To claim that RAID is "good enough" in any circumstances where data loss is unacceptable is to not fully understand data backup.
What happens if two of your drives fail simultaneously? This is not as unlikely as it sounds, since those drives were almost certainly manufactured, bought, and installed more or less at the same time, meaning they'll meet their MTBF at the same time. Yes, the M in MTBF means "Mean", but they're still all going to be reaching the end of their expected life at the same time. And when one drive fails, the demand on the others goes up a lot when you rebuild the RAID, increasing the chance of failure even more.
What happens if you get filesystem corruption? Yes, it happens, no matter what hardware or what OS. My university had a massive RAIDed file server whose controller decided to start randomly corrupting things one day. Good thing they had everybody's files on tape, because that RAID was toast, and any RAID would be under those same circumstances.
What happens if your house gets hit by a meteor? Yes, the meteor is fanciful, but building-destroying events are not. Meteor, flood, fire, whatever, RAID helps not a bit, because your redundant drives all get smashed/wet/burned at the same time. And even if you think that these are unlikely, what about a miniature flood caused by somebody spilling their Supersized Coke? Or any number of minor domestic accidents....
If you can't lose the data, you must have offsite backups. If you can lose it, why bother with RAID?
Wouldn't it be even better if the tech support could provide that human touch? Why employ two seperate people?
Wouldn't it be nice if the accounting department could handle their own programming tasks? Why employ two separate people?
Wouldn't it be nice if the truck drivers could simply build their own trucks? Why employ two separate people?
You might have a point if they hired a random guy off the street with decent people skills. But that's not what they did. They hired a psychologist. Not just a regular guy with people skills, but a professional. This probably cost a lot more than a Random Guy, but they did it anyway. Presumably this means it was worth it to them, and that they really want/need a bona fide psychologist. In which case, expecting the tech support people to also be professional psychologists is idiotic, particularly if the need is so rare that they only have one.
CS can be roughly divided into two parts: software engineering, and discrete mathematics/theory of computation. Agile methods and design patterns aren't part of the latter, but they sure are part of the former. You wouldn't tell a math guy that "how to write proofs" wasn't part of math, would you? Likewise, "how to build software" is very much a part of CS.
Drug companies like Merck, Smith Kline, etc. have as much money, if not more, than the budgets of most states.
Merck's yearly revenues are about $23.2 billion. A random small, not particularly rich midwestern state such as Wisconsin has a yearly budget of about $24.5 billion.
I had that happen to me once. Then I realized it was playing from a CD, in a CD player smart enough to pick up where it left off when the car was turned back on.
There's a huge difference between, "PRNGs aren't truly random" and "PRNGs suck so much that I can hear the difference in the shuffle algorithm on my iPod". Anybody who thinks that they can actually detect the non-randomness in a good PRNG simply by listening to a few thousand songs is highly deluded.
What exactly does Applocale do, though? As far as I've seen, running Windows in a multilingual household, most Windows apps only come with one localization, and those which have more have some custom way of choosing the language.
Ok, I did a bit of my own research, and that's not the same thing at all. Applocale simply sets up so that non-unicode programs will display their non-ASCII text correctly. What I'm talking about is this scenario: I'm running Mail, and it's in English. I set my preferences to have French first, restart Mail, and it's in French. I set my preferences to have Chinese first, restart Safari, and now Safari is in Chinese.
Mac OS X has a pervasive localization system which allows applications to embed other languages for their interfaces in a standard way. This means you can switch between interface languages on a system level and all of the apps you launch afterwards will follow. Of course it won't work if the application hasn't actually been translated, but a lot of apps have been and all Apple applications have been translated into a ton of mainstream languages. There's none of this nonsense about installing a version of the OS suited to a given language; the stock version of Mac OS X can be set to run in every language Apple has translated it to.
This will compile, and if your compiler is evil, it may not even warn. (Although if it doesn't, you should either fix it or fire it.)
if(0 = x)
This won't compile, because 0 is not an lvalue. However, the correct way to prevent this error is to get the compiler to tell you about it any time it happens, not to contort your code.
NULL isn't necessarily equal to 0 at the machine level. However, at the language level, 0 is always interpreted exactly the same as NULL if it's being converted to a pointer, and vice versa. This is explicitly spelled out in the C standard, so any compiler that doesn't obey this is breaking the standard. Saying !ptr and ptr == NULL is always identical on a conforming compiler (which they pretty much all are).
And? How much is fifteen seconds of air time going to cost you? If it's so expensive that you can't afford fifteen seconds to soothe your burning curiosity, get a new plan.
