Don't mistake in-filesystem deduplication and snapshots for a backup system. It's most certainly not backup and if you treat it as such you will eventually be very sorry. A SAN with ZFS, snapshots, and deduplication features is at best an archive, which is distinct in form and purpose from a backup. Still very useful, though. Ideally you have both archive and backup systems. To get a feel for the difference, consider that an archive is for when a user says, "I overwrote a file last week sometime. Can you recover the version before I made this change or saved over this file?" Whereas a backup is for recovering an entire system from when there's a catastrophic failure (like a SAN dying). Very distinct things. Both are useful.
I get strange looks when I tell people that a Time Capsule is not a backup. Nor is a single Time Machine external disk. Now 2, 3 or even 4 external disks could constitute a backup (and as a bonus with Time Machine an archive also).
Great. More drivel. His book, "From Beirut to Jerusalem" was incredible. "The World is Flat" is hundreds of pages of duh. Except for the part where he's interviewing Steve Ballmer and Ballmer is not quite claiming to have invented the internet, but claiming that MS built the tools the fundamentally drive e-commerce. Unbelievable.
I used to read Thomas Friedman's oped column regularly until the NY Times put him behind their paywall. Eventually they dropped the paywall but by then I was too late. I just didn't care that much any more. The few times I did pick up his column I realized that except for his columns on the middle east (his field of expertise) there wasn't much that he had to say that was incredibly relevant. I'm probably one of the few people that found his book, "the World is Flat" to be incredibly uninsightful.
The paywall made me realize that for the most part there isn't much separating such oped columns from the average blogger. However had the NY Times not put up the paywall I probably would still be reading their oped columns regularly.
I agree with the junk science bit. As for the price of fertilizer, it's highly variable and is doubtlessly different across the world, depending on the price of natural gas usually, or shipping costs if it's imported. Given that two seasons ago in Alberta, Canada our fertilizer bill was about $200k for 2500 irrigated acres (this season was about $100k), it's not inconceivable that prices could double, triple, or even quadruple, depending on oil prices. Not sure what kind of farm you have, but if it's high yield crops on irrigation in sandy soil, fertilizer costs can be staggering. I agree the article is probably exaggerating the savings, though.
On GSM phones, just dial *002*# and all your unanswered calls will go to your google voice account. Of course Google likely uses this technique, but has some added logic to make it so that Google Voice will not forward back to your cell phone if the call is being forwarded from your cell phone in the first place. I can't find any details on how Google does it, but it has to be done with the forwarding mechanisms already offered by providers.
A downside to all this is that forwarding uses up your airtime. Also it's not available on T-Mobile prepaid (though it is on AT&T GoPhones).
Having sensors detect eye movement and focus is essential for making 3d goggles. Your brain is constantly moving your eyes in order to get depth information. That and head movement. Regular goggles are very tiring to use because when your eyes move around, the scene does not. This is very confusing for your brain and causes my eyes to really hurt after a while.
One use case I can see for fat packages or FatELF (either one works) would be if we also had a smart boot loader that could take a single-architecture binary and run it through QEMU in conjunction with FatELF libraries on the system. If my ARM netbook ran Fedora, example, and installed FatELF libraries supporting both ARM and x86 (supposing cheap SSDs!) then if I really needed Adobe Reader for some reason which is only on x86, then I could download and install their Fedora x86 RPM and run it seamlessly.
This could also be done with plain fat packages too. A fat gtk-libs package, for example could dump files native to your architecture in/usr/lib or/usr/lib64 or both, while putting other architecture libraries in the Qemu system directory for that architecture.
Note that Qemu already allows this without fat libraries. But wouldn't expect a average netbook user to know how to download the rpm or tarball, extract everything and stick it somewhere, then populate the Qemu system directory with Fedora x86 libraries. The benefit of FatELF or fat packages here would be that the RPM would just install because it could see that the requisite FatELF libraries where installed or that the architecture-specific libs were installed in the Qemu system. This is all provided that RPM or DEB or whatever either knows about FatELF or implements fat packages.
I wasn't talking about bringing ZFS to linux. Oracle very well could bring ZFS to linux, which be nice for migrating away from Solaris to Linux and reading ZFS disks. I was referring to porting BtrFS to Solaris. Unless Oracle owns all the copyrights on the BtrFS code (given the contributors from the kernel community this is unlikely), it can't be placed into Solaris.
