You;re wasting your time pissing and moaning about something I wasn't even trying to say.
:):) Actually, I figure about 80% of why anyone posts on Slashdot is to piss and moan, including me.:) But, to be honest, I'm trying to work back to the original point -- politics is politics, and should (in my opinion) be separate from questions of mortality. Death is not a good thing, whether applied to a good person or an evil person!
As for my politics, I also voted against dubya, but as I live pretty deep inside Bush country, I kinda despair sometimes. Might be why I'm pissing and moaning so much.:) One insight, though -- most people around here really, truly believe that Bush is right for the country. They're not just being swayed by some campaign advertising. The fact is, if it wasn't Bush leading us, it'd be someone much like him, because they want to see conservative, religious, right-wing leadership. I'm still trying to understand why so many people think this way.
My point was, that death will always take us all, good or ill, and if a despot rises and cannot be overthrown by any other means, then death will ultimately take him or her.
But, you see, that doesn't help -- you've already admitted that each succeeding generation doesn't necessarily improve on the previous one simply by the fact of being younger. Each generation will have its share of potential despots; thus, it is the task of each generation to deal with its own members in its own way.
Saying that "death will eventually remove our generation's despot" is nothing more than saying "death will eventually fix our generation's mistake". This is not an argument I would use to support the concept of mortality.
but even with the worst leaders possible, the most destructive, oppressive regimes around, we have the consolation of knowing that sooner or later they'll die.
It's no consolation for me. Saying that "mortality is good because evil leaders die" is, at least implicitly, stating that the members of a society have no control over their leaders; that they simply must endure their situation until their leader passes on. I disagree: if a leader has enough support within a society to maintain power, all the members of that society take some share of the blame for his activities.
The point is: to say death is good because there are some people you want dead, is to imply that you don't want to deal with them while they are alive. I can't agree with that.
Oh, I _love_ this argument. Do you actually think that each new generation creates better leadership than the previous one? That today's leaders are, just because of their relative youth, better than the ones that existed before?
The fact is, society doesn't change unless the people in that society choose to exercise the will to change it. Civil rights imply civil responsibilities: you have to invest effort to create the society you want to inhabit, regardless of your age.
(Quick check -- do you think Americans today have more or less civil rights than they did, say, 20 years ago?)
The only serious mechanism for social change is the death of the powerful.
A bit pessimistic aren't we? I've heard this argument against long life before. My usual response: "Yes! Isn't it great that all the dictators and tyrants and corrupt officials died off hundreds of years ago! Once they were gone, decent and efficient governments just sprang up of their own accord. Citizens haven't had to lift a finger to defend their liberty since then. Yup, a naturally limited lifespan is all you need for good leadership."
Ah, unfortunately, "natural selection" is a bit of a slippery concept; you can't actually say that inheritance, family ties, friendship, etc. is keeping the "best from succeeding". From an evolutionary perspective, if a given individual is selected over another due to interpersonal relationships rather than innate ability, then natural selection has applied!
In fact, I personally believe that the ability to maintain and support personal relationships is one of the most significant advantages of humans over other animals; there are many bright creatures in the world, but none have the ability we do to communicate with one another. We can exchange vast amounts of knowledge, ideas, and experiences between ourselves, and we've learned how to transmit this information great distances, broadcast it to many individuals, and record it for the future. Because of this, enormous groups of humans can work together to accomplish something that any single individual could not.
So yes, the ability to create, maintain, and take advantage of interpersonal relationships is extremely valuable selection-wise, possibly more valuable than any other innate ability...
Arrogant attitude? Most People don't contribute anything to free software. No money, no time, no effort, no nothing. You want a Linux to be a viable replacement to Windows for most people? Give me a good reason why someone creating a piece of software for his or her own pleasure should care in the least about a group of users who are going to do nothing more than moan about how it isn't enough for them.
Honestly, I understand that it's important to produce good software. But you have to understand that it's the people who provide the time, the expertise, or the money, whose voices are heard. And right now, that's certainly not the general Windows-using public. The first law of business is to satisfy your customer -- and in the world of open-source software, customers are generally other developers, not some group of anonymous users.
Remember, Linux is open-source software. Those who write the software do so for their own reasons, and thus determine success or failure on their own terms. Simply put, if you don't contribute to the creation of the software, your opinion doesn't matter. (It's not like you're giving any money to these people.)
