plural: (bowler)
plural ([personal profile] plural) wrote2003-10-25 03:23 am

On Necessity

[this was mostly written during my downtime]
[I even used real pen and paper]

"Necessity is the mother of all invention"

sounds simple
but to me is an understatement

necessity is the driving force of all action
all behaviour

it is the defining motivation of all life

in the animal kingdom
all actions, all behaviours
are dictated by necessity
and we humans
even at our loftiest
remain animals

however only in humanity
does necessity breed an additional layer of complexity

in our thoughts
in our reflections on our lives
we acknowledge the influence of necessity
even if we do not realize the extent which it dictates to us

this is evident in a uniquely human trait

the need to be needed

In our lives
we have friends
pets
lovers
and ultimately children
to fulfill this need
this requirement

it is our ode to necessity

the animal does not worry about its social standing
even pack animals like wolves
which have complex social structures
status is not something which a wolf contemplates
either a wolf is an alpha wolf
or it is not
if it can dominate another wolf
and rise in stature
it will
but it doesn't waste time pondering it
it merely responds to the situation and the opportunity

the animal does not wonder why it exists
what its purpose is
it simply fulfills it or dies

for a human
especially in modern times
when we are no longer forced to spend
the majority of our energies and time
working to provide the most basic necessities
of food and shelter.

To be needed give us
cause for our existence
a reason for our struggle
a reason to stick it out another day

Even so this is a relatively new development
we saw the first signs of this
only among the rich

how many famous works of philosophy
came from the peasants of greece or rome?

those who had to work for a living focused their energies on just that
and had little time or patience for existential thought

it took the rise of a middle class to raise it into the broad scope
of human existence
and finally
the industrial revolution to give it to the poor

to allow us to turn our collective minds
from feeding and clothing ourselves
to pondering our thoughts and values

Today our most important necessity is not food or shelter
but necessity itself

So strong is our need to be needed
that should you give a man the
food and shelter
comfort and wealth
he required
but without community
without the necessity of others
he is miserable

[identity profile] budhaboy.livejournal.com 2003-10-25 04:12 am (UTC)(link)
It just occured to me that discussing what is in the interesting directory might cause me some problems, so I deleted the post. Check your mail to read it, and get the IP from this post...

[identity profile] plural.livejournal.com 2003-10-25 08:31 am (UTC)(link)
*grin*

sweet got it working

btw

I am not sure if this is because my user account also has network rights in addition to access to the share but I can see almost all of your files

the only directory I couldnt access was "root"

though I didnt really look to see if I was going anywhere beyond the local machine, just saw that I had access to view quite a few of your local files, and generally that is a bad thing

[it took me a lil while to find the folder with the files in it cause it automatically routes me to a default home file without any contents]

[identity profile] budhaboy.livejournal.com 2003-10-25 08:52 am (UTC)(link)
Heh.

oops.

I just pointed the share to the 'second' drives on the machines pappy, and boyle.

All of the 'other' files are recovery files...
(deleted comment)

and another thing...

[identity profile] budhaboy.livejournal.com 2003-10-27 03:54 pm (UTC)(link)
While I doubt you'd ever need this feature, I've forwarded port 80 to that machine as well.

you can post stuff via the /home/plural/public_html directory. It's address will be (obviously) http://IPaddress/~/plural/.

Disk quotas do not exist and filespace will be limited to the HD: 20GB.

[identity profile] budhaboy.livejournal.com 2003-10-27 05:40 pm (UTC)(link)
damn.

I'm looking at my network throughput statistics... What's your throuput?

[identity profile] plural.livejournal.com 2003-10-28 12:34 am (UTC)(link)
normally I can pull about 3mb down but I am only pulling 30k from you

[identity profile] budhaboy.livejournal.com 2003-10-28 01:15 am (UTC)(link)
hmmm...

ntop suggests that the totall throughput for that box is running 340-380kbs...

Now that would include those who are using the http server, as well as the nsf into the box, but when I break it out by connected hosts, you stick out as being in the 280-300kbs range.

I can't imagine that anyone's cracked the box because ntop runs as route and tabulates the packets going into and out of the box.

[identity profile] plural.livejournal.com 2003-10-28 11:47 am (UTC)(link)
*grin*

could be

I am just going by that stats WinSCP is giving me

no idea how accurate those are

[identity profile] budhaboy.livejournal.com 2003-10-28 01:18 pm (UTC)(link)
I've often been confused by kb/s.

Is that kilobyte, or kilobit? How do you know? would it account for the discrepency?

[identity profile] plural.livejournal.com 2003-10-28 11:12 pm (UTC)(link)
kilobyte is 1024 bits

kilobit is 1000 bits

so it would account for a discrepancy of up to 24%

[identity profile] plural.livejournal.com 2003-10-28 11:13 pm (UTC)(link)
lol

can we say horrid math there

it would account for a 2.4% discrepancy

[identity profile] budhaboy.livejournal.com 2003-10-29 12:32 am (UTC)(link)
heh.

It's good that you caught that. because in the three years I've known you, I can't recall ever knowing you to be wrong as a matter of fact (in matters of opinion, I've disagreed, perhaps), and according to google:
1 kilobyte = 8 kilobits

two mistakes in one post... I would have been inclined to have you killed as an imposter.

I was always miserably at octal arithmetic... I could believe this is accounting for the differences.

[identity profile] plural.livejournal.com 2003-10-29 01:25 am (UTC)(link)
*sigh*

this why we shouldnt comment on sleep dep

8 bits is a byte

1024 bytes is a kb

1024 kb is a mb

I was thinking about how they calculate hard drive formatting as 1000 mb = 1 gb instead of the correct 1024 mb = 1 gb

though I suppose

one error in three years is not a bad track record all things considered

*Grin*
(deleted comment)

[identity profile] plural.livejournal.com 2003-10-28 11:14 pm (UTC)(link)
*grin*

I have been downloading about 2gb a day roughly so your numbers sound about right

[identity profile] budhaboy.livejournal.com 2003-10-29 01:22 am (UTC)(link)
google rules all.

apparently, kb/s is kilobits, and kB/s is kiloBytes.

typing the following into google:

290kb/s=

yields 290 (kilobits / second) = 36.25 kBps from their calculator.

I'm convinced we're getting the same numbers.

[identity profile] plural.livejournal.com 2003-10-29 01:26 am (UTC)(link)
sounds right