P2P file-sharing isn't against copyright law. Sharing copyrighted files, via a P2P file-sharing program, without the copyright owner's permission is against copyright law.
Careful yourself! Non-commercial redistribution has always been permitted under fair use. If I understand the situation, the extent to which you can redistribute copyrighted content electronically online remains as yet undefined in most countries. P2P sharing of copyrighted files without permission isn't necessarily against copyright law.
People who can't comprehend why the RIAA keeps alienating their customer base by suing them into oblivion are missing this fundamental piece which is the motivation behind the whole thing. The RIAA is essentially trying to convince the general public that this behavior is illegal when it's legality is still very much in question by repeating the same scenario of lawsuit and settlement over and over. "Why would they settle and pay big money if they did nothing wrong?" Repetition makes things sink in and by having story after story in the press about someone getting sued and settling they build de-facto legal precedent and change public opinion.
If you remember, they tried this tactic in France recently and it backfired. The judge ruled it wasn't against the law.
I think most people believe that the benefit to society of allowing online redistribution out ways the harm to companies and as power really does come from the people, eventually it will probably be legal most places, especially since it's unclear as to whether there is any harm at all and the benefits are obvious.
If we could only remove our politicians motivation to do what the RIAA wanted we'd probably be rid of this problem here in the US already.
I think that trying to judge a book by its cover is probably the worst way to determine the utility of a window manager.
Agreed. But they appear to be working on some significant usability improvements. If they do what was outlined in this (which I believe is a design mockup, article is slashdotted already so I don't know) they'd be a lot closer to winning me over.
Proving once again the relative lack of worth of requiring SSL certificates to be signed.
SSL Certificates don't have to be signed. You can create X509 self signed certs no problem. Web browsers just don't like them and pop up all kinds of warnings.
They should tier SSL certs and make the higher level ones more difficult and time consuming to get: 0 None 1 Self Signed 2 Small business 3 Mid-sized business 4 Large business 5 Financial Institution
Browsers should display a lock with a number explaining what encryption a site used (even when none is used) and could explain the rank when the icon is moused over. Then people always would have a place to look to check the rank before deciding if they should punch information in.
The original SSL design was a good first step but it is definitely showing it's age today.
Agree without judging to do whatever your boss wants, even if it is wrong. Just be careful not to get blamed for the outcome.
Of course you have to agree to do what your boss says but "without judging".... No. If you have an opinion, state it respectfully and back it up. You may know, instinctively, that something is a bad idea but that rarely convinces people unless you have worked with closely for a long time. Figure out how to explain why it's a bad idea. Stoop so far as to create a PowerPoint if you must, and communicate your objections clearly. People in the IT field are expected to be professionals. Simply agreeing to do something that you know is a bad idea without speaking up isn't professional.
Some interesting things will probably come out of this. First, you will find you probably aren't right as often as you think. Second, if you are often right, suddenly people take your advice much more seriously. Making a screwup once or twice against your advice is a mistake. Doing it 3 or more times is a consistent pattern and becomes actionable. If you have good evidence it becomes dangerous for them to ignore you. If you simply whine about the boss to co-workers, you haven't really done anything useful. Often though, you can find out if you have a good idea by bouncing it off of them. Then you have to make the hard decision of whether to act on it.
You have to know how and when to contribute and there are times when managers simply don't want input at all but you can usually get your point across without agitating them and with little risk to yourself. There are bosses that are severely allergic to advice (criticism) and get very annoyed when you bring up objections, especially in a public setting. Often a well written polite private email respectfully disagreeing is a good way to go on record with your thoughts. They can read the first 2 lines and close the email and move on if they feel like it but it's still there, it was still sent, and when you turn out to be right you can remind them of it and they'll probably go back and read it and swear and make a mental note to not be such a moron and listen to you next time.
It may seem like a waste of time to organize your thoughts, drum up evidence and compose a clear explanation of why someone else is wrong especially if they won't listen but if you take the time and make your augments clear you will probably find people listening to what you have to say much more often.
Hold your ground and respectfully disagree. Then seek out reputable reports backing up your position. If you are right and you respectfully, calmly and clearly explain why to others you will almost always prevail.
Failing all of that, do yourself a favour and spend the $30 or so on a router and sit your machine behind it. Personally, I wouldn't connect any machine running any OS directly to the open net, but that's just me.
