IT develops in a spiral, with old ideas being re-introduced in new and better ways every few years. Sure, remote hosting has existed a long time, and virtualization was invented more than 40 years ago.
So what is new about cloud computing? The idea that a virtualized guest can run on any server, anywhere in the cloud. If you boot up an EC2 instance, you neither know nor care what the underlying hardware is, or whether it is in California or Timbuktu. In fact, one day your instance may be in one data center, and another day somewhere else entirely. With live migration, it is even possible for an instance to move from one host to another while running.
This degree of dynamic resource allocation is entirely new. It is made possible by (a) some pretty snazzy virtualization technology (Xen & co), plus (b) the hardware support (virtualization extensions) built into Intel and AMD processors since 2006.
Shockingly, I know, but I actually went and read your bug reports. You were specifically asked to file separate bug reports for separate issues. The original report was closed on the assumption that you would do so.
Whether that is a good approach or not? One can debate that. But you were not ignored...
There's a bunch of countries out there where if you get admitted into a university, the government picks up the tuition bill, period. Those countries ain't richer than the USA.
Sure there are. There are differences though. Speaking for the country I am in, anyone can go attend lectures, almost for free. Fine. But:
We don't have the culture you seem to have developed, where bloody everyone tries to go to college. Your gardener, carpenter, clerk, etc. do not need a college degree.
No one pays you to live while you're going to school.
After a couple of semesters there is a selection process. If you don't make the cut, you must leave.
Why are tuition rates so high in the US? Economics 101: Supply and demand. Everyone in the US has this delusion that they need to go to college. Half of them study some useless liberal arts field that will leave them flipping hamburgers to pay off their debts.
It's outrageous that the people the government and banks should be supporting - those who spend nearly a decade earning an advanced education - are being fleeced left and right.
Nice sense of entitlement there. Just why should the government support you? Being a student is great fun - I spent a lot of time as a student. That doesn't mean that I think anyone but me should have paid for it.
Get a grant. Failing that, get a part-time job. If that doesn't work, go work a few years and then go back to school.
My favorite teacher in school, a physics guy, loved to play poker in Vegas. He lost, of course. But he played blackjack and won - after every Vegas vacation, he came home happy: he had funded his poker losses from the blackjack table, and came home neither richer nor poorer. He never did tell us how he did it, but it involved some pattern in his betting and he must have counted cards. He probably never ran afoul of the burly guys simply because he never got greedy.
As always, it is unclear just what they consider "pirated". For example, if your company purchases 100% legitimate software via eBay, the BSA will not accept this as your software during an audit. They refuse to accept any and all eBay receipts. Hence, it is quite likely that they have counted all purchases via auction sites as pirated, even though this is clearly not true.
This is only one of many "rules" they apply that make little or no sense. Did you know that possessing the complete packaging of a program, including the original CD/DVD and the enclosed license certificate is, according to the BSA, not proof of ownership? You must have an original receipt, with the company (or individual) name correctly spelled, which explicitly lists the product and version.
The BSA may once have been a way to combat piracy'it has evolved into a monstrosity. Microsoft, Adobe and the other companies should terminate their relationships with it and start over.
I am just getting into the Penumbra series. It is very well done, and quite unusual: you are not some sort of sword-wielding superhero, but just an ordinary, unskilled guy. About the best you can do is to throw rocks, and you aren't even very good at that.
But: getting it to run is a bit of a pain. In my case (Ubuntu 9.04), I had to switch to the proprietary Nvidia driver. Which, when installed, killed the system (problems with permissions on/tmp). And then one must manually disable the screensaver through the system configuration tool (or gconf-edit) - apparently just the periodic idle-check interferes with the game.
After all that pain, the game runs well, and looks to be very immersive and a lot of fun.
Normal people not only don't care - they have no idea there is even a choice. Talk to a non-technical person. If you are lucky, they may have heard the name Firefox, and still have no idea what it is. If they do no, as likely as not, they think it is also a Microsoft product.
