I must assume your anecdote comes from an extremely tiny sample size, as no one with any credibility would claim that linux doesn't crash. With as many servers as I'm responsible for, it's only a matter of days between some system, somewhere, crashing.
I guess you think all those kernel exploits the likes of redhat are patch all the damn time, don't really exist either, since you don't see them?
More bugs in un privileged space in exchange for an incredibly stable micro kernel, would be an awesomely positive trade off.
And the BSD operating systems are "so damn solid" only in the sense that many parts are very mature and the pace of development is fairly slow, lagging well behind Linux for a good decade.
Right... That was why head-to-head benchmarks of Linux and FreeBSD on SMP and file-system performance showed FreeBSD coming out ahead pretty consistently. These days, people have stopped caring about a little performance one way or the other, but it's utterly ridiculous to claim FreeBSD lags "a good decade" behind Linux... In fact it leads Linux often enough.
ZFS vs Btrfs seems like a good contemporary example.
Linux does run every component of the kernel in the same address space, which has its downsides (a buggy video driver can theoretically affect your network driver), but I haven't seen these downsides come up in practice.
Oh, but you have, actually... Every time you've seen a Linux system lock-up, you're seeing the effects of a monolithic kernel. Every time you seek a kernel security exploit, you're seeing the result of a monolithic kernel.
People are familiar with the idea that userland code on a Linux/Unix system should be unable to cause a kernel crash, but few are familiar with microkernels, where only the tiniest bit of code makes up the core of the kernel, and the most low-level of services can fail, will not hurt anything else, and can be restarted automatically, with no effect on the stability of the system.
You need only look at the rabid fan-base of OpenVMS for an example. It can be immensely stable, even running on hardware with buggy and unstable drivers. It invariably comes up in first place in every test of security, because there's so little code in privileged space that it can be easily audited to be bug-free, and none of the bugs in any other code can cause serious problems.
Think of it this way... Computers are just math machines. Code is just equations, and equations can be PROVABLY correct. A properly written microkernel can be PROVEN to be correct. In other words, baring hardware problems, you can prove that the fully audited microkernel will never crash, will never malfunction at all. And since it's a microkernel, it doesn't matter if the drivers and other userland code running under it are reliable or not... If they don't behave, they will be killed and restarted transparently, and the system will continue to function. You can see this level of rigour in seL4: http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/klein-sosp09.pdf
They don't? If I wasn't required to use Linux at work, I'd be 100% FreeBSD, no Linux, no Windows, nothing. FreeBSD remains a far superior desktop system. Linux remains a nightmarish fight to get a system stable and with the software you want installed. Load up RHEL5/6 with all the repos you want, and it's still completely hit or miss as to whether the program you've been using for decades will be in any of the repos. So go get the source RPM and cross your fingers and hope... Ever tried to compile OpenSuSe SRPMs on RHEL? Yikes!
In FreeBSD, there's a port (and probably a package if not for license issues) for everything you could ever want to have installed. And if it's older and was since deleted, you can probably pull it in from an old ports tree, and it'll still work just fine.
One simple little thing ALL the BSDs get right, that ALL the Linux distros (except Slackware) get wrong... Headers (-devel) included in the package, not separately. They're tiny, they'll never cause any problems, and almost everyone will end up needing them at some point, so it's incomprehensible that they're universally shunned...
The BSD license lacks the self-preservation to exist as an independent product, sure the code won't go away but all the users disappear on proprietary spin-offs and so too in essence all the potential developers.
Linux and GNU aren't dependant on companies and developers just doing the bare minimum to comply with the GPL. No, they have to go above and beyond that, to working with the community to get their changes merged. Apple's tar dumps of WebKit source code were useless, yet this is the license you were saying was going to keep them honest? Sorry, no, it was public pressure that got them playing nice, NOT license obligations.
There are many examples of non-CopyLeft licenses working out fine, and furthermore, being NECESSARY.
Theo is complaining, because he personally burned a lot of bridges, and I'm not sure companies want to be associated with him at all. FreeBSD is doing just fine and developing quite well, even if it gets vastly less press than Linux. Jimmy Wales is begging for money every day, does that mean Wikipedia, like BSD, is a failed idea, and it needs a copyright that requires contributions to Wikimedia for all commercial redistribution?
There are plenty of examples of BSD/MITX licensed software being NECESSARY. Pretty much EVERYTHING that is a de-facto internet standard was released as BSD/MITX-licensed software, and I'd say next to nothing released as CopyLeft has ever risen to that level...
OpenSSH wouldn't have caught-on if it was GPL'd. Why do you think FreSSH has negligible installed base? Telnet and rsh stayed in-use far after they should have died out, yet it wasn't until OpenSSH came along that everyone agreed on a standard.
Apache has done quite well, both in funding and code contributions, despite their very free license across their projects.
The same is true of BIND and SENDMAIL.