Simply untrue. Oracle is still committed to BtrFS. In fact in one article I read, they quoted lead developers as saying that BtrFS fit Oracle's needs better than ZFS. This led to speculation that in the long term BtrFS would replace ZFS. Of course licensing issues would necessitate a clean-room implementation, likely. Probably what will really happen is that ZFS will remain with Solaris while BtrFS becomes the standard across the Linux world, and will obviously be heavily used by Oracle database users. The fact also is that BtrFS is a better design than ZFS. ZFS was revolutionary, no doubt about it. But BtrFS has more of a future and more potential due to its ingenious use of btrees in a way (I don't know the particulars) that was previously not thought to be possible, which is why ZFS did it differently. So while they are very similar file systems in effect and characteristics (COW, etc), under the hood they are very different and BtrFS seems to be technically superior, though lacking in features so far (no RAID-5 yet).
Most Linux kernel developers consider Ext4 to be a stopgap until BtrFS is ready. And it is being developed fairly intensely still, the lack of release notwithstanding. Once it is ready, I expect and hope a windows driver will surface, allowing it to be a more universal file format.
Too bad this brilliant little piece of prose is already rated at +5, Funny. In reality it should be +5, Insightful. It is both funny and insightful. So close to the truth as far as most people's relationship with Windows goes that it actually hurts! Best comment I think I've ever read on slashdot. Bravo.
What I meant is that I remember from watching the television program on the joystick steering car, not that I actually drove it myself. I have, however, driven various kinds of machinery with sticks and and other forms of non-steering wheel control and never encountered any issues. A bit different from driving 130 kph down the road though.
That's not what I remember. I remember that it was very accurate and very quick. It was easy to safely swerve around around a pylon safely, for example. Much more so than a wheel. Ultimately a stick would highly benefit from a variable ratio. The faster you go, the more reduced the ratio is. Or if you move the stick hard and fast, the ratio temporarily increases or something. With such a system, subtle maneuvers should be easy and accurate.
Fly by wire is statistically much safer than direct mechanical linkage. It's trivial to get redundancy and such a system is not as likely to experience mechanical failure. Hence power steering failure just doesn't happen randomly in a purely electrical system. If you lost all electrical power, that would be a problem, but that also means you have a lot of other problems too, such as your engine quitting very suddenly. As long as the car is moving, sufficient electrical energy can be generated (using redundant systems even) to steer. Towing wouldn't be an issue either as just like normal steering, the design of the steering knuckle assembly is such that the wheels will turn in whatever direction they are pulled.
A few years ago, one of the car companies researched electric brakes. The results were very good. Breaking responsiveness was very high. Also they could run multiple, redundant electrical control lines to the brake units, making them much more safe compared to the single, exposed brake line. But potential customers freaked out, citing arguments such as yours which, in reality, were baseless.
I watched a program years ago about using a joystick steering system in a car. They found that cornering and steering in general was much more accurate than a wheel. But ultimately there, the ignorance of the drivers (opposition to anything different than what they were used to) killed it. I hope Toyota succeeds. Unfortunately many car advancements have been held back by consumers' irrational fear.
You think that people that want to go to the Vatican Museum and see some of the worlds' greatest works of art are stupid? Wow. That is so sad. Guess you've never been to see it. Suffice it to say most people do not go to the vatican museum out of religious zeal. In fact most visitors to the museum are likely not even catholic, or even religious. The Sistine Chapel paintings are simply amazing. Sure you can look at the paintings from a religious point of view, but as artwork they stand just fine without religious feeling, and are some of the great masterpieces of all time. Surely even slashdotters can appreciate great art (besides nude statues of Venus) when they see it.
So the solution is very obvious. Just put the entire computer in subspace field that creates a pocket of reality where the speed of light is faster (many times faster). Course you then have to have some mechanism for speeding up and slowing down data coming in the ODN conduits. It's been commonly done since the early 24th century. All of these pesky "limits" can be worked around with some fancy level-three diagnostics.
