What you're going on about? It's not a technology problem. There isn't a technology solution for it. This "DRM foothold" you're worried about? It has always been there, since the first popular software existed; along with the cracking tools that made it irrelevant for those who choose not to pay. Same as it ever was.
WTF are you even talking about? I'm talking about watching movies, while you seem to be writing some sort of dystopian SF novel? Can you really not understand that it's the content owners, not Netflix, not the standards committee, who require DRM?
That word, "standard'? You keep using it, but I don't think that word mean what you think it means. A standard is what people actually use, not what some nerd bitching on/. thinks they should use.
IE is still my favorite browser - I like it's UI. It's all subjective.
Not sure where you'd get an overall picture of "browsers surfing", but the stats I've seen have IE at just over half (all versions combined), followed by Chrome, with FF just hanging onto a respectable share.
I hope you enjoy fighting the far more difficult battles in the future, because you didn't stop this crap when it was still small.
The majority of internet traffic is DRMd video streams - has been for years. A standards committee has no power to tell the vendors what to do; instead their job is to write down what the big vendors are already doing, so that everyone else can interoperate.
Use the right tool for the job, man. If you want non-DRMd video, you're supposed to use a torrent client, not a web browser. Not every tool has to solve every problem, you know - let each be good for its purpose instead.
Still, it would've been better to leave the DRM where it belongs, in plugins to be installed by each user who wants to have their rights managed.
Which is exactly how the standard works - except now the plug-in interface is standardized. So much nerdwhine over nothing with the HTML5 DRM stuff. Feel free to grab the "can't watch Netflix" version if it makes you happy. Not needing Silverlight (or Flash, or some other exploit delivery engine) makes me happy.
Since there's no existing law telling employers to fuck right off when it comes to employees' personal activities, we need to pass one, so that the courts could then rule based on that.
I think this needs to be fixes in law, not just in a court case. Some law that makes it explicit that employers have no interest in what you do with yourself when "off duty", and protects your privacy and dignity from your employer when you're not at work (or otherwise on the clock).
Penny Arcade once expressed this well: the ability of user to mod, or contribute, to a game can be measured in "mean time to penis". With fully crowdsourced tools, MTTP is close to 0 (witness the current GNAA/Penisbird first post). With very minimal user ability to affect the product MTTP is high - but that just means the product is awkward to use, not that you have somehow discouraged juvinality.
Wikipedia is very strong on a very narrow set of articles: non-controversial scientific basic, and episode lists for TV programs (and book lists for authors, etc) Stuff where all the facts are easy to explain, and there's no argument anywhere about them. I find it very valuable for that narrow use!
I'd love to see more work spent in explaining less accessible math/science entries (from particle physics to group theory - the articles are a mess past the most introductory stuff). It's sad that people get such a negative experience with the reversionists and deletionists that this doesn't happen.
Try another $522M - The FP's "$2.5 million" counts as an extremely misleading number from someone with an obvious agenda. That $2.5 million literally only covers bandwidth and electricity; WMF actually has an annual budget of almost 10x that, $23M.
Exactly! You have to include the $20 million/year "Jimmy Wales junket fund" (as VallyWag called it for years while reporting on his exotic trips). Hookers and blow don't buy themselves, you know.
No manager would be learning to use a word processor, that's crazy talk - they won't be wasting their valuable time when they already have a secretary for this!
Same thing. Word processors meant that the overhead cost of the secretarial pool was eliminated, and everyone was expected to be able to create their own documents.
You mention "typing formulas into Excel", but you don't seem to realize there's an entire coding culture there already. You can't get very far without VBA scripts (or whatever the current MS language is for Excel), and it's all done by people with no or little formal CS training re-inventing the simplest of wheels. A bit of CS training in school would go a long way there.
You can't guarantee that a filesystem metadata change won't be halfway complete unless the OS is in control over when the drive powers down.