What will happen to the index record? If I do a search for articles on that subject, will Nexis still tell me "Article by Joe Shmoe, NYT 3/9/87 page 23, aritlce not in database" so I can go look for the article in the microfilms at the library?
Well, I'm not anywhere near this issue in the company, but I would assume that (using your example) if you pull up "page 23" of the NYT, 3/9/87, there should be some indication that an article previously residing in that position is no longer there.
The problem is, that isn't how people use online databases. The value of the Nexis system (or any database system) is its ability to search the content of those millions of documents and quickly return matches to you. A content-based search is not going to find an article that is now lacking all content.
Also, the people who use this system don't generally have the time to amble on down to the local library to read the documents that are returned. Think about how you use a Google search (or whatever internet search system you prefer); generally, a simple search will return hundreds of documents, and you'll generally need to check several of them by hand before you really find what you're looking for. The search is only useful because you can get to those documents almost instantly; if it took a 15 minute trip to check those documents, you'd never do it. Now, the Nexis search system has some additional features that allow users to configure a search more accurately than is generally possible with Google/etc., but realistically any researcher is going to need to pare down the results of a search by hand.
Yes, this isn't a "Memory Hole", but it isn't nothing; it does severely impair the indexing of that data, and even if you could find it, integrating on-line searching with physical documents is not an optimal way of working.
If the company must pay for the period that is on-line already, why not keep it further.
Perhaps because it isn't worth it? I actually work at Lexis-Nexis (although I'm just a lowly programmer, and no, I'm not speaking for the company); there are many good reasons to support the plaintiff's case, but one overriding reason why they'll never see a cent from their efforts -- the market won't support it.
People spend money on the Lexis-Nexis service because of the depth and quality of our databases. We literally have decades worth of archived newspapers, magazines, technical journals, legislation, and court documents. Consider the effort it takes just to maintain relationships with the thousands of publishers of these documents. Now, we are to be forced to treat each individual freelance newspaper story as a separate relationship with each author? I've heard there may be more than 10,000 of these stories already archived!
Nah, I can't believe that Lexis-Nexis will ever make a serious attempt to contact thousands of authors individually to try and negotiate a contract; we'll just have to purge them from the system. I can't really imagine any other online database company trying to accomplish that either. They'd never be able to make up the cost of the time it took to manage all those relationships, even if the authors allowed free use of their works.
But it has happened to me. Many times. Generally, I put off upgrading my computer hardware until modern software begins having trouble with my aging hardware.
But that's the point. I don't buy software just so I can have something to show off the capabilities of my computer hardware; I buy computer hardware in order to run the software I'm interested in. The fact is, Exile does things that my older graphics cards could never handle, but it honestly does improve the game!
There is no law requiring software engineers to produce software supporting every possible hardware platform in existence. Myst III may not work on the hardware you own, but it has vastly superior graphics and sound to many lowest-common-denominator games I have, and that makes it worthwhile to me.
Michael, I'm sorry, but I have a 180 degree different view of Exile.
Perhaps it's because I pre-ordered the collector's edition (which came with the game, a "making-of" CD, a soundtrack CD (to which I am at this very moment listening), the Prima hint guide book, and a cute pewter statuette of a Squee. Perhaps it's because I have a PC with a decent graphics card, sound card and processor, and didn't have any trouble in the least running the game.
Regardless, Exile is an awesome game. The soundtrack is fantastic, the graphics are fantastic, the puzzles are entertaining (and consistently make you feel like you are inside the mechanism of the puzzle rather than just looking at it). I was worried that Presto would not have the touch that Cyan did in creating games within the world of Myst, but they've done a wonderful job of remaining true to the series.
I've had a long, and tortured, relationship with object-oriented databases. First, in college, I worked on a project to develop a software reengineering environment; source code was parsed and stored persistently in an Objectstore database. Unfortunately, at that time Objectstore was apparently still young, and their DB had a variety of bugs. The effort taken to adapt to and work around these flaws eventually monopolized, and then consumed, the resources availiable to the project. Perhaps Objectstore has worked out these problems by now, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.
