The obvious answer for this is nbd, as pointed out in another post -- but I would have concerns about speed with that kind of setup. I'd be interested in hearing reports on that.
But if you don't want to get into nbd, you can tolerate delayed writes to your virtualized disks, and all you want is the network equivalent of RAID level 1, then you could always just set up an rdist script that synchronizes your local data disk with a remote repository (or eight) every so often...
--ZS
Beware the Sensor Dust...
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've had a Canon 10D for a few months now. The camera is absolutely superb -- I even have a 36" x 48" print of one of the shots I've taken with it hanging on my wall, and it impresses people when I tell them it was shot digitally.
That being said, I've found one major drawback: sensor dust. On one trip, I shot an image at F/22 that had a lot of blue sky in it. When I got home, I discovered little black specks and what could only be a hair showing up in the image. Cleaned the lenses and the mirror, took another sky shot, same problem.
It turns out that the dust and dirt is on the sensor. I haven't had it cleaned yet (I hate to part with it for that long, and unless I'm shooting at high F stop settings it doesn't show up much), but rumor has it that doing it yourself is a big no-no, so I'm unwiling to try it. Plan to have this camera cleaned every few months if your'e in to serious photography.
In other words, you'll end up with higher maintenance in return for your phenomenal photos.
Personally, I'm happy with it -- but if you're picky and don't like having it cleaned a lot, you're in for a disappointment unless you're *really* *really* careful not to get dust in it.
I was gonna write a long drawn out post, but I'll skip that, and simply say this: I don't disagree that knowledge of the particular field you're working in is absolutely crucial. It is my belief, however, that you should know the basics of your tool, first. In terms of a co-sci education, this should be tought in the first couple of years of college. It shouldn't take longer than that (although unfortunately it usually does).
Knowing the basics will only enhance your ability to work in your specialized area. Once you've hit the field, it's really too late -- IMHO, people should know this stuff prior to having a job in the computer field.
This is all JMHO, of course -- and admittedly I'm a bit jaded because I've worked with so many folks that couldn't figure out how to put a Windows machine on a network if their lives depended on it.
It seems you have an irrational hate of people who write in Java - are you perhaps one of those antisocial C programmers who worship execution speed over usability and reliability?
Actually, no. I don't hate anyone, first of all; it's a perfectly rational annoyance with people who program in Java to the exclusion of all else, seeing it as the end-all and be-all of languages. And yes, I've written in Java, and probably will again at some point -- I believe in using the right tool for the right job.
And you'd be quite surprised at how often execution speed and reliability come up in the modern world -- usually after a product's been released. My last two jobs alone have seen instances of people writing software non-optimally and not worrying about it because "it's not necessary." As the product scales (or rather, fails to scale), they quickly rethink that position. The way to avoid this is to learn what the pitfalls are and avoid them by nature. It's not as hard as it sounds, if you know how the machine does things.
My personal belief is that all the garbage about not needing to know how the machine works because you're writing in <insert favorite language here> is simply an excuse for laziness or simple lack of interest.
As to your last question, you could've had it right if you'd stopped at 'antisocial'. I am, in fact, an antisocial perl/C/C++/... programmer, and I enjoy providing the utmost in execution speed when the time budget allows. But you will find that the vast majority of my software is among the most usable and reliable written within an organization that I work for. Not always, but usually.
I said *have written in* assembly. Not *will continue to write in* assembly.
The point of knowing assembly on the target platform is not due to some misguided plan to build the project in assembly. Hardly realistic in today's world. The reason for it is because most anyone who has ever successfuly written a program in any assembly-level language, will understand vaguely how the machine works.
That's the point. As a person who is tasked with hiring a staff to write software, I don't give a damn about a college degree or whether or not you know Java. I want to know if you understand the machine in general -- because if you don't, you're pretty much guaranteed to write crappy software.
But then, most people that respond with comments like this typically fall into the Java programmer category...
10 steps for builidng a successful software product:
1) Fire half (perhaps all) of your programming staff. Most of them don't know know the difference between a heap and a stack, don't have a clue beyond the Java language, and if faced with the prospect of learning x86 assembly language, they'd faint.
2) Hire people that *do* know the difference between a heap and a stack, perhaps have written in some assembly somewhere (even if just in college), and have figured out how to use a few more languages besides Java.
3) When doing #2, ignore college degrees. Whether or not someone has one doesn't indicate whether or not they're a good programmer, at least until our the majority of our school system can actually teach the *relevant* skills.
But, if the bidders pay for it, why would they pay for it if they knew i was available for free? They either pay for it because they did not know it existed. so the seller is bringing it to a new market, or they dodn't have the time to download it.