"International travel to the U.S. declined by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2009 according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. To lure visitors back, U.S. Travel has been pushing the Travel Promotion Act, which recently was passed in the Senate and is awaiting action in the House, to create a campaign to strengthen the image of the United States abroad."
The US has just announced a $10 fee that any visitor to the US must pay to enter the country. This is to be used to fund an internation publicity campaign. Putting two-and-two together, I assume this is the campaign that the fee is going to.
Putting bills into version control would make sense - if one wanted people to be able to check the contents. In fact, most bills contain numerous special-interest amendments that are intended to sail through without any undue notice. If the legislators themselves are neither willing nor able to read the legislation they pass - let's just say that this is a giant clue as to the state of our governmental system. In fact, changes are generally made to a bill up until a few hours before the vote, meaning that - even if they wanted to - legislators could not possibly be aware of the exact contents.
The best thing Congress could do to remedy the situation would be to require the text of any bill to be finalized and made available to the public two weeks before it is voted on.
I think you are misunderstanding the problem. I live in Europe, and see the streams of "refugees" coming in. The problem is this: someone shows up on your border, with no papers or documentation of any kind, and says "Help me! I need refuge!".
You ask them why. They say "I am from country XXX, it is terrible there".
Did they truly flee from some horrible fate? Possible. It is also possible that they are from somewhere else entirely, and just looking for any way to get into the land of milk and honey. Where - having few useful skills and less education - they will probably spend the rest of their lives living on welfare.
Right now, the main technique is a series of interviews. What language do they speak? This requires access to a huge supply of interpreters. Then you ask them general knowledge questions, like "what's the name of your capital ciety". All of this is time-consuming, expensive and extremely error-prone. If they speak some European language, they may be able to avoid using their native language. They may have been prepped with general information. Or they may be genuine refugees with no education and hence may really not know the name of the capital city.
It is no wonder at all that governments are looking for additional ways to check identity. Such a test could never be definitive, but it would be one more piece of evidence. You can also see this in a positive light: assuming that the tests are halfway reliable, if they show the person really is from war-torn Elbonia, you can short-circuit the whole frustrating interview and testing process.
The problem with any sort of TCO study always comes down to two things:
Personnel costs. Personnel costs are higher than software costs. If changing to OSS means that you have to pay for more admin time, then your software savings will be eaten up by salaries. Much as I like Linux, the fact is that Windows AD/GPO tools are more usable "out of the box". To get anything equivalent with Linux does cost you those additional salaries.
Legacy software. One widely-used, legacy application that won't run under Linux, and the costs aren't even a factor anymore. Terminal server, or other kludged solutions are not user friendly. Reimplementing the legacy app is too expensive.
Use Linux when you can, Windows when you have to. Unfortunately, you usually have to...
"Genuine democracy does not scale with current population levels. As someone else here said, the American Constitution was originally written for a population of 3 million..."
This is a very important point, and very often overlooked. In Switzerland, with a population of less than 8 million, democracy still works very well indeed. Other European countries, with sizes of 40, 50 or 80 million, begin to suffer from domination by a political elite (For the most egregious example, look at Italy). Scale up to the size of the USA, and the politicians no longer have any real connection to their districts or the people they represent. Candidates and election outcomes are largely scripted - through the media and by who gets the campaign money - or else two "competing" candidates are put up, both of whom are acceptable to the political machine.
Government becomes too remote for the average person to feel like they can change anything. An earlier post here gave a wonderful example of local democracy in action. But it was local democracy in a town whose population probably numbered in the thousands. That sort of grassroots effort on a national scale is very, very difficult.
The simple-but-dramatic solution: there should be a recognized right of secession. Communities should have the right to decide whether or not they wish to belong to a larger political entity. If they feel poorly served, they can go it alone, or agree to join some other political entity (Canada? Germany? Swaziland?).
Also a matter of opinion. IE5 had some nifty features, but was pretty far along in the second phase of Microsoft's standard "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy: it broke with established web standards in a major way. Because it was delivered with Windows, companies used it. They therefore built Intranet sites that didn't work with Netscape. The next step was extinguish, which worked pretty well until Firefox came along.
