but creating something that works well for everybody is an art that few people master.
actually, it's an art that nobody masters because it's impossible to make a UI that works well for everyone - different people have different requirements.
I, for example, find most GUI icons hopelessly confusing. I can never tell what the fuck they're supposed to mean(*). They confuse the hell out of me. Even after months or years of use, I just recognise the ones i use regularly by pattern matching (rote memory), not by understanding what the picture is supposed to be. and i suspect that's partially true for everyone - take web browser icons like the icons for chromium or firefox for example....the ONLY reason they're recognisable as web browsers is brand-recognition. There's nothing about them that "intuitively" indicates "web browser' to someone who doesn't already know the branding.
(*) this is, of course, partly due to resolution - higher res icons have more detail and are generally more recognisable. but it's also partly due to inherent ambiguity - is a picture of a document meant to indicate Open Office or Abiword or something else entirely? is it even a text document or is that funny colored squigle in the corner supposed to indicate that it's a picture? i dunno, click it and see....i might even remember it after a few hundred clicks.
Words, however, make perfect sense to me. They're unambiguous, clear, and "exactly what it says on the label". So, wherever possible, I use text menus, text labels as well as (or instead of, when possible) the default inscrutable hieroglyphics.
I fully understand that most people are far more visually-oriented than I am...and that a UI designed for me would be sub-optimal for them, just as a UI designed for them is sub-optimal for me.
which was my point - different people have different requirements. there is no one-size-fits-all user interface.
some people like to dismiss textual UIs as being only for geeks. contrarily, i could easily dismiss UIs with an icon fetish as being only for illiterate morons who never mastered reading beyond looking at the pictures in the Mr Men books.
yes, and by the same logic, murder isn't so bad because the victim was going to die eventually anyway. what difference does it make if they die now or in 5 or 6 decades? none at all. which irrefutably proves that there's no such thing as anthropogenic death, that's just a scare-tactic by law-and-order loonies with an agenda.
even if you had a legitimate point or worthwhile information to distribute, repeatedly spamming the same fucking post dozens of times is just going to piss off and alienate anyone who might potentially benefit from it.
but it's most likely that you're just a troll. you're certainly a spammer.
1. btrfs is experimental. corruption and data-loss is not surprising (or even a valid cause of complaint) for a fs tagged as being experimental.
2. btrfs is far from the only fs available for linux. the default ext4 is quite reliable. as is XFS.
3. Native (in-kernel, not FUSE) ZFS is available for linux. Will probably never be in mainline kernel due to licensing issues (CDDL vs GPL) unless Oracle relicenses ZFS as BSD or similar (making it GPL would make it incompatible with *BSD and opensolaris etc)
The Ubuntu PPA packages easily re-compiled for debian (just change the Depends line from zfs-grub to grub)...builds nice dkms module packages, so maintainence is almost as hassle-free as if it were in the mainline kernel.
you can buy a 20 or 24 bay case for around $300-$400 US, e.g. Norco RPC-4020 or RPC-4224. Takes up to a full size EEB 12"x13" motherboard and 20 or 24 3.5" hot-swap SAS/SATA drives. Can take a standard power supply or there are redundant dual power supplies available.
The 24 port version has a nice option to replace the internal fan bracket (which supports 4 x 80mm fans) with a bracket that supports 3 x 120mm fans. Much quieter for a home environment. Dunno if the RPC-4020 has a similar option. You *WILL* want to replace all of the supplied fans with third-party silent fans. http://www.silentpcreview.com/ is a good place to start researching this.
Even if you're only planning to have 10 or less drives right now, the extra bays are useful if/when you need to replace or upgrade existing drives. You won't have to juggle drives in and out of bays just to replace them. or have a drive hanging outside the case for a few hours while the data is copied.
For extra SATA ports, there are several models of LSI 9211 and similar HBA adaptors providing SAS/SATA 6Gpbs, PCI-e 8x slot. RRP is around $350 for 8 port models but you can find them cheaper on ebay, and several manufacturers (e.g. the IBM M1015) have significantly cheaper rebadged models. A SAS card allows you to use either or both SAS and SATA drives, and also allows you to use SAS expanders (to attach more drives to the one card - SATA has something similar called "port multipliers" but it's a crappy substitute only good for destroying your data). Unless you don't have enough PCI-e 8x slots in your m/b, though, you're better off just buying more 8 port cards.
