The FUSE implementations are for compatibility--when someone hands you a ZFS or NTFS formatted disk and you have to be able to read it. FUSE is also useful for remote file systems, where the extra overhead doesn't matter.
For your primary local disk file system, you really need a kernel-based implementation.
Well, the main thing I regret about the ZFS/Linux license incompatibility is that we don't get a chance to see ZFS fall flat on its face like all the other supposedly terribly advanced file systems. But that's a minor regret. In the end, we all know that the next file system for Linux will be ext4, and that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
And the evidence that this makes any difference is... what?
Also, this is effectively how soldiers get trained. And in combat, soldiers may even kill for real. Does that mean we shouldn't let soldiers back into society because, based on their experiences, they have become a threat to everybody?
I didn't say "third HTML standard", I said "third standard", as in "third standard desktop browser on Windows".
it adheres to the W3C standards, just like good browsers should
Yes, and if you had bothered to understand what I wrote, you'd have figured out that that's why I think it's a good thing that Apple is trying to establish Safari as a third standard browser on Windows.
Imagine for two seconds if Safari, Firefox and Konqeueror all used the same rendering engine. As a web designer, I design valid (X)HTML and test it in Safari, Firefox or Konqueror, confident that I know it will render the same way in all three browsers. [...] Even Opera would have to seriously consider joining in the KHTML love.
All you're trying to do is replace the dependency on one ill-defined HTML rendering library with a dependency on another one. That's the exact opposite of what an "HTML standard" is supposed to be.
People like you are the enemy of an open and standards-based web.
Or rather, wrap it in a Qt UI. Oh, wait. Such a thing already exists, Konqueror the name.
Konqueror relies on a lot of KDE desktop components, and it's much more than a web browser. There are also no standalone downloads for Windows or Macintosh.
IMO, the idea of us just being able to "change" the space-time metric at will is quite a tall order:-)
Sure: it's hard and there's a good chance that it's practically unrealizable. My point is simply that it doesn't cause problems with causality, therefore there is no known logical or mathematical reason against it.
How are sadistic killings and relentless manhunts different from standard Hollywood movies or TV series?
Disembowelment, shots to the head, criminally insane killers, rape, torture, etc., they all seem to be standard plot devices in movies and even TV shows.
Actually, I think Safari was a bad decision for Apple but a good decision for everybody else. The easy solution for Apple would have been to put Gecko inside a Cocoa app, which would have given them much more compatibility with Web 2.0 sites. By struggling to establish a third standard, they are actually helping everybody else. And if they manage to establish Safari as the #2 browser on the web, all the better: FOSS will simply take the Safari rendering engine (which is open source) and wrap it in a Gtk+ UI.
Plan 9 looks to me like the perennial contender for something which is never to be released; much like the HURD
Plan 9 has been released, and it's working.
Is it going to catch on? Who knows. It took 20-30 years for UNIX to catch on after it had matured reasonably well, so that would put Plan 9 taking over the world at somewhere between 2010 and 2020.
I'm sure Plan 9 is an interesting intellectual exercise for the people involved, but other than that , what exactly is its point?
The point is to make distributed computation a whole lot simpler than it is right now.
I do wonder why thety bother and don't just try and integrate any new ways of thinking they've come up with into pre-existing systems such as Linux or BSD.
They do try, and they have succeeded to some degree.
But that's fraught with its own problems; for example, few if any Linux programs will know anything about 9P or naming or any of that.
I have Comcast for Internet access and am reasonably happy with them. I think their cable TV channels are way overpriced, so I'm not subscribing to anything there, but, then, I have never watched much cable.
So, why not just cancel? You have alternatives: DSL, satellite, OTA, other cable companies.
We live in a two-party system where one side says "We'll take all your money and give it to the welfare programs, prisons, and the poor" and the other side says "We'll take all your money and give it to the oil companies, airlines, and the telecoms". Either way, they've taken all your money.
First of all, the growth in prison populations is due primarily to Republican agenda items and so-called "law and order" candidates. The other thing Republicans love to spend money on is military contractors and suppliers.