So, yes, IE5 was nifty. And anyone who cared about the future of the Internet at the time rightly detested it.
Remember the Sony statements from 2000: ""The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user."
In 2005, Sony came out with their rootkit. This was met with less-than-wild enthusiasm (plus a few lawsuits).
So in 2009, the industry takes a new approach: owning your cellphone.
This will continue until they have either (a) gotten the technology through one way or another or (b) pissed their customers off enough to put themselves out of business. Sadly, given pliant politicians, the odds favor (a).
Microsoft sees Google as a major competitor. As such, it is only logical that they would attack something like this that will give Google a substantial competitive advantage. I hope the court will see it in that light...
any (legal) copyright protection removed for any material that has DRM. You, author, want to break the deal with customers and with general public by not giving them all the rights they have (via technological means). FINE. There's no deal then. No (legal) copyright protection
Reading about his experience, Rowan Trollope has done real, solid technical work - back in the days when Symantec products (like Norton Utilities) were actually worth having. Given that, it is really hard to understand how he can say something like "clean up the Internet".
The Intenet is real life, with easier anonymity. If we can't clean criminals out of ordinary cities, how in the world does he suppose we will clean them out of the Internet?
Guess what, there are kids who want to be anywhere but in the classroom. They pay no attention, and do their best to keep other kids from paying attention. Why these kids are this way - that is a completely different topic. Whatever the reason, they exist and they deserve to fail as early and as hard as you can make it happen - get them the hell out of the way of the other kids.
Then there are the kids who have reached their limits. Perhaps not in primary school, but as soon as you hit harder courses around grade 7 and up, the left-hand side of the bell-curve ought not be able to keep up. They ought to be steered towards vocational education. Of course, that would be politically incorrect, so instead the whole system is dumbed down - which is why many/.ers found school so boring...
You have to account for both the child's ability and the child's own motivation. If we take this "unschooling" as a serious suggestion, it will surely only work for children who are both very intelligent and very motivated. Even then, some gruntwork is inescapable. Multiplication tables, foreign language vocabulary, etc - such things require memorization.
For the vast majority of children, unschooling will lead to uneducated adults. Just what we need more of...
The truth is, the people putting "unschooling" forward are dissatisfied with public schools - and unwilling to invest the massive effort required by effective home schooling. They then want to pretend that their children will magically absorb knowledge...
As I recall, there were three competing architectures. And things worked out as they usually do:
The National Semiconductor chips like the 32032: a clean architecture, consistent and well-designed instruction set. Good engineering, lousy marketing, sank without a trace.
The Motorola chips beginning withthe 6502 and later the 68000 stuff: acceptable architecture, decent but somewhat messy instruction set. Not great, but ok. Lived on as second-best.
And, of course, the Intel 80xx series: kludged archtecture, inconsistent and awkward instruction set. Poor engineering but good marketing. Of course, these are the chips that went on to dominate the industry.
If the US does not act to reduce the 'carbon footprint' of humanity, we are all going to be fucked.
Why? Who sold you a bridge?
One of the absolute facts that the media never bothers to mention is this: carbon dioxide has one primary role in the eco-system, more important than any other. It is plant food. Fertilizer.
If you were able to drop CO2 levels back to preindustrial levels, the single most noticeable effect would be a drop in crop yields of between 20 and 25%, depending on crop and climate. Grains growing in drier climates (Australia, much of the US midwest) seem to benefit the most. Fruits and vegetables somewhat less.
The fact is that CO2 levels are at or near historical lows, if you view them on geological time scales. For most of the earths history, CO2 levels were much higher. Not a wimpy 20% or 50% but dozens to hundreds of times higher. The contribution of mankind to CO2 levels is a sneeze on the breeze compared to natural changes. Mankind is just not that significant.
Yes, me too: sick of people who won't listen to science, and instead listen to the media and the so-called scientists who support the consensus so that they can get their grant money.