The filesystem needs to be able to trust that a drive has completed its write when the I/O completes. This is a difference between SSD and spinning rust - most SSDs lie, as they're often still shuffling things around when they report I/O completion on the bus. What's more, the SSD tend to have far more internal metadata, and you can actually lose the whole volume on some of these SSD due to sudden power loss. Finishing up the write internally fixes that.
It's the same old problem with RAID controllers - NetAp built a huge business on simply ensuring trust in write buffering, with battery backup of cache and whatnot, so that you could trust the controller when it reported the I/O complete (even though the data hadn't made it to disk).
BTW, although write order isn't necessarily preserved, if such behavior is really important, that's where you need to take advantage of a sync system call, which guarantees that all data previously sent towards the disk is complete before the call returns.
This is exactly what I'm on about. This doesn't always work. All you can do with a "sync" is get the data through filesystem buffering. Not RAID controller buffering. Not disk internal buffering. Everybody lies.
And none of that matters anyhow, if you're writing to two volumes (as is often the case with such schemes), as it's possible you'll lose the whole system, and get restored from backups taken at different times.
If a sync system call fails to enforce write ordering, then we have a word for drives that report that a sync operation is complete before it actually is. Defective.
Nope. "Normal" is the word. That's normal for consumer SSDs. Normal for RAID controllers. Normal for some old-school drives in some error conditions. And the whole thing is irrelevant when it comes to restoring from backup.
Such a disk is fundamentally untrustworthy for any purpose.
Most people never notice. Most software will never care. And caring used to mean you either pay 10x, or take a 10x performance hit. Now with SSDs, it's the bit extra enterprise SSDs cost.
Before Microsoft's elaborate snapshotting technology, it used to be the realm of 6-7 figure backup products to solve the cross-disk backup problem (taking coherent multi-volume snapshots requires applications cooperate in quiescing). That's now a solved problem with mainstream software and mid-tier storage devices, thanks to MS demanding it for the lower-end stuff Windows servers tend to run with.
I rather suspect it depends on the quality of company one works for. I've seen dozens of low-quality devs (who worked from India) when I work for cheap places, but even then, the few they were willing to pay to bring to the US were the cream of that crop.
Did you interview the H1-B guys just like everyone else? Or was this some outsourcing thing? I've found that usually when people are complaining about "H1-Bs" their complains are really about shitty contractors in general.
That's not a trade-off that's important in the US. The federal government only spends 11% of it's budget on all that sort of thing: education, infrastructure, etc. We don't need to take from one to give more to the other. We spend 65% of the budget mailing checks to people, and that's the part we'd need to political will to cut in order to fund other things.
There's confusion here between various storage devices that happen to have a capacitor. There's DRAM, of course, and there are RAID controllers that keep enough power to "finish a write" during power loss, to greatly speed write caching. But there are also SSDs, and SSDs have the same problem with "finishing a write" during power loss. Most consumer SSDs risk losing data in a power hit, while the better ones have a capacitor just to avoid that problem. I think that's what they're talking about here: the grade of SSDs where it's safe to believe the drive when it tells you a write has completed.
It amazes me the number of devs I've worked with over the years who just could not understand that write order isn't necessarily preserved across crashes (or even restores from backups), and being clever with "I wait for the write of A to finish before I write B, so there can never be a B without its A" is wishful thinking.
Globally there's probably 6 or 7 billion people. Are we all going to be coders? Seriously...
No one is suggesting that we're all going to be software developers. But increasingly you need some coding, or DB, or other "automation" skills to be better at other professional jobs, much like you need high school math for many professional jobs today.
We certainly need to break from our current educational system that was explicitly designed to create good manufacturing workers (with any knowledge transfer being secondary to that goal). Manufacturing jobs were great jobs 100 years ago, and that system made sense at the time, but it's really hurting us now. Changing that focus to teaching kids how to think abstractly and solve technical problems of any description -- well, it's not going to fix everything, but it will help.