Probably because they're eBay junkies;-)
In all seriousness, this is a perfectly valid point. If I put myself in the author's shoes, I think it's more the idea of having a seemingly shady thing happen with my name attached to it somewhere that would really tweak me. If my name's on it, then I want it to represent *my* ethics.
But you're absolutely right. Selling it does not make it bad....I suppose my moral view is that culture should be free for all, but that if culture is free, why will someone spend time producing art (i know there can be a love, but this is only part of it, one has to put bread on the table), when they don't get paid?
I've tried to work through the thought process, and it really does twist the brain... You and I would probably have a helluva good time discussing it:P
If art cannot be paid for we risk no art. If art is paid for we serve the highest bidder or the lowest common denominator. This is a true dilemma.
I think a love of art does, in fact, go a long way. I'm a musician that will probably never make a red cent on my music -- but that's okay. Instead of playing for the wealthy and powerful, I get to play for my friends, and we all have a great time;) Just a thought...
The DMCA will eventually be overruled, using it to bully people into compliance makes you as bad as all the other companies who use it.
Using this logic, then suing someone is bad in general, and I definitely disagree with that concept. It is certainly used FAR more often than need be to obtain results, but that's a different issue.
The difference here, assuming he does things ethically, would be this:
The RIAA sues a couple of college students for $98 BILLION DOLLARS for putting up a song sharing server on a college campus.
This guy sues the jerk who's publishing his work to require him to either (a) stop doing it, or (b) do it properly, and maybe if he's in a really bad mood requires that the guy turn over some of the profit, but probably not.
See the difference?
Now, I can't speak for the motives of the article's author, but I suspect it's rather like the second version. Definitely much more so than the first.
The first is bullying. The second is protecting your rights.
Just because you choose to do the world a service and give your work away, doesn't mean you shouldn't get credit.
Writing textbooks is HARD. Not everyone can do it. This guy is making a contribution to the educational world in a way in which non-rich people can afford it. That's a damn nice gift, if you ask me. The more education in our world, the better.
And you would tell him he should just screw off? I don't think so.
Personally, I'd use whatever legal means were at my disposal if I was incensed by what happened, up to and including the DMCA. Law is law. Turn something bad into something good.
The "kernel interface" is internal for the purposes of this discussion. As a Windows NT application or driver programmer, it's something one does not see.
Internally, yes, I'm sure that whotsisface used a lot of concepts from VMS. That happens when you're a programmer -- you stick with what works.
I've worked on VAXen running VMS, from v5 through v7. NT is *nothing* like VMS, at least from an interface point of view (and I'm talking API, not actual user interface). The deep internals may be different, who knows.
I prefer a solution more along the lines of "smack the shit out of our government for letting this get so out of hand." Unfortunately, I'm thinking that's not going to happen -- there aren't enough citizens interested in actually changing things (or who ever know what's going on that needs to be changed) in order to actually affect the government in this country.
I saw another post here that made a great point: it's not the truly evil looking laws you have to worry about. Your civil rights aren't just going to suddenly go *poof*. It's laws like this, which many don't mind, that are the problem. They'll slowly erode our rights and freedom until one day we'll wake up and realize we haven't got any anymore.
They may have some immunity to punishment, but they can certainly be required to provide records. Phone company has to do this all the time for law enforcement, and they're the canonical "common carrier."
A while ago I got the bug to design an MP3 player for my car, and needed some embedded hardware for it (unfortunately this happened right before I moved back accross the US, and I lost interest after that, what with work an' all). I ended up picking up a buscuit PC board from www.advantech.com. It was like $500 at the time, but had everything on it -- audio, ethernet, IDE, floppy, VGA, LCD, a bunch of serial ports, and a PC/104 port that I intended to use for a PCMCIA adapter (wireless support).
These things are cool. You could literally build one into a 5.25" disk enclosure, and it would fit perfectly (even uses the right power connector). If you want something that doesn't have the mess of an ATX power supply and slots that make the cards stick out, PC/104-based solutions are ideal -- it's a nice, clean stack.
Advantech also now manufactures a StrongARM-based solution, which I'm thinking about picking up for a revived version of the project. I think they've also got XScale-based boards.
In any dialect of SQL (which, according to one of my former coworkers, really should've been pronounced "Squeel") that I've written in, including Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, and others, the quotes aren't necessary at all -- eg:
SELECT karma FROM users WHERE userid = 138474;
Unless there's something funky about the backticks that I'm missing here. A SQL wizard I am not. =)
I've got this fun little project I'm working on, and part of it involves a web server, which I wrote. There was a crash bug in one of the early versions. Took me forever to figure out why the box was crashing -- until I realized that I'd mapped port 80 from my firewall to said box. A few quick lines of debug code later......and I found that I was getting >50 Nimda/Code Red type virus attacks on that very same port every HOUR from users on my local cable subnet. One of the less common URLs had a malformed query string, which was blowing the thing up due to a stupid bug in my parser.
