I've recently been doing some contract development work for other companies. These companies, so far, have all been very friendly to GPLing the work they hire me for that extends existing GPLed work.
However, when I'm preparing contracts I never know just how to specify that wholly original work we do for them will be "Work-for-hire" under whatever license they choose, but code based on and extending GPLed software will be placed under the same license.
I've browsed through the GNU site, in hopes of locating some example contract language that would make this clear to new customers and make it a legally binding aspect of any agreements made, but alas, I could find no help in this regard.
I should point out: my clients know that the GPL is an enforceable copyright, and don't have a problem with that--our work with GPL'ed software is usually the reason they come to us...this isn't a question of companies wishing to steal GPLed software. It is a question of how to make those terms compatible with an agreement that covers both GPLed work and non-GPLed "work-for-hire". Usually we are doing a bit of both types of work, and we'd like the contract to reflect that in a clear and comprehensive manner.
Seems like this would be a common problem for developers, and I was surprised that I couldn't find any documentation about adding this kind of clause to a contract.
Are you suggesting that < and > won't substitute for if= and of=? Or perhaps you are suggesting that one must specify specific partitions to dd?
In either case, I'm not wrong. GNU dd, as provided by Linux distributions accepts < and >. And specifying a device rather than a partition is accepted, and works as expected. Everyone has used this same command form to make boot floppies, right?
And where are you getting the bit about a boot CD? I didn't say anything about a boot CD, nor did the parent to my post. The two issues are entirely orthogonal. Strange post all-around...or maybe just more subtle trolling.
I said it last time this came up in 1999 and I'll say it again. Ultramonkey is a combination of LVS (for balancing) and other tools (for fail detection, weighting, etc.).
It doesn't make very much sense to say "Should I use UltraMonkey or LVS?" as the latter is a piece of the former. There are other combinations of LVS+other stuff that you might put into that sentence: "Should I use Piranha or UltraMonkey?" or "Should I use UltraMonkey or Joe Macks LVS Config scripts?" or even "Should I build my own LVS scripts or use an existing framework?"
There are other HTTP load balancing options out there. Squid has a new branch in CVS called rproxy that handles multiple backend web servers very effectively with failure detection and other fun stuff (not to mention caching). Pound is a reverse proxy that does load balancing of HTTP traffic and SSL wrapping (most everything Squid can do for reverse proxying minus the caching features).
Balance is a generic TCP load balancer with some nice features. The best features being that it is simple and works on more platforms than just Linux and handles more than just the HTTP protocol. It probably has some disadvantages for some situations because it operates at a lower level than the HTTP proxies above, though it can probably do lots of the same things LVS does (I don't know very much about Balance).
Eddie is a neat framework written in Ericssons Erlang language. Seems to be dormant, but I think it is in pretty widespread use so is probably pretty stable.
As a kid, I read just about anything sci-fi...but even then, I think I recognized the gems of the genre. The books I kept, versus the books I gave away or sold, includes a list of the authors I still read and enjoy today. Back then, if there were robots or sex or spaceships, it was probably good enough for me to read it once...but what I kept has some qualities that the majority of the pulp stuff just doesn't have.
I think sci-fi without a real science underpinning is generally crap. The science doesn't have to involve mechanical technology in the form of spaceships or robotics, it can just as easily be the science of sociology or the science of medicine. But where "sci-fi" pulp fiction often fails is in being too dedicated to mysterious magical developments...I'm afraid the Star Trek and Star Wars universes often fail because of this reliance on trappings of mystery. The explanation of The Force as a virus just seems forced, if you'll forgive the pun. Star Trek has too many dramatic dying scenes and too many dramatic miraculous healing scenes for either to be believable.
Good sci-fi asks tough questions about how the human race will realize some dream, and what the cost will be. Great sci-fi shows us the fallacy of common truisms, and makes a case for the other side. As has been said many times before, science fiction is about asking "What if?" and making an honest attempt to figure it out.
Asimov, of course, deserves the title of great science fiction writer. The Foundation novels are compelling for their sweeping vision of a human future (not The human future, as no one knows what The human future will be, and there wouldn't be so much point to sci-fi if we did). History and social sciences are merged and theorized into a strikingly convincing future. One comes away from them with a little more understanding of human history, and human behavior on a grand scale. Of course, it wouldn't be very much fun if the story wasn't worthwhile as fiction. In that regard too, Asimov is a lonely figure (though not entirely alone) in the sci-fi landscape. Humor permeates his every novel and story, along with a profound sense of joy and surprise at the diversity of the human race. Every character is real, complete and knowable. Without the human element, science fiction is just more useless techno-babble.
Heinlein too, has persisted in my book collection, and his best works are capable of impressing even people ordinarily bored to tears by sci-fi. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, perhaps my favorite, provides laugh-out-loud comedy, strikingly human personalities (even on Mike the computer), and a great story of "what if?". What if a computer developed "life"? What if the moon housed a colony of humans, growing tired of being dominated by Earth? What makes a revolution? The best of Heinlein is respectful of history, is lovingly impressed with and in equal part disgusted with the human race (to know us is to love us...and hate us), and perhaps most importantly, fun as hell to read.