I went on to work at a job involving a similar product, which stored data persistently in a Poet OODB. Although the basic functionality of Poet seemed to work correctly, my manager had chosen Poet in order to use a special feature that had been advertised, but (as it turns out) wasn't completed at the time the DB was released. Support e-mails turned into intercontinental discussions with the German developers of the product, weeks turned into months, and before long this project was a year behind schedule, due almost solely to a dependence on an OODB. Finally, Poet modified their licensing scheme (forcing potential users of our project to absorb exorbitant sub-licensing fees), and that broke the back of the whole effort.
I moved on to a new job at a large information services company. Here, they've been using Objectivity internally for some years, but we're now in the process of converting over to Oracle. Problems with scalability, with bugs, with support, and with licensing has driven the company to look for alternatives.
In short, I have no arguments against the underlying technology of OODBMSs, but I have yet to find an OODB company that can execute well enough to make their product worthwhile.
Just one thing I'd like to note: the "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" mentality is one of the good, not bad, elements of the Open Source movment. Both the conventional Capitalist closed-source system and OSS ultimately depend on people's greed, and therefore benefit from the human drive to satisfy that greed. As a proponent of the OSS system, one doesn't receive money from one's activities, but you do receive the equivalent of a nearly unlimited license to use and redistribute a vast amount of software, which in the end can amount to the same thing.
An update: I just flashed the latest BIOS from Abit (the "WZ" bios), and that seems to have fixed the problem. (I can now untar and make X windows source without any errors.)
I'm also having similar trouble with my setup. I've got an Abit KT7-Raid and a Western Digital 40 gig drive currently running on the raid controller. I'm running Linux 2.4.2. File corruption appears to occur mainly during heavy disk usage. I can get the error to occur reliably by compiling the X Windows source code -- every time, a few random files generated during the compile (for example, some of the makefiles built by imake) appear to have a small section of the file (maybe 15-30 characters) replaced with a corresponding set of characters copied from a location just above it in the file.
I read one posting on the linux-kernel mailing list where a user (with an Asus A7V I think, but the same chipset) thought the problem was with a PCI caching system that was not getting updated appropriately; old data was being flushed to the disk from the cache. (The VIA "north bridge" chip in these motherboards has some ability to cache data passing between the CPU and the PCI.) It certainly seems to mesh with the type of corruption I'm experiencing. He reported being able to avoid the corruption by turning off caching in the BIOS. I'm going to try that as soon as I get the chance.
Another Abit KT7 user I've talked to says that he's experienced no problems, but that he's using the standard IDE controller (he has the version of the motherboard without the raid controller). I may end up just taking my HD off the raid controller and putting it on the standard IDE, and see if that fixes my problems.
--John
Well, yeah, it is grim.:) But as it is (to a certain degree) a parody of the arms race during the cold war (something that comes up in a lot of Lem's work), and I think the mood is suitable.
Actually, Lem's quick-freeze "vitrifax" machine used to save the guy's life on Triton has a basis in science fact: one of the problems with "cryonic" suspended animation is that when human tissues are cooled below the freezing point of water, the ice crystallizes and cracks. When you thaw the tissue again, it is damaged beyond repair. But when water is cooled extremely rapidly, it can apparently become "vitrified" ice; the liquid form goes over to the solid form without the normal process of crystal formation.
I don't know all the details, but I'm sure Lem was pointing to that technique with his mechanism.
I agree that Solaris is good, although my favorites are The Cyberiad, Eden, and The Invincible. One of his works that I really enjoy that hasn't been mentioned yet is Fiasco; I thought the speculative gravity-based technology in that story was wonderful.
One thing about Lem I've always liked is that he can write a great Sci-Fi tragedy. I've noticed that the great majority of modern (Western) Sci-Fi is almost always written as heroic opera; even when it centers on an anti-hero, it's a truly heroic anti-hero, inevitably saving the world by the end of the story. Lem is far more unpredictable; he doesn't follow a set formula, and you can't always tell how the story is going to end. One of his tales of Pirx the Pilot (I can't quite remember the name; I think it's "The Albatross") always sticks with me; while the main character is Pirx, his role in the story is little more than as a witness to a spacecraft in the process of a catastrophic failure. Even though nobody wins in the end, the scenes drawn in the story of desperation and selfless sacrifice against a backdrop of hard vacuum are starkly beautiful.
