the Wish You Were Here guitar riff. The radio operator picks up a guitar and plays along, and so the next song starts.

Wish You Were Here rounds off the songs about the music industry, and this is a much more direct and personal commentary towards listeners rather than the industry itself. It challenges the listener: "Do you think you can tell Heaven from Hell? ... Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?"; and at the same time seems to call out to Syd: "Running over the same old ground / What have we found? The same old fears / Wish you were here".

Wish You Were Here crossfades into the sound of wind blowing, ushering in the tour de force of the album, which begins with a simple, one-note bass line. The conclusion of Shine On You Crazy Diamond enters with one Rick and David solo apiece, before returning to the final verse for Syd, this time more directly alluding to his own disillusionment with commercial success ("pile on many more layers, and I'll be joining you there").

The concluding six minutes of the album are again instrumental, but I find these much more interesting than the opening solos. Part VIII is a funky jam, not quite as catchy as those you'll find on Atom Heart Mother or Meddle, but the closest thing you'll get to Pink Floyd rocking out post-Dark Side, dominated by Rick's clavinet and synth parts. Part IX is a final send-off for Syd, written entirely by Rick, with his most beautiful Minimoog solo of the album.

This isn't one of my favourite Pink Floyd albums. It's good, and it's one of the last examples of Roger, David and Rick all working together, but it just feels like the band is going through the motions instead of doing anything particularly creative. I say dispense with the concept albums and bring back the extended instrumental jams.

1944

Status Notices / Unplanned outage, 2014-10-11

« on: October 11, 2014, 03:12:34 PM »

From approximately 14:50 to 15:10 UTC, 2014-10-11, the forum, wiki and IRC were offline. This was an unplanned outage initiated by the hosting provider, as a result of problems on the server unrelated to FES.

I indirectly take responsibility for the outage due to negligence, as I was informed of the situation 24 hours in advance and did not see the correspondence. I intend to address the problem in the short term by investigating why I didn't notice the correspondence and remedying that.

In the medium- to long-term, FES's hosting will be moved off my personal VPS and onto its own dedicated VPS, which will solve the problem more generally.

Many apologies for the inconvenience.

1945

Arts & Entertainment / Re: The Pink Floyd discography listen-through

« on: October 11, 2014, 01:48:28 PM »

Pink Floyd is wonderful!

If you haven't already, you should check out a band called "The Tea Party" I don't know of anyone who likes Pink Floyd who doesn't also like them.

I may well do, when I'm done with this listen-through.

I got sick of reviews for a while, but I'm back, baby! Let's get this show on the road.

1946

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Ask a Jew anything.

« on: October 10, 2014, 01:08:50 AM »

I also happen to be an atheist because I don't believe in God, which happens to be the only necessary factor in atheism.

Incorrect. That is the only necessary factor in nontheism, which includes both agnosticism and atheism.

Agnostics don't believe in God, but they also don't believe in the absence of God. Atheists subscribe to the belief that God does not exist, in addition to not holding the belief that God exists.

1947

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: On the notion of FES reunification

« on: October 08, 2014, 05:14:24 PM »

How's this going?  Haven't had an update in over a month.

Neither have we. I'll send Daniel a follow-up e-mail later today.

1948

Technology & Information / Re: The great (well, not so great) storage upgrade

« on: October 07, 2014, 11:28:01 AM »

So you lose any writes that are done by said applications after copying?

Yes.

That's hardly equivalent, or even comparable.

What happens if they write something to the file while it's being copied?

Nothing.

Really? Nothing at all? I would expect, at the very least, that the OS would perform the write on the original copy of the file.

Do you get a consistent copy?

Yes.

How does the OS ensure consistency if an application writes to the file while it is being copied?

The drive is simply the file location in Windows. (e.g. C:\, D:\, E:\ etc.) it doesn't have to refer to a physical drive. A physical hard disk can have multiple partitions, each with their own drive mapping. At this point it just feels like you're being purposefully obtuse which is rather obnoxious. You're the only Linux person I know of that really, truly, doesn't know how Windows works, which leads me to believe you're just being a dolt on purpose.

You brought Windows into this discussion, not me. It is not reasonable to assume that I was using a Windows-specific definition of a word in a thread I made about how great Linux is.

1949

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Australian anti-terrorism laws

« on: October 07, 2014, 10:59:09 AM »

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/sword-removed-in-counterterrorism-raids-a-common-plastic-decoration-owner-reveals-20141007-10r7nj.html

I'm absolutely terrified of these plastic-wielding gamers. Save us, ASIO! Protect us from religious decorations!

1950

Technology & Information / Re: The great (well, not so great) storage upgrade

« on: October 07, 2014, 02:18:24 AM »

For one thing, it only requires one pass.

I wouldn't trust any magnetic storage erasure mechanism that claims to require only one pass.

Like I said, it depends entirely on the application. Most don't lock out anything. If it is too much trouble you could always just copy and paste instead of directly moving the data.

So you lose any writes that are done by said applications after copying? What happens if they write something to the file while it's being copied? Do you get a consistent copy?

Words have multiple meanings. Shocking, I know.