They're just "dumb" HBAs offering only RAID-0, RAID-1, and JBOD....but that's exactly what you want for software raid or btrfs or ZFS so why pay extra for RAID-5 in the card that you're never going to use.
The LSI 1068 based cards are even cheaper, but they only support SAS/SATA 3Gbps. Doesn't matter much for current hard disks, but you'll need a few 6Gbps ports on the motherboard if you want to use SSD drives (e.g. for caching.)
For the file system, I very strongly recommend ZFS On Linux (the native kernel implementation, not the ZFS-Fuse module). http://zfsonlinux.org/ - gives you raid-like features, disk/volume management, compression, de-duping, snapshots, ssd caching and more. all data is checksummed too so it can detect errors (and automatically repair them from redundant info on the RAID1/5-like volumes).
The Ubuntu PPA compiles easily on debian (you only have to change one dependancy from zfs-grub to grub in the debian/control file) - it's about 10 minutes work, and most of that is waiting for the packages to compile.
ZFS will give you software-raid like capabilities - superior equivs to RAID-0, RAID-1, and RAID-5/6 and combinations of them, plus multiple optional hot and cold spares. "superior" because the redundancy is on the file/data level, not at the block level, and each block of each file is checksummed. Plus you can use one or more fast devices like an SSD for automatic read caching of frequently access data (ZFS cache or L2ARC), and for a write-intent log (ZFS ZIL) for buffering random-writes to an SSD before writing them to the main drives. This ZIL eliminates the final advantage that hardware raid cards had
The benefit of free software for non-programmer users is far more important than just "they don't have to pay for it".
Proprietary operating systems, like Windows or Mac OS X, are not written for the benefit of the end users, they are written primarily for the benefit of the vendor (e.g. MS, or Apple) *and* for the advertising, retail, media, etc companies (as well as law enforcement and intelligence agencies) that the vendor has made deals with. End users are not the "customer", they are the product.
In short, proprietary operating systems and proprietary software in general are full of anti-features.
Free software is made primarily for the benefit of the developers, who *are* the users....and they certainly don't want to spy on or spam themselves for the benefit of some corporation. Non-developer users get the benefit of that.
I've never been a Windows user, I've been a Linux-only user since 1993 and OS/2 and DOS before that. Earlier this year, I got sick of being unable to play some of the games i bought on linux (in wine) so I built a win7 box from parts left over from my most recent upgrade. It turns out that most of the games that wouldn't run on Wine were because of anti-features like DRM or copy protection or because they required me to use or log in to an online service (XBLA, EA Online, punkbuster, gamespy) - which would be understandable for a multiplayer game but I have no interest in multiplayer games, i only play single-player games or the single-player campagins of single+multi games.
(oh, and much of the bugginess in games that I thought was due to particular games running in wine rather than their native environment of real MS Windows, actually turned out to be the games being buggy crap anyway)
I'm disgusted by the contempt for the user shown by this kind of intrusive crap. I really can't understand why non-linux users put up with it, it's not as if Linux desktop GUIs aren't just as usable and "user-friendly" as the windows GUI (that issue was solved years ago)...I can only guess that they just think it's normal and don't even wonder if there's any alternative. I know I only put up with it because it's only games, which really aren't that important....I guess i think of my Win7 box like most Win users think of games consoles - it's a single purpose appliance just for running games.
One final point: I've never been even remotely tempted to use Windows on my main desktop machine and this experiment/experience just confirms my previous suspicion that the ONLY thing MS Windows is good for is as a games machine (and if it wasn't for stuff like DRM breaking games, wine would be just as good) - there's just no good reason (and lots of anti-reasons) for using it for anything else. I certainly wouldn't use it for online banking or purchases (I do all my purchases of, e.g., steam games on my linux machine...i just don't trust Windows anywhere near enough to even visit my bank's site or paypal, let alone enter my login details or credit card number etc)
maybe the stupid hysterical bullshit about drugs in sport will eventually end. gene tweaking and gene transfer, taking enhancement drugs, prosthetics, absurd training regimens - it's bullshit to pretend that one (the last) is any more "natural" (and therefore allowable) than the others.