In OS X, not only can you change the interface language, you can change it on the fly for any new application you launch. It's perfectly feasible to have a bunch of apps open in English, your e-mail app open in French, and your browser open in Chinese, all at once. (I've done it.) This is probably useless for a lot of people, but it's wonderful for some of us.
I think you may have set a new record. In one short post, you've managed to insult:
- All non-American (or British, or wherever you're from) English speakers. - Everybody who didn't get your joke. - Jews. - Non-Jews. - Slashdot moderators.
Why can't we just strap two pieces of toast together? Do it horizontally, like this (arrow points in the direction of butter):
vvvvvvvv^^^^^^^^
If one piece impacts the ground, the other will as well. What's more, if one piece lands buttered-side-down, the other one will be buttered-side-up, violating physics. This eliminates the cat, which is a large source of uncertainty and injury in the device.
I'm not real familiar with the "old" BSG, but as far as I can tell, the new one is totally different. It's an excellent show.
This explanation is both hilarious and completely true : )
That's the best out-of-context quoting I've seen today. I didn't mean to make a jab at the old BSG, but if I were, that's exactly how I would have done it! Thanks for playing with my post.
(Not me, I was never a BSG fan... I was a TNG fan)
You should check it out. I'm not real familiar with the "old" BSG, but as far as I can tell, the new one is totally different. It's an excellent show. My tastes have changed since I was a TNG fan, but the first season of BSG is as good as TNG was at its peak, and very consistently good. I personally can't wait for season 2.
Beg, borrow, steal, or buy the miniseries and give it a spin. Any TV series that begins with the brutal destruction of human civilization can't be all bad.
Precisely. This sounds like typical "I live in the basement and hate people" ranting. If you pick up the phone, you're not going to get magically charged thousands of dollars. If you're so gullible that you can't withstand a scammer's pitch for the ten seconds it takes to discover who they are, you probably shouldn't have a phone at all.
Terminating your rights under this license doesn't mean you can no longer use the program.
And this is different from any other EULA how? Show me an example of where someone has been successfully sued for using software because of a restriction in an EULA.
Irrelevant. The debate is not over what EULAs can or cannot do; the debate is over what they try to do, and what software publishers believe they can do.
It's obvious that software publishers think they can require you to accept the EULA to use the software. They require you to agree to it in their installers, or on their shrinkwraps, and they include clauses that state you can return the software for a refund if you don't agree.
The GPL, on the other hand, clearly states that you aren't required to accept it:
You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it.
If you don't accept it, you are governed by regular copyright law, and the FSF understands and explicitly states this. The GPL is explicitly optional.
"You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void,
Up to here, I can see why you'd think so, though.
and will automatically terminate your rights under this License."
Terminating your rights under this license doesn't mean you can no longer use the program. It means you can no longer use the rights granted to you by the GPL with this copy. You may continue to use the copy, distribute under fair use, etc., but you are no longer allowed to redistribute the program under the terms of the GPL.
GPL is not "our way or the highway", it's "our way or the regular copyright way".
Sounds like they've just restricted all of your fair use and first sale rights just there, except the ones they expressly grant. If I buy GPLed software, can I resell the binary without distributing the source or not? It is my right under first sale to redistribute in this way, after all, but according to the GPL I cannot do this.
I don't believe that "distribution" covers resale. Even if it did, you can still resell, but you give up your GPL rights for this copy of the program. You probably don't care too much, though, since you're reselling it.
The GPL is fundamentally different from a EULA, and this is why:
Copyright law gives you, the end user, certain rights and restrictions. Namely, you may copy the work as far as fair use allows, and use it however you like, as long as you don't distribute copies beyond the allowances of fair use.
An EULA takes the rights you have and restricts them further. They may add things such as restrictions on your use of the software, your ability to sue the publisher, etc.
The GPL takes the rights you have and expands them. The GPL does not restrict your rights under copyright law in any way. What the GPL does is allow you to go beyond the rights you are given by law, provided you follow the GPL.
It is perfectly legal and legitimate to use GPLd software without reading, understanding, or accepting the GPL. In this case, you fall back to the default copyright restrictions, which are more restrictive than the GPL. If you do this, you won't be allowed to copy the software beyond what fair use allows, but you can still use the software like any other piece of copyrighted software.
And that is why the GPL is not an EULA, and why arguments over enforceability, legality, and morality of EULAs do not apply to the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
To claim that RAID is "good enough" in any circumstances where data loss is unacceptable is to not fully understand data backup.
What happens if two of your drives fail simultaneously? This is not as unlikely as it sounds, since those drives were almost certainly manufactured, bought, and installed more or less at the same time, meaning they'll meet their MTBF at the same time. Yes, the M in MTBF means "Mean", but they're still all going to be reaching the end of their expected life at the same time. And when one drive fails, the demand on the others goes up a lot when you rebuild the RAID, increasing the chance of failure even more.