For an overview of the overwhelming evidence against the so-called consensus, see this presentation by Burt Rutan. Pay particular attention to the part where he talks about the deliberate falsification of data by the "scientists" who support the global warming consensus.
Of course, a trial only makes sense if the objectivity of the judge could somehow be assured.
This is not a troll. If you haven't even looked into the science, or even read that presentation, then maybe you should...
...is the fact that big corporations find it necessary to put absurd numbers of minorities into their marketing photos. If you were to believe the marketing literature, the logical conclusion would be that white males are rapidly becoming extinct.
Slashdot Mirror
IT develops in a spiral, with old ideas being re-introduced in new and better ways every few years. Sure, remote hosting has existed a long time, and virtualization was invented more than 40 years ago.
So what is new about cloud computing? The idea that a virtualized guest can run on any server, anywhere in the cloud. If you boot up an EC2 instance, you neither know nor care what the underlying hardware is, or whether it is in California or Timbuktu. In fact, one day your instance may be in one data center, and another day somewhere else entirely. With live migration, it is even possible for an instance to move from one host to another while running.
This degree of dynamic resource allocation is entirely new. It is made possible by (a) some pretty snazzy virtualization technology (Xen & co), plus (b) the hardware support (virtualization extensions) built into Intel and AMD processors since 2006.
My idea is to create an adblocker for advertising in operating systems.
Shockingly, I know, but I actually went and read your bug reports. You were specifically asked to file separate bug reports for separate issues. The original report was closed on the assumption that you would do so. Whether that is a good approach or not? One can debate that. But you were not ignored...
There's a bunch of countries out there where if you get admitted into a university, the government picks up the tuition bill, period. Those countries ain't richer than the USA.
Sure there are. There are differences though. Speaking for the country I am in, anyone can go attend lectures, almost for free. Fine. But:
Why are tuition rates so high in the US? Economics 101: Supply and demand. Everyone in the US has this delusion that they need to go to college. Half of them study some useless liberal arts field that will leave them flipping hamburgers to pay off their debts.
It's outrageous that the people the government and banks should be supporting - those who spend nearly a decade earning an advanced education - are being fleeced left and right.
Nice sense of entitlement there. Just why should the government support you? Being a student is great fun - I spent a lot of time as a student. That doesn't mean that I think anyone but me should have paid for it.
Get a grant. Failing that, get a part-time job. If that doesn't work, go work a few years and then go back to school.
My favorite teacher in school, a physics guy, loved to play poker in Vegas. He lost, of course. But he played blackjack and won - after every Vegas vacation, he came home happy: he had funded his poker losses from the blackjack table, and came home neither richer nor poorer. He never did tell us how he did it, but it involved some pattern in his betting and he must have counted cards. He probably never ran afoul of the burly guys simply because he never got greedy.
As always, it is unclear just what they consider "pirated". For example, if your company purchases 100% legitimate software via eBay, the BSA will not accept this as your software during an audit. They refuse to accept any and all eBay receipts. Hence, it is quite likely that they have counted all purchases via auction sites as pirated, even though this is clearly not true.
This is only one of many "rules" they apply that make little or no sense. Did you know that possessing the complete packaging of a program, including the original CD/DVD and the enclosed license certificate is, according to the BSA, not proof of ownership? You must have an original receipt, with the company (or individual) name correctly spelled, which explicitly lists the product and version.
The BSA may once have been a way to combat piracy'it has evolved into a monstrosity. Microsoft, Adobe and the other companies should terminate their relationships with it and start over.
I am just getting into the Penumbra series. It is very well done, and quite unusual: you are not some sort of sword-wielding superhero, but just an ordinary, unskilled guy. About the best you can do is to throw rocks, and you aren't even very good at that.
But: getting it to run is a bit of a pain. In my case (Ubuntu 9.04), I had to switch to the proprietary Nvidia driver. Which, when installed, killed the system (problems with permissions on /tmp). And then one must manually disable the screensaver through the system configuration tool (or gconf-edit) - apparently just the periodic idle-check interferes with the game.