when this works, it works great - unfortunately, what it often results in is individuals and/or departments thinking "if i'm going to pay for it anyway, i may as well hire an outsider", which (apart from the technical and security and management problems already mentioned numerous times in this thread) has two main effects:
1. it demoralizes the tech staff as their jobs become doing just the shit work
2. it accelerates the loss of in-house knowledge (both institutional - "wtf was this set up *this* way?" - and technical).
it also tends to discourage sharing services unless there is a separate budget for shared services, as dept A doesn't want to pay the big bucks for a server that dept B might benefit from in future unless they split the cost somehow.....or thinks they were ripped off because they paid for all or most of it but some other dept. uses it too. some things should just be worn as a company-wide expense without trying to recover costs from individuals or depts. in short, the same kind of extreme suckage that applies to the "User Pays" philosophy in politics and government provision of services
ummmm....who cares? i'm no more interested in paying $1 to $10 for a crappy iOS app than I would be to pay it for a crappy Android applet. When it comes to the "marketplace" for both iOS and Android, Sturgeon's Law is a massive understatement.
Even aside from the quality of the apps, there's also the far more important issue of software licensing - I decided nearly two decades ago that i didn't want to be dependant on proprietary software on my desktop machines or on my servers, so WTF would I want to become dependant on proprietary software on my phone or tablet? Makes no sense to me
what matters to me is that iOS is completely closed. Apple gets to decide what's allowed to run on my phone/tablet, not me. Android, by contrast, is open. I can choose to run what the manufacturer supplies, or i can replace it with a community "distro" like cyanogenmod. I can choose to use the apps in the official marketplace, or i can use one of dozens of other markets - fdroid, for instance. or i can do both.
but mostly, there's a place for GNU style free software on Android. There isn't on iOS.
Android will have a thriving GPL and other FOSS developer community. iOS will have, at best, a fringe presence of FOSS developers. Nothing else really matters (to me, at least)
You know why Apple is winning the tablet and phone market?
because Android tablets are priced roughly the same - or slightly less - than ipad prices. And while Apple fanboys are willing to pay that much for a tablet, most people aren't.
Even with that, android devices are starting to overtake ipads in terms of sales and market share. When the current crop of $400-$600+ android tablets are down to about $150 or so, that'll be the real tipping point and Apple ipads will become a small niche of 5-10% of price-doesn't-matter buyers like Macs are on the desktop
BTW, Apple's already lost the phone market. They're (probably) still leading for tablets. But not for long.
yeah, me too. while it's probably better to have the high-precision timestamps, for me it's more useful to have them readable.
I have the same problem with squid logs - they use unix time_t with milliseconds for the timestamp. more precise but less readable. I filter the lines through a small perl script to reformat the dates when i need to tail or process them:
#!/usr/bin/perl -p
use Date::Format;
s/^\d+\.\d+/time2str("%Y-%m-%d\/%H:%M:%S", $&)/e;
this is similar to what is mentioned in http://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/LogFormat but with the improvement (IMO) that the timestamp still only takes one column (compared to localtime() making it take 5 columns), so it doesn't mess up other processing scripts that depend on the detail being in specific columns)
from this;
1322779413.527
to this:
2011-12-02/09:43:33
It would be annoying to have to do that for syslog logs too. I don't really need millisecond precision for my system logs anyway, near enough is good enough. All i need is accuracy and consistency across multiple systems - and ntp gives me that.
In its origins, Linux was simply a fork of Minix.
Admittedly Torvalds had to re-write everything,
Nope. That's called a clone or a re-implementation, not a fork. A fork is based on the original project's source code. Since Linus wrote everything from scratch, it wasn't not a fork.
IMO, Linux was successful where Minx & *BSD were not, for three main reasons:
- Linus himself - makes a near-ideal benevolent dictator for his project
- The GPL - guaranteed other devs that their work would always be Free Software
- Support for 386 and later 486 chips - a major itch that needed scratching
There were numerous secondary reasons too, but IMO the above are the main ones. In order of importance
and when he left, he changed the account to just his own name. he did the right thing here.
the only fair outcome is that he gets to keep his own account, and his company can create their own @phonedog twitter account. They don't own his name, or have any right to use it (not unless he agrees, and is compensated adequately for the use of his name)
unfortunately, gnome 3 isn't an "angel". it's just the same old devil with a mask and a lobotomy
i switched to Gnome 3 on my desktop machine at work several months ago. Gnome Shell is abysmal but it's almost OK in fallback mode.
