[9fans] Flash

[9fans] Flash

[Richard Uhtenwoldt]

Steve Simon writes:
>I turn flash off on all the browsers I use, I find it irritating and
>slows things down.

I go further.  I uninstall flash, as follows:

rm ~/.mozilla/plugins/{flashplayer.xpt,libflashplayer.so}

Why do I uninstall flash?  To remove the temptation to visit a
flash web site to play chess.  (I was unhappy with the amount of
time I wasted playing chess when I had flash installed.)

Re: [9fans] Flash

[Paul Lalonde]

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If time is the constraint, then just uninstall all your web browsers,
or just run native plan9.

Paul

On 9-Feb-08, at 2:08 PM, Richard Uhtenwoldt wrote:

>
> Steve Simon writes:
>> I turn flash off on all the browsers I use, I find it irritating and
>> slows things down.
>
> I go further.  I uninstall flash, as follows:
>
> rm ~/.mozilla/plugins/{flashplayer.xpt,libflashplayer.so}
>
> Why do I uninstall flash?  To remove the temptation to visit a
> flash web site to play chess.  (I was unhappy with the amount of
> time I wasted playing chess when I had flash installed.)

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Re: [9fans] Flash

[Pietro Gagliardi]

Better yet, disconnect your Internet connection and go to Multics.

On Feb 9, 2008, at 7:04 PM, Paul Lalonde wrote:

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> Hash: SHA1
>
> If time is the constraint, then just uninstall all your web
> browsers, or just run native plan9.
>
> Paul
>
> On 9-Feb-08, at 2:08 PM, Richard Uhtenwoldt wrote:
>
>>
>> Steve Simon writes:
>>> I turn flash off on all the browsers I use, I find it irritating and
>>> slows things down.
>>
>> I go further.  I uninstall flash, as follows:
>>
>> rm ~/.mozilla/plugins/{flashplayer.xpt,libflashplayer.so}
>>
>> Why do I uninstall flash?  To remove the temptation to visit a
>> flash web site to play chess.  (I was unhappy with the amount of
>> time I wasted playing chess when I had flash installed.)
>
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> oKSovEHHlmjv2Tyc363AMVw=
> =YEYw
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Re: [9fans] Flash

[Richard Uhtenwoldt]

Paul Lalonde writes:
>If time is the constraint, then just uninstall all your web browsers

If I did that, I would indeed waste less time, but I would also
have to forgo great benefits that I now enjoy.  In contrast, I
derived almost no benefit from Flash web pages.

I am _not_ claiming that Flash cannot be used to create a web
page beneficial to me or that Flash is intrinsically bad or that
_you_ should uninstall _your_ Flash plugins.

People seem to vary widely in how easy it is for a person to
resist time-wasting temptations.  Having to resist the temptation
to play chess online seemed to consume a nontrivial amount of my
willpower, which I would prefer to have available for other
uses.

--
Unless the body contains my name or email address or you CC me,
it will probably be a long time before I see your reply.

Re: [9fans] Flash

[Harri Haataja]

2008/2/10 Richard Uhtenwoldt <ru@river.org>:
> Paul Lalonde writes:
>  >If time is the constraint, then just uninstall all your web browsers
>  If I did that, I would indeed waste less time, but I would also
>  have to forgo great benefits that I now enjoy.  In contrast, I
>  derived almost no benefit from Flash web pages.

I occasionally do. Particularly since flash video is so popular all
around. Given the miserable "support" for any other type of video
distribution, in many cases I can see why flash players are used so
much.

A lot of grief can be avoided by installing a flash block extension
(at least FF allows that) to add another feature that should have been
there in the first place. Then you get buttons instead of flash
elements that you can click to start flash only for those elements you
want to.

Terrible and ugly, yes. But it works with what there is.

--
I appear to be temporarily using gmail's horrible interface. I
apologise for any failure in my part in trying to make it do the right
thing with post formatting.