Stanislaw Lem is a new one for me, but one that I can't help be impressed with. I recently picked up Peace on Earth because of frequent Slashdot recommendations, and was simply blown away. Lem knows science, and is convincing whenever he wanders into imagining the future of technology. Lem also knows the human mind, and presents it in all its glory and fallability. But the key to Lem is his feel for the movement of a story. The story flows from beginning to end with the majestic and impossible force of a glacier...it is unstoppable, and yet it is almost unnoticeable in its momentum. It reaches its conclusion with almost crushing force, and leaves the reader satisfied at having made good use of the time spent reading.
All of that said, I keep finding myself wanting to differentiate the above authors from run of the mill science fiction by talking down the things they are not. They are not writing fantastic tales of improbable outcomes in entirely fictitious universes. That is the realm of fantasy writers. Science fiction requires a respect for science, not a mindless fascination with explosions and shiny things. Of course, great science fiction isn't just respectful of science, it remembers what its purpose is...to entertain. Without that, any other reasons are moot, as no one will read the story to find them. So, great science fiction is also great fiction, and can stand beside other great works of fiction...if it can't, then it is merely an interesting footnote into predicting the future (if the predictions within prove correct in some respect). I wouldn't be ashamed to suggest Asimov's Nightfall or Bicentennial Man, be read alongside Huckleberry Finn in a study of great American literature. Ray Bradbury doesn't really need my endorsement, as he has already received much of the respect amongst the literati that he deserves, but is worth mentioning anyway, as he is a shining example of great science fiction. Nearly everything he has written is simply stunningly pretty to read, all the while answering all of the other requirements for great science fiction.
I would like to think that the tripe (even the tripe I enjoyed as a child) will be filtered out of our collective memory over time...There just isn't any point in wasting more peoples time or money on L. Ron Hubbard books. I attempted to reread Battlefied Earth when the movie was nearing release, and was just astonished at how bad the book really is (I loved it when I was a kid). Full of paper thin caracitures posing as human, overwhelming in its scientific and historical ignorance, and painfully obvious in its every twist and turn. A more thoroughly pulp sci-fi space opera has yet to be constructed (Ok, Star Wars comes close, but I still love the original episodes as well as the next nerd, despite its flaws).
I'll stop talking now, as I'm back to wanting to bash the stupid 'sci-fi' products of the world rather than talking up the good fiction and film. There's just so much crap to talk about...
"Like fuckin hell I'd replace my perfectly working BIOS with some lame-ass hack bios that is likely to lock up and prevent me from booting my PC...."
Ummm...Shut up, troll. Nobody asked you to replace your BIOS.
"BTW companies like ASUS provide **FREE** updates to the BIOS so its hardly like I'm forking out a bag of cash to get it updated."
Yep. You do that. But if you need a box that boots from power-off to running Linux in 3 seconds or less, you'll be wanting LinuxBIOS.
Anyway, no one is telling you to use LinuxBIOS. This isn't one of those Free The Software sloganeering exercises...this is people who build supercomputers with commodity Linux boxes needing a fast boot time. They're doing a really cool bunch of work over there, and the next time some nifty Linux based appliance boots up for you instantly you can thank them for it.
English is for secret agents and English teachers.
Nerds on the other hand know what a DTD is. Nerds that don't know, know what Google does. "DTD" aint a buzzword, it's a technical abbreviation in common use among nerds.
We've been prototyping with the Eden platform in the Cubid 2677 chassis (no, 'Cubid' is not a mispelling), and really like them a lot. We could come up with a few nits about the chassis, but the platform itself is fabulous and runs Linux wonderfully.
With the 533MHz CPU, it needs no CPU fan, and is still plenty zippy for all of your favorite gateway tasks--we use them for web caching, DHCP, DNS caching, masquerading, NATting, routing micro-uber-boxes. Even with all of those services running, these little boxes will push a T1 line chock full of goodness with plenty of power to spare. We'd like it to be even smaller, of course, but I don't think the Lex box in question is the right way for us because we don't want a big hot Intel CPU in there.
We're popping an Intel dual NIC into the PCI slot for the firewall enhanced version (that's three NICs total), giving a nice Internal/DMZ/External separation in a very nice little low-power package.
Anyway, I'm enjoying the relative quiet of these boxes so much, that I'm considering getting an 800MHz one for my desktop machine. All of my real work goes on in the machine closet anyway, so I might as well have some peace, quiet, and an easily moveable machine out here in the civilized part of the office.
So you'd use a proprietary product, just not if it uses another proprietary product? (that is distributed under a very similar, and even less restrictive, license!)
How is Borland any less evil than Troll Tech?
Huh? How is Troll Tech evil? People wanted QT under the GPL, and lo and behold, they released it under the GPL. Seems like a nice bunch of folks to me.
I'll second the vote for DevShed. It is a friendly place with a lot of good information in byte-sized chunks about all of your favorite scripting languages and a lot of other good stuff.
It wouldn't be at the top of my list for compiled languages or Java. But for web development it is an excellent choice.
Yes, folks, some filesystems are faster than others for some type of file.
