If I could afford petabyts I'd use petabytes. There is no real limit to the amount of hdd space I can go through. No matter how much I add I always feel like I'm running out of space. I'm always shuffling around a couple hundred gigs here and a couple hundred gigs there to try to fit stuff in. This weekend I downloaded over 100GB of files from the web, several gigs of files using Bit Torrent, and had several gigs of mail.
Even my none geek friends and family are starting to feel the pain as working with video and Bit Torrent becomes more common. Multiple TB usage won't be that uncommon I think. What we really need now though is RAID-5 for the average Joe.
My sister has cerebal palsy so I do know that sometimes things are very unfriendly to handicapped people. On the other hand I've also been around a lot of handicapped people and I can tell you form experience that, like any minority group, some are bitter and want to blame everyone else for their problems. One example is that when I was managing one store I had some people, who weren't even shopping, come in and bitch because we'd just redone the parking lot and the handicapped space wasn't marked again yet. They were threatening to sue which is utterly ridiciulous because the parking lot only had five spaces anyway and all were roughly an equal distance from the front door and were equally easy for handicapped use.
I try to make my websites reasonably usable by text browsers and I leave the rest up to the user's browser to figure out. I'd like to see a more structured format instead of HTML but trying to force HTML into the mode is pointless. I wonder if RSS could be made to be used as menus between pages? The hard part is that sometimes you just have to have a lot of options available from a page which isn't very friendly to someone using a screen reader. I imagine it's like using a voice mail system that constantly lists of 30 options for every menu.
Of course I think it's stupid to enforce such things by law. If Target isn't filling handicapped customer's needs then it's a market opportunity for a competitor to create a website that's more friendly to handicapped users. Personally, I'd love if some blind users would review my websites and let me know what I could do to make things better for them - especially if they'd buy from me after I made the corrections.
The index really isn't that big because, for the most part, the same words get reused. You also don't need to keep the index in memory - just use a standard database and let it handle the details. I haven't had a problem with MySQL as my backend.
I've done this with millions of email messages and it works fine so I don't see any serious issue with it. It's a lot faster than looking at my email with Thunderbird or Pine or any other mainstream program I've tried. I doubt many other people have 100's of gigs of mail stored up so I think it'd work for most people.
I always get along pretty well with cats - with most animal actually - but I'm sure there'd be all sorts of practical issues involved. My solution would probably be to add back some of that human intelligence and tweak things to make them as docile as possible but then you'd risk submitting quasi-brain-humans to the horrible life cats have. It'd be rough being forced to lounge around all day doing nothing but eatting and napping and running around whenever you felt like it.
Somehow I feel cheated that I'm not someones pet. It's like being a kid but without the responsibility of growing up.;)
I have the vindictive habit - any movie I've bought that has those annoying 'downloading is stealing" ads gets ripped and shared just because their ads make me angry. I usually rip my DVDs for my own use anyway just to remove annoying ads, menus, etc. I want my damn DVD to play when I put it in the drive and not require half an hour of watching ads and clicking buttons first.
I also can rip and use my own copies of movies while keeping my originals safe because funny enough even though I'm supposedly buying a license for the movie, and not the physical disc itself, when I buy a movie they still won't provide a reasonable price for a replacement disc.
I feel no more like a criminal for downloading or uploading media than I would for breaking laws forbidding spitting on the sidewalk or taking my giraffe for a walk up main street. It's stupid, out-dated, laws.
If NIN and Radiohead have donation boxes on their website I may contribute something. I'm only mildly a fan of their music but I support the step they've taken. If bands I like better would take the same move I'd post bigger donations to keep them in business. As little as the actual artists are paid from the labels I wonder how big a donation I'd have to give per album for them to make as much. They don't even have to pay for bandiwdth since I'll download using Bit Torrent. Seems they could make out pretty well this way.
I'm familiar with both Apache and IIS and I'd rather use Apache any day. Rather than half an hour of clicking around to make it behave the way I want, if it's possible at all in crappy IIS, I can copy, paste, and modify a short bit of text in a few seconds. There is no mystery to how it works and it always works on the first try, assuming you know what you're doing, which is not something I can say for IIS.