I've stuck with Gnome 2 on all my desktop machines at home, mostly because fallback mode's panel is an inadequate substitute for the gnome 2 panel. You can't easily move or remove launcher icons, everything is in fixed locations. and it really really shits me to have my name on the screen all the time, and for it to be a menu - it took me hours before i even realised it was a menu at first, i thought it was supposed to be a helpful reminder in case i was too stupid to remember my own name, and even now i still don't know WTF the "Away" and "Online" menu items actually do, presumably they're for some kind of chat service - but which one? and HTF do i get them to go away, because i'm just not interested in that shit?
If and when fallback mode gets close to gnome2 and its panel, i'll probably upgrade at home too. or maybe i'll be forced to upgrade whether i like it or not - gnome3 has already hit debian unstable and i've had to hold a lot of packages from upgrading....eventually it'll get to the point where i have to choose between switching to gnome3 or not upgrading anything. that sucks.
really, all i wanted was gnome 2 with bugs fixed and maybe some minor improvements. i didn't want the way i interacted with my computers to be radically changed, there's no benefit at all to me in that. but fixing bugs isn't anywhere near as exciting as doing yet another complete rewrite from scratch ("this time we'll get it right"...yeah, sure)
WTF does America still even have the idea of a contested divorce?
if either or both parties don't want to be married any more - for whatever reason, or for no reason at all - then a divorce should be granted. no hassle, no fuss, no "evidence" required.
all that's left then is fairly dividing up shared assets and ensuring appropriate financial support for the children (if any). OK, sure, divvying up the assets can be a shitstorm of bitter disputes but it's separate from the divorce itself.
yes. cannabis has been proven to be totally non-addictive. even the most rabid anti-drug campaigner knows that arguing that will completely destroy their credibility, which is why they invented the bogus 'gateway-drug' propaganda to make it seem just as bad as if it were actually addictive.
which is not to say that it's completely harmless. nothing is. but it's certainly less harmful than something like, say, sugar.
yep, *LO cards have a lot more than just a BIOS implementation of VNC.
To start with, they provide a hardware watchdog, power on/off/cycle options, and querying of sensors and settings via ipmi from the OS as well as just remote console access. They're also a dedicated computer that's available at all times, not just when the machine is running the BIOS, including when they main machine is powered off. i.e. they offer out-of-band access to controlling the server.
You can completely manage a remote machine. And it's just as useful when the remote machine is in a server room down the hall or even a machine in the spare room at the back of the house (walking back and forth between your main system and the back room system gets old after the first 5 or 6 times) as it is for a remote server on the other side of the world.
The one big annoyance with every single lights-out card i've ever used (DRAC, ILOM, ELOM, RiLO/iLO, and others) is that they *all* use their own crappy proprietary java applet for remote console access rather than VNC or RDP. And the trouble with java for client apps is that it's way too fragile and version dependent - some applets require java 1.5 and won't work with 1.6, and some are the opposite. Some only work with Sun (Oracle, now) Java, and some work on openjdk. If you need to run several different applets occasionally, you're screwed.
VNC in the BIOS isn't as good as a real BMC card, but this is a great step in the right direction. IMO, IPMI belongs on consumer-grade equipment too, not just on server motherboards.
And hopefully it will encourage the server-board manufacturers to dump their java craplets for de-facto standard protocols.
The clueless paranoid whingers here who think this is a bad idea obviously have never had to manage more than one system at a time - and that one is probably at home in their parents' basement.
ps: finally a topic where "Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these" is an appropriate comment. VNC at the BIOS level would be incredibly useful for managing a cluster built with a rack or racks of cheap consumer motherboards. even if you dedicate the built-in NIC for this task, buying a second network switch and a cheap PCI or PCI-e card for each machine is a lot cheaper and a lot less hassle than buying a KVM, and ethernet patch cables are easier to manage than KVM cables.
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you do realise that that's a command-line, don't you?
you've bypassed the GUI and entered a command line to run a particular program....presumably because navigating the GUI is too slow.
actually, it's an art that nobody masters because it's impossible to make a UI that works well for everyone - different people have different requirements.
