A username with a leading digit is absolutely valid. It's documented as being valid in POSIX, with explicit details about how names vs UID/GIDs are disambiguated when used as command-line arguments. It goes without saying that systemd got it completely backwards, ignoring existing standards and conventions, which is the root cause of this bug.
Use the right tool for the right job. If you care about your data and you want to use ZFS, it makes sense to use FreeBSD for its top-notch ZFS implementation. Use it when it's the best tool for the job. When I set up a home NAS I specifically went with FreeBSD because this is a genuinely excellent feature, and ZFS on Linux is not yet up to scratch in comparison. We also use it on FreeBSD VMs at work for CI and testing work where the snapshot support is worth having. But at home and work everything else is still Linux on Ubuntu, Ubuntu LTS and CentOS as appropriate; we use them rather than FreeBSD because they have features and usability which FreeBSD does not. We use ZFS on Linux where appropriate as well.
This has always been possible. You grow the storage by adding more vdevs, or by upgrading the capacity of an existing vdev. So you can start with a vdev of a single mirror, and then you can add another mirror vdev, and another... and the zpool will be striped across all the vdevs. This increases the number of iops the pool can sustain linearly with the number of vdevs. For each mirror vdev, you can swap out a disc with a larger capacity drive, resilver it and then repeat for the other drive, which will increase the capacity of that vdev; you can also do this for raid vdevs, all while online with no service interruption. While you can't remove vdevs or shrink them, both of these options provide easy means to increase the capacity of a pool.
You can absolutely do this. You create two mirrored vdevs, so that reads and writes are striped across the pair of mirrors. I have this exact setup in my home NAS; see this example for how it's set up. Note the sizes aren't strictly true for the used space since it takes compression into account; the discs are paired 1.8 and 2.7T discs; I've upgraded one pair to larger capacity drives, and I'll likely do the same for the other pair next time I upgrade it (or add a third mirror).
That would remove some of the data integrity guarantees and healing of corrupt data which ZFS provides. There are good reasons for the layered design of ZFS, and giving it full control of the underlying storage is required if you want the best performance and robustness out of it. Create a mirrored vdev like ZFS wants and you'll have a much happier experience if one of them fails. Like fast resilvering instead of a full array sync.
You can use ZFS on the root filesystem. I'm writing this on a system which has been using ZFS on root for 18 months now (since Ubuntu 16.04, upgraded through to 17.10 without a hitch).
All the common 8-bit systems had ROMs with defined entrypoints for various functions. You could even get CP/M on option ROMs IIRC. The ZX Spectrum +3/+2A had a DOS (+3DOS) with defined entry points for all disc operations, plus several other ROMs. You placed the one you wanted into the address space by bank switching, then jumped to the appropriate point.
Likewise, at my work we would be very happy to ditch the awful mac minis for VMs on our beefy ESX cluster. And we would be happy to pay for it, just as we do for other software licensing. It wouldn't even lose them money--we would still be using Macs as client systems; we would simply be using more appropriate hardware in the datacentre.
These models don't need to be "best sellers". They need to fill niches which are not filled by any of their other models.
Apple don't have a powerful and expandable system for high-end usage; none of their current offerings are good for that. Something that you can fill full of storage, GPUs and other PCI-E boards and do some serious stuff with. We'd buy them for work if they were available; we used to have several G5 towers. We also had several Xserves; if we could buy a current rackmount system we would. The mini is a desktop without a built-in display like the imac; I'd buy one if they made it a decent spec.
At work, we develop cross-platform software and struggle greatly with Mac hardware. We need CI systems and would use a rackmount of pro tower for this if one was available. We use a couple of minis on a rack shelf, but they are miserable for CPU, storage and remote management. We use MacBook pros for personal use, but they are also woeful; they are handily beaten by a Dell a quarter of the price. I spend most of my time using Linux for development as a result; you can develop on a much more capable system: huge amount of storage, and as much CPU and memory as you like, plus a decent keyboard.
Apple have badly dropped the ball here. They should be making high end systems to showcase the very best they have to offer. It doesn't matter about dedicating massive engineering resources to it; a tower is a tower, and it's not a fashion statement unlike their other models. I care more about what's inside the box.