Forking has gotten a lot cheaper in Linux since we originally sought out better ways to demand more from our webs servers. It's still probably not the ideal way to do high-load stuff but it's improved.
Why anyone would use Windows for a web server I can't really imagine. Linux or BSD is cheaper, easier, more flexibile, more reliable, more secure, and runs faster with less overhead. I hate when I need to develop for, or admin, IIS-based web servers because they are such poor systems.
I'd buy an animal-woman hybrid if they can produce the body of a teenage girl with the brain of say a cat. Finally a date that is impressed by going to a buffet and that just wants to go home and spend some time licking and petting.
Okay - so I'm married now so I guess I couldn't buy one. I just don't think my wife would let me keep a pet that looked human and especially not one that tended towards being an attractive nude female. It'd be awful hard to explain to the kids too.
I'd add the war on drugs, the war on immigration, and just throw in a general 90% of the population as being obviously underclocked. Of course my personal problem is that my sleep mode malfunctions - thus explaining this post at 4am.
They should just provide upgrade slots so that we can add-on backwards compatibility if we want it by dropping in a card that'll provide the extra hardware. That way you can buy the consoles cheaper but can still have full backwards compatibility if you want it. Hell, I want a univiersal backwards compatibility card for mine that'll let me play any console game every made on a single console. I'd pay extra for it.
A hdd with a massive RAM cache seems like it'd be better than using flash. Or just get more RAM and use a filesystem that caches frequently read (and seldom written?) files to RAM? 2GB of extra RAM should cover the vast majority of files the typical user will use during a computing session - only forcing the hdd to work when a file needs to be read into cache or a file is written. I use such a file system on my Linux systems - I dunno how Windows handls such things.:)
I like Firefox and Thunderbird. I just want them not to suck. IMO data loss is one of the worst errors a program can have. Mozilla has known about these issues for a long time and they don't do anything to fix them. Fixing them shouldn't be that hard - it's just an issue that keeps getting ignored. Trying to talk to developers familiar with the actual codebase is somewhat frustrating because they make it sound like the functionality of working with files is badly implemented and more of a pain to fix than it should be - to much effort spent on finding a perfect solution and not enough effort on making a solution that'll work while we wait for perfection. I manually split folders 2GB+ into sub-folders. They could at least automate that process as obviously it's better than data being lost. It's pretty simple - detect when message being moved into folder is going to put folder over limit, create new sub-folder, move message to new folder instead.
I'd have to look. I gave up bitching about it and now just split my mail folders up, manually, so that they never get to be 2GB in size. I should write an add-on to do this for me but I'd rather screw around writing my own mail clients. I mostly use Thunderbird to test against to see if I'm receiving the same number of messages, each message has the same number of attachments, etc.
If you're keeping an index does it matter if the messages are stored as individual files or one big glob? It's kind of silly to have to search file by file. No wonder most mail programs are so horribly slow at searches. If they are having issues with to many files in a directory it's not hard to create a tree. Lots of programs do this. The Squid proxy server would be one example.
I agree - I frequently lose settings with both Firefox and Thunderbird and this is very annoying and IMO shows poor programming. Usually it's minor enough that I continue using these programs anyway but lossing mail is a lot worse than lossing settings.
Unfortunately, I've yet to find an IMAP server + client combination that can handle several gigs of mail per user a day being properly filtered into proper folders etc. I have ran into data loss issues there too. I'm experimenting with creating a custom file system (using FUSE) that collects new mail from POP and IMAP sources, or by just moving a mail file onto that file system, and makes it available at the file system level. I like my system because it first detaches attachments and saves them as real files - creating links (virtual copies actually) instead of copies in case of duplicates, downloads and does the same with web linked files, compresses text portions of messages and removes duplicates, and massively indexes everything and provides virtual directories for sorting through it all. Very handy for geeky persons such as my self. Have been thinking of making it so you can send messages by dropping a text file into the proper directory. Probably would be considered pretty user-unfriendly though as it requires mucking around at the file system level to use. Most of this used to be a text-based app I made but have been turning it into a file system our of idle boredom. No data loss is my #1 design goal.