Re: [9fans] Flash

[hiro]

I'm currently using opera on debian and I luckily can't seem to find
any working flash plugins in the apt repositories. It sometimes sucks
not being able to see some pages, but all in all I also think I am
more productive now. I don't like the flash blocking. It doesn't save
any time, but rather forces you t o click around even more.

Re: [9fans] Flash

[Rodolfo Garcia (kix)]

> I'm currently using opera on debian and I luckily can't seem to find
> any working flash plugins in the apt repositories. It sometimes sucks
> not being able to see some pages, but all in all I also think I am
> more productive now. I don't like the flash blocking. It doesn't save
> any time, but rather forces you t o click around even more.


You can download the flash player for linux. It has an installer.
The installer copy the .so file in the browser's plugin directory.

saludos

Re: [9fans] Flash

[hiro]

Yeah, i used to have the installer package as deb. But since apt
automagically removed it again (and me being too lazy to install such
crap by hand) apt saved me a lot of time.

Re: [9fans] Flash

[bblochl]

Rodolfo Garcia (kix) schrieb:
>> I'm currently using opera on debian and I luckily can't seem to find
>> any working flash plugins in the apt repositories. It sometimes sucks
>> not being able to see some pages, but all in all I also think I am
>> more productive now. I don't like the flash blocking. It doesn't save
>> any time, but rather forces you t o click around even more.
>>
>
>
> You can download the flash player for linux. It has an installer.
> The installer copy the .so file in the browser's plugin directory.
>
> saludos
>
>
>
>
Flash is missing in debian because of severe vulnarabilities! See for
instance
http://www.debian.org/News/2008/20080217.en.html the chapter "Important
changes":

    Updated versions of the bcm43xx-fwcutter package will be distributed
    via volatile.debian.org. The package itself will be removed from
    etch with the next update.

    Flashplugin-nonfree has been removed (see below), as this is closed
    source and we don't get security support for it. For security
    reasons, we recommend to immediately remove any version of
    flashplugin-nonfree and any remaining files of the Adobe Flash
    Player. Tested updates will be made available via backports.org.


Better use an open source player to stay root on your machine yourself.
For instance see http://wiki.debian.org/Flash.

Regards

Bernhard

Re: [9fans] threads vs forks

[William Josephson]

On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 07:00:26AM +0200, lucio@proxima.alt.za wrote:
> . A cache?  As quanstro pointed out, flash makes a wonderful WORM.
>   Now to get Fossil to work as originally intended, or a more suitable
>   design and implementation to take its place in this role and we have
>   a winner.

Sadly, if a WORM is your only application, then no one cares.
At least not enough to pony up for real peformance.  The folks
at places like Sandia are interested in running HPC applications
and there are a lot of people in other industries such as big oil
and finance that are willing to pay for performance for running
HPC applications, VMs which tend to have high I/O requirements when
an OS patch comes out, etc.

In the near term, the performance leaders in the flash market
ship a device driver plus hardware.  Much of the intelligence
actually resides in the device driver.  It is that secret sauce
that gets you good performance.  In theory it could be pushed
down, but it takes CPU, memory, and memory bandwidth that may
not be cost effective there.

 -WJ

Re: [9fans] threads vs forks

[erik quanstrom]

> Sadly, if a WORM is your only application, then no one cares.
> At least not enough to pony up for real peformance.  The folks
> at places like Sandia are interested in running HPC applications
> and there are a lot of people in other industries such as big oil
> and finance that are willing to pay for performance for running
> HPC applications, VMs which tend to have high I/O requirements when
> an OS patch comes out, etc.

ask not what a technology can do for the world,
ask what a technology can do for you!

- erik

Re: [9fans] Flash

[William K. Josephson]

On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 12:19:25AM -0500, erik quanstrom wrote:
> > Sadly, if a WORM is your only application, then no one cares.
> > At least not enough to pony up for real peformance.  The folks
>
> ask not what a technology can do for the world,
> ask what a technology can do for you!