After all that pain, the game runs well, and looks to be very immersive and a lot of fun.
Normal people not only don't care - they have no idea there is even a choice. Talk to a non-technical person. If you are lucky, they may have heard the name Firefox, and still have no idea what it is. If they do no, as likely as not, they think it is also a Microsoft product.
"International travel to the U.S. declined by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2009 according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. To lure visitors back, U.S. Travel has been pushing the Travel Promotion Act, which recently was passed in the Senate and is awaiting action in the House, to create a campaign to strengthen the image of the United States abroad."
The US has just announced a $10 fee that any visitor to the US must pay to enter the country. This is to be used to fund an internation publicity campaign. Putting two-and-two together, I assume this is the campaign that the fee is going to.
Draw footgun, fire!
Putting bills into version control would make sense - if one wanted people to be able to check the contents. In fact, most bills contain numerous special-interest amendments that are intended to sail through without any undue notice. If the legislators themselves are neither willing nor able to read the legislation they pass - let's just say that this is a giant clue as to the state of our governmental system. In fact, changes are generally made to a bill up until a few hours before the vote, meaning that - even if they wanted to - legislators could not possibly be aware of the exact contents.
The best thing Congress could do to remedy the situation would be to require the text of any bill to be finalized and made available to the public two weeks before it is voted on.
I think you are misunderstanding the problem. I live in Europe, and see the streams of "refugees" coming in. The problem is this: someone shows up on your border, with no papers or documentation of any kind, and says "Help me! I need refuge!". You ask them why. They say "I am from country XXX, it is terrible there". Did they truly flee from some horrible fate? Possible. It is also possible that they are from somewhere else entirely, and just looking for any way to get into the land of milk and honey. Where - having few useful skills and less education - they will probably spend the rest of their lives living on welfare. Right now, the main technique is a series of interviews. What language do they speak? This requires access to a huge supply of interpreters. Then you ask them general knowledge questions, like "what's the name of your capital ciety". All of this is time-consuming, expensive and extremely error-prone. If they speak some European language, they may be able to avoid using their native language. They may have been prepped with general information. Or they may be genuine refugees with no education and hence may really not know the name of the capital city. It is no wonder at all that governments are looking for additional ways to check identity. Such a test could never be definitive, but it would be one more piece of evidence. You can also see this in a positive light: assuming that the tests are halfway reliable, if they show the person really is from war-torn Elbonia, you can short-circuit the whole frustrating interview and testing process.
The problem with any sort of TCO study always comes down to two things:
Use Linux when you can, Windows when you have to. Unfortunately, you usually have to...
"Genuine democracy does not scale with current population levels. As someone else here said, the American Constitution was originally written for a population of 3 million..."
This is a very important point, and very often overlooked. In Switzerland, with a population of less than 8 million, democracy still works very well indeed. Other European countries, with sizes of 40, 50 or 80 million, begin to suffer from domination by a political elite (For the most egregious example, look at Italy). Scale up to the size of the USA, and the politicians no longer have any real connection to their districts or the people they represent. Candidates and election outcomes are largely scripted - through the media and by who gets the campaign money - or else two "competing" candidates are put up, both of whom are acceptable to the political machine.
Government becomes too remote for the average person to feel like they can change anything. An earlier post here gave a wonderful example of local democracy in action. But it was local democracy in a town whose population probably numbered in the thousands. That sort of grassroots effort on a national scale is very, very difficult.
The simple-but-dramatic solution: there should be a recognized right of secession. Communities should have the right to decide whether or not they wish to belong to a larger political entity. If they feel poorly served, they can go it alone, or agree to join some other political entity (Canada? Germany? Swaziland?).
Also a matter of opinion. IE5 had some nifty features, but was pretty far along in the second phase of Microsoft's standard "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy: it broke with established web standards in a major way. Because it was delivered with Windows, companies used it. They therefore built Intranet sites that didn't work with Netscape. The next step was extinguish, which worked pretty well until Firefox came along. So, yes, IE5 was nifty. And anyone who cared about the future of the Internet at the time rightly detested it.