What happens if you get filesystem corruption? Yes, it happens, no matter what hardware or what OS. My university had a massive RAIDed file server whose controller decided to start randomly corrupting things one day. Good thing they had everybody's files on tape, because that RAID was toast, and any RAID would be under those same circumstances.
What happens if your house gets hit by a meteor? Yes, the meteor is fanciful, but building-destroying events are not. Meteor, flood, fire, whatever, RAID helps not a bit, because your redundant drives all get smashed/wet/burned at the same time. And even if you think that these are unlikely, what about a miniature flood caused by somebody spilling their Supersized Coke? Or any number of minor domestic accidents....
If you can't lose the data, you must have offsite backups. If you can lose it, why bother with RAID?
Wouldn't it be even better if the tech support could provide that human touch? Why employ two seperate people?
Wouldn't it be nice if the accounting department could handle their own programming tasks? Why employ two separate people?
Wouldn't it be nice if the truck drivers could simply build their own trucks? Why employ two separate people?
You might have a point if they hired a random guy off the street with decent people skills. But that's not what they did. They hired a psychologist. Not just a regular guy with people skills, but a professional. This probably cost a lot more than a Random Guy, but they did it anyway. Presumably this means it was worth it to them, and that they really want/need a bona fide psychologist. In which case, expecting the tech support people to also be professional psychologists is idiotic, particularly if the need is so rare that they only have one.
CS can be roughly divided into two parts: software engineering, and discrete mathematics/theory of computation. Agile methods and design patterns aren't part of the latter, but they sure are part of the former. You wouldn't tell a math guy that "how to write proofs" wasn't part of math, would you? Likewise, "how to build software" is very much a part of CS.
Drug companies like Merck, Smith Kline, etc. have as much money, if not more, than the budgets of most states.
Merck's yearly revenues are about $23.2 billion. A random small, not particularly rich midwestern state such as Wisconsin has a yearly budget of about $24.5 billion.
I get peeved when people talk too loudly while taking public transportation, but I hardly think it should be illegal.
I had that happen to me once. Then I realized it was playing from a CD, in a CD player smart enough to pick up where it left off when the car was turned back on.
There's a huge difference between, "PRNGs aren't truly random" and "PRNGs suck so much that I can hear the difference in the shuffle algorithm on my iPod". Anybody who thinks that they can actually detect the non-randomness in a good PRNG simply by listening to a few thousand songs is highly deluded.
What exactly does Applocale do, though? As far as I've seen, running Windows in a multilingual household, most Windows apps only come with one localization, and those which have more have some custom way of choosing the language.
Ok, I did a bit of my own research, and that's not the same thing at all. Applocale simply sets up so that non-unicode programs will display their non-ASCII text correctly. What I'm talking about is this scenario: I'm running Mail, and it's in English. I set my preferences to have French first, restart Mail, and it's in French. I set my preferences to have Chinese first, restart Safari, and now Safari is in Chinese.
Mac OS X has a pervasive localization system which allows applications to embed other languages for their interfaces in a standard way. This means you can switch between interface languages on a system level and all of the apps you launch afterwards will follow. Of course it won't work if the application hasn't actually been translated, but a lot of apps have been and all Apple applications have been translated into a ton of mainstream languages. There's none of this nonsense about installing a version of the OS suited to a given language; the stock version of Mac OS X can be set to run in every language Apple has translated it to.
Actually, it would help. For example:
if(x = 0)
This will compile, and if your compiler is evil, it may not even warn. (Although if it doesn't, you should either fix it or fire it.)
if(0 = x)
This won't compile, because 0 is not an lvalue. However, the correct way to prevent this error is to get the compiler to tell you about it any time it happens, not to contort your code.
NULL isn't necessarily equal to 0 at the machine level. However, at the language level, 0 is always interpreted exactly the same as NULL if it's being converted to a pointer, and vice versa. This is explicitly spelled out in the C standard, so any compiler that doesn't obey this is breaking the standard. Saying !ptr and ptr == NULL is always identical on a conforming compiler (which they pretty much all are).
Putting the value on the left side prevents == VS = mixups
So does using -W -Wall -Werror, and that lets you write your statements naturally and protects you when comparing two variables.
Relying on NULL #define-ition to be compatible with all pointer types is risky.
Relying on behavior that is explicitly specified in the ISO/ANSI standard is never risky.
And? How much is fifteen seconds of air time going to cost you? If it's so expensive that you can't afford fifteen seconds to soothe your burning curiosity, get a new plan.
Drop-down menus on a web site replicate the common user interface of the menu in a desktop application.