Your firewall runs an OS. It just happens to be secure enough to be directly attached to the internet. My firewall's OS is also secure enough to be directly attached to the internet but it happens to be Linux and it acts as server as well as a firewall. I have been running Linux boxes directly attached to the internet for many years now without a problem. You need to pay attention to what services you enable but if you know what you are doing it's pretty easy to keep a Linux box up to date and secure these days.
The architecture of Java doesn't allow it to share library memory space like this. The effect of this is Java programs, appear to use about the same amount of memory as compiled programs when, in fact, they are using quite a bit more. This is why running a Java program that takes up 25 megs of memory can seem to suck the life out of a computer while a compiled executable using 25 megs doesn't. Java is probably really using about 10x more memory.
It's also why systems running a Java framework with multiple programs executing in the same Java process do so much better than ones where everything is in its own process. This is Java's sweet spot, where these JVM architecture disatvantages have the least impact.
This is my understanding of how Java's libraries work. Someone let me know if I'm missing something here.
This sounds like an organized crime activity to me. Lots of cash flowing around and knowing people's secrets could be just what somebody needed to get a fat contract where they could skim millions. Follow the money and you'll probably find who did this, even if you cant prove it.
I wouldn't be surpriesd if organized crime here in the US hadn't figured out a way to tap into people's phone calls. The telepone companies don't seem to care who listens to our phone calls anymore.
It's time for end to end encryption of all communications. We should get an SSL session from one handset to the other.
Digital signing of binaries is the *only* way you can create an open source DRM solution. Otherwise anyone could come along and modify the code to ignore the DRM rules and expose the yummy DRM'd insides. Being able to setup your own solution that signs using different keys is besides the point.
The idea is to stop someone from taking control of open source software by only allowing signed, authorized-by-them versions of that software to access the content. If you are writing the software from scratch and expect it to be signed and DRM'd you'd simply not use GPL3 as it's license. This limitation would only apply to imposing controls on already existing open source software. But this is precisely what you want to do with digital signing of binaries for security reasons.
The proposed changes would make it illegal lock down a system to only run signed binaries if those programs are licensed under GPL3.
Think about it: I create uber-secure-linux (or uber-secure-new-os) that requires uber-secure corp (tm) to sign all binaries before they were loaded and executed I'd be breaking the rules to load any GPL3'd code. Even if uber-secure-new-os said that in order to read and write from the/system folder (or/etc/var/usr and/bin) you needed to be signed.. nope, you don't have access to the same files (if I am interpreting things correctly, I haven't read the draft GPL3 carefully enough, someone correct me if I'm wrong.)
This is a problem.
It seems unlikely that you can make everything you want people to be able to do with DRM illegal and everything you do want people to be able to do, legal.
Even if you could.. Even if this wording accomplished that goal, is this really a good idea? Is it appropriate to say what OS's what environments, what users can run GPLd code? I could see where it could possibly make some sense but in the case of the Linux kernel, it seems like a bad idea.
One of the points he made which is very important is that digital signing of content is important for the way open source software works. If RedHat has to supply the keys used to sign Fedora Core 6 with the OS, the signature is completely useless. The anti-DRM provissions of GPL V3 would not only lead to less places you can use open source software, it would also make that software worse.
I also agree with the idea that, while DRM is evil, it's not software developers place to fight it and in fact there is no *need* to fight it. The proprietary vs open thing will soon be smack the content creators around just as badly as it is smacking the software creators around now. The more quality content that is available for free, the harder it will be for the content houses to insist that you not only pay for content, you also have crazy limits on what you can do with it.
There should be a fund and an organization dedicated to fostering tallent and helping them develop creating creative commons licenced works. I'd like to see all the National Endowment for the Arts money going to something like this for a few years. Better yet, I think there should be a tax on RIAA/MPAA producs used to fund it.
You are assuming it will be sold as a "PC" and not an internet apliance or set top box. Nobody turns on their cable box or XBox and wonders where Word is.
Is Google about to release this as an alternative to Windows?
That's tot likely. What would be more likely would be releasing a dedicated internet hardware device running Linux behind the scenes that provides some combination of Internet based TV, VOIP, Browsing, and Email.
True, the IOMeter performance of the drive revewed, and most SATA drives under deep queues isn't as good as the more expensive SCSI/FC drives out there but looking at this fact in isolation gives a skewed picture.
Most servers operate with a queue depth of 1 most of the time and that's especially true in a small office. If you are looking to make an array that performs well under queue depths of 128, you are generally dealing with many thousands of users and therefor probably not designing for a small, inexpensive system. If you are looking to see how fast a bunch of people can transfer medium/large files to/from a machine, don't look at I/O's per second in deep queues, it's not applicable. The High-End DriveMark is really more appropriate there.