NFS (v3) was looking horribly decrepit for a number of years. Yet it kept being used, while all the GPL'd network filesystems being developed without the drawbacks and features like encryption died on the vine. And now with NFSv4, the freer option is back up to snuff, and all those CopyLeft alternatives remain dead.
rsync is a great service, but will it ever be established as an alternative to primitive FTP file transfers? It actually looks like SFTP is taking over a lot of those functions.
NTP? LPD? Kerberos & LDP? iSCSI?
Go ahead, just name one piece of CopyLeft software that has gone on to become a defacto internet standard, and prove me wrong.
The moral of the story is, you want to say if it was BSD instead of Linux, it would have been "stolen" and locked-up in proprietary products. I'd say if it had been BSD instead of Linux, penetration would have been VASTLY faster, and COMPLETE. Sure, th
This isn't Earth were you can have some sort of cataclysmic event and practically go back to a primitive agrarian society. You want that space suit to function? That airlock to work? The solar panels to produce heat so you don't freeze to death? If they break down and you can't fix them or replace them you're dead.
While you're correct that it is tougher to survive on a non-teraformed planet, the skills required aren't all that high tech. Smelting iron ore, and cooking silica to create panes of glass doesn't require a college degree, let alone a major industrial complex. More than that, heating and cooling, and botany are the only special skills required on Mars that you could survive without on Earth, but even here they'd be plenty valuable post-apocalypse.
we can send a radiation hardened CPU to Mars but a factory to build one? And all the tools required to maintain and repair that factory? So? You're back to iPod-level tech again. An HVAC system doesn't need a CPU... they happen to have them because low-end CPUs happen to be diirt cheap. Things worked just fine 50 years ago before any of these high-tech inventions came along. The big thing a colony will need is a dome, and plants. A CPU is not necessary. This is a colony, not a fighter jet. Things like communications would fail after a few decades, but they would survive just fine with basic, millenia-old, mechanical & agricultural skills.
So far we're still not talking about average individuals; in fact, we're now talking about a subset (marathon trainers) of a subset (runners).
No, we aren't. The quote doesn't say anything like that, so you just pulled that one entirely out of your ass. And your assertion is directly refuted by the source I already cited.
you're never going to adapt as well as someone who started where you did but has had generations to get there.
Is this your utter misunderstanding of evolution on display here? Nothing magic happens in-utero (being "born there"), and none of your "adaptations" get passed to the next generation in any way.
And no matter how much you run, you're not going to run as well as someone who was quite literally born to run
Directly refuted by the source already cited.
In summary: It's not my fault you never learned to read.
You do reealize JPEG was basically the very first multimedia standard, don't you? It preedates MPEG-1. We didn't "reach" this point... we STARTED at this point. GIF is similarly old, and PNG has made only very limited inroads towards displacing it... It's a real shame they didn't include animation features from day one, or it might have done better.
The second part, ESTABLISHED, is the big one. It's hard to get everyone to upgrade every piece of software, everywhere, and it's hard to cut off even a small segment of your customer base. PNG did amazingly well, it's a shame it didn't include a decent lossy format as well.
Personally, I'm rooting for WebP now... One standard, that can obsolete both lossy and lossless image formats... Of course WebM has video covered, but I wonder if an animated image format might still be desirable.
H.264 is a core technology in digital video with 1,081 licensees. AVC/H.264 Licensees
MPEG-2 is vastly more popular than H.264 will ever be... THAT DOESN'T MEAN I NEED IT IN MY BROWSER. Put MPEG-2 or H.264 encoders in your studio cameras, why not? Go ahead. But you don't just dump that ultra-high-bitrate video on the public, anyhow. You've got to reencode it at a reasonable bitrate, and with seriously constrained settings, particularly for mobile devices. That last re-encoding step may as well happen with WebM as anything else...
No such thing as a WebM security camera.
There are Theora security cameras. No reason not to expect we'll see WebM used there in the future. After all, H.264 had a huge head start on WebM. Back when H.264 debuted, you could have used it's slow adoption to dismiss it as well. WebM's wide open licensing seems likely to have natural advantages and ecnomies that even a gratis H.264 (because they're scared of losing their monopoly) can't match. Obviously, only time will tell.
NARRATOR: Steve's embrace of endurance running raises the question, are we all born to run?
Some human features seem just right for the job like the springy arch of the human foot. Hairless skin and abundant sweat glands provide exceptional cooling. We also have large muscular butts which prevent us from tipping too far forward.
Humans don't run fast. Sometimes even squirrels can outrace us. But in a warm climate, over distance, we can outrun dogs, antelope, and even horses, which will all overheat.
In our evolutionary past, that may have been a killer advantage.
DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN (Harvard University): Early humans were so good at running in the middle of the day that they were able to run animals to exhaustion and to heat stroke. And then, at that point, the animal's already dying. It takes no technology to kill that animal, so you can safely and effectively, and fairly easily, have access to meat....
MALISSA WOOD (Massachusetts General Hospital): The risk for dying during exercise is one out of 50,000. So it's higher than the risk of dying when you're just standing around in a sedentary fashion.