We benchmark ReiserFS versus all other Linux filesystems about once every 6 months or so, and the last one from about 3 months ago still places Reiser in the "significantly faster" category for our workloads, specifically web caching with Squid.
ext3 is a nice filesystem, and I use it on my home machine and my laptop. But for some high performance environments, ReiserFS is still superior by a large margin. It is also worth mentioning that I could crash a machine running ext3 at will the last time we ran some Squid benchmarks (this was on 2.4.9-31 kernel RPM from Red Hat, so things have probably been fixed by now).
All that said, I'll be giving ext3 vs. ReiserFS another run real soon now, since there does seem to be some serious performance and stability work going into ext3.
Ultra Monkey is a package including LVS, prepared mostly by Horms.
Super Sparrow is a distributed load balancing package also by Horms (formerly of VA Research|Linux|Software|Spacecraft|Doohickeys) that uses BGP route information to decide which server ought to service a request. Neat stuff. Super Sparrow is not ready for deployment, and appears to be on a back burner (due to VA's disinterest in such things these days, probably).
LVS is the project to beat in this space, by a long ways. It is very very solid, and extremely efficient. Wensong is quite an impressive nerd.
I used to do price comparisons at PriceWatch and KillerApp every time I bought anything, and bought from the lowest price vendor. Sometimes that vendor was MWave, sometimes it wasn't. After several thousand dollars worth of orders it became clear who was acting the way I thought a good vendor ought to act and who wasn't.
MWave always accepts returns without a hassle. They are extremely fast about shipping in-stock items (I've been known to order after 6PM CST and they shipped it out that evening nearly every time--they're in California so it is after 4PM there, still impressive). And they are always polite and helpful whenever I've had to speak with them. Their prices aren't always the lowest, but they don't overcharge on shipping the way a lot of PriceWatch vendors do, so the bill comes out similar.
Anyway, I've learned that saving two dollars on a new motherboard just isn't worth the headaches of dealing with a bad vendor. I've been screwed out of $1100 because of idiotic return policies before (Googlegear.com, avoid those useless stumps at all costs), so I view MWave as the best value even if they aren't the cheapest price.
He has already made it clear in previous interviews that ISOs are part of what they are trying to get away from. Mr. Love has a very traditional software business mindset: Per-seat licensing, and no easily downloadable free version. That is fine for Caldera, but I'm not buying it and I'm not selling it to my clients.
Personally, I don't have any interest in yet another proprietary Operating System, regardless of whether it has some free components. I'll stick with Free alternatives like Red Hat, and Debian. The reason Linux is superior is not technical...if it is no longer free of artificial scarcity factors, and has limits on users ability to modify and redistribute, then it becomes just another OS. I, as a user and a business owner, gain nothing from that and might as well buy Solaris, or even Windows. Caldera has been integrating proprietary, and non-redistributable components in their OS for years now--it has been impossible to download a full Caldera ISO long before now.
Luckily, there are free alternatives to Caldera that provide an excellent platform for everything I want to do. I'm baffled that anyone would choose Caldera over a free alternative, but maybe I just don't understand the business mindset Ransom and Co. are trying to cater to.
Moody Gardens in Galveston
on
Project Eden
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It isn't quite the same concept or as big but has a lot of the same elements and is wonderful to behold (I think I probably enjoy the pyramid architecture by I.M. Pei at Moody Gardens better than I would like the domes of Eden--and I'm pretty sure Galveston has better weather outside of the buildings). When I was living in Houston I made it a regular summer trip. The butterflies are lovely, and they have very interesting tropical rainforest 'rooms'.
Well worth a trip, if the UK isn't in the travel plans anytime soon, and Texas isn't too far out of the way for you (Galveston is a nice destination for a lot of reasons). I've always enjoyed myself, and always find something new, even though I've been several times.
Read more about them here (and forgive them for hiding the pyramids deep into the site--they are the most striking thing as you approach from any direction): The Moody Gardens Website.
You're right, it is an anecdote. And I don't expect anyone to take me at my word and take up ReiserFS today. I was merely saying that I have my own data, I don't need anecdotes to tell me what filesystem to use.
Gather your data, choose your filesystem. Don't listen to me, except perhaps to get the advice: Gather your data for yourself. Opinions are often meaningless.
I have also heard from someone who does Linux consulting who won't use ReiserFS. Overall, I don't call it stable.
Heheh...I read a funny quote here on slashdot earlier today that I think applies:
The plural of
anecdote is not data.
I've heard from a lot of people who consider themselves experts that ReiserFS is not stable, never has been, never will be, all that fun stuff. But I know better, because I have data. Hard numbers...I know I can run a Squid box harder and at higher loads for longer on ReiserFS than ext2 or ext3. I know that I can run a Squid machine for 2 years with ReiserFS cache partitions with uptimes over a year, with the reboot after all that time being for a kernel upgrade.
Yes, there have been data corruption issues for some people for ReiserFS. But I'm on the ext3 and jfs mailing lists as well...I know they have data corruptions of their own. It's a fact of life when dealing with computers, things go wrong for everyone at some point. I simply don't believe the masses when they tell me ReiserFS is not suitable for production use, because I have more machines to administer than the vast majority of slashdotters, and I believe I can trust ReiserFS. I trust my opinion above most.