I'm extremely interested in Palm's platform, as well as Android. However I don't want a phone. I want a small, ipod touch-like device that has a slick interface, a good music player, and an all-around mobile computing platform. The iPod Touch, except for being so locked down, has been really an ideal little computer for my purposes. I sometimes listen to music or audio books, but most often read ebooks (a dual-mode LCD/e-paper screen would be slick on a handheld). Or watch the odd movie. Generally speaking I don't need VoIP and I don't need cell functionality. I do use the calendaring on it from time to time and sync it against google calendar. I'd buy a Palm WebOS device right now if it were available without a phone. Or an android device. I long to have something with the utility of my touch by lets me escape the bonds of Apple. But I'm in the minority I guess, and convergence is definitely a real demand by customers. I've been told the Nokia N810 is what I want, but it's a bit bigger than my touch and the UI isn't as slick as Apple's, Android or WebOS from what I've seen. Maybe Moblin though...
What do you mean the proprietary PyQt is not compatible with the LGPL'd Qt? I should think you can indeed use the proprietary PyQt license with the LPGL'd Qt; the LGPL license certainly allows it.
Seems a bit daft to create methane and other organic molecules using sunlight, and then burn the methane to make hydrogen for use a fuel cells! If methane is produced, then why not burn it directly for maximum efficiency. Or convert methane into a heavier, gasoline-like molecule to burn in a conventional engines.
None of the things you mention guarantee anything though. At best they are hedges against cost increases. But simple math dictates that as demand grows so will the costs.
Your math is quite interesting. Yes it's cheaper for you. But the current problem with natural gas and electricity is that your really just taking advantage of the fact that no one else is doing it yet. In other words the rest of us (on a macro scale) are subsidizing your commute, making it artificially cheap for you. Eventually what will happen is the cost of electricity will rise (dramatically), making it at least the same price per mile as gasoline. Not that that's a bad thing (well it will really kill certain industries like aluminum production, or even agriculture but hey we outsource anyway). Just that these rosy comments are really wishful thinking. If everyone drove these electric vehicles, we'd certainly have to pay for increased generation, beefing up the transmission system, etc.
Another counter point. You mention that over 10 years you'd save $16k over driving your current "clunker" truck at 10 mpg. But that's only if you paid much less than $16k for the Chevy Volt. In fact, if you bought the volt at $16k even, you'd have to wait 10 years before you broke even. The economics of that don't wash, since in 10 years the volt will likely be worn out and needing replacement. If the car is more expensive than $16k (even more likely) it will take you even longer to break even. If you're worried about simple economics, your truck seems like a better deal to me. Not green though.
Eh? You're the one bringing up the tired meme. Do you even read slashdot comments on anything Apple-related? If so you'd know that most people come down pretty hard on Apple. It's an equal-opportunity hating I think. And of course without fail on any google, apple, or microsoft post, we have someone repeating what you just said, which gets really tiring. As for understanding slashot posters' often hypocritical and contradictory statements, just realize we are all driven by the maxim, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
He's not talking about the Ribbon interface though. He's talking about the custom window decorations that all apps (including Outlook) have in Office 2007. And he's right. None of them fit with windows XP at all and you can't easily tell which windows are active and focused because of the color.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't mistake in-filesystem deduplication and snapshots for a backup system. It's most certainly not backup and if you treat it as such you will eventually be very sorry. A SAN with ZFS, snapshots, and deduplication features is at best an archive, which is distinct in form and purpose from a backup. Still very useful, though. Ideally you have both archive and backup systems. To get a feel for the difference, consider that an archive is for when a user says, "I overwrote a file last week sometime. Can you recover the version before I made this change or saved over this file?" Whereas a backup is for recovering an entire system from when there's a catastrophic failure (like a SAN dying). Very distinct things. Both are useful.
I get strange looks when I tell people that a Time Capsule is not a backup. Nor is a single Time Machine external disk. Now 2, 3 or even 4 external disks could constitute a backup (and as a bonus with Time Machine an archive also).
Great. More drivel. His book, "From Beirut to Jerusalem" was incredible. "The World is Flat" is hundreds of pages of duh. Except for the part where he's interviewing Steve Ballmer and Ballmer is not quite claiming to have invented the internet, but claiming that MS built the tools the fundamentally drive e-commerce. Unbelievable.
I used to read Thomas Friedman's oped column regularly until the NY Times put him behind their paywall. Eventually they dropped the paywall but by then I was too late. I just didn't care that much any more. The few times I did pick up his column I realized that except for his columns on the middle east (his field of expertise) there wasn't much that he had to say that was incredibly relevant. I'm probably one of the few people that found his book, "the World is Flat" to be incredibly uninsightful.