NARRATOR: Malissa Wood is a cardiologist who studies the effects of marathoning on the heart. And she's found how well the heart fares during the race depends on how diligently the runner has trained.
MALISSA WOOD: If the individual has not trained their heart adequately, the heart really starts getting tired. In people that have trained adequately for the marathon, their hearts look fine.
NARRATOR: Most heart attacks aren't caused by just tired and stressed heart muscle, but by blocked coronary arteries, often associated with poor diet and lack of exercise.
And besides all that, a job with on-call duties is a job that has need of them. That means they either have an unstable system or they aren't staffed properly. It's a huge sign that things are not right, and that company is best avoided.
Good luck with that... I doubt you'll ever find an IT job without a stipulation that you need to be reachable. Yes, some companies abuse the privilege, but even in the best case, if you're any good, there are going to be things you're able to do that somebody on the night shift won't. Hence levels of escalation, and if the last line of defence can be shared between several people, it's likely not too bad.
And besides that, YOUR ATTITUDE can make a big difference in how bad on-call is. In short, get one... A bad one... Company abusing on-call? Take the call, and then just tell them it's not critical enough that you're going to fix it outside of work hours. You may get your boss yelling at you, but that's non-fatal. Brush it off and do the same next time. Either they'll decide they can do better and they'll fire you, or after a few times around, they'll learn they don't get to abuse you. If you're desperate for the job, well, then I guess you get to tolerate the abuse until you can line-up something better.
I didn't forget that at all. Humans are warm-blooded, but it's not as if you're always generating the same amount of heat. Your body cuts down on its less necessary heat-generating activities as temperatures increase, which is a big part of the reason why I find myself eating next to nothing, day after day, through the summer. More importantly, your body heat isn't confined, internally. Increased blood flood brings heat close to your skin, where it can be cooled by the air (and sweat, if it's a bit hotter).
Also, northern towns just aren't equipped to deal with heat waves - nobody has swimming pools, and only about 70% of homes have air conditioning.
As a desert rat myself, who goes jogging in 50C (120F) weather, I feel compelled to remind everyone that YOU CAN HANDLE HIGH TEMPERATURES. Is everyone unaware that 35C (95F) is BELOW normal body temperature? And when it gets warmer than that, a little perspiration kicks in and keeps your temperature well regulated. I realize in many places like Los Angeles a heat wave will cause a blackout as millions of airconditioners struggle to keep up, but that's an "I've got too much money" thing, not remotely necessary.
In fact humans are among the animals most highly evolved to handle high temperatures. Endurance hunting is proof enough of that. We don't have fur, and we've got whole-body persiration for major cooling. The only requirements you need to keep in mind are light, short, loose cotton clothing, shade and airflow wherever you can get it, and lots of water and electrolytes (ie. salt).
Of course, if you do have a really hard time of it (medical problems, overweight, whatever) the life-savers are knowing that cold drinks and/or ice helps a lot, and that dumping a bucket of tap water over your head will immediately and dramatically cool you down.
People insist on airconditioning only because they refuse to adapt, and want to wear long pants, long sleeves, without ever a single bead of sweat forming, and with no airflow to speak of.
Siri could easily become an advertising platform that rivals Google. Targeted advertising, where companies pay Apple for premium listings ( eg Asking Siri about a Pizza place returns Pizza Hut who paid the most for that key word).
What? Those are called Points-of-Interest, and there's nothing new or exciting about them. Google Maps, Mapquest, and other navigation software is free, precisely because they believe they'll make enough profit on the premium placement POI to make it worthwhile.
How does that remotely compete with Google? Except in-so-much as anywhere advertising could be done by Google but isn't, that's not competition at all, unless Siri turns into a full Navigation app, and has a web interface where you can search the web, it's not even the tiniest of threats to Google, or anyone else in the "ads on your phone" space.
Yes I did. In fact my rant about low-res screens and crappy unresponsive touchscreens is directed SQUARELY AT ARCHOS.
"Capacitive" isn't a magic keyword that makes it not-suck. The cheap ones are still a nightmare to use, and since that's the sole form of input, the whole device becomes worthless.
That wasn't the only issue, btw. Other big issues were the lack of a compas, lack of GPS, inability to charge, AT ALL from USB, a power socket DIRECTLY next to the headphone jack, a power plug exactly the same size as a headphone jack (see where we're going, here?) super-slick case and absolutely no ergonomics making it impossible to hold, being much heavier than comparable devices.
I consider Archos tablets the canonical example of crap that I wouldn't use if they were giving it away, and here you're trumpeting them as first-class devices.
That's interesting, but really no different than any boom town.
You've got to expect that that kind of money is a short-term thing... a fluke which will be corrected in short order. The housing shortage might actuaally be the CAUSE of those great wages, and as soon as homes can be built for the flood of people heading up there, prices will level out and decline. So in the mean time, suffer through it for the money. Be a millionaire living in a trailer while the money is good, and cash out when things settle down.