I've followed ReiserFS development for years now, shipping our first servers with it some two years ago (and every box we've shipped since then), and I believe they have the best long-term plan for this kind of thing. Hans has written some excellent white-papers on making small files extremely cheap.
The eventual goal of Reiser is a filesystem that is indistinguishable from a powerful database (if a special purpose database). The plan is to make small files so cheap that every extension of a file, directory, etc. is just another file. Another interesting turn is that files would no longer be, necessarily, of the form '/big/long/path/to/some/file'...because the filesystem is a database, one could also access it by a category, so that one file read pulls in all of the data of that category (from any number of files). Directories become just one view of the data available, with any number of other views possible depending on the application.
As was mentioned in the parent, this would lead to things like 250 email recipients and only one actual file. But of course, this leaves out the copy-on-write functionality needed to make this seamless.
So I think the solution is probably to fix the filesystem--not to fix the email storage mechanism. A number of very smart people have 'fixed' email storage in the past, leading to all of the options we have today, none of which works extremely well on really large mailboxes. Yes, many are good enough, and many work fabulously for small to mid-sized applications. But the day will come when they do not work so well, due to the higher volume and growing average size of emails.
A good place to start for information about these ideas (which are primarily a consolidation of the most interesting research in the field of filesystems and databases):
http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html
ReiserFS is good stuff. Give Hans' papers a read sometime.
BTW-Don't gripe at me about ReiserFS instability, etc. I know better. As I mentioned I've been shipping servers with it for 2 years, and we've never had a single ReiserFS-caused corruption. Not one.
No offense intended, but if you associates aren't smart enough to distinguish between a scam and a legitimate e-mail, than you need to let thme get burnt a few times. Either that or get them off the Internet.
Yep, you're right. Let's make all the grandmothers stay in their rocking chairs where they belong. The internet is for young, savvy nerds. Knitting is for old people.
Seriously, I understand your perspective, and it isn't as though I'm suggesting legislation or something stupid like that (I'm anti-government on all issues)...I'm just saying I think people will get scammed using this method. And I think it may be damaging to legitimate companies as well. This is unfortunate on two counts...it is bad for my grandmother, and yours, and it is bad for honest businesses who would never use spam marketing or pull some kind of bait-and-switch, or just plain ol' scam.
That's all...I don't have solutions. I'm just griping about the problem. Isn't that what slashdot is for, hand-wringing and griping?
I would have thought it wasn't a problem except...
on
Spoofing URLs With Unicode
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I recently received an email from a confused user who had received an email that appeared to be from Apple, and was selling Apple products using Apple logos, Apple website concepts and images, etc., but was not from Apple. He didn't sign up for the list, and though it appeared to be a legitimate Apple affiliate as far as I could tell (though perhaps one that used somewhat shaky methods to reach customers), he was confused why Apple was sending him email that he didn't ask for. It was his belief that the mail had actually come from Apple, because it looked like it was from Apple.
Non-nerds have proven to be extremely difficult to educate on the concept that "what email claims to be is not always what email is, and where it claims to come from is not always where it really came from". During the recent Klez outbreak, I even received a message from a nerd-friend saying that he thought my machine might be infected, because he received an infected message from "me". Of course it was spoofed, because I happen to be in a lot of peoples address books, but since I haven't used Windows on the desktop in over three years, it clearly didn't actually originate with my box.
Folks are just kinda thick about questioning the veracity of claims (hell, astrology still sells books and 900-number phone calls). And this could definitely be used for nasty purposes...and certainly will. Spammers will have a field day with this, because they can't help but seem 'fly by night' because they cannot establish a real brand name due to the disgusting nature of their busines. If they stand still, they'll get lynched. But if they can, even for a short time, hijack a real name that people trust, and offer up a too-good-to-be-true scam under that trusted name...well, you see where I'm going with this.
Of course, everyone here knows that unsolicited "business offers" by email are always scams run by filthy people...but my grandmother doesn't know it, nor do my parents or many of my non-nerd friends for that matter.
Just a thought. We'll see how it plays out, I reckon...
And then there's the issue of the Qt licensing. I hate to dig out this hoary old chestnut, but it really is a problem. I'm not trying to be ideologically purer than anyone else, but it's just not free software.
Put that hairy old chestnut back in your pocket, and read this:
Yep, I love KOffice. I don't even use KDE on my desktop, but KWord is simply the bee's knees. I am wholly addicted to the frame-based word processor concept, and now feel lost without it. Whenever I use AbiWord (which is also very nice these days) I feel kind of disoriented without frames and the overall 'feel' of KWord. I have never used a frame-based WP in the past, and so it certainly isn't just "what I'm used to"...I really think it is a better model than the Word/WordPerfect/StarOffice/everybody else except Adobe word processor.
Anyway, I agree. KOffice is highly underappreciated, and very competent in quite a few areas. It is still flaky in a lot more places than I like, but I do all of my labels, invoices, PDF brochures, and a lot of other stuff in KWord, and it really produces lovely output.