Even so, even if you somehow have an environment where you are going to be pushing queue depths way up, my argument still holds. In an array with 8 of those Raptors reviwed with a queue depth of 64, each drive can read about 190 I/Os per second for a total of 1500 I/Os per second. If you have 4 of the very best 15,000 RPM Maxtor drive you'll be pushing about 400 I/Os per second per drive with a depth of 128 for a total of 1600 I/Os per second. That's appears to be about the same speed but even that comaprison isn't fair. Those are both 150GB drives and the access pattern is random across the whole disk. With 300 GB of mirrored data (the most that 4 150 GB FC disks could hold) you'd only half fill the 8 SATA disks. Random seeks across half the disks surface are much faster than random seeks across the whole disk. The 8 SATA disks would far outperform the 4 FC disks in I/Os per second, and the speed increase would be even more dramatic when dealing with low queue depths and sequential transfers.
IOMeter is not a typical light-medium load/file server usage benchmark and it's results should not be interpreted as such. For example, for a file server running Samba, the application is single threaded so the queue depth for it will never exceed 1. IOMeter performance is really best used when an entire set of disks was dedicated as storage for a database with a large number of concurrent users. That's what these SCSI/FC drives are designed for and it also why you don't see FC in small businesses and education. Where you see it in use is when there are thousands of users hitting a system and you will lose millions of dollars in productivity if the array fails. That's when you buy FC and that's why the prices are so insane. These high-end drives don't do anywhere near as well when used in single threaded/file server rolls and are often even slower (look at the High-End DriveMark results in the article you linked.)
The performance of drives under deep queues has little to do with the interface and much more to do with the speed of the internal queueing mechanisms and the drives seek time. There's nothing magic about SCSI or Fibre Channel that will make a drive faster. It's simply high end heads, seek arms, and powerful controler logic designed for heavy concurrent use.
For a light dubty, high speed, milti-purpose array I'd suggest a nice 8 drive SATA array with a good 8 drive RAID controller. It will be bigger, faster, cheaper and able to handle more load than if you spent the same money on FC equipment. If that speed and size isn't required, go with a 4 drive SATA array. You would probably be amazed at how fast something like that is if you get a good controller and good drives.
but its major design compromise is to use ATA drives, thus losing the high I/O rate of FC drives
I'd recommend more SATA drives for the same price over fewer, more expensive FC drives. The differences in RAID controllers and number of drives has much more impact in array performance than interface technology. Since FC controllers and drives are more expensive, it's a disadvantage when you are tring to get high speed on a budget.
Fibre channel storage has been filtering down from the rarefied heights of big business and is now beginning to be a sensible option for smaller enterprises and institutions.
Storage systems designed with Fibre Channel have almost no advantages over SATA based ones and cost much more. How is that sensible?
EA's Need for Speed was found on the passenger seat of one of the racers. Police are investigating the possibility that the racing and subsequent crash was connected with the game.
WTF other game are kids into street racing going to be playing? Bible Adventures?
That's like being amazed when people who want to go on shooing rampages play FPS games or when hunters play Deer Hunter. People who like to do something for fun.. often enjoy simulations of the same thing. Duh!
People who experience street racing through a game are much less likely to be dumb enough to try it in real life. I suggest Need For Speed has stopped tons of street racing and saved lots of lives and if these dolts had played that game a little more they may not have been so stupid as to think it was safe to try in real life.
..dramatizing something helps PREVENT it in the real world. Their boycott is more likely to do harm than good.
When will people wake up and pay attention to the fact that freedom of speech is a good thing. The more prevalent the bad things are in media, the more they are thought about and the logical end of that thought is that they are bad things and we shouldn't do them. These people think of the general public as thoughtless automatons who do whatever they see. Thats simply not how humans work. Video games didn't invent violence and overall, as a society we are playing them more than ever before and yet we are living with less violent crime than ever before. This isn't a fluke an it isn't "despite" violent games it is *because* of violent games.
These people need to crawl back into their zone of stupidity and shut up.
It's a 3U rack mount 8 drive server with a nice dual-core cpu to keep the software raid moving along. I directly attached all 8 drives to the motherboard (it has 8 SATA ports). Grub has some trouble figuring out which is bootable but since I wanted all disks to have grub on them (in case of a failure) that's just required a bit of fiddling. The big thing I needed to do was plug all the fans in the box into 5v instead of 12 since they are insanely loud otherwise. This required a bit of fiddling to rewire the power supply fan but nothing hard. Since not too many people have enclosed racks at home a quieter desktop case would make that a non-issue.