I, for example, find most GUI icons hopelessly confusing. I can never tell what the fuck they're supposed to mean(*). They confuse the hell out of me. Even after months or years of use, I just recognise the ones i use regularly by pattern matching (rote memory), not by understanding what the picture is supposed to be. and i suspect that's partially true for everyone - take web browser icons like the icons for chromium or firefox for example....the ONLY reason they're recognisable as web browsers is brand-recognition. There's nothing about them that "intuitively" indicates "web browser' to someone who doesn't already know the branding.
(*) this is, of course, partly due to resolution - higher res icons have more detail and are generally more recognisable. but it's also partly due to inherent ambiguity - is a picture of a document meant to indicate Open Office or Abiword or something else entirely? is it even a text document or is that funny colored squigle in the corner supposed to indicate that it's a picture? i dunno, click it and see....i might even remember it after a few hundred clicks.
Words, however, make perfect sense to me. They're unambiguous, clear, and "exactly what it says on the label". So, wherever possible, I use text menus, text labels as well as (or instead of, when possible) the default inscrutable hieroglyphics.
I fully understand that most people are far more visually-oriented than I am...and that a UI designed for me would be sub-optimal for them, just as a UI designed for them is sub-optimal for me.
which was my point - different people have different requirements. there is no one-size-fits-all user interface.
some people like to dismiss textual UIs as being only for geeks. contrarily, i could easily dismiss UIs with an icon fetish as being only for illiterate morons who never mastered reading beyond looking at the pictures in the Mr Men books.
or you could just configure your DHCP server to give the same IP address every time to your PC's MAC address.
DHCP can do static IP allocation just as easily as it can do dynamic allocation.
yes, and by the same logic, murder isn't so bad because the victim was going to die eventually anyway. what difference does it make if they die now or in 5 or 6 decades? none at all. which irrefutably proves that there's no such thing as anthropogenic death, that's just a scare-tactic by law-and-order loonies with an agenda.
(FoxNews Reasoning<TM>used without permission).
I thought the stupid question made him look like a fucking idiot.
the monospace just intensified it :)
In this instance, fucking is a correctly used adverb which adds emphasis in a manner similar to very, only more so.
It is what is known as an intensifier.
fuck off and die, spammer.
even if you had a legitimate point or worthwhile information to distribute, repeatedly spamming the same fucking post dozens of times is just going to piss off and alienate anyone who might potentially benefit from it.
but it's most likely that you're just a troll. you're certainly a spammer.
1. btrfs is experimental. corruption and data-loss is not surprising (or even a valid cause of complaint) for a fs tagged as being experimental.
2. btrfs is far from the only fs available for linux. the default ext4 is quite reliable. as is XFS.
3. Native (in-kernel, not FUSE) ZFS is available for linux. Will probably never be in mainline kernel due to licensing issues (CDDL vs GPL) unless Oracle relicenses ZFS as BSD or similar (making it GPL would make it incompatible with *BSD and opensolaris etc)
http://zfsonlinux.org/
works well.
The Ubuntu PPA packages easily re-compiled for debian (just change the Depends line from zfs-grub to grub)...builds nice dkms module packages, so maintainence is almost as hassle-free as if it were in the mainline kernel.
you can buy a 20 or 24 bay case for around $300-$400 US, e.g. Norco RPC-4020 or RPC-4224. Takes up to a full size EEB 12"x13" motherboard and 20 or 24 3.5" hot-swap SAS/SATA drives. Can take a standard power supply or there are redundant dual power supplies available.
http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=1&modelno=RPC-4020
http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=1&modelno=RPC-4224
The 24 port version has a nice option to replace the internal fan bracket (which supports 4 x 80mm fans) with a bracket that supports 3 x 120mm fans. Much quieter for a home environment. Dunno if the RPC-4020 has a similar option. You *WILL* want to replace all of the supplied fans with third-party silent fans. http://www.silentpcreview.com/ is a good place to start researching this.
Even if you're only planning to have 10 or less drives right now, the extra bays are useful if/when you need to replace or upgrade existing drives. You won't have to juggle drives in and out of bays just to replace them. or have a drive hanging outside the case for a few hours while the data is copied.
For extra SATA ports, there are several models of LSI 9211 and similar HBA adaptors providing SAS/SATA 6Gpbs, PCI-e 8x slot. RRP is around $350 for 8 port models but you can find them cheaper on ebay, and several manufacturers (e.g. the IBM M1015) have significantly cheaper rebadged models. A SAS card allows you to use either or both SAS and SATA drives, and also allows you to use SAS expanders (to attach more drives to the one card - SATA has something similar called "port multipliers" but it's a crappy substitute only good for destroying your data). Unless you don't have enough PCI-e 8x slots in your m/b, though, you're better off just buying more 8 port cards.