Look at Apple's new headquarters. It's a monument to executive vanity and corporate largesse. They might have billions in the bank, but that's not necessarily a good thing. That hoarded loot pile comes at the detriment of the wider economy since it's been completely taken out of circulation. It also means they don't have a big incentive to push the boundaries and create new products, and while they slow down the pace, others will overtake them. It's not like Apple as a company are any different from the many large companies of the past which peaked and declined; it's human nature and social/economic trends which result in the same pattern over and over. They are ultimately just another company, and they will succeed or fail based upon the behaviours of their corporate executives and middle management. The quality of their software has been declining for years now, and recently the hardware quality has taken a nosedive. They are pinching pennies on their keyboards; a coworker spent over £3k on a new MacBook Pro and the keyboard keys didn't work. He's not alone, there are many accounts of the new keyboards not being able to tolerate the tiniest amount of dust. If they don't actually make hardware and software people want to use, they will end up declining pretty fast. The neglect came about due to their focus on the iPhone, but here they have relied upon the most fickle of things, fashion, to market it to the wider world. It's already become stale and boring, and it's only a matter of time before it tanks. There's only so far you can push a product like this before the world gets fed up with it, and moves onto the next fashionable thing of the moment.
As much as I loathe antivirus software, it does seem like the government pressure to ban Kaspersky is actually a huge endorsement for its effectiveness in rooting out malware. Too bad its malware the government doesn't want found, he he. Is it just me, or is the whole concept of "cyber warfare" with "cyber weapons" just plain stupid in both concept and execution?
It's all down to the culture of extreme backward compatibility, both of interfaces and implementations. Look at core applications like notepad, calculator, paint etc. as well as various explorer dialogue windows, control panel dialogues etc. None were changed since their original implementation except for the most superficial tweaks. They made zero effort to update these in line with the rest of the system, which is why the whole thing is a horrible inconsistent mess using several generations of different UI conventions and toolkits.
Another example is Visual Studio. Still a 32-bit application despite people asking for a 64-bit version for many years. They refuse to give us a 64-bit build. Why? They are arguing over the performance impact of 32-bit vs 64-bit pointers. Way to miss the wood for the trees. On Linux you have an all 64-bit distribution (with optional 32-bit libs) or all 32-bit distribution. Windows is a huge inconsistent mess, and irrespective of whether the 64-bit build of Visual Studio is slower, it makes it compatible with 64-bit libraries and extensions and all the other advantages of being 64-bit. Microsoft still don't care, but when Visual Studio crashes every few minutes due to exceeding the memory limits of a 32-bit address space, enough is enough. Should be a no-brainer, but still we suffer... Make the whole thing 64-bit, make all your applications 64-bit, and let us move on with our lives!
They definitely should. But they intentionally made ARM a second class platform by locking it down to only use store apps, as well as locking out other OSes from the UEFI BIOS, etc. If they wanted it to be adopted, they should have given us reasons to want to use it, rather than reasons to avoid it. I wouldn't have minded using and developing on ARM. But a locked down system which is only useful for a small number of apps, and which I can't also boost with FreeBSD or Linux, is a system I won't be bothering with.
The problem is that they are still trying to lock people in. If they wanted everyone to switch to UWP (the new universal runtime) then they shouldn't have locked it down to apps using the store. The should have made it easy to use and adopt, rather than giving people good reasons not to use it, solely because they wanted to strong-arm developers into using the store. Talk about shooting themselves in the foot!
There's an element of truth to it. If I want to interact with any project which is on github, I'm coerced into joining that ecosystem whether or not I want to. Just like I might be coerced to join Facebook by friends using it.
I've been reading for 20 years now (!). While I still follow slashdot, it's no longer the go-to place for interesting tech stories and discussion. I make the occasional comment, but all to often I end up thinking, what's the point? Slashdot did always have a mixture of topics, but it seems to have become increasingly general over time; politics in particular is something of little interest to me; there are far better sites if you care about that.
I now look at hacker news, specific subreddits, soylent news and a few others. I'd have to say, I'm still looking for something as great as slashdot in the late '90s. Hacker news is often too oriented around silicon valley venture capital-funded startup culture, but still covers contemporary topics. There are plenty of interesting and friendly subreddits, but you have to be aware of which ones are worth the time to subscribe to. Some are excellent, and have lots of the key people in their field as active participants, which makes them valuable resources. soylent is around equivalent to slashdot but has less comments (not necessarily a bad thing, so long as the quality is high).