Yeah, ugly, funny-sized, badly-colored, slow menus inside a window certainly replicate the pretty, consistent, snappy menus at the top of my screen.
The only thing than not copying an interface the user knows is copying such an interface, but doing it very very badly, which is what these sites do.
In OS X, not only can you change the interface language, you can change it on the fly for any new application you launch. It's perfectly feasible to have a bunch of apps open in English, your e-mail app open in French, and your browser open in Chinese, all at once. (I've done it.) This is probably useless for a lot of people, but it's wonderful for some of us.
I think you may have set a new record. In one short post, you've managed to insult:
- All non-American (or British, or wherever you're from) English speakers.
- Everybody who didn't get your joke.
- Jews.
- Non-Jews.
- Slashdot moderators.
Good job!
Why can't we just strap two pieces of toast together? Do it horizontally, like this (arrow points in the direction of butter):
vvvvvvvv^^^^^^^^
If one piece impacts the ground, the other will as well. What's more, if one piece lands buttered-side-down, the other one will be buttered-side-up, violating physics. This eliminates the cat, which is a large source of uncertainty and injury in the device.
The system doesn't work the way I want it to! Let's sue!
Cry me a river. I hope these guys get bitchslapped by the judge and/or jury.
Do you really want the same group of people deciding the verdict, setting the penalty, and collecting the money? Bad, bad, bad idea.
That's the best out-of-context quoting I've seen today. I didn't mean to make a jab at the old BSG, but if I were, that's exactly how I would have done it! Thanks for playing with my post.
Or, if you like to use your computer as a DVD player, grab a copy of VLC instead of using crippled software.
(Not me, I was never a BSG fan... I was a TNG fan)
You should check it out. I'm not real familiar with the "old" BSG, but as far as I can tell, the new one is totally different. It's an excellent show. My tastes have changed since I was a TNG fan, but the first season of BSG is as good as TNG was at its peak, and very consistently good. I personally can't wait for season 2.
Beg, borrow, steal, or buy the miniseries and give it a spin. Any TV series that begins with the brutal destruction of human civilization can't be all bad.
Precisely. This sounds like typical "I live in the basement and hate people" ranting. If you pick up the phone, you're not going to get magically charged thousands of dollars. If you're so gullible that you can't withstand a scammer's pitch for the ten seconds it takes to discover who they are, you probably shouldn't have a phone at all.
Irrelevant. The debate is not over what EULAs can or cannot do; the debate is over what they try to do, and what software publishers believe they can do.
It's obvious that software publishers think they can require you to accept the EULA to use the software. They require you to agree to it in their installers, or on their shrinkwraps, and they include clauses that state you can return the software for a refund if you don't agree.
The GPL, on the other hand, clearly states that you aren't required to accept it:
You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it.
If you don't accept it, you are governed by regular copyright law, and the FSF understands and explicitly states this. The GPL is explicitly optional.
And the GPL does not?
No, it doesn't.
"You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void,
Up to here, I can see why you'd think so, though.
and will automatically terminate your rights under this License."
Terminating your rights under this license doesn't mean you can no longer use the program. It means you can no longer use the rights granted to you by the GPL with this copy. You may continue to use the copy, distribute under fair use, etc., but you are no longer allowed to redistribute the program under the terms of the GPL.
GPL is not "our way or the highway", it's "our way or the regular copyright way".
Sounds like they've just restricted all of your fair use and first sale rights just there, except the ones they expressly grant. If I buy GPLed software, can I resell the binary without distributing the source or not? It is my right under first sale to redistribute in this way, after all, but according to the GPL I cannot do this.
I don't believe that "distribution" covers resale. Even if it did, you can still resell, but you give up your GPL rights for this copy of the program. You probably don't care too much, though, since you're reselling it.
The GPL is fundamentally different from a EULA, and this is why:
Copyright law gives you, the end user, certain rights and restrictions. Namely, you may copy the work as far as fair use allows, and use it however you like, as long as you don't distribute copies beyond the allowances of fair use.
An EULA takes the rights you have and restricts them further. They may add things such as restrictions on your use of the software, your ability to sue the publisher, etc.
The GPL takes the rights you have and expands them. The GPL does not restrict your rights under copyright law in any way. What the GPL does is allow you to go beyond the rights you are given by law, provided you follow the GPL.
It is perfectly legal and legitimate to use GPLd software without reading, understanding, or accepting the GPL. In this case, you fall back to the default copyright restrictions, which are more restrictive than the GPL. If you do this, you won't be allowed to copy the software beyond what fair use allows, but you can still use the software like any other piece of copyrighted software.
And that is why the GPL is not an EULA, and why arguments over enforceability, legality, and morality of EULAs do not apply to the GPL.