Second, US taxes are still fairly low compared to other industrialized nations, so there is little justification for this whining.
Third, and most importantly, Democrats have historically spent considerably less money than Republicans, and what they spend money on is stuff that benefits people, including you. Yes, even "welfare" benefits you because, even if you're cynical about whether it helps people, ultimately, giving them money to keep quiet is still better than the alternatives.
So, there are clear differences between the parties and how they spend money. If you think there aren't, you haven't been doing your homework and you're part of the problem.
Only a few networks even have commentators that even discuss both sides of an issue.
Absolutely right. In fact, the media are dominated by right-wing nuts, in the guise of "conservative commentators". Liberal, left-wing, or even middle-of-the-road commentators are nearly absent.
If we let kittens walk our streets with their heads still attached, surely the terrorists have won.
Anyway, think of the children! Do you really want your children to be exposed to kitty porn and pussy on the street? Besides, those kittens have teeth, and they may be carrying rabies!
Why is anyone a "card-carrying" anything? Why don't they assess each issue and position as it arises regardless of which party is presenting it?
Thy do, it's just that the parties themselves set the agenda and support it with billions of dollars in marketing. Do you really think Americans would give beans about which orifice someone is sticking their weenie in or whether some braindead woman's life support is turned off or not? Those things have become issues because political parties made them issues, for all sorts of reasons. For example, a lot of these "issues" become issues because politicians like to distract from things that they don't know how to handle, or because they like to draw attention away from government handouts, or they like to derail legislation that would be inconvenient for their constituents or their financial supporters.
And when the debate starts and scientific opinion is brought into the debate, people with political agendas try to discredit the scientists and dig up the most obscure crackpots to provide an "alternative viewpoint".
And if all else fails, appealing to fear always works: "but think of the children", "it's for national security", and "you could be next".
(Non-American here.)
You don't seriously think that this is different anywhere else. It's the way people work the world over. Having followed European politics a little, the issues, irrationality, and fear seem to be the same, the only differences are: if it gets really dirty, they let the Americans deal with it or blame the Americans for it, and the amounts of money involved seem to be smaller.
And you see the same kind of behavior in smaller democratic organizations as well (various boards and organizations).
I think the best solution is probably devolution, free movement of people, and perhaps the creation of many more states. That way, gay marriage and physician assisted suicide can be legal in San Francisco, and school prayer, polygamy, and anti-sodomy laws can be legal in Salt Lake City.
I can't avoid getting the feeling that this would introduce the time-travel paradox issues (killing one's parents etc) or at least make reality somehow inconsistent if not for you, for multiple observers at least... loss of locality is a big thing.
There is no "loss of locality", it's just a different topology of spacetime, and there is no time travel associated with it either.
Anyway, God-like spacetime bending is magic as far as I'm concerned;-)
I think it's good not to be prejudiced in such matters; this bending of spacetime may turn out to be impossible via any physical mechanism, or it may turn out to be possible with a simple trick. I'm just saying that there is no logical reason why it should be impossible. All we can say is that, right now, we don't have any idea how to do it. I'd say it's pretty certain that within the next 50 years, we won't be able to (because even if the necessary physics were discovered tomorrow, it would take that long for physics and engineering to catch up), but beyond that, it's anybody's guess.
Let's just say that if you want to claim that there is reason to believe it's doable in light of our current knowledge, your extraordinary claim will require extraordinary evidence
I'm not claiming it's "doable", I'm simply saying that it is compatible with GR and causality, and that no weirdness need ensue.
you aren't going to accelerate matter beyond light speed.
Of course not. We're not talking about acceleration beyond light speed, we're talking about the geometry of spacetime.
I think people on all sides are extrapolating too far out.
All we can say is that manned interstellar travel is practically impossible with current technologies, and that manned interplanetary travel is too expensive for colonization with current technologies. As a result, for the next several decades, we should plan on using robotic probes and telescopes and learn more about space, physics, AI, and the solar system, instead of wasting money on sending people to Mars. In a few decades, perhaps we can consider sending a robotic interstellar probe.