I've been using Thunderbird as my main mail client for years and overall I like it. My biggest issue with it is that in Linux it has a 2GB limit per mail folder. If it crosses that limit it losses all the mail in the folder up to that point. IMO that is the cardinal sin of programming - permanently lossing data. They've known about this bug for at least a year - because I made it known at that time and had some not so helpful feedback from developers. But it still happens.
That's why we invented ssl, ssh, etc. AP security is mostly an illusion anyway and at least IMO it should not be allowed as it's hijacking a scarce public resource (the frequency being used) and making it into a private resource. Very annoying if you live in a crowded area where everyone is trying to run their own little AP and it's to congested to work well and you can't share because they are all locked.
I was thinking earlier of putting together a nice looking website that puts the issue into easy terms for people to understand and frames things so they'll care. Anyone good at drawing? My graphic artist isn't up for anything that might involve conflict. I have some ideas of how I want the website but I'm not good at drawing.
For code developed by the government at the taxpayers' expense I can see that the BSD license might be a good choice although then I wonder why not just release it as PD. For open source projects though I can't see it as very good because it's not protecting the original author or the community. Even if the code is developed by the government I can see the benfit of forcing code changes to be returned to the community at large while I can't see any benefit to the community for these changes not to be returned.
I do not entirely agree with you. While I do agree that competing with a free product can be a challenge, I think that the BSD license makes it easier. If the new product has enough value added and enough branding it can win. OS X is a good example of this. It absorbed a lot of free code and has stolen a good part of the commercial value of those free projects. Part of this is the failure of the BSD+Linux community to make a decent desktop offering but Apple has used the free code it absorbed to make a giant leap forward for itself without pulling the community that created much of that code along with it.
It's harder for small companies with less value added and less money to throw at branding to abuse open source projects but all that is doing is helping big companies keep small companies from challenging them. Hardly the idea behind open source.
*shrugs* If you want something to happen with regards to how your code is used then put it in your license. Never count on fellow humans doing the right thing because truth be told most of us are scum.
I certainly agree that the ethical thing to do, and the smart long-term thing to do, is to open all source code, protocols, specifications, etc. In reality that isn't how things work though. Just wishing for it to be that way won't make it that way. Intelligent people know that a basic principal of life is that we're all in it together. Unfortunately most of us can't see past our immediate self and how our choices will have a short-term benefit to our person. That's why you need restrictions in your license - to push people to act in ways they might not otherwise be willing to act.
If the world was full of unselfish good people the BSD license would be the way to go. It isn't - so the GPL is smarter. BSD dreams of a utopian society while GPL builds a workable, utopiaisk, society in our current reality.
I don't really care that much if developers are Linux friendly. I have a simple solution to that. I just don't buy from companies which don't work with the systems I need them to work with. If they don't offer full Linux support I just won't give them any of my money. Pretty easy. If there is demand for Linux support then somebody will fill that demand. That is how business works. e.g. I've been a long time user of Nvidia video cards. With AMD/ATI opening their specs I'll be keeping an eye on them for future video card purchases. If better drivers exist for ATI cards then I'll buy ATI cards. I spend the vast majority of my time using computers running Linux so that has high priority for me. I also use BSD, OS X, and Windows on a daily basis so I hope that by opening specs I'll see better support in those also.
I do think the relicensing of the BSD code as GPL was wrong but I think it was probably a misunderstanding. It wasn't the proper way to merge BSD and GPL code but merging BSD and GPL code is perfectly legal if done correctly.
I agree with you though that releasing GPL code as BSD is not agreeable. There are specific protections that the GPL gives the author that the BSD license doesn't. Whining about not having these kinds of protection when using the BSD license is kind of out of the spirit of using the BSD license.