They're just "dumb" HBAs offering only RAID-0, RAID-1, and JBOD....but that's exactly what you want for software raid or btrfs or ZFS so why pay extra for RAID-5 in the card that you're never going to use.
The LSI 1068 based cards are even cheaper, but they only support SAS/SATA 3Gbps. Doesn't matter much for current hard disks, but you'll need a few 6Gbps ports on the motherboard if you want to use SSD drives (e.g. for caching.)
here's a good starting point: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=10
see also http://forums.servethehome.com/showthread.php?19-LSI-RAID-Controller-HBA-Equivalency-Mapping
For the file system, I very strongly recommend ZFS On Linux (the native kernel implementation, not the ZFS-Fuse module). http://zfsonlinux.org/ - gives you raid-like features, disk/volume management, compression, de-duping, snapshots, ssd caching and more. all data is checksummed too so it can detect errors (and automatically repair them from redundant info on the RAID1/5-like volumes).
The Ubuntu PPA compiles easily on debian (you only have to change one dependancy from zfs-grub to grub in the debian/control file) - it's about 10 minutes work, and most of that is waiting for the packages to compile.
ZFS will give you software-raid like capabilities - superior equivs to RAID-0, RAID-1, and RAID-5/6 and combinations of them, plus multiple optional hot and cold spares. "superior" because the redundancy is on the file/data level, not at the block level, and each block of each file is checksummed. Plus you can use one or more fast devices like an SSD for automatic read caching of frequently access data (ZFS cache or L2ARC), and for a write-intent log (ZFS ZIL) for buffering random-writes to an SSD before writing them to the main drives. This ZIL eliminates the final advantage that hardware raid cards had
call it a Jewish lunar calendar full of Old Testament goodness.
The benefit of free software for non-programmer users is far more important than just "they don't have to pay for it".
Proprietary operating systems, like Windows or Mac OS X, are not written for the benefit of the end users, they are written primarily for the benefit of the vendor (e.g. MS, or Apple) *and* for the advertising, retail, media, etc companies (as well as law enforcement and intelligence agencies) that the vendor has made deals with. End users are not the "customer", they are the product.
In short, proprietary operating systems and proprietary software in general are full of anti-features.
Free software is made primarily for the benefit of the developers, who *are* the users....and they certainly don't want to spy on or spam themselves for the benefit of some corporation. Non-developer users get the benefit of that.
I've never been a Windows user, I've been a Linux-only user since 1993 and OS/2 and DOS before that. Earlier this year, I got sick of being unable to play some of the games i bought on linux (in wine) so I built a win7 box from parts left over from my most recent upgrade. It turns out that most of the games that wouldn't run on Wine were because of anti-features like DRM or copy protection or because they required me to use or log in to an online service (XBLA, EA Online, punkbuster, gamespy) - which would be understandable for a multiplayer game but I have no interest in multiplayer games, i only play single-player games or the single-player campagins of single+multi games.
(oh, and much of the bugginess in games that I thought was due to particular games running in wine rather than their native environment of real MS Windows, actually turned out to be the games being buggy crap anyway)
I'm disgusted by the contempt for the user shown by this kind of intrusive crap. I really can't understand why non-linux users put up with it, it's not as if Linux desktop GUIs aren't just as usable and "user-friendly" as the windows GUI (that issue was solved years ago)...I can only guess that they just think it's normal and don't even wonder if there's any alternative. I know I only put up with it because it's only games, which really aren't that important....I guess i think of my Win7 box like most Win users think of games consoles - it's a single purpose appliance just for running games.
