Btrfs is largely working with other kernel Storage subprojects such as the common MD-infrastructure, and block layers to improve atomic consistency and performance in underlying components. (Such as proper barrier-support).
Lately, Ceph came in on top, adding a layer of network-distribution for your storage needs, and they're too working with Btrfs, deprecating their own filesystem for shared benefit.
I can understand if one codes strictly in C, using Vim and makefiles - then, yeah, the concept of IDE itself is already alien. But that is not a particularly productive environment, especially for in-house line of business apps.
Why specifically C? I code JavaScript, C, D Java, Python, Ruby, Shell-scripts, CSS, HTML / whatever in VIM or Kate, depending on scope.
My measured productivity (in LOC/hour) stands well to industry averages (according to COCOMO) for the languages where data is available. And I ususally complete given tasks before the consultant hired to do the job is finished configuring his/her IDE.
Sorry, I don't get your argument. Yes, an IDE may be favourable to some people, yet unfavourable to others. It depends on the projects, the person, experience, operating system...
Claiming it's generally more productive with an IDE sounds strange in my ears.
Though, for Clang/LLVM, I'd say it's more of a 19-year old, with fresh ideas and a brilliant career ahead. It's not a three-year-old anymore, more like just came out of adolescence.
For LLDB, as of yet, the immaturity makes it only-osx-supported, and only for x86(-64). It's not really playing cello yet, although I would not be too surprised if it will soon.
To the one searching for MSDN-style-tools, Linux-development is probably alien, strange and crude.
For one like me, Microsoft-centric development is mostly bloated, crippled, slow and comes with a straight-jacket I do not like to wear.
Basically, people look for familiarity most of the time. Most of the Linux criticism I hear is of the "not like Windows"-kind, which is exactly how I feel when I'm forced to deal with the corporate Microsoft environment at work. "This stupid thing doesn't work like Linux."
I have a full MSDN subscription, which would cost me piles of money but most likely costs my employer very little per head. I can download and use and develop with anything I want, for free. It only costs money because the production servers have to be fully licensed and legit.
Very insightful.
Just a reflection though; under Ubuntu, "I can download and use and develop with anything I want, for free.", except the CentOS production server software is also free.
The main holdout for Microsoft I think is still market inertia. Noone got fired for buying Microsoft. (Except perhaps the guys behind London Stock Exchange).
The way I see it, they've had about 9 years to fix it. All the way since XP was released. (unless it was introduced by some service pack).
Software Security is ultimately the responsibility of the creator of the software. Others have no obligation whatsoever, moral or legal, to report in errors.
Non-microsoft employees are NOT Microsoft's security-staff. Or maybe they are.
I also talk a lot with some compiler-developers working/having worked for both GCC and LLVM, and I hear what they're saying.
I've also myself attempted to dwelve into the code-base of GCC, and well, you won't hear me argue against a clean new take on compilers from a fresh C++ codebase.
LLDB in particular however, may BECOME another piece in the puzzle, but it's really to immature to say.
Seriously? The mere existence of a debugger project for LLVM, reportedly faster (whatever does that mean for a debugger?) than gdb, leads to the question of GCC as a project has it's days numbered?
1. LLDB is AFAIU only for MacOSx yet, and x86-(64). Then what about all other combinations of platforms that make up ~99% of install base (yes, counting embedded) where GCC reigns supreme? 2. It's a friggin toddler! Doesn't mean it won't grow up into something fantastic, doesn't mean it will! 3. PERFORMANCE is the key sales-point? What about the multi-thread-debugging everyone else seems to care about?
Don't get me wrong. Noone would like to see competition in the open-source-sphere than I do, especially for such entrenched segments as GCC. But LLDB as of yet doesn't really affect things at all IMO.
The blogger intentionally used GB in order to express the size of the data relative to today's average PC
It's probably what the blogger meant, but I've found it's a pretty bad comparison.
1. An "average PC" hardly exists today, with small cheap netbooks, home-server configurations and all in-between. 2. Average consumers doesn't relate to gigabytes anyways. Size is better explained in "number of mp3 files" or "hours of HD-video".