StarOffice is neat too, but I'm done with the Microsoft Office style of doing things...I just feel sluggish and confused when using those apps, and the popup light-bulb doesn't improve things.
if they were gonna open this stuff up i think they would have already
Where have you been, man? This stuff has been opened up. It is in development kernels already. Heck it might even be in the shipping Red Hat kernel (TUX was offered in my most recent Red Hat installation, and these patents regard nifty stuff Ingo wrote for TUX).
These things are a part of the kernel. Red Hat can't help but open it up.
Slashdot Mirror
I've recently been doing some contract development work for other companies. These companies, so far, have all been very friendly to GPLing the work they hire me for that extends existing GPLed work.
However, when I'm preparing contracts I never know just how to specify that wholly original work we do for them will be "Work-for-hire" under whatever license they choose, but code based on and extending GPLed software will be placed under the same license.
I've browsed through the GNU site, in hopes of locating some example contract language that would make this clear to new customers and make it a legally binding aspect of any agreements made, but alas, I could find no help in this regard.
I should point out: my clients know that the GPL is an enforceable copyright, and don't have a problem with that--our work with GPL'ed software is usually the reason they come to us...this isn't a question of companies wishing to steal GPLed software. It is a question of how to make those terms compatible with an agreement that covers both GPLed work and non-GPLed "work-for-hire". Usually we are doing a bit of both types of work, and we'd like the contract to reflect that in a clear and comprehensive manner.
Seems like this would be a common problem for developers, and I was surprised that I couldn't find any documentation about adding this kind of clause to a contract.
wrong again.
Wrong in what way?
Are you suggesting that < and > won't substitute for if= and of=? Or perhaps you are suggesting that one must specify specific partitions to dd?
In either case, I'm not wrong. GNU dd, as provided by Linux distributions accepts < and >. And specifying a device rather than a partition is accepted, and works as expected. Everyone has used this same command form to make boot floppies, right?
And where are you getting the bit about a boot CD? I didn't say anything about a boot CD, nor did the parent to my post. The two issues are entirely orthogonal. Strange post all-around...or maybe just more subtle trolling.
Argh...Once more with preview:
/dev/hda > /dev/hdb
dd <
A troll, of course, but due to lack of moderator points:
/dev/hdb
dd
Yep. That would be much simpler under Windows.
It doesn't make very much sense to say "Should I use UltraMonkey or LVS?" as the latter is a piece of the former. There are other combinations of LVS+other stuff that you might put into that sentence: "Should I use Piranha or UltraMonkey?" or "Should I use UltraMonkey or Joe Macks LVS Config scripts?" or even "Should I build my own LVS scripts or use an existing framework?"
There are other HTTP load balancing options out there. Squid has a new branch in CVS called rproxy that handles multiple backend web servers very effectively with failure detection and other fun stuff (not to mention caching). Pound is a reverse proxy that does load balancing of HTTP traffic and SSL wrapping (most everything Squid can do for reverse proxying minus the caching features).
Balance is a generic TCP load balancer with some nice features. The best features being that it is simple and works on more platforms than just Linux and handles more than just the HTTP protocol. It probably has some disadvantages for some situations because it operates at a lower level than the HTTP proxies above, though it can probably do lots of the same things LVS does (I don't know very much about Balance).
Eddie is a neat framework written in Ericssons Erlang language. Seems to be dormant, but I think it is in pretty widespread use so is probably pretty stable.
Links:
LVS
Squid rproxy branch
Pound
Balance
Eddie
As a kid, I read just about anything sci-fi...but even then, I think I recognized the gems of the genre. The books I kept, versus the books I gave away or sold, includes a list of the authors I still read and enjoy today. Back then, if there were robots or sex or spaceships, it was probably good enough for me to read it once...but what I kept has some qualities that the majority of the pulp stuff just doesn't have.
I think sci-fi without a real science underpinning is generally crap. The science doesn't have to involve mechanical technology in the form of spaceships or robotics, it can just as easily be the science of sociology or the science of medicine. But where "sci-fi" pulp fiction often fails is in being too dedicated to mysterious magical developments...I'm afraid the Star Trek and Star Wars universes often fail because of this reliance on trappings of mystery. The explanation of The Force as a virus just seems forced, if you'll forgive the pun. Star Trek has too many dramatic dying scenes and too many dramatic miraculous healing scenes for either to be believable.
Good sci-fi asks tough questions about how the human race will realize some dream, and what the cost will be. Great sci-fi shows us the fallacy of common truisms, and makes a case for the other side. As has been said many times before, science fiction is about asking "What if?" and making an honest attempt to figure it out.
Asimov, of course, deserves the title of great science fiction writer. The Foundation novels are compelling for their sweeping vision of a human future (not The human future, as no one knows what The human future will be, and there wouldn't be so much point to sci-fi if we did). History and social sciences are merged and theorized into a strikingly convincing future. One comes away from them with a little more understanding of human history, and human behavior on a grand scale. Of course, it wouldn't be very much fun if the story wasn't worthwhile as fiction. In that regard too, Asimov is a lonely figure (though not entirely alone) in the sci-fi landscape. Humor permeates his every novel and story, along with a profound sense of joy and surprise at the diversity of the human race. Every character is real, complete and knowable. Without the human element, science fiction is just more useless techno-babble.