In India (where Bangalore is) , software developer is the high-status job. It's higher status and better paying than a doctor or a lawyer. We're talking average house prices for a city of over 8 million here. Successful software developers tend to have staff: beyond a maid and gardener as you might find in the US, a nanny, a driver, perhaps a cook. Sure, those jobs aren't providing a first-world standard of living, but the software jobs are coming close (you have the staff, but there's very little in affordable consumer electronics).
by not training any of the average to above average people, they're significantly reducing the pool of those that potentially could become the best in the future.
I've worked with dozens, perhaps hundreds of above average people who have the opportunity to become the best in the future because they were brought here on H1-Bs. There will always be sweatshops - I started in one myself, and it's the only way I was able to break into the industry. But that's separate from the core issue: humanity benefits the most as a whole from tapping the largest talent pool to push technology forward.
A big flaw in modern thinking is the idea that "government" is the best way for people to work together to achieve a common goal. Government ends up dominated by those with lust for power over those with skill at governing. Companies competing with one another does better for longer, as you get some weeding out of leaders who lack skill at governing, but it seems the lust for power still wins in the end, by eliminating that "competing" part. Better, but not great: we need a new path. Sadly, people want to turn everything into a fight between those two poles, rather than finding a way to move past them both.
I find the large-scale structures fascinating myself, as it starts to seem like the universe is in some way older than the big bang - inflation can paper-over the uniformity of temperature, but that's already a stretch without adding structures that shouldn't have had time to form. The idea "before the big bang" starts to seem sensible, as in the very early universe having been interacting since before the singularity. (Penrose has one model for this, if not perhaps a convincing one, in his cyclic cosmology, but it's at least one example of making rigorous sense of the concept.)
Slashdot Mirror
Torrents aren't going away. Build-your-own PCs aren't going away. Tinfoil isn't going away. You'll be fine.
What you're going on about? It's not a technology problem. There isn't a technology solution for it. This "DRM foothold" you're worried about? It has always been there, since the first popular software existed; along with the cracking tools that made it irrelevant for those who choose not to pay. Same as it ever was.
WTF are you even talking about? I'm talking about watching movies, while you seem to be writing some sort of dystopian SF novel? Can you really not understand that it's the content owners, not Netflix, not the standards committee, who require DRM?
That word, "standard'? You keep using it, but I don't think that word mean what you think it means. A standard is what people actually use, not what some nerd bitching on /. thinks they should use.
IE is still my favorite browser - I like it's UI. It's all subjective.
Not sure where you'd get an overall picture of "browsers surfing", but the stats I've seen have IE at just over half (all versions combined), followed by Chrome, with FF just hanging onto a respectable share.
I hope you enjoy fighting the far more difficult battles in the future, because you didn't stop this crap when it was still small.
The majority of internet traffic is DRMd video streams - has been for years. A standards committee has no power to tell the vendors what to do; instead their job is to write down what the big vendors are already doing, so that everyone else can interoperate.
Use the right tool for the job, man. If you want non-DRMd video, you're supposed to use a torrent client, not a web browser. Not every tool has to solve every problem, you know - let each be good for its purpose instead.
Still more accurate than your average newspaper. Still a very useful resource. IMO, entertaining vandalism like that just makes it better.
Still, it would've been better to leave the DRM where it belongs, in plugins to be installed by each user who wants to have their rights managed.
Which is exactly how the standard works - except now the plug-in interface is standardized. So much nerdwhine over nothing with the HTML5 DRM stuff. Feel free to grab the "can't watch Netflix" version if it makes you happy. Not needing Silverlight (or Flash, or some other exploit delivery engine) makes me happy.
That whooshing sound you hear is not the coupe passing by. The whole post was so over the top it could have won WWI.
Since there's no existing law telling employers to fuck right off when it comes to employees' personal activities, we need to pass one, so that the courts could then rule based on that.