Needless to say, said port is no longer mapped (and bug is fixed).
And there is NO WAY IN HELL I will ever connect a machine directly to the cable modem without some pretty serious hardening.
Depends on how you look at it. I do realize that Linux was not built from Minix source. However, I believe Linus had access to Minix source at the time. *that*'s the part that counts.
As I said in another post recently, everything else is just legal trickery anyway;)
Personally, I think that's a marketing tactic. If they lose against IBM, it's less damaging than if they lose against RedHat.
Look at it this way:
If they sue IBM, there's a sizable percentage of the Linux community that will say "whatever...".
If they sue RedHat or SuSE, then almost the ENTIRE community will tar and feather them, destroying any potential revenue base they could possibly have in the future.
McBride: In our case, Linux comes from Unix and we own the Unix operating system. How this plays out with other code bases, I don't know.
Okay, now unless minix was based on original Unix source code (which I don't believe it was), then this is entirely false. Linux was based on the API for Unix, but that's about as far as it goes.
Now to say that it might contain some Unix IP these days, that's possible. But to say that it "comes from Unix"?
Who looks like the Iraqi information minister? That's another great one.
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious answer for this is nbd, as pointed out in another post -- but I would have concerns about speed with that kind of setup. I'd be interested in hearing reports on that.
But if you don't want to get into nbd, you can tolerate delayed writes to your virtualized disks, and all you want is the network equivalent of RAID level 1, then you could always just set up an rdist script that synchronizes your local data disk with a remote repository (or eight) every so often...
--ZS
I've had a Canon 10D for a few months now. The camera is absolutely superb -- I even have a 36" x 48" print of one of the shots I've taken with it hanging on my wall, and it impresses people when I tell them it was shot digitally.
That being said, I've found one major drawback: sensor dust. On one trip, I shot an image at F/22 that had a lot of blue sky in it. When I got home, I discovered little black specks and what could only be a hair showing up in the image. Cleaned the lenses and the mirror, took another sky shot, same problem.
It turns out that the dust and dirt is on the sensor. I haven't had it cleaned yet (I hate to part with it for that long, and unless I'm shooting at high F stop settings it doesn't show up much), but rumor has it that doing it yourself is a big no-no, so I'm unwiling to try it. Plan to have this camera cleaned every few months if your'e in to serious photography.
In other words, you'll end up with higher maintenance in return for your phenomenal photos.
Personally, I'm happy with it -- but if you're picky and don't like having it cleaned a lot, you're in for a disappointment unless you're *really* *really* careful not to get dust in it.
--ZS
I do hope that you're referring to capacitors, not resistors...
Slashdot: large amounts of crappy information in really small doses. Usually.
--ZS
I was gonna write a long drawn out post, but I'll skip that, and simply say this: I don't disagree that knowledge of the particular field you're working in is absolutely crucial. It is my belief, however, that you should know the basics of your tool, first. In terms of a co-sci education, this should be tought in the first couple of years of college. It shouldn't take longer than that (although unfortunately it usually does).
Knowing the basics will only enhance your ability to work in your specialized area. Once you've hit the field, it's really too late -- IMHO, people should know this stuff prior to having a job in the computer field.
This is all JMHO, of course -- and admittedly I'm a bit jaded because I've worked with so many folks that couldn't figure out how to put a Windows machine on a network if their lives depended on it.
--ZS
It seems you have an irrational hate of people who write in Java - are you perhaps one of those antisocial C programmers who worship execution speed over usability and reliability?
Actually, no. I don't hate anyone, first of all; it's a perfectly rational annoyance with people who program in Java to the exclusion of all else, seeing it as the end-all and be-all of languages. And yes, I've written in Java, and probably will again at some point -- I believe in using the right tool for the right job.
And you'd be quite surprised at how often execution speed and reliability come up in the modern world -- usually after a product's been released. My last two jobs alone have seen instances of people writing software non-optimally and not worrying about it because "it's not necessary." As the product scales (or rather, fails to scale), they quickly rethink that position. The way to avoid this is to learn what the pitfalls are and avoid them by nature. It's not as hard as it sounds, if you know how the machine does things.
My personal belief is that all the garbage about not needing to know how the machine works because you're writing in <insert favorite language here> is simply an excuse for laziness or simple lack of interest.