Heinlein too, has persisted in my book collection, and his best works are capable of impressing even people ordinarily bored to tears by sci-fi. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, perhaps my favorite, provides laugh-out-loud comedy, strikingly human personalities (even on Mike the computer), and a great story of "what if?". What if a computer developed "life"? What if the moon housed a colony of humans, growing tired of being dominated by Earth? What makes a revolution? The best of Heinlein is respectful of history, is lovingly impressed with and in equal part disgusted with the human race (to know us is to love us...and hate us), and perhaps most importantly, fun as hell to read.
Stanislaw Lem is a new one for me, but one that I can't help be impressed with. I recently picked up Peace on Earth because of frequent Slashdot recommendations, and was simply blown away. Lem knows science, and is convincing whenever he wanders into imagining the future of technology. Lem also knows the human mind, and presents it in all its glory and fallability. But the key to Lem is his feel for the movement of a story. The story flows from beginning to end with the majestic and impossible force of a glacier...it is unstoppable, and yet it is almost unnoticeable in its momentum. It reaches its conclusion with almost crushing force, and leaves the reader satisfied at having made good use of the time spent reading.
All of that said, I keep finding myself wanting to differentiate the above authors from run of the mill science fiction by talking down the things they are not. They are not writing fantastic tales of improbable outcomes in entirely fictitious universes. That is the realm of fantasy writers. Science fiction requires a respect for science, not a mindless fascination with explosions and shiny things. Of course, great science fiction isn't just respectful of science, it remembers what its purpose is...to entertain. Without that, any other reasons are moot, as no one will read the story to find them. So, great science fiction is also great fiction, and can stand beside other great works of fiction...if it can't, then it is merely an interesting footnote into predicting the future (if the predictions within prove correct in some respect). I wouldn't be ashamed to suggest Asimov's Nightfall or Bicentennial Man, be read alongside Huckleberry Finn in a study of great American literature. Ray Bradbury doesn't really need my endorsement, as he has already received much of the respect amongst the literati that he deserves, but is worth mentioning anyway, as he is a shining example of great science fiction. Nearly everything he has written is simply stunningly pretty to read, all the while answering all of the other requirements for great science fiction.
I would like to think that the tripe (even the tripe I enjoyed as a child) will be filtered out of our collective memory over time...There just isn't any point in wasting more peoples time or money on L. Ron Hubbard books. I attempted to reread Battlefied Earth when the movie was nearing release, and was just astonished at how bad the book really is (I loved it when I was a kid). Full of paper thin caracitures posing as human, overwhelming in its scientific and historical ignorance, and painfully obvious in its every twist and turn. A more thoroughly pulp sci-fi space opera has yet to be constructed (Ok, Star Wars comes close, but I still love the original episodes as well as the next nerd, despite its flaws).
I'll stop talking now, as I'm back to wanting to bash the stupid 'sci-fi' products of the world rather than talking up the good fiction and film. There's just so much crap to talk about...
"Like fuckin hell I'd replace my perfectly working BIOS with some lame-ass hack bios that is likely to lock up and prevent me from booting my PC...."
Ummm...Shut up, troll. Nobody asked you to replace your BIOS.
"BTW companies like ASUS provide **FREE** updates to the BIOS so its hardly like I'm forking out a bag of cash to get it updated."
Yep. You do that. But if you need a box that boots from power-off to running Linux in 3 seconds or less, you'll be wanting LinuxBIOS.
Anyway, no one is telling you to use LinuxBIOS. This isn't one of those Free The Software sloganeering exercises...this is people who build supercomputers with commodity Linux boxes needing a fast boot time. They're doing a really cool bunch of work over there, and the next time some nifty Linux based appliance boots up for you instantly you can thank them for it.
English is for secret agents and English teachers.
Nerds on the other hand know what a DTD is. Nerds that don't know, know what Google does. "DTD" aint a buzzword, it's a technical abbreviation in common use among nerds.
With the 533MHz CPU, it needs no CPU fan, and is still plenty zippy for all of your favorite gateway tasks--we use them for web caching, DHCP, DNS caching, masquerading, NATting, routing micro-uber-boxes. Even with all of those services running, these little boxes will push a T1 line chock full of goodness with plenty of power to spare. We'd like it to be even smaller, of course, but I don't think the Lex box in question is the right way for us because we don't want a big hot Intel CPU in there.
We're popping an Intel dual NIC into the PCI slot for the firewall enhanced version (that's three NICs total), giving a nice Internal/DMZ/External separation in a very nice little low-power package.
Anyway, I'm enjoying the relative quiet of these boxes so much, that I'm considering getting an 800MHz one for my desktop machine. All of my real work goes on in the machine closet anyway, so I might as well have some peace, quiet, and an easily moveable machine out here in the civilized part of the office.
So you'd use a proprietary product, just not if it uses another proprietary product? (that is distributed under a very similar, and even less restrictive, license!)
How is Borland any less evil than Troll Tech?
Huh? How is Troll Tech evil? People wanted QT under the GPL, and lo and behold, they released it under the GPL. Seems like a nice bunch of folks to me.