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If I could afford petabyts I'd use petabytes. There is no real limit to the amount of hdd space I can go through. No matter how much I add I always feel like I'm running out of space. I'm always shuffling around a couple hundred gigs here and a couple hundred gigs there to try to fit stuff in. This weekend I downloaded over 100GB of files from the web, several gigs of files using Bit Torrent, and had several gigs of mail.
Even my none geek friends and family are starting to feel the pain as working with video and Bit Torrent becomes more common. Multiple TB usage won't be that uncommon I think. What we really need now though is RAID-5 for the average Joe.
My sister has cerebal palsy so I do know that sometimes things are very unfriendly to handicapped people. On the other hand I've also been around a lot of handicapped people and I can tell you form experience that, like any minority group, some are bitter and want to blame everyone else for their problems. One example is that when I was managing one store I had some people, who weren't even shopping, come in and bitch because we'd just redone the parking lot and the handicapped space wasn't marked again yet. They were threatening to sue which is utterly ridiciulous because the parking lot only had five spaces anyway and all were roughly an equal distance from the front door and were equally easy for handicapped use.
I try to make my websites reasonably usable by text browsers and I leave the rest up to the user's browser to figure out. I'd like to see a more structured format instead of HTML but trying to force HTML into the mode is pointless. I wonder if RSS could be made to be used as menus between pages? The hard part is that sometimes you just have to have a lot of options available from a page which isn't very friendly to someone using a screen reader. I imagine it's like using a voice mail system that constantly lists of 30 options for every menu.
Of course I think it's stupid to enforce such things by law. If Target isn't filling handicapped customer's needs then it's a market opportunity for a competitor to create a website that's more friendly to handicapped users. Personally, I'd love if some blind users would review my websites and let me know what I could do to make things better for them - especially if they'd buy from me after I made the corrections.
The index really isn't that big because, for the most part, the same words get reused. You also don't need to keep the index in memory - just use a standard database and let it handle the details. I haven't had a problem with MySQL as my backend.
I've done this with millions of email messages and it works fine so I don't see any serious issue with it. It's a lot faster than looking at my email with Thunderbird or Pine or any other mainstream program I've tried. I doubt many other people have 100's of gigs of mail stored up so I think it'd work for most people.
I always get along pretty well with cats - with most animal actually - but I'm sure there'd be all sorts of practical issues involved. My solution would probably be to add back some of that human intelligence and tweak things to make them as docile as possible but then you'd risk submitting quasi-brain-humans to the horrible life cats have. It'd be rough being forced to lounge around all day doing nothing but eatting and napping and running around whenever you felt like it.
;)
Somehow I feel cheated that I'm not someones pet. It's like being a kid but without the responsibility of growing up.
Though this is genetics and not artificial intelligence it reminds me of the book The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker.
I have the vindictive habit - any movie I've bought that has those annoying 'downloading is stealing" ads gets ripped and shared just because their ads make me angry. I usually rip my DVDs for my own use anyway just to remove annoying ads, menus, etc. I want my damn DVD to play when I put it in the drive and not require half an hour of watching ads and clicking buttons first.
I also can rip and use my own copies of movies while keeping my originals safe because funny enough even though I'm supposedly buying a license for the movie, and not the physical disc itself, when I buy a movie they still won't provide a reasonable price for a replacement disc.
I feel no more like a criminal for downloading or uploading media than I would for breaking laws forbidding spitting on the sidewalk or taking my giraffe for a walk up main street. It's stupid, out-dated, laws.
If NIN and Radiohead have donation boxes on their website I may contribute something. I'm only mildly a fan of their music but I support the step they've taken. If bands I like better would take the same move I'd post bigger donations to keep them in business. As little as the actual artists are paid from the labels I wonder how big a donation I'd have to give per album for them to make as much. They don't even have to pay for bandiwdth since I'll download using Bit Torrent. Seems they could make out pretty well this way.
I'm familiar with both Apache and IIS and I'd rather use Apache any day. Rather than half an hour of clicking around to make it behave the way I want, if it's possible at all in crappy IIS, I can copy, paste, and modify a short bit of text in a few seconds. There is no mystery to how it works and it always works on the first try, assuming you know what you're doing, which is not something I can say for IIS.