The thing is, flash isn't going to replace disk for WORM-like
applications due to capacity.  It might be very interesting
for things like the index and to replace battery-backed DRAM
for the NVRAM component in an appliance.

Re: [9fans] Flash

[erik quanstrom]

On Sat Mar  7 00:47:33 EST 2009, jkw@eecs.harvard.edu wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 12:19:25AM -0500, erik quanstrom wrote:
> > > Sadly, if a WORM is your only application, then no one cares.
> > > At least not enough to pony up for real peformance.  The folks
> >
> > ask not what a technology can do for the world,
> > ask what a technology can do for you!
>
> The thing is, flash isn't going to replace disk for WORM-like
> applications due to capacity.  It might be very interesting
> for things like the index and to replace battery-backed DRAM
> for the NVRAM component in an appliance.

i've been evaluating replacing the worm in the coraid fileserver's
sr15x1 with ssd.  so far it looks promising.

- erik

Re: [9fans] Flash

[William Josephson]

On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 09:42:00AM -0500, erik quanstrom wrote:
> On Sat Mar  7 00:47:33 EST 2009, jkw@eecs.harvard.edu wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 12:19:25AM -0500, erik quanstrom wrote:
> > > > Sadly, if a WORM is your only application, then no one cares.
> > > > At least not enough to pony up for real peformance.  The folks
> > >
> > > ask not what a technology can do for the world,
> > > ask what a technology can do for you!
> >
> > The thing is, flash isn't going to replace disk for WORM-like
> > applications due to capacity.  It might be very interesting
> > for things like the index and to replace battery-backed DRAM
> > for the NVRAM component in an appliance.
>
> i've been evaluating replacing the worm in the coraid fileserver's
> sr15x1 with ssd.  so far it looks promising.

My point isn't that it is a bad idea, just that it isn't
likely to provide enough business to keep manufacturers
interested.  Moreover, for capacity disks will keep on
winning for a long time.  They just start to look more
and more like tape.

 -WJ

Re: [9fans] Flash

[Russ Cox]

> i've been evaluating replacing the worm in the coraid fileserver's
>  sr15x1 with ssd.  so far it looks promising.

i don't understand this.  your "worm" is magnetic disk, right?
why would you put the ssd in the slow half (the worm)
instead of the fast half (the cache)?

similarly, someone on this thread said they'd use ssd
for just the arenas (which are mostly linear access),
when if i had to make the choice i would use it for just
the index (which is mostly random access and would
benefit more from dropping the seek penalities).

russ

Re: [9fans] Flash

[erik quanstrom]

> i don't understand this.  your "worm" is magnetic disk, right?
> why would you put the ssd in the slow half (the worm)
> instead of the fast half (the cache)?

the current setup is that the worm and the "cache" are
the same speed (in fact, the cache is slower because
it's on two disks rather than 4).  i found it was needlessly
expensive to copy data from the worm to cache, so the
only data that makes it to the cache are dirty blocks.
it's used as a write buffer, not a cache.
http://www.quanstro.net/plan9/disklessfs.pdf.

if i simply reenabled the cache and replaced the two
hard drives with ssd, i don't think we'd see much performance
increase as we're not thrashing the ram cache yet.  and
for heavy write loads with a caching appliance, i think that
8 disk-limited disks would compete well with 2 sata-limited
drives.  i think  one would get better bang/buck by replacing
the worm drives with a greater number of smaller hard drives;
ssds would be even better.

on the other hand, a fusion i/o device would be a compelling
reason to reinstitute a true cache.

> similarly, someone on this thread said they'd use ssd
> for just the arenas (which are mostly linear access),
> when if i had to make the choice i would use it for just
> the index (which is mostly random access and would
> benefit more from dropping the seek penalities).

i guess the $640 question is, how good is that wear leveling.

- erik