Remember the Sony statements from 2000: ""The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user."
In 2005, Sony came out with their rootkit. This was met with less-than-wild enthusiasm (plus a few lawsuits).
So in 2009, the industry takes a new approach: owning your cellphone.
This will continue until they have either (a) gotten the technology through one way or another or (b) pissed their customers off enough to put themselves out of business. Sadly, given pliant politicians, the odds favor (a).
Microsoft sees Google as a major competitor. As such, it is only logical that they would attack something like this that will give Google a substantial competitive advantage. I hope the court will see it in that light...
any (legal) copyright protection removed for any material that has DRM. You, author, want to break the deal with customers and with general public by not giving them all the rights they have (via technological means). FINE. There's no deal then. No (legal) copyright protection
Yes.
Reading about his experience, Rowan Trollope has done real, solid technical work - back in the days when Symantec products (like Norton Utilities) were actually worth having. Given that, it is really hard to understand how he can say something like "clean up the Internet". The Intenet is real life, with easier anonymity. If we can't clean criminals out of ordinary cities, how in the world does he suppose we will clean them out of the Internet?
"No child fails, the teacher fails the child."
Haven't taught children, have you?
Guess what, there are kids who want to be anywhere but in the classroom. They pay no attention, and do their best to keep other kids from paying attention. Why these kids are this way - that is a completely different topic. Whatever the reason, they exist and they deserve to fail as early and as hard as you can make it happen - get them the hell out of the way of the other kids.
Then there are the kids who have reached their limits. Perhaps not in primary school, but as soon as you hit harder courses around grade 7 and up, the left-hand side of the bell-curve ought not be able to keep up. They ought to be steered towards vocational education. Of course, that would be politically incorrect, so instead the whole system is dumbed down - which is why many /.ers found school so boring...
You have to account for both the child's ability and the child's own motivation. If we take this "unschooling" as a serious suggestion, it will surely only work for children who are both very intelligent and very motivated. Even then, some gruntwork is inescapable. Multiplication tables, foreign language vocabulary, etc - such things require memorization.
For the vast majority of children, unschooling will lead to uneducated adults. Just what we need more of...
The truth is, the people putting "unschooling" forward are dissatisfied with public schools - and unwilling to invest the massive effort required by effective home schooling. They then want to pretend that their children will magically absorb knowledge...
As I recall, there were three competing architectures. And things worked out as they usually do:
If the US does not act to reduce the 'carbon footprint' of humanity, we are all going to be fucked.
Why? Who sold you a bridge?
One of the absolute facts that the media never bothers to mention is this: carbon dioxide has one primary role in the eco-system, more important than any other. It is plant food. Fertilizer.
If you were able to drop CO2 levels back to preindustrial levels, the single most noticeable effect would be a drop in crop yields of between 20 and 25%, depending on crop and climate. Grains growing in drier climates (Australia, much of the US midwest) seem to benefit the most. Fruits and vegetables somewhat less.
The fact is that CO2 levels are at or near historical lows, if you view them on geological time scales. For most of the earths history, CO2 levels were much higher. Not a wimpy 20% or 50% but dozens to hundreds of times higher. The contribution of mankind to CO2 levels is a sneeze on the breeze compared to natural changes. Mankind is just not that significant.
Yes, me too: sick of people who won't listen to science, and instead listen to the media and the so-called scientists who support the consensus so that they can get their grant money.
For an overview of the overwhelming evidence against the so-called consensus, see this presentation by Burt Rutan. Pay particular attention to the part where he talks about the deliberate falsification of data by the "scientists" who support the global warming consensus.
Of course, a trial only makes sense if the objectivity of the judge could somehow be assured.
This is not a troll. If you haven't even looked into the science, or even read that presentation, then maybe you should...
...is the fact that big corporations find it necessary to put absurd numbers of minorities into their marketing photos. If you were to believe the marketing literature, the logical conclusion would be that white males are rapidly becoming extinct.