The major change to my mind is that slashdot is where you used to get insightful opinions from key people in the tech world, from free software hackers to all sorts of other people who had valuable things to say. That's no longer the case for the most part, many of them moved elsewhere; you have to wade through a lot of ill-informed anonymous trolling to see the odd diamond in the rough.
I saw Ep1 last night (legally, on Netflix). Nice CGI, but the rest of it was largely terrible. Unsure I'll bother with Ep2, or anything after. Crap plot, crap characterisation, crap acting.
Compare this with the new Expanse (which also had its flaws), only one is really Science Fiction, and that would be the Expanse hands down. Looking forward to the third series, but I really don't care to see anything more of "STD".
Very interesting, thanks.
For those thinking that the XBox controller is "pretty good", consider that this is a relative assessment relative to other gaming controllers. It's a cheap mass-produced piece of plastic with cheap internals. It's OK for gaming, but objectively look at the sensitivity and accuracy of the thumbsticks and triggers and you'll see it's objectively quite poor. If you were to use the equivalents in industrial controllers and machine control panels, you would see a huge difference. Robust and weighty parts machined with tight tolerances which are silky smooth to operate, and correctly calibrated as well. Today's consumer electronics are simply not at that level.
Err, yes. If it's stated exactly like that as a fact, and has a reference to a scientific paper to back it up (which it did, earlier in the text), then it's disapassionately objective, not sexist. That's your biased and unfair interpretation of what you thought was written, not what was actually written down.
And yes, I did read the entirety of the text, and the critiques of it by several neuroscientists and psychologists, who confirmed the scientific understanding was pretty much accurate.
"Sexist" is a perjorative term, and unless you can read and understand what scientific objectivity is, there's really not much further to discuss here.
Slashdot Mirror
A username with a leading digit is absolutely valid. It's documented as being valid in POSIX, with explicit details about how names vs UID/GIDs are disambiguated when used as command-line arguments. It goes without saying that systemd got it completely backwards, ignoring existing standards and conventions, which is the root cause of this bug.
All the Scottish power reactors have graphite cores, actually. They are CO2-cooled graphite-moderated AGRs, a much safer design than BWRs.
shared_ptr doesn't actually need multiple objects. Take a look at make_shared, which does a single allocation.
Use the right tool for the right job. If you care about your data and you want to use ZFS, it makes sense to use FreeBSD for its top-notch ZFS implementation. Use it when it's the best tool for the job. When I set up a home NAS I specifically went with FreeBSD because this is a genuinely excellent feature, and ZFS on Linux is not yet up to scratch in comparison. We also use it on FreeBSD VMs at work for CI and testing work where the snapshot support is worth having. But at home and work everything else is still Linux on Ubuntu, Ubuntu LTS and CentOS as appropriate; we use them rather than FreeBSD because they have features and usability which FreeBSD does not. We use ZFS on Linux where appropriate as well.
This has always been possible. You grow the storage by adding more vdevs, or by upgrading the capacity of an existing vdev. So you can start with a vdev of a single mirror, and then you can add another mirror vdev, and another... and the zpool will be striped across all the vdevs. This increases the number of iops the pool can sustain linearly with the number of vdevs. For each mirror vdev, you can swap out a disc with a larger capacity drive, resilver it and then repeat for the other drive, which will increase the capacity of that vdev; you can also do this for raid vdevs, all while online with no service interruption. While you can't remove vdevs or shrink them, both of these options provide easy means to increase the capacity of a pool.
You can absolutely do this. You create two mirrored vdevs, so that reads and writes are striped across the pair of mirrors. I have this exact setup in my home NAS; see this example for how it's set up. Note the sizes aren't strictly true for the used space since it takes compression into account; the discs are paired 1.8 and 2.7T discs; I've upgraded one pair to larger capacity drives, and I'll likely do the same for the other pair next time I upgrade it (or add a third mirror).
That would remove some of the data integrity guarantees and healing of corrupt data which ZFS provides. There are good reasons for the layered design of ZFS, and giving it full control of the underlying storage is required if you want the best performance and robustness out of it. Create a mirrored vdev like ZFS wants and you'll have a much happier experience if one of them fails. Like fast resilvering instead of a full array sync.