I did a raid1/boot partition across all 8 disks. (Linux raid 1 will do more than just 2 disk mirroring) The main data partition is a 2.2 TB raid5 but I seriously considered raid6 and I'm keeping the option open. I like the idea of being still protected in the case of a disk failure since I won't be keeping a spare on site (unless I do.. hmm.)
This is a decent box but its a lot more work than should be involved in getting a simple home server. I will note that I get about 120 MB/s write speed and about 150MB/s read speed (sequential) which seems quite good to me.
I'm not saying it isn't true, but until you cite some real research, you are just talking out yer ass.
If by "talking out yer ass" you mean stating my impression based on my experience as a professional in the field, then yes, that's what I'm doing. I am not citing anything but that doesn't make my statement any less valid. It's not backed up by any research that I know of but what did you expect? This isn't some peer reviewed journal.. it's a Slashdot discussion.
Could you possibly have written a more useless generalization?
The implied but not stated part of my comment was that people had the impression that pretty much everything except operating systems would be better, faster, easier to create and maintain if they were written in Java (due in no small part to lots of marketing and hype from Sun suggesting this.) Lots of projects were pushed away from other languages into Java because it was the future of programming. Reality is starting to set in and people are realizing that Java has some serious limitations and trade offs and the areas where Java is the best language for the job are much smaller than previously thought.
Java is falling out of favor with many programmers and corporations. It has a huge user base and tons of programs are written in it and will continue to be written in it but that doesn't make it not a dying language. Cobol still has tons of programs written in it. Java has flaws and limitations that make it a bad choice for many types of applications and programming. People are starting to realise that.
C where speed counts, and, for everything else, Java...except that everyone has come to realize that Java is horrible. The language has some flaws but is decent. The big problem (I think) is java the platform. It's not designed to do things efficiently. I see a lot more growth (to my dismay) in.net languages than anything else and I see a steady shift away from java.
The thing we are shifting twords doesn't exist, but is being created slowly as we advance our programming languages. We need a nice platform that has a VM but allows you to write directly to machine code and have it interact gracefully with the VM based code. This way you could have your 3D engine coded hard and tight but your UI code could be up in VM land and loose and flexible. It should allow programming in multiple languages so programmers with all types of skilsets can program for it and allow the code written in different languages to interact. It should allow for scripting as well as compile to native OS executables for speed and to allow easy distribution. The best work I see twords that goal is Parrot (the new perl/everythning else platform). We'll see how that works out.
The problem with the safety of pebble bed's is it requires that everyone who has access to them does not want to purposely cause harm. You having a pebble bed reactor in your truck may be safe but when your friendly neighborhood radical terrorist carjacks you and grinds up the pebbles into a powder and runs around sprinkling it in school playgrounds we'll probably have an issue.
I like the idea of using more nuclear power, just not the idea of spreading it around everywhere. Not only does a power solution need to be clean and safe, it needs to be more economical than oil which is hard to do. Our current situation with nuclear power plants dotting the map causes too many expensive problems. I think fewer, higher volume sites would improve both the safety and the economics of nuclear power.
The idea of a security score card is good but the way they did it is meaningless. The ranking should be more like:
Number of bugs + Number of bugs with known exploits x 5 + Number of bugs with known exploits x the number of days the exploit was in the wild before the bug was patched.
Then multiply the whole thing by an risk factor (1-5) based on how much harm it can do.
No lumping multiple OSs. Each one should get it's own card. Lumping applications bundled with the OS is reasonable but skews things too. For an accurate comparison, only bugs in features common to all platforms and bugs in non-optional components should be counted.
The way the current ranking they use works you could have 50 non-exploitable, local user only, file permission modifying bugs in 100 different Lunix distributions and it would count as 5,000 bugs. Similarly you could have one remote attack that completely takes over a Windows box with known exploits which remained unpatched for 100 days and it would count as 1 bug. The score would be 5,000 to 1 in favor of Windows which is about opposite from what it should be in this example. These are completely meaningless numbers.
I don't know how the OSs would stack up given an accurate reporting but I would be interested to see.
Slashdot Mirror
P2P file-sharing isn't against copyright law. Sharing copyrighted files, via a P2P file-sharing program, without the copyright owner's permission is against copyright law.
Careful yourself! Non-commercial redistribution has always been permitted under fair use. If I understand the situation, the extent to which you can redistribute copyrighted content electronically online remains as yet undefined in most countries. P2P sharing of copyrighted files without permission isn't necessarily against copyright law.