Long term--who knows. It may well turn out that the Oort cloud extends to the Oort cloud of neighboring star systems, in which case interstellar travel could happen over millennia as a series of short hops and colonization. And if we get fusion going, there may be enough energy all the way. Or maybe we do find a way for FTL travel. Or many other things may happen.
I don't particularly like Safari, but I think if more people use more browsers other than IE and FF, it can only be good. And I trust Apple will at least make an effort towards standards-compliance.
Oh, and what I'm "bitter" about is the following: operating systems have become commodities. But companies like Sun (and Microsoft and Apple) simply can't deal with it. Rather than moving into other areas, they are doing everything to defend their turf. For example, the spread FUD about Linux, they create fake open source projects, and they market the hell out of unnecessary features.
I've been developing on it for about 10, so maybe I'm biased.
I've been a SunOS/Solaris user and developer for 20 years, including delivering commercial solutions on it. Until about half a dozen years ago, I was buying Sun machines by the boatload. Now, it's almost all Linux, and I'm not going back. It's not even my preference, customers just aren't asking for it anymore.
You sound really bitter about Solaris. I dunno what's up with that.
Geez, one can't win with you people. If one doesn't know Solaris, you say that one isn't qualified to comment. When one says that one has been working with Solaris, you try to characterize one as "bitter".
It's really simple: neither Sun hardware nor Sun software is competitive anymore as far as I'm concerned, and adding useless gimmicks like DTrace and ZFS or spreading FUD about supposed Linux binary incompatibilities isn't going to make either us or any of our customers want to buy Solaris machines again.
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The FUSE implementations are for compatibility--when someone hands you a ZFS or NTFS formatted disk and you have to be able to read it. FUSE is also useful for remote file systems, where the extra overhead doesn't matter.
For your primary local disk file system, you really need a kernel-based implementation.
Well, the main thing I regret about the ZFS/Linux license incompatibility is that we don't get a chance to see ZFS fall flat on its face like all the other supposedly terribly advanced file systems. But that's a minor regret. In the end, we all know that the next file system for Linux will be ext4, and that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
And the evidence that this makes any difference is... what?
Also, this is effectively how soldiers get trained. And in combat, soldiers may even kill for real. Does that mean we shouldn't let soldiers back into society because, based on their experiences, they have become a threat to everybody?
Safari is not a "third standard"
I didn't say "third HTML standard", I said "third standard", as in "third standard desktop browser on Windows".
it adheres to the W3C standards, just like good browsers should
Yes, and if you had bothered to understand what I wrote, you'd have figured out that that's why I think it's a good thing that Apple is trying to establish Safari as a third standard browser on Windows.
Imagine for two seconds if Safari, Firefox and Konqeueror all used the same rendering engine. As a web designer, I design valid (X)HTML and test it in Safari, Firefox or Konqueror, confident that I know it will render the same way in all three browsers. [...] Even Opera would have to seriously consider joining in the KHTML love.
All you're trying to do is replace the dependency on one ill-defined HTML rendering library with a dependency on another one. That's the exact opposite of what an "HTML standard" is supposed to be.
People like you are the enemy of an open and standards-based web.
Or rather, wrap it in a Qt UI. Oh, wait. Such a thing already exists, Konqueror the name.
Konqueror relies on a lot of KDE desktop components, and it's much more than a web browser. There are also no standalone downloads for Windows or Macintosh.
IMO, the idea of us just being able to "change" the space-time metric at will is quite a tall order :-)
Sure: it's hard and there's a good chance that it's practically unrealizable. My point is simply that it doesn't cause problems with causality, therefore there is no known logical or mathematical reason against it.
Konqueror is not a stand-alone web browser, it's a file manager that includes a web browser.
How are sadistic killings and relentless manhunts different from standard Hollywood movies or TV series?
Disembowelment, shots to the head, criminally insane killers, rape, torture, etc., they all seem to be standard plot devices in movies and even TV shows.