I'll second the vote for DevShed. It is a friendly place with a lot of good information in byte-sized chunks about all of your favorite scripting languages and a lot of other good stuff.
It wouldn't be at the top of my list for compiled languages or Java. But for web development it is an excellent choice.
We benchmark ReiserFS versus all other Linux filesystems about once every 6 months or so, and the last one from about 3 months ago still places Reiser in the "significantly faster" category for our workloads, specifically web caching with Squid.
ext3 is a nice filesystem, and I use it on my home machine and my laptop. But for some high performance environments, ReiserFS is still superior by a large margin. It is also worth mentioning that I could crash a machine running ext3 at will the last time we ran some Squid benchmarks (this was on 2.4.9-31 kernel RPM from Red Hat, so things have probably been fixed by now).
All that said, I'll be giving ext3 vs. ReiserFS another run real soon now, since there does seem to be some serious performance and stability work going into ext3.
Ultra Monkey is a package including LVS, prepared mostly by Horms.
Super Sparrow is a distributed load balancing package also by Horms (formerly of VA Research|Linux|Software|Spacecraft|Doohickeys) that uses BGP route information to decide which server ought to service a request. Neat stuff. Super Sparrow is not ready for deployment, and appears to be on a back burner (due to VA's disinterest in such things these days, probably).
LVS is the project to beat in this space, by a long ways. It is very very solid, and extremely efficient. Wensong is quite an impressive nerd.
MWave always accepts returns without a hassle. They are extremely fast about shipping in-stock items (I've been known to order after 6PM CST and they shipped it out that evening nearly every time--they're in California so it is after 4PM there, still impressive). And they are always polite and helpful whenever I've had to speak with them. Their prices aren't always the lowest, but they don't overcharge on shipping the way a lot of PriceWatch vendors do, so the bill comes out similar.
Anyway, I've learned that saving two dollars on a new motherboard just isn't worth the headaches of dealing with a bad vendor. I've been screwed out of $1100 because of idiotic return policies before (Googlegear.com, avoid those useless stumps at all costs), so I view MWave as the best value even if they aren't the cheapest price.
So, my suggestion:
MWave.com
They have nearly everything I ever buy...
He has already made it clear in previous interviews that ISOs are part of what they are trying to get away from. Mr. Love has a very traditional software business mindset: Per-seat licensing, and no easily downloadable free version. That is fine for Caldera, but I'm not buying it and I'm not selling it to my clients.
Personally, I don't have any interest in yet another proprietary Operating System, regardless of whether it has some free components. I'll stick with Free alternatives like Red Hat, and Debian. The reason Linux is superior is not technical...if it is no longer free of artificial scarcity factors, and has limits on users ability to modify and redistribute, then it becomes just another OS. I, as a user and a business owner, gain nothing from that and might as well buy Solaris, or even Windows. Caldera has been integrating proprietary, and non-redistributable components in their OS for years now--it has been impossible to download a full Caldera ISO long before now.
Luckily, there are free alternatives to Caldera that provide an excellent platform for everything I want to do. I'm baffled that anyone would choose Caldera over a free alternative, but maybe I just don't understand the business mindset Ransom and Co. are trying to cater to.
This page intentionally left blank.
It isn't quite the same concept or as big but has a lot of the same elements and is wonderful to behold (I think I probably enjoy the pyramid architecture by I.M. Pei at Moody Gardens better than I would like the domes of Eden--and I'm pretty sure Galveston has better weather outside of the buildings). When I was living in Houston I made it a regular summer trip. The butterflies are lovely, and they have very interesting tropical rainforest 'rooms'.
Well worth a trip, if the UK isn't in the travel plans anytime soon, and Texas isn't too far out of the way for you (Galveston is a nice destination for a lot of reasons). I've always enjoyed myself, and always find something new, even though I've been several times.
Read more about them here (and forgive them for hiding the pyramids deep into the site--they are the most striking thing as you approach from any direction): The Moody Gardens Website.
You're right, it is an anecdote. And I don't expect anyone to take me at my word and take up ReiserFS today. I was merely saying that I have my own data, I don't need anecdotes to tell me what filesystem to use.
Gather your data, choose your filesystem. Don't listen to me, except perhaps to get the advice: Gather your data for yourself. Opinions are often meaningless.
Heheh...I read a funny quote here on slashdot earlier today that I think applies:
I've heard from a lot of people who consider themselves experts that ReiserFS is not stable, never has been, never will be, all that fun stuff. But I know better, because I have data. Hard numbers...I know I can run a Squid box harder and at higher loads for longer on ReiserFS than ext2 or ext3. I know that I can run a Squid machine for 2 years with ReiserFS cache partitions with uptimes over a year, with the reboot after all that time being for a kernel upgrade.
Yes, there have been data corruption issues for some people for ReiserFS. But I'm on the ext3 and jfs mailing lists as well...I know they have data corruptions of their own. It's a fact of life when dealing with computers, things go wrong for everyone at some point. I simply don't believe the masses when they tell me ReiserFS is not suitable for production use, because I have more machines to administer than the vast majority of slashdotters, and I believe I can trust ReiserFS. I trust my opinion above most.