People who can't comprehend why the RIAA keeps alienating their customer base by suing them into oblivion are missing this fundamental piece which is the motivation behind the whole thing. The RIAA is essentially trying to convince the general public that this behavior is illegal when it's legality is still very much in question by repeating the same scenario of lawsuit and settlement over and over. "Why would they settle and pay big money if they did nothing wrong?" Repetition makes things sink in and by having story after story in the press about someone getting sued and settling they build de-facto legal precedent and change public opinion.
If you remember, they tried this tactic in France recently and it backfired. The judge ruled it wasn't against the law.
I think most people believe that the benefit to society of allowing online redistribution out ways the harm to companies and as power really does come from the people, eventually it will probably be legal most places, especially since it's unclear as to whether there is any harm at all and the benefits are obvious.
If we could only remove our politicians motivation to do what the RIAA wanted we'd probably be rid of this problem here in the US already.
I think that trying to judge a book by its cover is probably the worst way to determine the utility of a window manager.
Agreed. But they appear to be working on some significant usability improvements. If they do what was outlined in this (which I believe is a design mockup, article is slashdotted already so I don't know) they'd be a lot closer to winning me over.
Proving once again the relative lack of worth of requiring SSL certificates to be signed.
SSL Certificates don't have to be signed. You can create X509 self signed certs no problem. Web browsers just don't like them and pop up all kinds of warnings.
They should tier SSL certs and make the higher level ones more difficult and time consuming to get:
0 None
1 Self Signed
2 Small business
3 Mid-sized business
4 Large business
5 Financial Institution
Browsers should display a lock with a number explaining what encryption a site used (even when none is used) and could explain the rank when the icon is moused over. Then people always would have a place to look to check the rank before deciding if they should punch information in.
The original SSL design was a good first step but it is definitely showing it's age today.
Agree without judging to do whatever your boss wants, even if it is wrong. Just be careful not to get blamed for the outcome.
Of course you have to agree to do what your boss says but "without judging".... No. If you have an opinion, state it respectfully and back it up. You may know, instinctively, that something is a bad idea but that rarely convinces people unless you have worked with closely for a long time. Figure out how to explain why it's a bad idea. Stoop so far as to create a PowerPoint if you must, and communicate your objections clearly. People in the IT field are expected to be professionals. Simply agreeing to do something that you know is a bad idea without speaking up isn't professional.
Some interesting things will probably come out of this. First, you will find you probably aren't right as often as you think. Second, if you are often right, suddenly people take your advice much more seriously. Making a screwup once or twice against your advice is a mistake. Doing it 3 or more times is a consistent pattern and becomes actionable. If you have good evidence it becomes dangerous for them to ignore you. If you simply whine about the boss to co-workers, you haven't really done anything useful. Often though, you can find out if you have a good idea by bouncing it off of them. Then you have to make the hard decision of whether to act on it.
You have to know how and when to contribute and there are times when managers simply don't want input at all but you can usually get your point across without agitating them and with little risk to yourself. There are bosses that are severely allergic to advice (criticism) and get very annoyed when you bring up objections, especially in a public setting. Often a well written polite private email respectfully disagreeing is a good way to go on record with your thoughts. They can read the first 2 lines and close the email and move on if they feel like it but it's still there, it was still sent, and when you turn out to be right you can remind them of it and they'll probably go back and read it and swear and make a mental note to not be such a moron and listen to you next time.
It may seem like a waste of time to organize your thoughts, drum up evidence and compose a clear explanation of why someone else is wrong especially if they won't listen but if you take the time and make your augments clear you will probably find people listening to what you have to say much more often.
Hold your ground and respectfully disagree. Then seek out reputable reports backing up your position. If you are right and you respectfully, calmly and clearly explain why to others you will almost always prevail.
They are talking about ports of ActiveState's perl/php/python/tcl/ruby on intel OS X.
Failing all of that, do yourself a favour and spend the $30 or so on a router and sit your machine behind it. Personally, I wouldn't connect any machine running any OS directly to the open net, but that's just me.
Your firewall runs an OS. It just happens to be secure enough to be directly attached to the internet. My firewall's OS is also secure enough to be directly attached to the internet but it happens to be Linux and it acts as server as well as a firewall. I have been running Linux boxes directly attached to the internet for many years now without a problem. You need to pay attention to what services you enable but if you know what you are doing it's pretty easy to keep a Linux box up to date and secure these days.