So, a technically correct, and at the same time explanatory way to put it would be. "100 petabytes (about 3000 years of HD-video)".
Another topic is what Google stores in their index if it just the keywords and metadata amounts to those volumes.
Not sure I would call it a "web"-site.
* Does not follow web-standardisation (or AFAIU standardisation of any kind except "install our plugin")
* Cannot be display solely by a web-browser
* Though it may be pretty-looking pictures, it breaks most everything else that is good about the web
* Global Indexing and search
* Browser-integrated navigation (middle-click to open in tab...)
* Accessibility-extentions
* Mashable (and configurable in other means, like design-adjustable for aspect ratio and similar)
*...
One of the more drastic consequences of poorly-performing software, is that hardware companies keep having huge incentives for creating faster and faster machines. That in itself, would be a good thing.
The bad thing is, that the arms-race of hardware performance, is what causes the HUGE power-demand, leading to poor battery times, and lots of heat-production. Many Desktop-PSU:s today are in the 600-700W range (and above), which is about the output effect on a small microwave-oven. If you're not careful regularly opening up your machine cleaning it out, it's going to get clogged by dust. That's a recipe for a fire-hazard. (In a recent lecture on fire-safety, I learnt fire-hazards by computer-overheating is on the rise, to no surprise.)
If instead Software developers maintained a focus for designing and coding efficient applications, the performance of ~6 years old machines would be _VERY_ snappy for all common tasks today. Then the incentive for creating faster machines for the average Joe would not be as great (since Joe does not care if starting the browser takes 50ms or 100ms, he does not notice anyways), so the hardware competition could happen in other qualities; power-consumption, reliability, price.
Especially, fewer houses would burn down because someone forgot the laptop on in the sofa.
Throw in the opportunity to throw a monkey-wrench into practically all open-source competitor's machinery, and I'm pretty sure both Apple and Microsoft will bite. (Damn Mozilla stealing IE-shares, forcing active development again and other such costly crap.)
So true. The problem is that the "Hyper_TEXT_ MARKUP Language" was designed for linked documents, word-style, and has been shoe-horned into something it was not designed for. Any HTML-site, nomatter how pretty CSS can make it look, still has an underlying model of a text-document, and is working hard at things like word-wrapping and layout-calculations, which is completely against what many web-designers ask for. (Personally I think many designers ask for the wrong things anyways, but that's a different topic.)
Flash is more comparable to SVG than HTML, unfortunately SVG is a quite bad solution to a problem that should have been solved years ago. (Seriously XML container for vector-graphics, where texture-embedding is essential, and vertex-lists can grow huge?)
Flash still sucks from a usability, performance and openness/freedom standpoint though.
And here I thought someone had found an exploit of a common audio-video codec, or just plain DCT or something interesting.
Anti-virus is an arms-race, and IMHO causes about as much problems as it solves. (Except the caused problems are rarely truly evil like the attacks stopped.)
Other examples where anti-virus software just fails;
* Decompression bombs
* McAfee:s recent XP borking
* Even good reputable AV seems to have problems catching up with months-old malware
* Let's not start talking performance-hogging
I wish security would be more built-into rather than bolted-on.
Submarine patents must be addressed. With regards to the question of h.264, the Theora submarine patent-scare is ridiculous, not because it is unrealistic, but because it is a very unsound patent-system that enables that kind of behaviour in the first place. The respectable purpose of patents is to protect inventors, not being used as legal weapons to stifle competition, or economical vampirism, and submarine patents is an obvious example of that.
Perhaps there should be some news-bulletin by the patent-office, where proposed standards and inventions can be submitted, and any patent-holders are given a certain amount of time to speak up, or surrender their patent. Puts a lot of effort on patent-holders though, other ideas, anyone?
Then regarding "trivial", that's always a moving target. What was inconceivable 10 years ago may be mainstream today, and the notion of "trivial" is often changed with it. My guess is the wheel wasn't trivial when it was invented, but revolutionary. Perhaps patents in general should have shorter lifespans.