The paywall made me realize that for the most part there isn't much separating such oped columns from the average blogger. However had the NY Times not put up the paywall I probably would still be reading their oped columns regularly.
I agree with the junk science bit. As for the price of fertilizer, it's highly variable and is doubtlessly different across the world, depending on the price of natural gas usually, or shipping costs if it's imported. Given that two seasons ago in Alberta, Canada our fertilizer bill was about $200k for 2500 irrigated acres (this season was about $100k), it's not inconceivable that prices could double, triple, or even quadruple, depending on oil prices. Not sure what kind of farm you have, but if it's high yield crops on irrigation in sandy soil, fertilizer costs can be staggering. I agree the article is probably exaggerating the savings, though.
Slashdot ate the code. It's *002*gvnumber#
See http://geckobeach.com/cellular/secrets/gsmcodes.php. Non-gsm providers have their own codes too that you can find with google.
On GSM phones, just dial *002*# and all your unanswered calls will go to your google voice account. Of course Google likely uses this technique, but has some added logic to make it so that Google Voice will not forward back to your cell phone if the call is being forwarded from your cell phone in the first place. I can't find any details on how Google does it, but it has to be done with the forwarding mechanisms already offered by providers.
A downside to all this is that forwarding uses up your airtime. Also it's not available on T-Mobile prepaid (though it is on AT&T GoPhones).
Having sensors detect eye movement and focus is essential for making 3d goggles. Your brain is constantly moving your eyes in order to get depth information. That and head movement. Regular goggles are very tiring to use because when your eyes move around, the scene does not. This is very confusing for your brain and causes my eyes to really hurt after a while.
One use case I can see for fat packages or FatELF (either one works) would be if we also had a smart boot loader that could take a single-architecture binary and run it through QEMU in conjunction with FatELF libraries on the system. If my ARM netbook ran Fedora, example, and installed FatELF libraries supporting both ARM and x86 (supposing cheap SSDs!) then if I really needed Adobe Reader for some reason which is only on x86, then I could download and install their Fedora x86 RPM and run it seamlessly.
This could also be done with plain fat packages too. A fat gtk-libs package, for example could dump files native to your architecture in /usr/lib or /usr/lib64 or both, while putting other architecture libraries in the Qemu system directory for that architecture.
Note that Qemu already allows this without fat libraries. But wouldn't expect a average netbook user to know how to download the rpm or tarball, extract everything and stick it somewhere, then populate the Qemu system directory with Fedora x86 libraries. The benefit of FatELF or fat packages here would be that the RPM would just install because it could see that the requisite FatELF libraries where installed or that the architecture-specific libs were installed in the Qemu system. This is all provided that RPM or DEB or whatever either knows about FatELF or implements fat packages.
I wasn't talking about bringing ZFS to linux. Oracle very well could bring ZFS to linux, which be nice for migrating away from Solaris to Linux and reading ZFS disks. I was referring to porting BtrFS to Solaris. Unless Oracle owns all the copyrights on the BtrFS code (given the contributors from the kernel community this is unlikely), it can't be placed into Solaris.
Simply untrue. Oracle is still committed to BtrFS. In fact in one article I read, they quoted lead developers as saying that BtrFS fit Oracle's needs better than ZFS. This led to speculation that in the long term BtrFS would replace ZFS. Of course licensing issues would necessitate a clean-room implementation, likely. Probably what will really happen is that ZFS will remain with Solaris while BtrFS becomes the standard across the Linux world, and will obviously be heavily used by Oracle database users. The fact also is that BtrFS is a better design than ZFS. ZFS was revolutionary, no doubt about it. But BtrFS has more of a future and more potential due to its ingenious use of btrees in a way (I don't know the particulars) that was previously not thought to be possible, which is why ZFS did it differently. So while they are very similar file systems in effect and characteristics (COW, etc), under the hood they are very different and BtrFS seems to be technically superior, though lacking in features so far (no RAID-5 yet).
Most Linux kernel developers consider Ext4 to be a stopgap until BtrFS is ready. And it is being developed fairly intensely still, the lack of release notwithstanding. Once it is ready, I expect and hope a windows driver will surface, allowing it to be a more universal file format.