I think this needs to be fixes in law, not just in a court case. Some law that makes it explicit that employers have no interest in what you do with yourself when "off duty", and protects your privacy and dignity from your employer when you're not at work (or otherwise on the clock).
Penny Arcade once expressed this well: the ability of user to mod, or contribute, to a game can be measured in "mean time to penis". With fully crowdsourced tools, MTTP is close to 0 (witness the current GNAA/Penisbird first post). With very minimal user ability to affect the product MTTP is high - but that just means the product is awkward to use, not that you have somehow discouraged juvinality.
Wikipedia is very strong on a very narrow set of articles: non-controversial scientific basic, and episode lists for TV programs (and book lists for authors, etc) Stuff where all the facts are easy to explain, and there's no argument anywhere about them. I find it very valuable for that narrow use!
I'd love to see more work spent in explaining less accessible math/science entries (from particle physics to group theory - the articles are a mess past the most introductory stuff). It's sad that people get such a negative experience with the reversionists and deletionists that this doesn't happen.
Try another $522M - The FP's "$2.5 million" counts as an extremely misleading number from someone with an obvious agenda. That $2.5 million literally only covers bandwidth and electricity; WMF actually has an annual budget of almost 10x that, $23M.
Exactly! You have to include the $20 million/year "Jimmy Wales junket fund" (as VallyWag called it for years while reporting on his exotic trips). Hookers and blow don't buy themselves, you know.
No manager would be learning to use a word processor, that's crazy talk - they won't be wasting their valuable time when they already have a secretary for this!
Same thing. Word processors meant that the overhead cost of the secretarial pool was eliminated, and everyone was expected to be able to create their own documents.
You mention "typing formulas into Excel", but you don't seem to realize there's an entire coding culture there already. You can't get very far without VBA scripts (or whatever the current MS language is for Excel), and it's all done by people with no or little formal CS training re-inventing the simplest of wheels. A bit of CS training in school would go a long way there.
You can't guarantee that a filesystem metadata change won't be halfway complete unless the OS is in control over when the drive powers down.
The filesystem needs to be able to trust that a drive has completed its write when the I/O completes. This is a difference between SSD and spinning rust - most SSDs lie, as they're often still shuffling things around when they report I/O completion on the bus. What's more, the SSD tend to have far more internal metadata, and you can actually lose the whole volume on some of these SSD due to sudden power loss. Finishing up the write internally fixes that.
It's the same old problem with RAID controllers - NetAp built a huge business on simply ensuring trust in write buffering, with battery backup of cache and whatnot, so that you could trust the controller when it reported the I/O complete (even though the data hadn't made it to disk).
BTW, although write order isn't necessarily preserved, if such behavior is really important, that's where you need to take advantage of a sync system call, which guarantees that all data previously sent towards the disk is complete before the call returns.
This is exactly what I'm on about. This doesn't always work. All you can do with a "sync" is get the data through filesystem buffering. Not RAID controller buffering. Not disk internal buffering. Everybody lies.
And none of that matters anyhow, if you're writing to two volumes (as is often the case with such schemes), as it's possible you'll lose the whole system, and get restored from backups taken at different times.
If a sync system call fails to enforce write ordering, then we have a word for drives that report that a sync operation is complete before it actually is. Defective.
Nope. "Normal" is the word. That's normal for consumer SSDs. Normal for RAID controllers. Normal for some old-school drives in some error conditions. And the whole thing is irrelevant when it comes to restoring from backup.
Such a disk is fundamentally untrustworthy for any purpose.
Most people never notice. Most software will never care. And caring used to mean you either pay 10x, or take a 10x performance hit. Now with SSDs, it's the bit extra enterprise SSDs cost.
Before Microsoft's elaborate snapshotting technology, it used to be the realm of 6-7 figure backup products to solve the cross-disk backup problem (taking coherent multi-volume snapshots requires applications cooperate in quiescing). That's now a solved problem with mainstream software and mid-tier storage devices, thanks to MS demanding it for the lower-end stuff Windows servers tend to run with.