One final point: I've never been even remotely tempted to use Windows on my main desktop machine and this experiment/experience just confirms my previous suspicion that the ONLY thing MS Windows is good for is as a games machine (and if it wasn't for stuff like DRM breaking games, wine would be just as good) - there's just no good reason (and lots of anti-reasons) for using it for anything else. I certainly wouldn't use it for online banking or purchases (I do all my purchases of, e.g., steam games on my linux machine...i just don't trust Windows anywhere near enough to even visit my bank's site or paypal, let alone enter my login details or credit card number etc)
maybe the stupid hysterical bullshit about drugs in sport will eventually end. gene tweaking and gene transfer, taking enhancement drugs, prosthetics, absurd training regimens - it's bullshit to pretend that one (the last) is any more "natural" (and therefore allowable) than the others.
when this works, it works great - unfortunately, what it often results in is individuals and/or departments thinking "if i'm going to pay for it anyway, i may as well hire an outsider", which (apart from the technical and security and management problems already mentioned numerous times in this thread) has two main effects:
1. it demoralizes the tech staff as their jobs become doing just the shit work
2. it accelerates the loss of in-house knowledge (both institutional - "wtf was this set up *this* way?" - and technical).
it also tends to discourage sharing services unless there is a separate budget for shared services, as dept A doesn't want to pay the big bucks for a server that dept B might benefit from in future unless they split the cost somehow.....or thinks they were ripped off because they paid for all or most of it but some other dept. uses it too. some things should just be worn as a company-wide expense without trying to recover costs from individuals or depts. in short, the same kind of extreme suckage that applies to the "User Pays" philosophy in politics and government provision of services
ummmm....who cares? i'm no more interested in paying $1 to $10 for a crappy iOS app than I would be to pay it for a crappy Android applet. When it comes to the "marketplace" for both iOS and Android, Sturgeon's Law is a massive understatement.
Even aside from the quality of the apps, there's also the far more important issue of software licensing - I decided nearly two decades ago that i didn't want to be dependant on proprietary software on my desktop machines or on my servers, so WTF would I want to become dependant on proprietary software on my phone or tablet? Makes no sense to me
what matters to me is that iOS is completely closed. Apple gets to decide what's allowed to run on my phone/tablet, not me. Android, by contrast, is open. I can choose to run what the manufacturer supplies, or i can replace it with a community "distro" like cyanogenmod. I can choose to use the apps in the official marketplace, or i can use one of dozens of other markets - fdroid, for instance. or i can do both.
but mostly, there's a place for GNU style free software on Android. There isn't on iOS.
Android will have a thriving GPL and other FOSS developer community. iOS will have, at best, a fringe presence of FOSS developers. Nothing else really matters (to me, at least)
because Android tablets are priced roughly the same - or slightly less - than ipad prices. And while Apple fanboys are willing to pay that much for a tablet, most people aren't.
Even with that, android devices are starting to overtake ipads in terms of sales and market share. When the current crop of $400-$600+ android tablets are down to about $150 or so, that'll be the real tipping point and Apple ipads will become a small niche of 5-10% of price-doesn't-matter buyers like Macs are on the desktop
BTW, Apple's already lost the phone market. They're (probably) still leading for tablets. But not for long.
yeah, me too. while it's probably better to have the high-precision timestamps, for me it's more useful to have them readable.
I have the same problem with squid logs - they use unix time_t with milliseconds for the timestamp. more precise but less readable. I filter the lines through a small perl script to reformat the dates when i need to tail or process them:
#! /usr/bin/perl -p ;
use Date::Format
s/^\d+\.\d+/time2str("%Y-%m-%d\/%H:%M:%S", $&)/e;
this is similar to what is mentioned in http://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/LogFormat but with the improvement (IMO) that the timestamp still only takes one column (compared to localtime() making it take 5 columns), so it doesn't mess up other processing scripts that depend on the detail being in specific columns)
from this;
1322779413.527
to this:
2011-12-02/09:43:33
It would be annoying to have to do that for syslog logs too. I don't really need millisecond precision for my system logs anyway, near enough is good enough. All i need is accuracy and consistency across multiple systems - and ntp gives me that.
duh. s/wasn't not/was not/
Nope. That's called a clone or a re-implementation, not a fork. A fork is based on the original project's source code. Since Linus wrote everything from scratch, it wasn't not a fork.
IMO, Linux was successful where Minx & *BSD were not, for three main reasons:
- Linus himself - makes a near-ideal benevolent dictator for his project
- The GPL - guaranteed other devs that their work would always be Free Software
- Support for 386 and later 486 chips - a major itch that needed scratching
There were numerous secondary reasons too, but IMO the above are the main ones. In order of importance
and when he left, he changed the account to just his own name. he did the right thing here.
the only fair outcome is that he gets to keep his own account, and his company can create their own @phonedog twitter account. They don't own his name, or have any right to use it (not unless he agrees, and is compensated adequately for the use of his name)
unfortunately, gnome 3 isn't an "angel". it's just the same old devil with a mask and a lobotomy
i switched to Gnome 3 on my desktop machine at work several months ago. Gnome Shell is abysmal but it's almost OK in fallback mode.