Besides, it only seems crazy for North Dakota... Out here in the Southern California Megaopolis, you can't make the rent if you aren't earning a 6-figure salary, and while $150k will get you into an apartment, you'd still need a 30yr mortage for the most modest of homes. And this is today, long after the housing market crash. So take a crazy mortage, or commute back and forth an hour every day to your 10 homes out in the trashier areas.
only one of my compilers actually takes advantage of the multiple cores when it is compiling.
Send your octo-core my way, I'll see that it gets some use...
For any RPM based Linux distro, just edit your RPM macros file to add eg. -j8 option to make, and every "rpmbuild" will max-out all 8 cores with 8 instances of gcc operating on different files each.
And if you're lzma compressing the RPMs in question, and they're a non-trivial size, you can get a pretty good speed-up using either parallel-xz or p7zip across multiple cores. If you're packing-up large quantities of data in RPMs, or just using xz in general, we're talking a serious number of wall-clock hours savings.
For video encoding, while you lose a bit of quality with threading (so I discourage it on mere dual-core systems) you can see a pretty impressive speed-boost. And for video-decoding, multithreading is a no-brainer.
In conclusion, you bought an SUV before measuring if it had enough cargo room to haul your toys, and lost out. Those who need to haul different cargo find it a grat solution. There will always be some usage cases which don't benefit.
The real benefit is servers, though. I can't remember the last time you could get as big a performance boost on your server from upgrading the CPU as you can today, going from dual-core to 16 core, without needing a new mobo due to socket changes. And if you're lucky, your server can take 2 or 4 of them...
the fact that the $200 tablets were all running 2.2 was the only thing stopping me (lets be honest, on a 7" screen 2.x was crap).
Really? I was willing to stick with 2.3 but bailed out when I found that even the $300 Android tablets had awfully low res screens (lower than my tiny damn phone, in fact), and incredibly unresponsive and massively frustrating touch-screens.
By all means, if you find a $200 Android tablet that's buttery smooth and super-snappy, let us all know. There tends to be a big gulf between cheap junk and first tier tablets, with no middle ground.
On the same subject, let me know when you find an Android phone with two, good quality front-facing speakers. Even the cheapest tablets surpass the most expensive smartphones there for some reason... Even the EEEPC's tiny speakers sound far better. That's easily my top annoyance, significantly reducing the utility of my phone as an all-in-one device since I really have to lug around speakers.
We have neo-cons that encourage illegals to be here working for below prevailing wages, while not paying taxes. Then we have dems leaders that push for amnesty and allowing more illegals in
Republicans want Mexicans off the books so they can keep on getting paid slave wages, and have no rights. That's why their choice is a work program, so we can drive them across the border, lock them up in an isolated spot, make them work, pay them a pittance, and truck them back across the border again.
Democrats want to allow legal immigration, so those Mexicans are regular workers, with rights. They'd have to get paid minimum wage & pay taxes, since they can take their employers to the police or the courts just like the rest of us.
The problem is that its a toxic issues, that neither side has enough capital to force it to go one way or the other, and the status quo is getting worse, so states and individuals are coming up with their own crazy unconstitutional crap.
I generally agree Android devices are great and can do a hell of a lot, but it's not anywhere close to 90% of the utility of a laptop. As someone else said, they're closer to thin clients, which is a great thing, no doubt, but even there they are only 90% of the way there... ConnectBot crashes quite a bit, and there's still no NX Client for Android. Cisco Anyconnect is available, but ONLY if you root your device.
Many things I can get just BARELY functioning on my Android phone, but rather fragile and having lots of bugs and other dark corners to watch out for. Streaming video from an HTTP server in particular, I only turned up one player that worked, and it's frustratingly fragile and really all Android video players are stone-aged compared to MPlayer.
Even things that supposedly work well... like YouTube, there are a large number of videos you can't play on their mobile app. All the control you have on a computer just isn't there on Android. What do you do when your Android is having difficulty connecting to aa WiFi AP? You pull out your laptop so you can actually debug the problem, rather than having a "user-friendly" Android black box you can't look into at all. The lack of eg. USB to RS-232 adapters for Android also keeps it from being able replace a standard system. I HATE Windows, but even in Windows I can do a hell of a lot of things I can't do on an Android device, and on Linux/BSD I can do vastly more. Just try simple stuff like printing a document directly from a smartphone... I can do it on my 15 year-old Psion 5 PDA, but not modern smart phones...
Android is a great tool, but it's only 90% there for basic and thin-client functions. As a portable computer, it's got a long, long way to go. I think porting X11 would make it possible to make an Android device into a real computer, running real, first rate (not compromised "portable") applications. Until then, it's still just an accessory, still highly dependant on being tethered to real computers (ie. thin client).
Back ins 2000, 1Gflop cost about $1000 in computing hardware. As we approach the year 2012, 1Gflop cost is nearing $1 of hardware (and huge savings in power usage). That is pretty amazing to me.
Sorry, but I'm unimpressed. That "$1" device won't DO ANYTHING without a good $50 of other stuff wrapped around it, so measuring that "$1" piece is pretty pointless and arbitrary.