I've followed ReiserFS development for years now, shipping our first servers with it some two years ago (and every box we've shipped since then), and I believe they have the best long-term plan for this kind of thing. Hans has written some excellent white-papers on making small files extremely cheap.
The eventual goal of Reiser is a filesystem that is indistinguishable from a powerful database (if a special purpose database). The plan is to make small files so cheap that every extension of a file, directory, etc. is just another file. Another interesting turn is that files would no longer be, necessarily, of the form '/big/long/path/to/some/file'...because the filesystem is a database, one could also access it by a category, so that one file read pulls in all of the data of that category (from any number of files). Directories become just one view of the data available, with any number of other views possible depending on the application.
As was mentioned in the parent, this would lead to things like 250 email recipients and only one actual file. But of course, this leaves out the copy-on-write functionality needed to make this seamless.
So I think the solution is probably to fix the filesystem--not to fix the email storage mechanism. A number of very smart people have 'fixed' email storage in the past, leading to all of the options we have today, none of which works extremely well on really large mailboxes. Yes, many are good enough, and many work fabulously for small to mid-sized applications. But the day will come when they do not work so well, due to the higher volume and growing average size of emails.
A good place to start for information about these ideas (which are primarily a consolidation of the most interesting research in the field of filesystems and databases):
http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html
ReiserFS is good stuff. Give Hans' papers a read sometime.
BTW-Don't gripe at me about ReiserFS instability, etc. I know better. As I mentioned I've been shipping servers with it for 2 years, and we've never had a single ReiserFS-caused corruption. Not one.
Yep, you're right. Let's make all the grandmothers stay in their rocking chairs where they belong. The internet is for young, savvy nerds. Knitting is for old people.
Seriously, I understand your perspective, and it isn't as though I'm suggesting legislation or something stupid like that (I'm anti-government on all issues)...I'm just saying I think people will get scammed using this method. And I think it may be damaging to legitimate companies as well. This is unfortunate on two counts...it is bad for my grandmother, and yours, and it is bad for honest businesses who would never use spam marketing or pull some kind of bait-and-switch, or just plain ol' scam.
That's all...I don't have solutions. I'm just griping about the problem. Isn't that what slashdot is for, hand-wringing and griping?
I recently received an email from a confused user who had received an email that appeared to be from Apple, and was selling Apple products using Apple logos, Apple website concepts and images, etc., but was not from Apple. He didn't sign up for the list, and though it appeared to be a legitimate Apple affiliate as far as I could tell (though perhaps one that used somewhat shaky methods to reach customers), he was confused why Apple was sending him email that he didn't ask for. It was his belief that the mail had actually come from Apple, because it looked like it was from Apple.
Non-nerds have proven to be extremely difficult to educate on the concept that "what email claims to be is not always what email is, and where it claims to come from is not always where it really came from". During the recent Klez outbreak, I even received a message from a nerd-friend saying that he thought my machine might be infected, because he received an infected message from "me". Of course it was spoofed, because I happen to be in a lot of peoples address books, but since I haven't used Windows on the desktop in over three years, it clearly didn't actually originate with my box.
Folks are just kinda thick about questioning the veracity of claims (hell, astrology still sells books and 900-number phone calls). And this could definitely be used for nasty purposes...and certainly will. Spammers will have a field day with this, because they can't help but seem 'fly by night' because they cannot establish a real brand name due to the disgusting nature of their busines. If they stand still, they'll get lynched. But if they can, even for a short time, hijack a real name that people trust, and offer up a too-good-to-be-true scam under that trusted name...well, you see where I'm going with this.
Of course, everyone here knows that unsolicited "business offers" by email are always scams run by filthy people...but my grandmother doesn't know it, nor do my parents or many of my non-nerd friends for that matter.
Just a thought. We'll see how it plays out, I reckon...
Put that hairy old chestnut back in your pocket, and read this:
http://www.trolltech.com/developer/download/qt-
Yep, I love KOffice. I don't even use KDE on my desktop, but KWord is simply the bee's knees. I am wholly addicted to the frame-based word processor concept, and now feel lost without it. Whenever I use AbiWord (which is also very nice these days) I feel kind of disoriented without frames and the overall 'feel' of KWord. I have never used a frame-based WP in the past, and so it certainly isn't just "what I'm used to"...I really think it is a better model than the Word/WordPerfect/StarOffice/everybody else except Adobe word processor.
Anyway, I agree. KOffice is highly underappreciated, and very competent in quite a few areas. It is still flaky in a lot more places than I like, but I do all of my labels, invoices, PDF brochures, and a lot of other stuff in KWord, and it really produces lovely output.
StarOffice is neat too, but I'm done with the Microsoft Office style of doing things...I just feel sluggish and confused when using those apps, and the popup light-bulb doesn't improve things.
Where have you been, man? This stuff has been opened up. It is in development kernels already. Heck it might even be in the shipping Red Hat kernel (TUX was offered in my most recent Red Hat installation, and these patents regard nifty stuff Ingo wrote for TUX).
These things are a part of the kernel. Red Hat can't help but open it up.