Sorry, I don't follow. GIF isn't superior to PNG, but both are supported by every modern browser.
What I find interesting in all of this, is that not only aren't Apple and Microsoft implementing both formats for good measure (it would be a trivial thing to do). They are actually actively preventing 3d-party Theora implementations (and a plethora of other codecs) by not using their own DirectShow/QuickTime frameworks, which seems just weird.
Interesting with a slashdotter that is both motivating and well-reasoning.
They've managed to do quite well getting iPhone marketshare, despite competition from Android
Not quite right according to what I read. First of all, iPhone got it's momentum before Android was even conceived, let alone on the market. Now that Android has been introduced and marketed, it looks like it's actually gaining market share, and partially on cost of iPhone (although mostly on others).
Not that it has anything to do with the h264-decision. All Android-phones will probably come with h264 anyways.
And, also, they support a lot of open source projects - they own and maintain CUPS, they're major backers of llvm-clang (which, god willing, will eventually supplant gcc entirely), and you can download the source code for the BSD-derived components of OS X (including the patches they've made, despite not having to do so) as well as their kernel.
Yes, but I see one important guiding line through all Apples Open-Source work. Only where the chances of contributions to them is larger than the risk of competitions. I.E. they keep the Open Source components to the low-level work, and carefully avoid anything visible to a user.
When it comes to things like Linux on the Desktop, their stance seems to be it's a competitor like anyone else, and what profit-driven company wouldn't throw a wrench into competitors machinery?
it's frankly much better quality at lower bitrates than theora, and the default container format isn't the horrible shitty mess that is OGG.
And that explains the motives for say, YouTube to choose h264 over Theora, but not for Microsoft and Apple to block 3d-party implementations of Theora for HTML5, through DirectShow/QuickTime filters.
Yup, but I would not call it due to a business decision. Not in the sense; taken singularly and authoritatively by the company board, effectively steering the entire company in one particularly direction, as with the "We shall not implement anything but h264"-decision.
In the case of GIF vs. PNG, it was simply a result of a slow community reasoning where everybody just realized it maid sense.
Had the same pragmatical process been applied for HTML5-Video (and it still _might_ be, even if it seems unlikely), it would probably have reached a state where all commercial browsers fully supported Theora AND h264, while open-source browsers officially supported Theora, and semi-illegal 3d-party plugins implemented h264. Most Content-providers (Youtube, for instance) would probably had gone with h264 for Quality/Bandwidth-reasons, while a few like Wikipedia would opt for the political merits of Theora and use that.
As of now, it will be a disconnect between 64% of the web-users are Wikipedia. It will be interesting to see who budges first. I personally welcome back the good old days with "Site optimized for Browser X"-banners.
Since when had technological advantages had anything to do with business decisions?
Both Apple and Microsoft, two of the more influential forces in the decision, are stakeholders in MPEG LA. Add the fact that they both probably feels slightly anxious over the seemingly immortal Open Source guys, that just refuses to keel over, but invades market after market. Considered they had the chance to throw a monkey-wrench right into their common enemy, Open Source Software, and I think the decision was made completely without regard to technology.
Last time I read the License, MPEG LA has a few steps in the License, where below a certain number of installs it's free, in between it's increasingly pricey, and there's a ceiling of the total amount of licenses in an organisation, where new licenses don't cost more.
Of course though, you're completely right in your OEM assesment. This does in no way improve the situation for the vast majority of Canonicals users (who doesn't get Ubuntu through OEM), it's simply a move for Canonical to improve it's profitability. (Which in itself is of course not a bad thing)
Slashdot Mirror
Btrfs is largely working with other kernel Storage subprojects such as the common MD-infrastructure, and block layers to improve atomic consistency and performance in underlying components. (Such as proper barrier-support).
Lately, Ceph came in on top, adding a layer of network-distribution for your storage needs, and they're too working with Btrfs, deprecating their own filesystem for shared benefit.