I rather suspect it depends on the quality of company one works for. I've seen dozens of low-quality devs (who worked from India) when I work for cheap places, but even then, the few they were willing to pay to bring to the US were the cream of that crop.
Did you interview the H1-B guys just like everyone else? Or was this some outsourcing thing? I've found that usually when people are complaining about "H1-Bs" their complains are really about shitty contractors in general.
That's not a trade-off that's important in the US. The federal government only spends 11% of it's budget on all that sort of thing: education, infrastructure, etc. We don't need to take from one to give more to the other. We spend 65% of the budget mailing checks to people, and that's the part we'd need to political will to cut in order to fund other things.
There's confusion here between various storage devices that happen to have a capacitor. There's DRAM, of course, and there are RAID controllers that keep enough power to "finish a write" during power loss, to greatly speed write caching. But there are also SSDs, and SSDs have the same problem with "finishing a write" during power loss. Most consumer SSDs risk losing data in a power hit, while the better ones have a capacitor just to avoid that problem. I think that's what they're talking about here: the grade of SSDs where it's safe to believe the drive when it tells you a write has completed.
It amazes me the number of devs I've worked with over the years who just could not understand that write order isn't necessarily preserved across crashes (or even restores from backups), and being clever with "I wait for the write of A to finish before I write B, so there can never be a B without its A" is wishful thinking.
The top and bottom of the screen are the time axis, naturally. :)
Globally there's probably 6 or 7 billion people. Are we all going to be coders? Seriously...
No one is suggesting that we're all going to be software developers. But increasingly you need some coding, or DB, or other "automation" skills to be better at other professional jobs, much like you need high school math for many professional jobs today.
We certainly need to break from our current educational system that was explicitly designed to create good manufacturing workers (with any knowledge transfer being secondary to that goal). Manufacturing jobs were great jobs 100 years ago, and that system made sense at the time, but it's really hurting us now. Changing that focus to teaching kids how to think abstractly and solve technical problems of any description -- well, it's not going to fix everything, but it will help.
In India (where Bangalore is) , software developer is the high-status job. It's higher status and better paying than a doctor or a lawyer. We're talking average house prices for a city of over 8 million here. Successful software developers tend to have staff: beyond a maid and gardener as you might find in the US, a nanny, a driver, perhaps a cook. Sure, those jobs aren't providing a first-world standard of living, but the software jobs are coming close (you have the staff, but there's very little in affordable consumer electronics).
by not training any of the average to above average people, they're significantly reducing the pool of those that potentially could become the best in the future.
I've worked with dozens, perhaps hundreds of above average people who have the opportunity to become the best in the future because they were brought here on H1-Bs. There will always be sweatshops - I started in one myself, and it's the only way I was able to break into the industry. But that's separate from the core issue: humanity benefits the most as a whole from tapping the largest talent pool to push technology forward.
A big flaw in modern thinking is the idea that "government" is the best way for people to work together to achieve a common goal. Government ends up dominated by those with lust for power over those with skill at governing. Companies competing with one another does better for longer, as you get some weeding out of leaders who lack skill at governing, but it seems the lust for power still wins in the end, by eliminating that "competing" part. Better, but not great: we need a new path. Sadly, people want to turn everything into a fight between those two poles, rather than finding a way to move past them both.
Ah, I get what you're saying, thanks.
I find the large-scale structures fascinating myself, as it starts to seem like the universe is in some way older than the big bang - inflation can paper-over the uniformity of temperature, but that's already a stretch without adding structures that shouldn't have had time to form. The idea "before the big bang" starts to seem sensible, as in the very early universe having been interacting since before the singularity. (Penrose has one model for this, if not perhaps a convincing one, in his cyclic cosmology, but it's at least one example of making rigorous sense of the concept.)