Rather than a fight against evil aliens or mega-corporations, Lem's heroes strive against the very world around themselves. They may succeed or fail at the tasks given them in each story, but their heroism (or lack thereof) is implicit in how they uphold their own ideals in the face of adversity, rather than in what they actually accomplish. Wonderful stuff.
I'm glad we've finally gotten a clear-headed view of this situation, and I'm particularly glad it's from the head of Red Hat itself. Have people become so brain-washed by the Microsoft way of doing things that they think Red Hat is inevitably going to control our lives?
This is Open-Source software. So you get a copy of Red Hat 7: Don't like it? Don't use it. The software doesn't cost you anything! If you spend any money, all you're getting is the support from Red Hat, and if you don't want to use the software they choose to support, get your support elsewhere.
The whole point of having a public license is freedom. Red Hat is using their access to the code to construct their own environment; it is no more than what anyone who has built their own Linux system from source has done. Complain about Red Hat's bugs, complain about the choices they made, but for heaven's sake don't complain about their freedom to use publicly-licensed software for whatever purpose they wish.
Slashdot Mirror
:) :) Actually, I figure about 80% of why anyone posts on Slashdot is to piss and moan, including me. :) But, to be honest, I'm trying to work back to the original point -- politics is politics, and should (in my opinion) be separate from questions of mortality. Death is not a good thing, whether applied to a good person or an evil person!
As for my politics, I also voted against dubya, but as I live pretty deep inside Bush country, I kinda despair sometimes. Might be why I'm pissing and moaning so much. :) One insight, though -- most people around here really, truly believe that Bush is right for the country. They're not just being swayed by some campaign advertising. The fact is, if it wasn't Bush leading us, it'd be someone much like him, because they want to see conservative, religious, right-wing leadership. I'm still trying to understand why so many people think this way.
--John
--A closet B5 fan
But, you see, that doesn't help -- you've already admitted that each succeeding generation doesn't necessarily improve on the previous one simply by the fact of being younger. Each generation will have its share of potential despots; thus, it is the task of each generation to deal with its own members in its own way.
Saying that "death will eventually remove our generation's despot" is nothing more than saying "death will eventually fix our generation's mistake". This is not an argument I would use to support the concept of mortality.
--John
but even with the worst leaders possible, the most destructive, oppressive regimes around, we have the consolation of knowing that sooner or later they'll die.
It's no consolation for me. Saying that "mortality is good because evil leaders die" is, at least implicitly, stating that the members of a society have no control over their leaders; that they simply must endure their situation until their leader passes on. I disagree: if a leader has enough support within a society to maintain power, all the members of that society take some share of the blame for his activities.
The point is: to say death is good because there are some people you want dead, is to imply that you don't want to deal with them while they are alive. I can't agree with that.
--John
The fact is, society doesn't change unless the people in that society choose to exercise the will to change it. Civil rights imply civil responsibilities: you have to invest effort to create the society you want to inhabit, regardless of your age.
(Quick check -- do you think Americans today have more or less civil rights than they did, say, 20 years ago?)
--John
A bit pessimistic aren't we? I've heard this argument against long life before. My usual response: "Yes! Isn't it great that all the dictators and tyrants and corrupt officials died off hundreds of years ago! Once they were gone, decent and efficient governments just sprang up of their own accord. Citizens haven't had to lift a finger to defend their liberty since then. Yup, a naturally limited lifespan is all you need for good leadership."
Ah, unfortunately, "natural selection" is a bit of a slippery concept; you can't actually say that inheritance, family ties, friendship, etc. is keeping the "best from succeeding". From an evolutionary perspective, if a given individual is selected over another due to interpersonal relationships rather than innate ability, then natural selection has applied!
In fact, I personally believe that the ability to maintain and support personal relationships is one of the most significant advantages of humans over other animals; there are many bright creatures in the world, but none have the ability we do to communicate with one another. We can exchange vast amounts of knowledge, ideas, and experiences between ourselves, and we've learned how to transmit this information great distances, broadcast it to many individuals, and record it for the future. Because of this, enormous groups of humans can work together to accomplish something that any single individual could not.
So yes, the ability to create, maintain, and take advantage of interpersonal relationships is extremely valuable selection-wise, possibly more valuable than any other innate ability...