The architecture of Java doesn't allow it to share library memory space like this. The effect of this is Java programs, appear to use about the same amount of memory as compiled programs when, in fact, they are using quite a bit more. This is why running a Java program that takes up 25 megs of memory can seem to suck the life out of a computer while a compiled executable using 25 megs doesn't. Java is probably really using about 10x more memory.
It's also why systems running a Java framework with multiple programs executing in the same Java process do so much better than ones where everything is in its own process. This is Java's sweet spot, where these JVM architecture disatvantages have the least impact.
This is my understanding of how Java's libraries work. Someone let me know if I'm missing something here.
This sounds like an organized crime activity to me. Lots of cash flowing around and knowing people's secrets could be just what somebody needed to get a fat contract where they could skim millions. Follow the money and you'll probably find who did this, even if you cant prove it.
I wouldn't be surpriesd if organized crime here in the US hadn't figured out a way to tap into people's phone calls. The telepone companies don't seem to care who listens to our phone calls anymore.
It's time for end to end encryption of all communications. We should get an SSL session from one handset to the other.
Digital signing of binaries is the *only* way you can create an open source DRM solution. Otherwise anyone could come along and modify the code to ignore the DRM rules and expose the yummy DRM'd insides. Being able to setup your own solution that signs using different keys is besides the point.
/system folder (or /etc /var /usr and /bin) you needed to be signed.. nope, you don't have access to the same files (if I am interpreting things correctly, I haven't read the draft GPL3 carefully enough, someone correct me if I'm wrong.)
The idea is to stop someone from taking control of open source software by only allowing signed, authorized-by-them versions of that software to access the content. If you are writing the software from scratch and expect it to be signed and DRM'd you'd simply not use GPL3 as it's license. This limitation would only apply to imposing controls on already existing open source software. But this is precisely what you want to do with digital signing of binaries for security reasons.
The proposed changes would make it illegal lock down a system to only run signed binaries if those programs are licensed under GPL3.
Think about it: I create uber-secure-linux (or uber-secure-new-os) that requires uber-secure corp (tm) to sign all binaries before they were loaded and executed I'd be breaking the rules to load any GPL3'd code. Even if uber-secure-new-os said that in order to read and write from the
This is a problem.
It seems unlikely that you can make everything you want people to be able to do with DRM illegal and everything you do want people to be able to do, legal.
Even if you could.. Even if this wording accomplished that goal, is this really a good idea? Is it appropriate to say what OS's what environments, what users can run GPLd code? I could see where it could possibly make some sense but in the case of the Linux kernel, it seems like a bad idea.
One of the points he made which is very important is that digital signing of content is important for the way open source software works. If RedHat has to supply the keys used to sign Fedora Core 6 with the OS, the signature is completely useless. The anti-DRM provissions of GPL V3 would not only lead to less places you can use open source software, it would also make that software worse.
I also agree with the idea that, while DRM is evil, it's not software developers place to fight it and in fact there is no *need* to fight it. The proprietary vs open thing will soon be smack the content creators around just as badly as it is smacking the software creators around now. The more quality content that is available for free, the harder it will be for the content houses to insist that you not only pay for content, you also have crazy limits on what you can do with it.
There should be a fund and an organization dedicated to fostering tallent and helping them develop creating creative commons licenced works. I'd like to see all the National Endowment for the Arts money going to something like this for a few years. Better yet, I think there should be a tax on RIAA/MPAA producs used to fund it.
Well then I suppose this may be the appliance they also put their "iTunes-killer" on as well.
YES! Forgot that one. And they'll include Google Office too.
You are assuming it will be sold as a "PC" and not an internet apliance or set top box. Nobody turns on their cable box or XBox and wonders where Word is.
Is Google about to release this as an alternative to Windows?
That's tot likely. What would be more likely would be releasing a dedicated internet hardware device running Linux behind the scenes that provides some combination of Internet based TV, VOIP, Browsing, and Email.
The major advantage of SCSI or FC over SATA is its performance under heavy multi-user load. I refer you to test results at http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD150 0ADFD_6.html
True, the IOMeter performance of the drive revewed, and most SATA drives under deep queues isn't as good as the more expensive SCSI/FC drives out there but looking at this fact in isolation gives a skewed picture.
Most servers operate with a queue depth of 1 most of the time and that's especially true in a small office. If you are looking to make an array that performs well under queue depths of 128, you are generally dealing with many thousands of users and therefor probably not designing for a small, inexpensive system. If you are looking to see how fast a bunch of people can transfer medium/large files to/from a machine, don't look at I/O's per second in deep queues, it's not applicable. The High-End DriveMark is really more appropriate there.