I can understand if one codes strictly in C, using Vim and makefiles - then, yeah, the concept of IDE itself is already alien. But that is not a particularly productive environment, especially for in-house line of business apps.
Why specifically C? I code JavaScript, C, D Java, Python, Ruby, Shell-scripts, CSS, HTML / whatever in VIM or Kate, depending on scope.
My measured productivity (in LOC/hour) stands well to industry averages (according to COCOMO) for the languages where data is available. And I ususally complete given tasks before the consultant hired to do the job is finished configuring his/her IDE.
Sorry, I don't get your argument. Yes, an IDE may be favourable to some people, yet unfavourable to others. It depends on the projects, the person, experience, operating system...
Claiming it's generally more productive with an IDE sounds strange in my ears.
Cool view. :)
Though, for Clang/LLVM, I'd say it's more of a 19-year old, with fresh ideas and a brilliant career ahead. It's not a three-year-old anymore, more like just came out of adolescence.
For LLDB, as of yet, the immaturity makes it only-osx-supported, and only for x86(-64). It's not really playing cello yet, although I would not be too surprised if it will soon.
"good" is a fuzzy metric.
To the one searching for MSDN-style-tools, Linux-development is probably alien, strange and crude.
For one like me, Microsoft-centric development is mostly bloated, crippled, slow and comes with a straight-jacket I do not like to wear.
Basically, people look for familiarity most of the time. Most of the Linux criticism I hear is of the "not like Windows"-kind, which is exactly how I feel when I'm forced to deal with the corporate Microsoft environment at work. "This stupid thing doesn't work like Linux."
I have a full MSDN subscription, which would cost me piles of money but most likely costs my employer very little per head. I can download and use and develop with anything I want, for free. It only costs money because the production servers have to be fully licensed and legit.
Very insightful.
Just a reflection though; under Ubuntu, "I can download and use and develop with anything I want, for free.", except the CentOS production server software is also free.
The main holdout for Microsoft I think is still market inertia. Noone got fired for buying Microsoft. (Except perhaps the guys behind London Stock Exchange).
The way I see it, they've had about 9 years to fix it. All the way since XP was released. (unless it was introduced by some service pack).
Software Security is ultimately the responsibility of the creator of the software. Others have no obligation whatsoever, moral or legal, to report in errors.
Non-microsoft employees are NOT Microsoft's security-staff. Or maybe they are.
I use LLVM on a daily basis. It's great.
I also talk a lot with some compiler-developers working/having worked for both GCC and LLVM, and I hear what they're saying.
I've also myself attempted to dwelve into the code-base of GCC, and well, you won't hear me argue against a clean new take on compilers from a fresh C++ codebase.
LLDB in particular however, may BECOME another piece in the puzzle, but it's really to immature to say.
Seriously? The mere existence of a debugger project for LLVM, reportedly faster (whatever does that mean for a debugger?) than gdb, leads to the question of GCC as a project has it's days numbered?
1. LLDB is AFAIU only for MacOSx yet, and x86-(64). Then what about all other combinations of platforms that make up ~99% of install base (yes, counting embedded) where GCC reigns supreme?
2. It's a friggin toddler! Doesn't mean it won't grow up into something fantastic, doesn't mean it will!
3. PERFORMANCE is the key sales-point? What about the multi-thread-debugging everyone else seems to care about?
Don't get me wrong. Noone would like to see competition in the open-source-sphere than I do, especially for such entrenched segments as GCC. But LLDB as of yet doesn't really affect things at all IMO.
100 000 terabytes for $87? I'd buy that.
The blogger intentionally used GB in order to express the size of the data relative to today's average PC
It's probably what the blogger meant, but I've found it's a pretty bad comparison.
1. An "average PC" hardly exists today, with small cheap netbooks, home-server configurations and all in-between.
2. Average consumers doesn't relate to gigabytes anyways. Size is better explained in "number of mp3 files" or "hours of HD-video".
So, a technically correct, and at the same time explanatory way to put it would be. "100 petabytes (about 3000 years of HD-video)".
Another topic is what Google stores in their index if it just the keywords and metadata amounts to those volumes.