That's much more impressive than a $25 Raspberry Pi, lacking all I/O. Hell, get it just for a wireless SSH & VNC client. It's a great price for a mini Android tablet, even if you never use it with the (cheap) cell service. It would be absolutely awesome if somebody ported (rootless) X11 to Android, and we could build-up a userland on such a device, and cross-compile and install all our familiar desktop apps seamlessly. Barring that, maybe someone would be interested in merging the needed changes into a stock Linux kernel to boot the device, then writing a working native X11 driver, giving us a tiny full-fledged linux box on the go.
On that same note, x86 hardware is pretty dirt-cheap, too... An old Asus EEE-900 can be had for just $125 these days. A full-fledged, low-power, highly portable x86 computer, with a decent sized keyboard ready for touch-typing, just $125.
That's the real baseline for comparison. That $1 gigaflop doesn't mean anything if I can't do anything with it for $1, and can't add 100 of them to my server for $100, or anywhere CLOSE to that.
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Maybe that's true, but you didn't pick a verry good example, since Hulu has BG too.
I must assume your anecdote comes from an extremely tiny sample size, as no one with any credibility would claim that linux doesn't crash. With as many servers as I'm responsible for, it's only a matter of days between some system, somewhere, crashing.
I guess you think all those kernel exploits the likes of redhat are patch all the damn time, don't really exist either, since you don't see them?
More bugs in un privileged space in exchange for an incredibly stable micro kernel, would be an awesomely positive trade off.
Care to provide 4 examples? One success and one failure for each license type?
For a complete counter example, try USB support. Now that was a nightmare...
Right... That was why head-to-head benchmarks of Linux and FreeBSD on SMP and file-system performance showed FreeBSD coming out ahead pretty consistently. These days, people have stopped caring about a little performance one way or the other, but it's utterly ridiculous to claim FreeBSD lags "a good decade" behind Linux... In fact it leads Linux often enough.
ZFS vs Btrfs seems like a good contemporary example.
Oh, but you have, actually... Every time you've seen a Linux system lock-up, you're seeing the effects of a monolithic kernel. Every time you seek a kernel security exploit, you're seeing the result of a monolithic kernel.
People are familiar with the idea that userland code on a Linux/Unix system should be unable to cause a kernel crash, but few are familiar with microkernels, where only the tiniest bit of code makes up the core of the kernel, and the most low-level of services can fail, will not hurt anything else, and can be restarted automatically, with no effect on the stability of the system.
You need only look at the rabid fan-base of OpenVMS for an example. It can be immensely stable, even running on hardware with buggy and unstable drivers. It invariably comes up in first place in every test of security, because there's so little code in privileged space that it can be easily audited to be bug-free, and none of the bugs in any other code can cause serious problems.
Think of it this way... Computers are just math machines. Code is just equations, and equations can be PROVABLY correct. A properly written microkernel can be PROVEN to be correct. In other words, baring hardware problems, you can prove that the fully audited microkernel will never crash, will never malfunction at all. And since it's a microkernel, it doesn't matter if the drivers and other userland code running under it are reliable or not... If they don't behave, they will be killed and restarted transparently, and the system will continue to function. You can see this level of rigour in seL4: http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/klein-sosp09.pdf
They don't? If I wasn't required to use Linux at work, I'd be 100% FreeBSD, no Linux, no Windows, nothing. FreeBSD remains a far superior desktop system. Linux remains a nightmarish fight to get a system stable and with the software you want installed. Load up RHEL5/6 with all the repos you want, and it's still completely hit or miss as to whether the program you've been using for decades will be in any of the repos. So go get the source RPM and cross your fingers and hope... Ever tried to compile OpenSuSe SRPMs on RHEL? Yikes!
In FreeBSD, there's a port (and probably a package if not for license issues) for everything you could ever want to have installed. And if it's older and was since deleted, you can probably pull it in from an old ports tree, and it'll still work just fine.
One simple little thing ALL the BSDs get right, that ALL the Linux distros (except Slackware) get wrong... Headers (-devel) included in the package, not separately. They're tiny, they'll never cause any problems, and almost everyone will end up needing them at some point, so it's incomprehensible that they're universally shunned...
Linux and GNU aren't dependant on companies and developers just doing the bare minimum to comply with the GPL. No, they have to go above and beyond that, to working with the community to get their changes merged. Apple's tar dumps of WebKit source code were useless, yet this is the license you were saying was going to keep them honest? Sorry, no, it was public pressure that got them playing nice, NOT license obligations.
There are many examples of non-CopyLeft licenses working out fine, and furthermore, being NECESSARY.
Theo is complaining, because he personally burned a lot of bridges, and I'm not sure companies want to be associated with him at all. FreeBSD is doing just fine and developing quite well, even if it gets vastly less press than Linux. Jimmy Wales is begging for money every day, does that mean Wikipedia, like BSD, is a failed idea, and it needs a copyright that requires contributions to Wikimedia for all commercial redistribution?