Even so, even if you somehow have an environment where you are going to be pushing queue depths way up, my argument still holds. In an array with 8 of those Raptors reviwed with a queue depth of 64, each drive can read about 190 I/Os per second for a total of 1500 I/Os per second. If you have 4 of the very best 15,000 RPM Maxtor drive you'll be pushing about 400 I/Os per second per drive with a depth of 128 for a total of 1600 I/Os per second. That's appears to be about the same speed but even that comaprison isn't fair. Those are both 150GB drives and the access pattern is random across the whole disk. With 300 GB of mirrored data (the most that 4 150 GB FC disks could hold) you'd only half fill the 8 SATA disks. Random seeks across half the disks surface are much faster than random seeks across the whole disk. The 8 SATA disks would far outperform the 4 FC disks in I/Os per second, and the speed increase would be even more dramatic when dealing with low queue depths and sequential transfers.
IOMeter is not a typical light-medium load/file server usage benchmark and it's results should not be interpreted as such. For example, for a file server running Samba, the application is single threaded so the queue depth for it will never exceed 1. IOMeter performance is really best used when an entire set of disks was dedicated as storage for a database with a large number of concurrent users. That's what these SCSI/FC drives are designed for and it also why you don't see FC in small businesses and education. Where you see it in use is when there are thousands of users hitting a system and you will lose millions of dollars in productivity if the array fails. That's when you buy FC and that's why the prices are so insane. These high-end drives don't do anywhere near as well when used in single threaded/file server rolls and are often even slower (look at the High-End DriveMark results in the article you linked.)
The performance of drives under deep queues has little to do with the interface and much more to do with the speed of the internal queueing mechanisms and the drives seek time. There's nothing magic about SCSI or Fibre Channel that will make a drive faster. It's simply high end heads, seek arms, and powerful controler logic designed for heavy concurrent use.
For a light dubty, high speed, milti-purpose array I'd suggest a nice 8 drive SATA array with a good 8 drive RAID controller. It will be bigger, faster, cheaper and able to handle more load than if you spent the same money on FC equipment. If that speed and size isn't required, go with a 4 drive SATA array. You would probably be amazed at how fast something like that is if you get a good controller and good drives.
but its major design compromise is to use ATA drives, thus losing the high I/O rate of FC drives
I'd recommend more SATA drives for the same price over fewer, more expensive FC drives. The differences in RAID controllers and number of drives has much more impact in array performance than interface technology. Since FC controllers and drives are more expensive, it's a disadvantage when you are tring to get high speed on a budget.
Fibre channel storage has been filtering down from the rarefied heights of big business and is now beginning to be a sensible option for smaller enterprises and institutions.
Storage systems designed with Fibre Channel have almost no advantages over SATA based ones and cost much more. How is that sensible?
EA's Need for Speed was found on the passenger seat of one of the racers. Police are investigating the possibility that the racing and subsequent crash was connected with the game.
WTF other game are kids into street racing going to be playing? Bible Adventures?
That's like being amazed when people who want to go on shooing rampages play FPS games or when hunters play Deer Hunter. People who like to do something for fun.. often enjoy simulations of the same thing. Duh!
People who experience street racing through a game are much less likely to be dumb enough to try it in real life. I suggest Need For Speed has stopped tons of street racing and saved lots of lives and if these dolts had played that game a little more they may not have been so stupid as to think it was safe to try in real life.
..dramatizing something helps PREVENT it in the real world. Their boycott is more likely to do harm than good.
When will people wake up and pay attention to the fact that freedom of speech is a good thing. The more prevalent the bad things are in media, the more they are thought about and the logical end of that thought is that they are bad things and we shouldn't do them. These people think of the general public as thoughtless automatons who do whatever they see. Thats simply not how humans work. Video games didn't invent violence and overall, as a society we are playing them more than ever before and yet we are living with less violent crime than ever before. This isn't a fluke an it isn't "despite" violent games it is *because* of violent games.
These people need to crawl back into their zone of stupidity and shut up.
This is what I did: http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/WishList/WishS hareShow.asp?ID=1764600
/boot partition across all 8 disks. (Linux raid 1 will do more than just 2 disk mirroring) The main data partition is a 2.2 TB raid5 but I seriously considered raid6 and I'm keeping the option open. I like the idea of being still protected in the case of a disk failure since I won't be keeping a spare on site (unless I do.. hmm.)