I've stuck with Gnome 2 on all my desktop machines at home, mostly because fallback mode's panel is an inadequate substitute for the gnome 2 panel. You can't easily move or remove launcher icons, everything is in fixed locations. and it really really shits me to have my name on the screen all the time, and for it to be a menu - it took me hours before i even realised it was a menu at first, i thought it was supposed to be a helpful reminder in case i was too stupid to remember my own name, and even now i still don't know WTF the "Away" and "Online" menu items actually do, presumably they're for some kind of chat service - but which one? and HTF do i get them to go away, because i'm just not interested in that shit?
If and when fallback mode gets close to gnome2 and its panel, i'll probably upgrade at home too. or maybe i'll be forced to upgrade whether i like it or not - gnome3 has already hit debian unstable and i've had to hold a lot of packages from upgrading....eventually it'll get to the point where i have to choose between switching to gnome3 or not upgrading anything. that sucks.
really, all i wanted was gnome 2 with bugs fixed and maybe some minor improvements. i didn't want the way i interacted with my computers to be radically changed, there's no benefit at all to me in that. but fixing bugs isn't anywhere near as exciting as doing yet another complete rewrite from scratch ("this time we'll get it right"...yeah, sure)
Hand back the salary I've paid you (plus interest) or you're fired.
WTF does America still even have the idea of a contested divorce?
if either or both parties don't want to be married any more - for whatever reason, or for no reason at all - then a divorce should be granted. no hassle, no fuss, no "evidence" required.
all that's left then is fairly dividing up shared assets and ensuring appropriate financial support for the children (if any). OK, sure, divvying up the assets can be a shitstorm of bitter disputes but it's separate from the divorce itself.
hurry up and panic. don't think. just react.
yes. cannabis has been proven to be totally non-addictive. even the most rabid anti-drug campaigner knows that arguing that will completely destroy their credibility, which is why they invented the bogus 'gateway-drug' propaganda to make it seem just as bad as if it were actually addictive.
which is not to say that it's completely harmless. nothing is. but it's certainly less harmful than something like, say, sugar.
yep, *LO cards have a lot more than just a BIOS implementation of VNC.
To start with, they provide a hardware watchdog, power on/off/cycle options, and querying of sensors and settings via ipmi from the OS as well as just remote console access. They're also a dedicated computer that's available at all times, not just when the machine is running the BIOS, including when they main machine is powered off. i.e. they offer out-of-band access to controlling the server.
You can completely manage a remote machine. And it's just as useful when the remote machine is in a server room down the hall or even a machine in the spare room at the back of the house (walking back and forth between your main system and the back room system gets old after the first 5 or 6 times) as it is for a remote server on the other side of the world.
The one big annoyance with every single lights-out card i've ever used (DRAC, ILOM, ELOM, RiLO/iLO, and others) is that they *all* use their own crappy proprietary java applet for remote console access rather than VNC or RDP. And the trouble with java for client apps is that it's way too fragile and version dependent - some applets require java 1.5 and won't work with 1.6, and some are the opposite. Some only work with Sun (Oracle, now) Java, and some work on openjdk. If you need to run several different applets occasionally, you're screwed.
VNC in the BIOS isn't as good as a real BMC card, but this is a great step in the right direction. IMO, IPMI belongs on consumer-grade equipment too, not just on server motherboards.
And hopefully it will encourage the server-board manufacturers to dump their java craplets for de-facto standard protocols.
The clueless paranoid whingers here who think this is a bad idea obviously have never had to manage more than one system at a time - and that one is probably at home in their parents' basement.
ps: finally a topic where "Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these" is an appropriate comment. VNC at the BIOS level would be incredibly useful for managing a cluster built with a rack or racks of cheap consumer motherboards. even if you dedicate the built-in NIC for this task, buying a second network switch and a cheap PCI or PCI-e card for each machine is a lot cheaper and a lot less hassle than buying a KVM, and ethernet patch cables are easier to manage than KVM cables.