Not sure I would call it a "web"-site. ...
* Does not follow web-standardisation (or AFAIU standardisation of any kind except "install our plugin")
* Cannot be display solely by a web-browser
* Though it may be pretty-looking pictures, it breaks most everything else that is good about the web
* Global Indexing and search
* Browser-integrated navigation (middle-click to open in tab...)
* Accessibility-extentions
* Mashable (and configurable in other means, like design-adjustable for aspect ratio and similar)
*
"Flash"-site is a more apt name for it.
One of the more drastic consequences of poorly-performing software, is that hardware companies keep having huge incentives for creating faster and faster machines. That in itself, would be a good thing.
The bad thing is, that the arms-race of hardware performance, is what causes the HUGE power-demand, leading to poor battery times, and lots of heat-production. Many Desktop-PSU:s today are in the 600-700W range (and above), which is about the output effect on a small microwave-oven. If you're not careful regularly opening up your machine cleaning it out, it's going to get clogged by dust. That's a recipe for a fire-hazard. (In a recent lecture on fire-safety, I learnt fire-hazards by computer-overheating is on the rise, to no surprise.)
If instead Software developers maintained a focus for designing and coding efficient applications, the performance of ~6 years old machines would be _VERY_ snappy for all common tasks today. Then the incentive for creating faster machines for the average Joe would not be as great (since Joe does not care if starting the browser takes 50ms or 100ms, he does not notice anyways), so the hardware competition could happen in other qualities; power-consumption, reliability, price.
Especially, fewer houses would burn down because someone forgot the laptop on in the sofa.
Oh, that would be you then.
Personally I were thinking more about Mozilla and the open source phenomenon in general.
Throw in the opportunity to throw a monkey-wrench into practically all open-source competitor's machinery, and I'm pretty sure both Apple and Microsoft will bite. (Damn Mozilla stealing IE-shares, forcing active development again and other such costly crap.)
So true. The problem is that the "Hyper_TEXT_ MARKUP Language" was designed for linked documents, word-style, and has been shoe-horned into something it was not designed for. Any HTML-site, nomatter how pretty CSS can make it look, still has an underlying model of a text-document, and is working hard at things like word-wrapping and layout-calculations, which is completely against what many web-designers ask for. (Personally I think many designers ask for the wrong things anyways, but that's a different topic.)
Flash is more comparable to SVG than HTML, unfortunately SVG is a quite bad solution to a problem that should have been solved years ago. (Seriously XML container for vector-graphics, where texture-embedding is essential, and vertex-lists can grow huge?)
Flash still sucks from a usability, performance and openness/freedom standpoint though.
Am I the only one here surprised that vectorized symbols are not encouraged, or required?
Sure, they can be retraced later, when someone needs the free-res version. But in 2010, isn't Vector-fonts kindof de-facto?
I swear. One day there will be a FS-related post on slashdot WITHOUT a Reiser-joke.
That will mark the beginning of the apocalypse.
And here I thought someone had found an exploit of a common audio-video codec, or just plain DCT or something interesting.
Anti-virus is an arms-race, and IMHO causes about as much problems as it solves. (Except the caused problems are rarely truly evil like the attacks stopped.)
Other examples where anti-virus software just fails;
* Decompression bombs
* McAfee:s recent XP borking
* Even good reputable AV seems to have problems catching up with months-old malware
* Let's not start talking performance-hogging
I wish security would be more built-into rather than bolted-on.
Agreed, with one addition;
Submarine patents must be addressed. With regards to the question of h.264, the Theora submarine patent-scare is ridiculous, not because it is unrealistic, but because it is a very unsound patent-system that enables that kind of behaviour in the first place. The respectable purpose of patents is to protect inventors, not being used as legal weapons to stifle competition, or economical vampirism, and submarine patents is an obvious example of that.
Perhaps there should be some news-bulletin by the patent-office, where proposed standards and inventions can be submitted, and any patent-holders are given a certain amount of time to speak up, or surrender their patent. Puts a lot of effort on patent-holders though, other ideas, anyone?