As to your last question, you could've had it right if you'd stopped at 'antisocial'. I am, in fact, an antisocial perl/C/C++/... programmer, and I enjoy providing the utmost in execution speed when the time budget allows. But you will find that the vast majority of my software is among the most usable and reliable written within an organization that I work for. Not always, but usually.
--ZS
I said *have written in* assembly. Not *will continue to write in* assembly.
The point of knowing assembly on the target platform is not due to some misguided plan to build the project in assembly. Hardly realistic in today's world. The reason for it is because most anyone who has ever successfuly written a program in any assembly-level language, will understand vaguely how the machine works.
That's the point. As a person who is tasked with hiring a staff to write software, I don't give a damn about a college degree or whether or not you know Java. I want to know if you understand the machine in general -- because if you don't, you're pretty much guaranteed to write crappy software.
But then, most people that respond with comments like this typically fall into the Java programmer category...
--ZS
10 steps for builidng a successful software product:
1) Fire half (perhaps all) of your programming staff. Most of them don't know know the difference between a heap and a stack, don't have a clue beyond the Java language, and if faced with the prospect of learning x86 assembly language, they'd faint.
2) Hire people that *do* know the difference between a heap and a stack, perhaps have written in some assembly somewhere (even if just in college), and have figured out how to use a few more languages besides Java.
3) When doing #2, ignore college degrees. Whether or not someone has one doesn't indicate whether or not they're a good programmer, at least until our the majority of our school system can actually teach the *relevant* skills.
4) Plan. Plan. Plan. Document. Plan. Flowchart. Plan. Plan. Discuss. Plan. Discuss. Plan. Document. Plan.
5) Code.
6) Discuss. Test. Fix. Discuss. Test. Fix.
7) Refactor
8) Repeat 6-7 until all the software has been reduced to the simplest, most error-free possible codebase for its functionality.
9) QA. (Yup, this happens *after* the testing in (6)!)
10) Ship.
But, if the bidders pay for it, why would they pay for it if they knew i was available for free? They either pay for it because they did not know it existed. so the seller is bringing it to a new market, or they dodn't have the time to download it.
;-)
...I suppose my moral view is that culture should be free for all, but that if culture is free, why will someone spend time producing art (i know there can be a love, but this is only part of it, one has to put bread on the table), when they don't get paid?
:P
;) Just a thought...
Probably because they're eBay junkies
In all seriousness, this is a perfectly valid point. If I put myself in the author's shoes, I think it's more the idea of having a seemingly shady thing happen with my name attached to it somewhere that would really tweak me. If my name's on it, then I want it to represent *my* ethics.
But you're absolutely right. Selling it does not make it bad.
I've tried to work through the thought process, and it really does twist the brain... You and I would probably have a helluva good time discussing it
If art cannot be paid for we risk no art. If art is paid for we serve the highest bidder or the lowest common denominator. This is a true dilemma.
I think a love of art does, in fact, go a long way. I'm a musician that will probably never make a red cent on my music -- but that's okay. Instead of playing for the wealthy and powerful, I get to play for my friends, and we all have a great time
--ZS
I'm honestly not sure whether or you're for or against going after the guy, but there was a point that I wanted to respond to:
Or the bidders on ebay clearly did not know your product was freely available, so what does it hurt if it is sold?
It does hurt; it's scamming the buyer out of money when they can get it for free. JMHO.
--ZS
The DMCA will eventually be overruled, using it to bully people into compliance makes you as bad as all the other companies who use it.
Using this logic, then suing someone is bad in general, and I definitely disagree with that concept. It is certainly used FAR more often than need be to obtain results, but that's a different issue.
The difference here, assuming he does things ethically, would be this:
The RIAA sues a couple of college students for $98 BILLION DOLLARS for putting up a song sharing server on a college campus.
This guy sues the jerk who's publishing his work to require him to either (a) stop doing it, or (b) do it properly, and maybe if he's in a really bad mood requires that the guy turn over some of the profit, but probably not.
See the difference?
Now, I can't speak for the motives of the article's author, but I suspect it's rather like the second version. Definitely much more so than the first.
The first is bullying. The second is protecting your rights.
Big difference.
Just because you choose to do the world a service and give your work away, doesn't mean you shouldn't get credit.
Writing textbooks is HARD. Not everyone can do it. This guy is making a contribution to the educational world in a way in which non-rich people can afford it. That's a damn nice gift, if you ask me. The more education in our world, the better.
And you would tell him he should just screw off? I don't think so.
Personally, I'd use whatever legal means were at my disposal if I was incensed by what happened, up to and including the DMCA. Law is law. Turn something bad into something good.