Forking has gotten a lot cheaper in Linux since we originally sought out better ways to demand more from our webs servers. It's still probably not the ideal way to do high-load stuff but it's improved.
Why anyone would use Windows for a web server I can't really imagine. Linux or BSD is cheaper, easier, more flexibile, more reliable, more secure, and runs faster with less overhead. I hate when I need to develop for, or admin, IIS-based web servers because they are such poor systems.
I'd buy an animal-woman hybrid if they can produce the body of a teenage girl with the brain of say a cat. Finally a date that is impressed by going to a buffet and that just wants to go home and spend some time licking and petting.
Okay - so I'm married now so I guess I couldn't buy one. I just don't think my wife would let me keep a pet that looked human and especially not one that tended towards being an attractive nude female. It'd be awful hard to explain to the kids too.
I'd add the war on drugs, the war on immigration, and just throw in a general 90% of the population as being obviously underclocked. Of course my personal problem is that my sleep mode malfunctions - thus explaining this post at 4am.
They should just provide upgrade slots so that we can add-on backwards compatibility if we want it by dropping in a card that'll provide the extra hardware. That way you can buy the consoles cheaper but can still have full backwards compatibility if you want it. Hell, I want a univiersal backwards compatibility card for mine that'll let me play any console game every made on a single console. I'd pay extra for it.
A hdd with a massive RAM cache seems like it'd be better than using flash. Or just get more RAM and use a filesystem that caches frequently read (and seldom written?) files to RAM? 2GB of extra RAM should cover the vast majority of files the typical user will use during a computing session - only forcing the hdd to work when a file needs to be read into cache or a file is written. I use such a file system on my Linux systems - I dunno how Windows handls such things. :)
If I could spel they'd lt me out of kindygarden.
I like Firefox and Thunderbird. I just want them not to suck. IMO data loss is one of the worst errors a program can have. Mozilla has known about these issues for a long time and they don't do anything to fix them. Fixing them shouldn't be that hard - it's just an issue that keeps getting ignored. Trying to talk to developers familiar with the actual codebase is somewhat frustrating because they make it sound like the functionality of working with files is badly implemented and more of a pain to fix than it should be - to much effort spent on finding a perfect solution and not enough effort on making a solution that'll work while we wait for perfection. I manually split folders 2GB+ into sub-folders. They could at least automate that process as obviously it's better than data being lost. It's pretty simple - detect when message being moved into folder is going to put folder over limit, create new sub-folder, move message to new folder instead.
I'd have to look. I gave up bitching about it and now just split my mail folders up, manually, so that they never get to be 2GB in size. I should write an add-on to do this for me but I'd rather screw around writing my own mail clients. I mostly use Thunderbird to test against to see if I'm receiving the same number of messages, each message has the same number of attachments, etc.
If you're keeping an index does it matter if the messages are stored as individual files or one big glob? It's kind of silly to have to search file by file. No wonder most mail programs are so horribly slow at searches. If they are having issues with to many files in a directory it's not hard to create a tree. Lots of programs do this. The Squid proxy server would be one example.
I agree - I frequently lose settings with both Firefox and Thunderbird and this is very annoying and IMO shows poor programming. Usually it's minor enough that I continue using these programs anyway but lossing mail is a lot worse than lossing settings.
Unfortunately, I've yet to find an IMAP server + client combination that can handle several gigs of mail per user a day being properly filtered into proper folders etc. I have ran into data loss issues there too. I'm experimenting with creating a custom file system (using FUSE) that collects new mail from POP and IMAP sources, or by just moving a mail file onto that file system, and makes it available at the file system level. I like my system because it first detaches attachments and saves them as real files - creating links (virtual copies actually) instead of copies in case of duplicates, downloads and does the same with web linked files, compresses text portions of messages and removes duplicates, and massively indexes everything and provides virtual directories for sorting through it all. Very handy for geeky persons such as my self. Have been thinking of making it so you can send messages by dropping a text file into the proper directory. Probably would be considered pretty user-unfriendly though as it requires mucking around at the file system level to use. Most of this used to be a text-based app I made but have been turning it into a file system our of idle boredom. No data loss is my #1 design goal.