Then regarding "trivial", that's always a moving target. What was inconceivable 10 years ago may be mainstream today, and the notion of "trivial" is often changed with it. My guess is the wheel wasn't trivial when it was invented, but revolutionary. Perhaps patents in general should have shorter lifespans.
Sorry, I don't follow. GIF isn't superior to PNG, but both are supported by every modern browser.
What I find interesting in all of this, is that not only aren't Apple and Microsoft implementing both formats for good measure (it would be a trivial thing to do). They are actually actively preventing 3d-party Theora implementations (and a plethora of other codecs) by not using their own DirectShow/QuickTime frameworks, which seems just weird.
Interesting with a slashdotter that is both motivating and well-reasoning.
They've managed to do quite well getting iPhone marketshare, despite competition from Android
Not quite right according to what I read. First of all, iPhone got it's momentum before Android was even conceived, let alone on the market. Now that Android has been introduced and marketed, it looks like it's actually gaining market share, and partially on cost of iPhone (although mostly on others).
Not that it has anything to do with the h264-decision. All Android-phones will probably come with h264 anyways.
And, also, they support a lot of open source projects - they own and maintain CUPS, they're major backers of llvm-clang (which, god willing, will eventually supplant gcc entirely), and you can download the source code for the BSD-derived components of OS X (including the patches they've made, despite not having to do so) as well as their kernel.
Yes, but I see one important guiding line through all Apples Open-Source work. Only where the chances of contributions to them is larger than the risk of competitions. I.E. they keep the Open Source components to the low-level work, and carefully avoid anything visible to a user.
When it comes to things like Linux on the Desktop, their stance seems to be it's a competitor like anyone else, and what profit-driven company wouldn't throw a wrench into competitors machinery?
it's frankly much better quality at lower bitrates than theora, and the default container format isn't the horrible shitty mess that is OGG.
And that explains the motives for say, YouTube to choose h264 over Theora, but not for Microsoft and Apple to block 3d-party implementations of Theora for HTML5, through DirectShow/QuickTime filters.
Yup, but I would not call it due to a business decision. Not in the sense; taken singularly and authoritatively by the company board, effectively steering the entire company in one particularly direction, as with the "We shall not implement anything but h264"-decision.
In the case of GIF vs. PNG, it was simply a result of a slow community reasoning where everybody just realized it maid sense.
Had the same pragmatical process been applied for HTML5-Video (and it still _might_ be, even if it seems unlikely), it would probably have reached a state where all commercial browsers fully supported Theora AND h264, while open-source browsers officially supported Theora, and semi-illegal 3d-party plugins implemented h264. Most Content-providers (Youtube, for instance) would probably had gone with h264 for Quality/Bandwidth-reasons, while a few like Wikipedia would opt for the political merits of Theora and use that.
As of now, it will be a disconnect between 64% of the web-users are Wikipedia. It will be interesting to see who budges first. I personally welcome back the good old days with "Site optimized for Browser X"-banners.
It's certainly "closed standard", and "proprietary", since parts of it (the patents covering implementation) is property of it's creators.
But yeah, I also reacted to "closed source". I actually thought higher of The Register.
Since when had technological advantages had anything to do with business decisions?
Both Apple and Microsoft, two of the more influential forces in the decision, are stakeholders in MPEG LA. Add the fact that they both probably feels slightly anxious over the seemingly immortal Open Source guys, that just refuses to keel over, but invades market after market. Considered they had the chance to throw a monkey-wrench right into their common enemy, Open Source Software, and I think the decision was made completely without regard to technology.
Last time I read the License, MPEG LA has a few steps in the License, where below a certain number of installs it's free, in between it's increasingly pricey, and there's a ceiling of the total amount of licenses in an organisation, where new licenses don't cost more.
Of course though, you're completely right in your OEM assesment. This does in no way improve the situation for the vast majority of Canonicals users (who doesn't get Ubuntu through OEM), it's simply a move for Canonical to improve it's profitability. (Which in itself is of course not a bad thing)