There are plenty of examples of BSD/MITX licensed software being NECESSARY. Pretty much EVERYTHING that is a de-facto internet standard was released as BSD/MITX-licensed software, and I'd say next to nothing released as CopyLeft has ever risen to that level...
OpenSSH wouldn't have caught-on if it was GPL'd. Why do you think FreSSH has negligible installed base? Telnet and rsh stayed in-use far after they should have died out, yet it wasn't until OpenSSH came along that everyone agreed on a standard.
Apache has done quite well, both in funding and code contributions, despite their very free license across their projects.
The same is true of BIND and SENDMAIL.
NFS (v3) was looking horribly decrepit for a number of years. Yet it kept being used, while all the GPL'd network filesystems being developed without the drawbacks and features like encryption died on the vine. And now with NFSv4, the freer option is back up to snuff, and all those CopyLeft alternatives remain dead.
rsync is a great service, but will it ever be established as an alternative to primitive FTP file transfers? It actually looks like SFTP is taking over a lot of those functions.
NTP? LPD? Kerberos & LDP? iSCSI?
Go ahead, just name one piece of CopyLeft software that has gone on to become a defacto internet standard, and prove me wrong.
The moral of the story is, you want to say if it was BSD instead of Linux, it would have been "stolen" and locked-up in proprietary products. I'd say if it had been BSD instead of Linux, penetration would have been VASTLY faster, and COMPLETE. Sure, th
While you're correct that it is tougher to survive on a non-teraformed planet, the skills required aren't all that high tech. Smelting iron ore, and cooking silica to create panes of glass doesn't require a college degree, let alone a major industrial complex. More than that, heating and cooling, and botany are the only special skills required on Mars that you could survive without on Earth, but even here they'd be plenty valuable post-apocalypse.
No, we aren't. The quote doesn't say anything like that, so you just pulled that one entirely out of your ass. And your assertion is directly refuted by the source I already cited.
Is this your utter misunderstanding of evolution on display here? Nothing magic happens in-utero (being "born there"), and none of your "adaptations" get passed to the next generation in any way.
Directly refuted by the source already cited.
In summary: It's not my fault you never learned to read.
You do reealize JPEG was basically the very first multimedia standard, don't you? It preedates MPEG-1. We didn't "reach" this point... we STARTED at this point. GIF is similarly old, and PNG has made only very limited inroads towards displacing it... It's a real shame they didn't include animation features from day one, or it might have done better.
The second part, ESTABLISHED, is the big one. It's hard to get everyone to upgrade every piece of software, everywhere, and it's hard to cut off even a small segment of your customer base. PNG did amazingly well, it's a shame it didn't include a decent lossy format as well.
Personally, I'm rooting for WebP now... One standard, that can obsolete both lossy and lossless image formats... Of course WebM has video covered, but I wonder if an
animated image format might still be desirable.
MPEG-2 is vastly more popular than H.264 will ever be... THAT DOESN'T MEAN I NEED IT IN MY BROWSER. Put MPEG-2 or H.264 encoders in your studio cameras, why not? Go ahead. But you don't just dump that ultra-high-bitrate video on the public, anyhow. You've got to reencode it at a reasonable bitrate, and with seriously constrained settings, particularly for mobile devices. That last re-encoding step may as well happen with WebM as anything else...
There are Theora security cameras. No reason not to expect we'll see WebM used there in the future. After all, H.264 had a huge head start on WebM. Back when H.264 debuted, you could have used it's slow adoption to dismiss it as well. WebM's wide open licensing seems likely to have natural advantages and ecnomies that even a gratis H.264 (because they're scared of losing their monopoly) can't match. Obviously, only time will tell.
NARRATOR: Steve's embrace of endurance running raises the question, are we all born to run?
Some human features seem just right for the job like the springy arch of the human foot. Hairless skin and abundant sweat glands provide exceptional cooling. We also have large muscular butts which prevent us from tipping too far forward.
Humans don't run fast. Sometimes even squirrels can outrace us. But in a warm climate, over distance, we can outrun dogs, antelope, and even horses, which will all overheat.
In our evolutionary past, that may have been a killer advantage.
DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN (Harvard University): Early humans were so good at running in the middle of the day that they were able to run animals to exhaustion and to heat stroke. And then, at that point, the animal's already dying. It takes no technology to kill that animal, so you can safely and effectively, and fairly easily, have access to meat. ...
MALISSA WOOD (Massachusetts General Hospital): The risk for dying during exercise is one out of 50,000. So it's higher than the risk of dying when you're just standing around in a sedentary fashion.
NARRATOR: Malissa Wood is a cardiologist who studies the effects of marathoning on the heart. And she's found how well the heart fares during the race depends on how diligently the runner has trained.
MALISSA WOOD: If the individual has not trained their heart adequately, the heart really starts getting tired. In people that have trained adequately for the marathon, their hearts look fine.