I've been using Thunderbird as my main mail client for years and overall I like it. My biggest issue with it is that in Linux it has a 2GB limit per mail folder. If it crosses that limit it losses all the mail in the folder up to that point. IMO that is the cardinal sin of programming - permanently lossing data. They've known about this bug for at least a year - because I made it known at that time and had some not so helpful feedback from developers. But it still happens.
That's why we invented ssl, ssh, etc. AP security is mostly an illusion anyway and at least IMO it should not be allowed as it's hijacking a scarce public resource (the frequency being used) and making it into a private resource. Very annoying if you live in a crowded area where everyone is trying to run their own little AP and it's to congested to work well and you can't share because they are all locked.
I have a FON AP and access is free for anyone although they need a FON account to use it.
I was thinking earlier of putting together a nice looking website that puts the issue into easy terms for people to understand and frames things so they'll care. Anyone good at drawing? My graphic artist isn't up for anything that might involve conflict. I have some ideas of how I want the website but I'm not good at drawing.
The author is a user. Prehaps the most important user as it's the authors job to give the rest of the users something worth using.
For code developed by the government at the taxpayers' expense I can see that the BSD license might be a good choice although then I wonder why not just release it as PD. For open source projects though I can't see it as very good because it's not protecting the original author or the community. Even if the code is developed by the government I can see the benfit of forcing code changes to be returned to the community at large while I can't see any benefit to the community for these changes not to be returned.
I do not entirely agree with you. While I do agree that competing with a free product can be a challenge, I think that the BSD license makes it easier. If the new product has enough value added and enough branding it can win. OS X is a good example of this. It absorbed a lot of free code and has stolen a good part of the commercial value of those free projects. Part of this is the failure of the BSD+Linux community to make a decent desktop offering but Apple has used the free code it absorbed to make a giant leap forward for itself without pulling the community that created much of that code along with it.
It's harder for small companies with less value added and less money to throw at branding to abuse open source projects but all that is doing is helping big companies keep small companies from challenging them. Hardly the idea behind open source.
*shrugs* If you want something to happen with regards to how your code is used then put it in your license. Never count on fellow humans doing the right thing because truth be told most of us are scum.
I certainly agree that the ethical thing to do, and the smart long-term thing to do, is to open all source code, protocols, specifications, etc. In reality that isn't how things work though. Just wishing for it to be that way won't make it that way. Intelligent people know that a basic principal of life is that we're all in it together. Unfortunately most of us can't see past our immediate self and how our choices will have a short-term benefit to our person. That's why you need restrictions in your license - to push people to act in ways they might not otherwise be willing to act.
If the world was full of unselfish good people the BSD license would be the way to go. It isn't - so the GPL is smarter. BSD dreams of a utopian society while GPL builds a workable, utopiaisk, society in our current reality.
I don't really care that much if developers are Linux friendly. I have a simple solution to that. I just don't buy from companies which don't work with the systems I need them to work with. If they don't offer full Linux support I just won't give them any of my money. Pretty easy. If there is demand for Linux support then somebody will fill that demand. That is how business works. e.g. I've been a long time user of Nvidia video cards. With AMD/ATI opening their specs I'll be keeping an eye on them for future video card purchases. If better drivers exist for ATI cards then I'll buy ATI cards. I spend the vast majority of my time using computers running Linux so that has high priority for me. I also use BSD, OS X, and Windows on a daily basis so I hope that by opening specs I'll see better support in those also.
I do think the relicensing of the BSD code as GPL was wrong but I think it was probably a misunderstanding. It wasn't the proper way to merge BSD and GPL code but merging BSD and GPL code is perfectly legal if done correctly.
I agree with you though that releasing GPL code as BSD is not agreeable. There are specific protections that the GPL gives the author that the BSD license doesn't. Whining about not having these kinds of protection when using the BSD license is kind of out of the spirit of using the BSD license.