Honestly, I understand that it's important to produce good software. But you have to understand that it's the people who provide the time, the expertise, or the money, whose voices are heard. And right now, that's certainly not the general Windows-using public. The first law of business is to satisfy your customer -- and in the world of open-source software, customers are generally other developers, not some group of anonymous users.
--John
--John
Well, I'm not anywhere near this issue in the company, but I would assume that (using your example) if you pull up "page 23" of the NYT, 3/9/87, there should be some indication that an article previously residing in that position is no longer there.
The problem is, that isn't how people use online databases. The value of the Nexis system (or any database system) is its ability to search the content of those millions of documents and quickly return matches to you. A content-based search is not going to find an article that is now lacking all content.
Also, the people who use this system don't generally have the time to amble on down to the local library to read the documents that are returned. Think about how you use a Google search (or whatever internet search system you prefer); generally, a simple search will return hundreds of documents, and you'll generally need to check several of them by hand before you really find what you're looking for. The search is only useful because you can get to those documents almost instantly; if it took a 15 minute trip to check those documents, you'd never do it. Now, the Nexis search system has some additional features that allow users to configure a search more accurately than is generally possible with Google/etc., but realistically any researcher is going to need to pare down the results of a search by hand.
Yes, this isn't a "Memory Hole", but it isn't nothing; it does severely impair the indexing of that data, and even if you could find it, integrating on-line searching with physical documents is not an optimal way of working.
--John
Perhaps because it isn't worth it? I actually work at Lexis-Nexis (although I'm just a lowly programmer, and no, I'm not speaking for the company); there are many good reasons to support the plaintiff's case, but one overriding reason why they'll never see a cent from their efforts -- the market won't support it.
People spend money on the Lexis-Nexis service because of the depth and quality of our databases. We literally have decades worth of archived newspapers, magazines, technical journals, legislation, and court documents. Consider the effort it takes just to maintain relationships with the thousands of publishers of these documents. Now, we are to be forced to treat each individual freelance newspaper story as a separate relationship with each author? I've heard there may be more than 10,000 of these stories already archived!
Nah, I can't believe that Lexis-Nexis will ever make a serious attempt to contact thousands of authors individually to try and negotiate a contract; we'll just have to purge them from the system. I can't really imagine any other online database company trying to accomplish that either. They'd never be able to make up the cost of the time it took to manage all those relationships, even if the authors allowed free use of their works.
John
But that's the point. I don't buy software just so I can have something to show off the capabilities of my computer hardware; I buy computer hardware in order to run the software I'm interested in. The fact is, Exile does things that my older graphics cards could never handle, but it honestly does improve the game!
There is no law requiring software engineers to produce software supporting every possible hardware platform in existence. Myst III may not work on the hardware you own, but it has vastly superior graphics and sound to many lowest-common-denominator games I have, and that makes it worthwhile to me.
--John
Perhaps it's because I pre-ordered the collector's edition (which came with the game, a "making-of" CD, a soundtrack CD (to which I am at this very moment listening), the Prima hint guide book, and a cute pewter statuette of a Squee. Perhaps it's because I have a PC with a decent graphics card, sound card and processor, and didn't have any trouble in the least running the game.
Regardless, Exile is an awesome game. The soundtrack is fantastic, the graphics are fantastic, the puzzles are entertaining (and consistently make you feel like you are inside the mechanism of the puzzle rather than just looking at it). I was worried that Presto would not have the touch that Cyan did in creating games within the world of Myst, but they've done a wonderful job of remaining true to the series.
I give Exile two thumbs up.
--John
I went on to work at a job involving a similar product, which stored data persistently in a Poet OODB. Although the basic functionality of Poet seemed to work correctly, my manager had chosen Poet in order to use a special feature that had been advertised, but (as it turns out) wasn't completed at the time the DB was released. Support e-mails turned into intercontinental discussions with the German developers of the product, weeks turned into months, and before long this project was a year behind schedule, due almost solely to a dependence on an OODB. Finally, Poet modified their licensing scheme (forcing potential users of our project to absorb exorbitant sub-licensing fees), and that broke the back of the whole effort.