NARRATOR: Most heart attacks aren't caused by just tired and stressed heart muscle, but by blocked coronary arteries, often associated with poor diet and lack of exercise.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/marathon-challenge.html
Good luck with that... I doubt you'll ever find an IT job without a stipulation that you need to be reachable. Yes, some companies abuse the privilege, but even in the best case, if you're any good, there are going to be things you're able to do that somebody on the night shift won't. Hence levels of escalation, and if the last line of defence can be shared between several people, it's likely not too bad.
And besides that, YOUR ATTITUDE can make a big difference in how bad on-call is. In short, get one... A bad one... Company abusing on-call? Take the call, and then just tell them it's not critical enough that you're going to fix it outside of work hours. You may get your boss yelling at you, but that's non-fatal. Brush it off and do the same next time. Either they'll decide they can do better and they'll fire you, or after a few times around, they'll learn they don't get to abuse you. If you're desperate for the job, well, then I guess you get to tolerate the abuse until you can line-up something better.
I didn't forget that at all. Humans are warm-blooded, but it's not as if you're always generating the same amount of heat. Your body cuts down on its less necessary heat-generating activities as temperatures increase, which is a big part of the reason why I find myself eating next to nothing, day after day, through the summer. More importantly, your body heat isn't confined, internally. Increased blood flood brings heat close to your skin, where it can be cooled by the air (and sweat, if it's a bit hotter).
I am not overgeneralizing at all. I'm stating a biological fact, which is rather universally accepted.
Another one you'll hate... All healthy adults are capable of running marathons.
As a desert rat myself, who goes jogging in 50C (120F) weather, I feel compelled to remind everyone that YOU CAN HANDLE HIGH TEMPERATURES. Is everyone unaware that 35C (95F) is BELOW normal body temperature? And when it gets warmer than that, a little perspiration kicks in and keeps your temperature well regulated. I realize in many places like Los Angeles a heat wave will cause a blackout as millions of airconditioners struggle to keep up, but that's an "I've got too much money" thing, not remotely necessary.
In fact humans are among the animals most highly evolved to handle high temperatures. Endurance hunting is proof enough of that. We don't have fur, and we've got whole-body persiration for major cooling. The only requirements you need to keep in mind are light, short, loose cotton clothing, shade and airflow wherever you can get it, and lots of water and electrolytes (ie. salt).
Of course, if you do have a really hard time of it (medical problems, overweight, whatever) the life-savers are knowing that cold drinks and/or ice helps a lot, and that dumping a bucket of tap water over your head will immediately and dramatically cool you down.
People insist on airconditioning only because they refuse to adapt, and want to wear long pants, long sleeves, without ever a single bead of sweat forming, and with no airflow to speak of.
What? Those are called Points-of-Interest, and there's nothing new or exciting about them. Google Maps, Mapquest, and other navigation software is free, precisely because they believe they'll make enough profit on the premium placement POI to make it worthwhile.
How does that remotely compete with Google? Except in-so-much as anywhere advertising could be done by Google but isn't, that's not competition at all, unless Siri turns into a full Navigation app, and has a web interface where you can search the web, it's not even the tiniest of threats to Google, or anyone else in the "ads on your phone" space.
Yes I did. In fact my rant about low-res screens and crappy unresponsive touchscreens is directed SQUARELY AT ARCHOS.
"Capacitive" isn't a magic keyword that makes it not-suck. The cheap ones are still a nightmare to use, and since that's the sole form of input, the whole device becomes worthless.
That wasn't the only issue, btw. Other big issues were the lack of a compas, lack of GPS, inability to charge, AT ALL from USB, a power socket DIRECTLY next to the headphone jack, a power plug exactly the same size as a headphone jack (see where we're going, here?) super-slick case and absolutely no ergonomics making it impossible to hold, being much heavier than comparable devices.
I consider Archos tablets the canonical example of crap that I wouldn't use if they were giving it away, and here you're trumpeting them as first-class devices.
That's interesting, but really no different than any boom town.
You've got to expect that that kind of money is a short-term thing... a fluke which will be corrected in short order. The housing shortage might actuaally be the CAUSE of those great wages, and as soon as homes can be built for the flood of people heading up there, prices will level out and decline. So in the mean time, suffer through it for the money. Be a millionaire living in a trailer while the money is good, and cash out when things settle down.
Besides, it only seems crazy for North Dakota... Out here in the Southern California Megaopolis, you can't make the rent if you aren't earning a 6-figure salary, and while $150k will get you into an apartment, you'd still need a 30yr mortage for the most modest of homes. And this is today, long after the housing market crash. So take a crazy mortage, or commute back and forth an hour every day to your 10 homes out in the trashier areas.
Lies... Damn lies... and Statistics.
Adjusted for inflation, the EPA in 1972 had a budget of $13.3billion. Today they have a budget of $8.7billion.
Send your octo-core my way, I'll see that it gets some use...
For any RPM based Linux distro, just edit your RPM macros file to add eg. -j8 option to make, and every "rpmbuild" will max-out all 8 cores with 8 instances of gcc operating on different files each.