--ZS
The "kernel interface" is internal for the purposes of this discussion. As a Windows NT application or driver programmer, it's something one does not see.
Internally, yes, I'm sure that whotsisface used a lot of concepts from VMS. That happens when you're a programmer -- you stick with what works.
--ZS
I've worked on VAXen running VMS, from v5 through v7. NT is *nothing* like VMS, at least from an interface point of view (and I'm talking API, not actual user interface). The deep internals may be different, who knows.
--ZS
I prefer a solution more along the lines of "smack the shit out of our government for letting this get so out of hand." Unfortunately, I'm thinking that's not going to happen -- there aren't enough citizens interested in actually changing things (or who ever know what's going on that needs to be changed) in order to actually affect the government in this country.
I saw another post here that made a great point: it's not the truly evil looking laws you have to worry about. Your civil rights aren't just going to suddenly go *poof*. It's laws like this, which many don't mind, that are the problem. They'll slowly erode our rights and freedom until one day we'll wake up and realize we haven't got any anymore.
--ZS
They may have some immunity to punishment, but they can certainly be required to provide records. Phone company has to do this all the time for law enforcement, and they're the canonical "common carrier."
--ZS
A while ago I got the bug to design an MP3 player for my car, and needed some embedded hardware for it (unfortunately this happened right before I moved back accross the US, and I lost interest after that, what with work an' all). I ended up picking up a buscuit PC board from www.advantech.com. It was like $500 at the time, but had everything on it -- audio, ethernet, IDE, floppy, VGA, LCD, a bunch of serial ports, and a PC/104 port that I intended to use for a PCMCIA adapter (wireless support).
These things are cool. You could literally build one into a 5.25" disk enclosure, and it would fit perfectly (even uses the right power connector). If you want something that doesn't have the mess of an ATX power supply and slots that make the cards stick out, PC/104-based solutions are ideal -- it's a nice, clean stack.
Advantech also now manufactures a StrongARM-based solution, which I'm thinking about picking up for a revived version of the project. I think they've also got XScale-based boards.
--ZS
Ooops. I meant "IPv6" address. I use the preview before posting! Really!
--ZS
I'm waiting for 128-bit computing so that my IP address can fit snugly in a single register. Performance web serving! Or something.
--ZS
Im hoping their is a major backlash from the millions of students in this country.
Is it just me, or did your mind flip through "backslash/slashback" while parsing that word, too?
*smirk*
--ZS
...against those college students. They'll make nothing from it, but the results of them losing could be pretty ugly.
Could you imagine the counter-suit? I'd call a $98 BILLION lawsuit against "poor" college students "malicious prosecution."
--ZS
In any dialect of SQL (which, according to one of my former coworkers, really should've been pronounced "Squeel") that I've written in, including Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, and others, the quotes aren't necessary at all -- eg:
SELECT karma FROM users WHERE userid = 138474;
Unless there's something funky about the backticks that I'm missing here. A SQL wizard I am not. =)
--ZS
Hmph. Nope. Not without a firewall, anyway.
...and I found that I was getting >50 Nimda/Code Red type virus attacks on that very same port every HOUR from users on my local cable subnet. One of the less common URLs had a malformed query string, which was blowing the thing up due to a stupid bug in my parser.
I've got this fun little project I'm working on, and part of it involves a web server, which I wrote. There was a crash bug in one of the early versions. Took me forever to figure out why the box was crashing -- until I realized that I'd mapped port 80 from my firewall to said box. A few quick lines of debug code later...
Needless to say, said port is no longer mapped (and bug is fixed).
And there is NO WAY IN HELL I will ever connect a machine directly to the cable modem without some pretty serious hardening.
--ZS
Depends on how you look at it. I do realize that Linux was not built from Minix source. However, I believe Linus had access to Minix source at the time. *that*'s the part that counts.
;)
As I said in another post recently, everything else is just legal trickery anyway
--ZS
Personally, I think that's a marketing tactic. If they lose against IBM, it's less damaging than if they lose against RedHat.
Look at it this way:
If they sue IBM, there's a sizable percentage of the Linux community that will say "whatever...".
If they sue RedHat or SuSE, then almost the ENTIRE community will tar and feather them, destroying any potential revenue base they could possibly have in the future.
--ZS
McBride: In our case, Linux comes from Unix and we own the Unix operating system. How this plays out with other code bases, I don't know.
Okay, now unless minix was based on original Unix source code (which I don't believe it was), then this is entirely false. Linux was based on the API for Unix, but that's about as far as it goes.
Now to say that it might contain some Unix IP these days, that's possible. But to say that it "comes from Unix"?
Who looks like the Iraqi information minister? That's another great one.
--ZS