You can use ZFS on the root filesystem. I'm writing this on a system which has been using ZFS on root for 18 months now (since Ubuntu 16.04, upgraded through to 17.10 without a hitch).
All the common 8-bit systems had ROMs with defined entrypoints for various functions. You could even get CP/M on option ROMs IIRC. The ZX Spectrum +3/+2A had a DOS (+3DOS) with defined entry points for all disc operations, plus several other ROMs. You placed the one you wanted into the address space by bank switching, then jumped to the appropriate point.
They can do free direct delivery. But only once.
Likewise, at my work we would be very happy to ditch the awful mac minis for VMs on our beefy ESX cluster. And we would be happy to pay for it, just as we do for other software licensing. It wouldn't even lose them money--we would still be using Macs as client systems; we would simply be using more appropriate hardware in the datacentre.
These models don't need to be "best sellers". They need to fill niches which are not filled by any of their other models. Apple don't have a powerful and expandable system for high-end usage; none of their current offerings are good for that. Something that you can fill full of storage, GPUs and other PCI-E boards and do some serious stuff with. We'd buy them for work if they were available; we used to have several G5 towers. We also had several Xserves; if we could buy a current rackmount system we would. The mini is a desktop without a built-in display like the imac; I'd buy one if they made it a decent spec. At work, we develop cross-platform software and struggle greatly with Mac hardware. We need CI systems and would use a rackmount of pro tower for this if one was available. We use a couple of minis on a rack shelf, but they are miserable for CPU, storage and remote management. We use MacBook pros for personal use, but they are also woeful; they are handily beaten by a Dell a quarter of the price. I spend most of my time using Linux for development as a result; you can develop on a much more capable system: huge amount of storage, and as much CPU and memory as you like, plus a decent keyboard. Apple have badly dropped the ball here. They should be making high end systems to showcase the very best they have to offer. It doesn't matter about dedicating massive engineering resources to it; a tower is a tower, and it's not a fashion statement unlike their other models. I care more about what's inside the box.
Look at Apple's new headquarters. It's a monument to executive vanity and corporate largesse. They might have billions in the bank, but that's not necessarily a good thing. That hoarded loot pile comes at the detriment of the wider economy since it's been completely taken out of circulation. It also means they don't have a big incentive to push the boundaries and create new products, and while they slow down the pace, others will overtake them. It's not like Apple as a company are any different from the many large companies of the past which peaked and declined; it's human nature and social/economic trends which result in the same pattern over and over. They are ultimately just another company, and they will succeed or fail based upon the behaviours of their corporate executives and middle management. The quality of their software has been declining for years now, and recently the hardware quality has taken a nosedive. They are pinching pennies on their keyboards; a coworker spent over £3k on a new MacBook Pro and the keyboard keys didn't work. He's not alone, there are many accounts of the new keyboards not being able to tolerate the tiniest amount of dust. If they don't actually make hardware and software people want to use, they will end up declining pretty fast. The neglect came about due to their focus on the iPhone, but here they have relied upon the most fickle of things, fashion, to market it to the wider world. It's already become stale and boring, and it's only a matter of time before it tanks. There's only so far you can push a product like this before the world gets fed up with it, and moves onto the next fashionable thing of the moment.
As much as I loathe antivirus software, it does seem like the government pressure to ban Kaspersky is actually a huge endorsement for its effectiveness in rooting out malware. Too bad its malware the government doesn't want found, he he. Is it just me, or is the whole concept of "cyber warfare" with "cyber weapons" just plain stupid in both concept and execution?
There's always the option of FreeBSD, or one of the other BSDs.