Actually, I think Safari was a bad decision for Apple but a good decision for everybody else. The easy solution for Apple would have been to put Gecko inside a Cocoa app, which would have given them much more compatibility with Web 2.0 sites. By struggling to establish a third standard, they are actually helping everybody else. And if they manage to establish Safari as the #2 browser on the web, all the better: FOSS will simply take the Safari rendering engine (which is open source) and wrap it in a Gtk+ UI.
Plan 9 looks to me like the perennial contender for something which is never to be released; much like the HURD
Plan 9 has been released, and it's working.
Is it going to catch on? Who knows. It took 20-30 years for UNIX to catch on after it had matured reasonably well, so that would put Plan 9 taking over the world at somewhere between 2010 and 2020.
I'm sure Plan 9 is an interesting intellectual exercise for the people involved, but other than that , what exactly is its point?
The point is to make distributed computation a whole lot simpler than it is right now.
I do wonder why thety bother and don't just try and integrate any new ways of thinking they've come up with into pre-existing systems such as Linux or BSD.
They do try, and they have succeeded to some degree.
But that's fraught with its own problems; for example, few if any Linux programs will know anything about 9P or naming or any of that.
I'd get Dish in a heartbeat, if my landlord allowed it.
By law, your landlord has to allow it.
Since I can't use Dish, that breaks it down to Comcast or nothing.
Even if that were true, so what? Between Netflix, Amazon, and on-line video, what do you still need cable for?
In most of the areas serviced by comcast, and time warner they are the ONLY game in town.
No satellite dishes? No DSL?? No DVD rental stores??? No Netflix???? Get real!
I have Comcast for Internet access and am reasonably happy with them. I think their cable TV channels are way overpriced, so I'm not subscribing to anything there, but, then, I have never watched much cable.
So, why not just cancel? You have alternatives: DSL, satellite, OTA, other cable companies.
We live in a two-party system where one side says "We'll take all your money and give it to the welfare programs, prisons, and the poor" and the other side says "We'll take all your money and give it to the oil companies, airlines, and the telecoms". Either way, they've taken all your money.
First of all, the growth in prison populations is due primarily to Republican agenda items and so-called "law and order" candidates. The other thing Republicans love to spend money on is military contractors and suppliers.
Second, US taxes are still fairly low compared to other industrialized nations, so there is little justification for this whining.
Third, and most importantly, Democrats have historically spent considerably less money than Republicans, and what they spend money on is stuff that benefits people, including you. Yes, even "welfare" benefits you because, even if you're cynical about whether it helps people, ultimately, giving them money to keep quiet is still better than the alternatives.
So, there are clear differences between the parties and how they spend money. If you think there aren't, you haven't been doing your homework and you're part of the problem.
Only a few networks even have commentators that even discuss both sides of an issue.
Absolutely right. In fact, the media are dominated by right-wing nuts, in the guise of "conservative commentators". Liberal, left-wing, or even middle-of-the-road commentators are nearly absent.
If we let kittens walk our streets with their heads still attached, surely the terrorists have won.
Anyway, think of the children! Do you really want your children to be exposed to kitty porn and pussy on the street? Besides, those kittens have teeth, and they may be carrying rabies!
Why is anyone a "card-carrying" anything? Why don't they assess each issue and position as it arises regardless of which party is presenting it?
Thy do, it's just that the parties themselves set the agenda and support it with billions of dollars in marketing. Do you really think Americans would give beans about which orifice someone is sticking their weenie in or whether some braindead woman's life support is turned off or not? Those things have become issues because political parties made them issues, for all sorts of reasons. For example, a lot of these "issues" become issues because politicians like to distract from things that they don't know how to handle, or because they like to draw attention away from government handouts, or they like to derail legislation that would be inconvenient for their constituents or their financial supporters.
And when the debate starts and scientific opinion is brought into the debate, people with political agendas try to discredit the scientists and dig up the most obscure crackpots to provide an "alternative viewpoint".
And if all else fails, appealing to fear always works: "but think of the children", "it's for national security", and "you could be next".
(Non-American here.)