And if you're lzma compressing the RPMs in question, and they're a non-trivial size, you can get a pretty good speed-up using either parallel-xz or p7zip across multiple cores. If you're packing-up large quantities of data in RPMs, or just using xz in general, we're talking a serious number of wall-clock hours savings.
For video encoding, while you lose a bit of quality with threading (so I discourage it on mere dual-core systems) you can see a pretty impressive speed-boost. And for video-decoding, multithreading is a no-brainer.
In conclusion, you bought an SUV before measuring if it had enough cargo room to haul your toys, and lost out. Those who need to haul different cargo find it a grat solution. There will always be some usage cases which don't benefit.
The real benefit is servers, though. I can't remember the last time you could get as big a performance boost on your server from upgrading the CPU as you can today, going from dual-core to 16 core, without needing a new mobo due to socket changes. And if you're lucky, your server can take 2 or 4 of them...
Really? I was willing to stick with 2.3 but bailed out when I found that even the $300 Android tablets had awfully low res screens (lower than my tiny damn phone, in fact), and incredibly unresponsive and massively frustrating touch-screens.
By all means, if you find a $200 Android tablet that's buttery smooth and super-snappy, let us all know. There tends to be a big gulf between cheap junk and first tier tablets, with no middle ground.
On the same subject, let me know when you find an Android phone with two, good quality front-facing speakers. Even the cheapest tablets surpass the most expensive smartphones there for some reason... Even the EEEPC's tiny speakers sound far better. That's easily my top annoyance, significantly reducing the utility of my phone as an all-in-one device since I really have to lug around speakers.
Republicans want Mexicans off the books so they can keep on getting paid slave wages, and have no rights. That's why their choice is a work program, so we can drive them across the border, lock them up in an isolated spot, make them work, pay them a pittance, and truck them back across the border again.
Democrats want to allow legal immigration, so those Mexicans are regular workers, with rights. They'd have to get paid minimum wage & pay taxes, since they can take their employers to the police or the courts just like the rest of us.
The problem is that its a toxic issues, that neither side has enough capital to force it to go one way or the other, and the status quo is getting worse, so states and individuals are coming up with their own crazy unconstitutional crap.
I generally agree Android devices are great and can do a hell of a lot, but it's not anywhere close to 90% of the utility of a laptop. As someone else said, they're closer to thin clients, which is a great thing, no doubt, but even there they are only 90% of the way there... ConnectBot crashes quite a bit, and there's still no NX Client for Android. Cisco Anyconnect is available, but ONLY if you root your device.
Many things I can get just BARELY functioning on my Android phone, but rather fragile and having lots of bugs and other dark corners to watch out for. Streaming video from an HTTP server in particular, I only turned up one player that worked, and it's frustratingly fragile and really all Android video players are stone-aged compared to MPlayer.
Even things that supposedly work well... like YouTube, there are a large number of videos you can't play on their mobile app. All the control you have on a computer just isn't there on Android. What do you do when your Android is having difficulty connecting to aa WiFi AP? You pull out your laptop so you can actually debug the problem, rather than having a "user-friendly" Android black box you can't look into at all. The lack of eg. USB to RS-232 adapters for Android also keeps it from being able replace a standard system. I HATE Windows, but even in Windows I can do a hell of a lot of things I can't do on an Android device, and on Linux/BSD I can do vastly more. Just try simple stuff like printing a document directly from a smartphone... I can do it on my 15 year-old Psion 5 PDA, but not modern smart phones...
Android is a great tool, but it's only 90% there for basic and thin-client functions. As a portable computer, it's got a long, long way to go. I think porting X11 would make it possible to make an Android device into a real computer, running real, first rate (not compromised "portable") applications. Until then, it's still just an accessory, still highly dependant on being tethered to real computers (ie. thin client).
Sorry, but I'm unimpressed. That "$1" device won't DO ANYTHING without a good $50 of other stuff wrapped around it, so measuring that "$1" piece is pretty pointless and arbitrary.
The cost of a useful device is much more interesting. I'm very impressed I can get pretty good Android phone (Samsung Intercept) these days, with keyboard, for $99. http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-phones/samsung-intercept-phone.jsp
That's much more impressive than a $25 Raspberry Pi, lacking all I/O. Hell, get it just for a wireless SSH & VNC client. It's a great price for a mini Android tablet, even if you never use it with the (cheap) cell service. It would be absolutely awesome if somebody ported (rootless) X11 to Android, and we could build-up a userland on such a device, and cross-compile and install all our familiar desktop apps seamlessly. Barring that, maybe someone would be interested in merging the needed changes into a stock Linux kernel to boot the device, then writing a working native X11 driver, giving us a tiny full-fledged linux box on the go.
On that same note, x86 hardware is pretty dirt-cheap, too... An old Asus EEE-900 can be had for just $125 these days. A full-fledged, low-power, highly portable x86 computer, with a decent sized keyboard ready for touch-typing, just $125.
That's the real baseline for comparison. That $1 gigaflop doesn't mean anything if I can't do anything with it for $1, and can't add 100 of them to my server for $100, or anywhere CLOSE to that.