Irrelevant, unless you're claiming to have invented a new one for "drive" without telling anyone, in which there's no point continuing to communicate with you.

1951

Technology & Information / Re: The great (well, not so great) storage upgrade

« on: October 07, 2014, 01:43:29 AM »

Have you considered using the ATA Secure Erase command?  Seems a whole lot quicker and just as secure.
https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

What makes you think that would be any quicker?

You asked if Windows can move files while they're in use [by Windows], the answer is yes. I then clarified that if a third party application is using the files, the answer is no.

No, I asked if Windows could move files while you're using them as normal. Is your normal usage pattern to boot up an OS and sit there staring at your desktop without starting any applications?

Well, since you use Linux I suppose it might treat it differently, but Windows has two options: you expand the original drive and move data between physical locations (e.g. you expand the C:\ drive by X amount) or you create a new drive D:\ and move the data between drive designations. The former option isn't something I'd refer to as a drive migration.

When I said "drive" I meant, well, a hard drive. I'm not surprised you're confused if you consider "drive" to mean "logical volume" and/or "filesystem".

1952

Technology & Information / Re: need some Mac Server advice

« on: October 07, 2014, 01:34:27 AM »

How else can an iOS device to know that a server its talking to is the one apple said it is?

The same way literally every other PKI in the world achieves similar goals, by having Apple sign your public key with their private key. Your private key should remain, well, private.

1953

Technology & Information / Re: need some Mac Server advice

« on: October 06, 2014, 04:35:41 PM »

You get a public key, give it to apple, and they give you a private key back

How has Apple managed to fuck up PKI that badly?

1954

Technology & Information / Re: The great (well, not so great) storage upgrade

« on: October 06, 2014, 04:28:09 PM »

I'm now doing an initial backup with dirvish, which is a far superior backup program to the one I used previously, rdiff-backup. rdiff-backup is basically a Python script that stores binary diffs between backup increments, so you have to wait approximately three billion years for it to unravel its own diffs in order to restore to anything but the most recent backup.

Dirvish uses filesystem snapshots instead (usually hard-linked trees, but I'm using a patch that allows it to make use of btrfs copy-on-write snapshots for better efficiency), which means that each backup increment just appears as a directory on my filesystem. I can browse each increment as I would any other filesystem tree, and even trivially grep across multiple historical snapshots if I'm looking for something specific.

The other really nice thing about dirvish is that it's very easy to specify custom snapshot expiry. Previously, I kept backups going back 90 days, but I think now that I have dirvish I'll keep some backups (say, one increment per month) forever. October 2014 will be the first month I always have backups of.

1955

Technology & Information / Re: The great (well, not so great) storage upgrade

« on: October 06, 2014, 12:41:04 PM »

I've just finished a first pass of wiping my original drive with random data, since it had unencrypted files on it. I'll do a second pass later this week, but for now, I'm going to swap in my new 4 TB backup drive and get backups configured.

1956

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched

« on: October 06, 2014, 10:16:35 AM »

What about the 2004 series?

That's up next.

Now downloading obtaining through legitimate and above-board means. I'll be watching the opening mini-series shortly.

1957

Technology & Information / Re: need some Mac Server advice

« on: October 06, 2014, 09:10:58 AM »

Virtualisation sounds like completely the wrong solution to the problem of a software limitation like this. Even if the software isn't fixable (which would be the right solution), why can't you just run 7 instances of the server process?

Also, I don't know exactly which features of Mac server you use, but you could try Linux with Netatalk.

1958

Technology & Information / Re: The great (well, not so great) storage upgrade

« on: October 06, 2014, 09:04:23 AM »

Well, yes... I thought I've already addressed that. Were you confused by my original answer?

I was, since you opened with "yes" and then clarified that the answer is "no".

I thought we were talking about drive migration (you even use the term "migrated"). It sounds like you just expanded your drive, not migrated it. I don't know if Linux treats those as separate things, but Windows can do either.

I migrated data from one drive to another. There was no expansion involved; at the end of the process, my original drive was empty and I could remove it.

1959

Technology & Information / Re: The great (well, not so great) storage upgrade

« on: October 06, 2014, 12:04:25 AM »

Windows allows applications (through some mechanism, I am unaware of the specifics) to lock out files as "in use by application." For example, when Microsoft office has an Excel file open and it doesn't want you touching it, it locks the file out. This is opposed to an Access database that can have hordes of people all accessing the same thing. Some applications lock out pretty much entire folders, some lock down just a few files, some don't lock anything at all.

So you can't just move the entire filesystem from one device to another while using it as normal, if you happen to use an application that locks files. Good to know.

The migration I just did was done at the block level. Individual files were irrelevant, since the filesystem itself is above the layer at which data got migrated. Also, the paths to the files didn't change, since the files themselves stayed on the same filesystem. The physical location of the data is completely separate from logical file access.

1960

Technology & Information / Re: The great (well, not so great) storage upgrade

« on: October 05, 2014, 11:38:05 PM »

Yes^{[citation needed]}

Considering I've done it before, no, one is not needed.

What is different about Intel's drive migration utility from any other application that might be using the files? Why will Windows let you move files while in use by one application, but not another?