I moved on to a new job at a large information services company. Here, they've been using Objectivity internally for some years, but we're now in the process of converting over to Oracle. Problems with scalability, with bugs, with support, and with licensing has driven the company to look for alternatives.
In short, I have no arguments against the underlying technology of OODBMSs, but I have yet to find an OODB company that can execute well enough to make their product worthwhile.
--John
Just one thing I'd like to note: the "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" mentality is one of the good, not bad, elements of the Open Source movment. Both the conventional Capitalist closed-source system and OSS ultimately depend on people's greed, and therefore benefit from the human drive to satisfy that greed. As a proponent of the OSS system, one doesn't receive money from one's activities, but you do receive the equivalent of a nearly unlimited license to use and redistribute a vast amount of software, which in the end can amount to the same thing.
--John
I'm also having similar trouble with my setup. I've got an Abit KT7-Raid and a Western Digital 40 gig drive currently running on the raid controller. I'm running Linux 2.4.2. File corruption appears to occur mainly during heavy disk usage. I can get the error to occur reliably by compiling the X Windows source code -- every time, a few random files generated during the compile (for example, some of the makefiles built by imake) appear to have a small section of the file (maybe 15-30 characters) replaced with a corresponding set of characters copied from a location just above it in the file. I read one posting on the linux-kernel mailing list where a user (with an Asus A7V I think, but the same chipset) thought the problem was with a PCI caching system that was not getting updated appropriately; old data was being flushed to the disk from the cache. (The VIA "north bridge" chip in these motherboards has some ability to cache data passing between the CPU and the PCI.) It certainly seems to mesh with the type of corruption I'm experiencing. He reported being able to avoid the corruption by turning off caching in the BIOS. I'm going to try that as soon as I get the chance. Another Abit KT7 user I've talked to says that he's experienced no problems, but that he's using the standard IDE controller (he has the version of the motherboard without the raid controller). I may end up just taking my HD off the raid controller and putting it on the standard IDE, and see if that fixes my problems. --John
Actually, Lem's quick-freeze "vitrifax" machine used to save the guy's life on Triton has a basis in science fact: one of the problems with "cryonic" suspended animation is that when human tissues are cooled below the freezing point of water, the ice crystallizes and cracks. When you thaw the tissue again, it is damaged beyond repair. But when water is cooled extremely rapidly, it can apparently become "vitrified" ice; the liquid form goes over to the solid form without the normal process of crystal formation.
I don't know all the details, but I'm sure Lem was pointing to that technique with his mechanism.
One thing about Lem I've always liked is that he can write a great Sci-Fi tragedy. I've noticed that the great majority of modern (Western) Sci-Fi is almost always written as heroic opera; even when it centers on an anti-hero, it's a truly heroic anti-hero, inevitably saving the world by the end of the story. Lem is far more unpredictable; he doesn't follow a set formula, and you can't always tell how the story is going to end. One of his tales of Pirx the Pilot (I can't quite remember the name; I think it's "The Albatross") always sticks with me; while the main character is Pirx, his role in the story is little more than as a witness to a spacecraft in the process of a catastrophic failure. Even though nobody wins in the end, the scenes drawn in the story of desperation and selfless sacrifice against a backdrop of hard vacuum are starkly beautiful.
Rather than a fight against evil aliens or mega-corporations, Lem's heroes strive against the very world around themselves. They may succeed or fail at the tasks given them in each story, but their heroism (or lack thereof) is implicit in how they uphold their own ideals in the face of adversity, rather than in what they actually accomplish. Wonderful stuff.
I'm glad we've finally gotten a clear-headed view of this situation, and I'm particularly glad it's from the head of Red Hat itself. Have people become so brain-washed by the Microsoft way of doing things that they think Red Hat is inevitably going to control our lives? This is Open-Source software. So you get a copy of Red Hat 7: Don't like it? Don't use it. The software doesn't cost you anything! If you spend any money, all you're getting is the support from Red Hat, and if you don't want to use the software they choose to support, get your support elsewhere. The whole point of having a public license is freedom. Red Hat is using their access to the code to construct their own environment; it is no more than what anyone who has built their own Linux system from source has done. Complain about Red Hat's bugs, complain about the choices they made, but for heaven's sake don't complain about their freedom to use publicly-licensed software for whatever purpose they wish.