It's a 3U rack mount 8 drive server with a nice dual-core cpu to keep the software raid moving along. I directly attached all 8 drives to the motherboard (it has 8 SATA ports). Grub has some trouble figuring out which is bootable but since I wanted all disks to have grub on them (in case of a failure) that's just required a bit of fiddling. The big thing I needed to do was plug all the fans in the box into 5v instead of 12 since they are insanely loud otherwise. This required a bit of fiddling to rewire the power supply fan but nothing hard. Since not too many people have enclosed racks at home a quieter desktop case would make that a non-issue.
I did a raid1
This is a decent box but its a lot more work than should be involved in getting a simple home server. I will note that I get about 120 MB/s write speed and about 150MB/s read speed (sequential) which seems quite good to me.
I'm not saying it isn't true, but until you cite some real research, you are just talking out yer ass.
If by "talking out yer ass" you mean stating my impression based on my experience as a professional in the field, then yes, that's what I'm doing. I am not citing anything but that doesn't make my statement any less valid. It's not backed up by any research that I know of but what did you expect? This isn't some peer reviewed journal.. it's a Slashdot discussion.
Could you possibly have written a more useless generalization?
The implied but not stated part of my comment was that people had the impression that pretty much everything except operating systems would be better, faster, easier to create and maintain if they were written in Java (due in no small part to lots of marketing and hype from Sun suggesting this.) Lots of projects were pushed away from other languages into Java because it was the future of programming. Reality is starting to set in and people are realizing that Java has some serious limitations and trade offs and the areas where Java is the best language for the job are much smaller than previously thought.
It's not anywhere near dying.
Java is falling out of favor with many programmers and corporations. It has a huge user base and tons of programs are written in it and will continue to be written in it but that doesn't make it not a dying language. Cobol still has tons of programs written in it. Java has flaws and limitations that make it a bad choice for many types of applications and programming. People are starting to realise that.
C where speed counts, and, for everything else, Java ...except that everyone has come to realize that Java is horrible. The language has some flaws but is decent. The big problem (I think) is java the platform. It's not designed to do things efficiently. I see a lot more growth (to my dismay) in .net languages than anything else and I see a steady shift away from java.
The thing we are shifting twords doesn't exist, but is being created slowly as we advance our programming languages. We need a nice platform that has a VM but allows you to write directly to machine code and have it interact gracefully with the VM based code. This way you could have your 3D engine coded hard and tight but your UI code could be up in VM land and loose and flexible. It should allow programming in multiple languages so programmers with all types of skilsets can program for it and allow the code written in different languages to interact. It should allow for scripting as well as compile to native OS executables for speed and to allow easy distribution. The best work I see twords that goal is Parrot (the new perl/everythning else platform). We'll see how that works out.
The problem with the safety of pebble bed's is it requires that everyone who has access to them does not want to purposely cause harm. You having a pebble bed reactor in your truck may be safe but when your friendly neighborhood radical terrorist carjacks you and grinds up the pebbles into a powder and runs around sprinkling it in school playgrounds we'll probably have an issue.
I like the idea of using more nuclear power, just not the idea of spreading it around everywhere. Not only does a power solution need to be clean and safe, it needs to be more economical than oil which is hard to do. Our current situation with nuclear power plants dotting the map causes too many expensive problems. I think fewer, higher volume sites would improve both the safety and the economics of nuclear power.
Sounds good to me, but the articles I've read about pebble bed included tiny reactors all over the place. That scares me.
The idea of a security score card is good but the way they did it is meaningless. The ranking should be more like:
Number of bugs +
Number of bugs with known exploits x 5 +
Number of bugs with known exploits x the number of days the exploit was in the wild before the bug was patched.
Then multiply the whole thing by an risk factor (1-5) based on how much harm it can do.
No lumping multiple OSs. Each one should get it's own card. Lumping applications bundled with the OS is reasonable but skews things too. For an accurate comparison, only bugs in features common to all platforms and bugs in non-optional components should be counted.
The way the current ranking they use works you could have 50 non-exploitable, local user only, file permission modifying bugs in 100 different Lunix distributions and it would count as 5,000 bugs. Similarly you could have one remote attack that completely takes over a Windows box with known exploits which remained unpatched for 100 days and it would count as 1 bug. The score would be 5,000 to 1 in favor of Windows which is about opposite from what it should be in this example. These are completely meaningless numbers.
I don't know how the OSs would stack up given an accurate reporting but I would be interested to see.