You don't seriously think that this is different anywhere else. It's the way people work the world over. Having followed European politics a little, the issues, irrationality, and fear seem to be the same, the only differences are: if it gets really dirty, they let the Americans deal with it or blame the Americans for it, and the amounts of money involved seem to be smaller.
And you see the same kind of behavior in smaller democratic organizations as well (various boards and organizations).
I think the best solution is probably devolution, free movement of people, and perhaps the creation of many more states. That way, gay marriage and physician assisted suicide can be legal in San Francisco, and school prayer, polygamy, and anti-sodomy laws can be legal in Salt Lake City.
I can't avoid getting the feeling that this would introduce the time-travel paradox issues (killing one's parents etc) or at least make reality somehow inconsistent if not for you, for multiple observers at least... loss of locality is a big thing.
;-)
There is no "loss of locality", it's just a different topology of spacetime, and there is no time travel associated with it either.
Anyway, God-like spacetime bending is magic as far as I'm concerned
I think it's good not to be prejudiced in such matters; this bending of spacetime may turn out to be impossible via any physical mechanism, or it may turn out to be possible with a simple trick. I'm just saying that there is no logical reason why it should be impossible. All we can say is that, right now, we don't have any idea how to do it. I'd say it's pretty certain that within the next 50 years, we won't be able to (because even if the necessary physics were discovered tomorrow, it would take that long for physics and engineering to catch up), but beyond that, it's anybody's guess.
Let's just say that if you want to claim that there is reason to believe it's doable in light of our current knowledge, your extraordinary claim will require extraordinary evidence
I'm not claiming it's "doable", I'm simply saying that it is compatible with GR and causality, and that no weirdness need ensue.
you aren't going to accelerate matter beyond light speed.
Of course not. We're not talking about acceleration beyond light speed, we're talking about the geometry of spacetime.
It's unlikely there be new physics that is both consistent with our current knowledge and allows FTL travel without truly weird consequences...
What weird consequences? Even our current knowledge allows FTL travel in principle; we just don't know how to manipulate spacetime to make it happen.
I think people on all sides are extrapolating too far out.
All we can say is that manned interstellar travel is practically impossible with current technologies, and that manned interplanetary travel is too expensive for colonization with current technologies. As a result, for the next several decades, we should plan on using robotic probes and telescopes and learn more about space, physics, AI, and the solar system, instead of wasting money on sending people to Mars. In a few decades, perhaps we can consider sending a robotic interstellar probe.
Long term--who knows. It may well turn out that the Oort cloud extends to the Oort cloud of neighboring star systems, in which case interstellar travel could happen over millennia as a series of short hops and colonization. And if we get fusion going, there may be enough energy all the way. Or maybe we do find a way for FTL travel. Or many other things may happen.
I don't particularly like Safari, but I think if more people use more browsers other than IE and FF, it can only be good. And I trust Apple will at least make an effort towards standards-compliance.
You sound really bitter about Solaris
Oh, and what I'm "bitter" about is the following: operating systems have become commodities. But companies like Sun (and Microsoft and Apple) simply can't deal with it. Rather than moving into other areas, they are doing everything to defend their turf. For example, the spread FUD about Linux, they create fake open source projects, and they market the hell out of unnecessary features.
I've been developing on it for about 10, so maybe I'm biased.
I've been a SunOS/Solaris user and developer for 20 years, including delivering commercial solutions on it. Until about half a dozen years ago, I was buying Sun machines by the boatload. Now, it's almost all Linux, and I'm not going back. It's not even my preference, customers just aren't asking for it anymore.
You sound really bitter about Solaris. I dunno what's up with that.
Geez, one can't win with you people. If one doesn't know Solaris, you say that one isn't qualified to comment. When one says that one has been working with Solaris, you try to characterize one as "bitter".
It's really simple: neither Sun hardware nor Sun software is competitive anymore as far as I'm concerned, and adding useless gimmicks like DTrace and ZFS or spreading FUD about supposed Linux binary incompatibilities isn't going to make either us or any of our customers want to buy Solaris machines again.