It's all down to the culture of extreme backward compatibility, both of interfaces and implementations. Look at core applications like notepad, calculator, paint etc. as well as various explorer dialogue windows, control panel dialogues etc. None were changed since their original implementation except for the most superficial tweaks. They made zero effort to update these in line with the rest of the system, which is why the whole thing is a horrible inconsistent mess using several generations of different UI conventions and toolkits. Another example is Visual Studio. Still a 32-bit application despite people asking for a 64-bit version for many years. They refuse to give us a 64-bit build. Why? They are arguing over the performance impact of 32-bit vs 64-bit pointers. Way to miss the wood for the trees. On Linux you have an all 64-bit distribution (with optional 32-bit libs) or all 32-bit distribution. Windows is a huge inconsistent mess, and irrespective of whether the 64-bit build of Visual Studio is slower, it makes it compatible with 64-bit libraries and extensions and all the other advantages of being 64-bit. Microsoft still don't care, but when Visual Studio crashes every few minutes due to exceeding the memory limits of a 32-bit address space, enough is enough. Should be a no-brainer, but still we suffer... Make the whole thing 64-bit, make all your applications 64-bit, and let us move on with our lives!
They definitely should. But they intentionally made ARM a second class platform by locking it down to only use store apps, as well as locking out other OSes from the UEFI BIOS, etc. If they wanted it to be adopted, they should have given us reasons to want to use it, rather than reasons to avoid it. I wouldn't have minded using and developing on ARM. But a locked down system which is only useful for a small number of apps, and which I can't also boost with FreeBSD or Linux, is a system I won't be bothering with.
The problem is that they are still trying to lock people in. If they wanted everyone to switch to UWP (the new universal runtime) then they shouldn't have locked it down to apps using the store. The should have made it easy to use and adopt, rather than giving people good reasons not to use it, solely because they wanted to strong-arm developers into using the store. Talk about shooting themselves in the foot!
There's an element of truth to it. If I want to interact with any project which is on github, I'm coerced into joining that ecosystem whether or not I want to. Just like I might be coerced to join Facebook by friends using it.
I've been reading for 20 years now (!). While I still follow slashdot, it's no longer the go-to place for interesting tech stories and discussion. I make the occasional comment, but all to often I end up thinking, what's the point? Slashdot did always have a mixture of topics, but it seems to have become increasingly general over time; politics in particular is something of little interest to me; there are far better sites if you care about that. I now look at hacker news, specific subreddits, soylent news and a few others. I'd have to say, I'm still looking for something as great as slashdot in the late '90s. Hacker news is often too oriented around silicon valley venture capital-funded startup culture, but still covers contemporary topics. There are plenty of interesting and friendly subreddits, but you have to be aware of which ones are worth the time to subscribe to. Some are excellent, and have lots of the key people in their field as active participants, which makes them valuable resources. soylent is around equivalent to slashdot but has less comments (not necessarily a bad thing, so long as the quality is high). The major change to my mind is that slashdot is where you used to get insightful opinions from key people in the tech world, from free software hackers to all sorts of other people who had valuable things to say. That's no longer the case for the most part, many of them moved elsewhere; you have to wade through a lot of ill-informed anonymous trolling to see the odd diamond in the rough.
I saw Ep1 last night (legally, on Netflix). Nice CGI, but the rest of it was largely terrible. Unsure I'll bother with Ep2, or anything after. Crap plot, crap characterisation, crap acting. Compare this with the new Expanse (which also had its flaws), only one is really Science Fiction, and that would be the Expanse hands down. Looking forward to the third series, but I really don't care to see anything more of "STD".
Very interesting, thanks. For those thinking that the XBox controller is "pretty good", consider that this is a relative assessment relative to other gaming controllers. It's a cheap mass-produced piece of plastic with cheap internals. It's OK for gaming, but objectively look at the sensitivity and accuracy of the thumbsticks and triggers and you'll see it's objectively quite poor. If you were to use the equivalents in industrial controllers and machine control panels, you would see a huge difference. Robust and weighty parts machined with tight tolerances which are silky smooth to operate, and correctly calibrated as well. Today's consumer electronics are simply not at that level.
Maybe in the USA. I was referring to UK law, where statutory rights can not be removed by contract law.
You can't waive statutory rights; you have them irrespective of any contract, and it's illegal for a company to ignore them.
Err, yes. If it's stated exactly like that as a fact, and has a reference to a scientific paper to back it up (which it did, earlier in the text), then it's disapassionately objective, not sexist. That's your biased and unfair interpretation of what you thought was written, not what was actually written down. And yes, I did read the entirety of the text, and the critiques of it by several neuroscientists and psychologists, who confirmed the scientific understanding was pretty much accurate. "Sexist" is a perjorative term, and unless you can read and understand what scientific objectivity is, there's really not much further to discuss here.