Too bad this brilliant little piece of prose is already rated at +5, Funny. In reality it should be +5, Insightful. It is both funny and insightful. So close to the truth as far as most people's relationship with Windows goes that it actually hurts! Best comment I think I've ever read on slashdot. Bravo.
What I meant is that I remember from watching the television program on the joystick steering car, not that I actually drove it myself. I have, however, driven various kinds of machinery with sticks and and other forms of non-steering wheel control and never encountered any issues. A bit different from driving 130 kph down the road though.
That's not what I remember. I remember that it was very accurate and very quick. It was easy to safely swerve around around a pylon safely, for example. Much more so than a wheel. Ultimately a stick would highly benefit from a variable ratio. The faster you go, the more reduced the ratio is. Or if you move the stick hard and fast, the ratio temporarily increases or something. With such a system, subtle maneuvers should be easy and accurate.
Fly by wire is statistically much safer than direct mechanical linkage. It's trivial to get redundancy and such a system is not as likely to experience mechanical failure. Hence power steering failure just doesn't happen randomly in a purely electrical system. If you lost all electrical power, that would be a problem, but that also means you have a lot of other problems too, such as your engine quitting very suddenly. As long as the car is moving, sufficient electrical energy can be generated (using redundant systems even) to steer. Towing wouldn't be an issue either as just like normal steering, the design of the steering knuckle assembly is such that the wheels will turn in whatever direction they are pulled.
A few years ago, one of the car companies researched electric brakes. The results were very good. Breaking responsiveness was very high. Also they could run multiple, redundant electrical control lines to the brake units, making them much more safe compared to the single, exposed brake line. But potential customers freaked out, citing arguments such as yours which, in reality, were baseless.
I watched a program years ago about using a joystick steering system in a car. They found that cornering and steering in general was much more accurate than a wheel. But ultimately there, the ignorance of the drivers (opposition to anything different than what they were used to) killed it. I hope Toyota succeeds. Unfortunately many car advancements have been held back by consumers' irrational fear.
You think that people that want to go to the Vatican Museum and see some of the worlds' greatest works of art are stupid? Wow. That is so sad. Guess you've never been to see it. Suffice it to say most people do not go to the vatican museum out of religious zeal. In fact most visitors to the museum are likely not even catholic, or even religious. The Sistine Chapel paintings are simply amazing. Sure you can look at the paintings from a religious point of view, but as artwork they stand just fine without religious feeling, and are some of the great masterpieces of all time. Surely even slashdotters can appreciate great art (besides nude statues of Venus) when they see it.
Actually the internal win32 API allows you to use normal slashes as delimiters.
file=fopen("C:/windows/system32/blah","r")
works just fine.
So the solution is very obvious. Just put the entire computer in subspace field that creates a pocket of reality where the speed of light is faster (many times faster). Course you then have to have some mechanism for speeding up and slowing down data coming in the ODN conduits. It's been commonly done since the early 24th century. All of these pesky "limits" can be worked around with some fancy level-three diagnostics.
I'm extremely interested in Palm's platform, as well as Android. However I don't want a phone. I want a small, ipod touch-like device that has a slick interface, a good music player, and an all-around mobile computing platform. The iPod Touch, except for being so locked down, has been really an ideal little computer for my purposes. I sometimes listen to music or audio books, but most often read ebooks (a dual-mode LCD/e-paper screen would be slick on a handheld). Or watch the odd movie. Generally speaking I don't need VoIP and I don't need cell functionality. I do use the calendaring on it from time to time and sync it against google calendar. I'd buy a Palm WebOS device right now if it were available without a phone. Or an android device. I long to have something with the utility of my touch by lets me escape the bonds of Apple. But I'm in the minority I guess, and convergence is definitely a real demand by customers. I've been told the Nokia N810 is what I want, but it's a bit bigger than my touch and the UI isn't as slick as Apple's, Android or WebOS from what I've seen. Maybe Moblin though...
What do you mean the proprietary PyQt is not compatible with the LGPL'd Qt? I should think you can indeed use the proprietary PyQt license with the LPGL'd Qt; the LGPL license certainly allows it.
Actually you could argue that Apple has named their operating systems after German tanks. Of course they probably never did it purposly, but it is interesting to consider: http://ormset.no/wordpress/2007/01/01/german-armored-vehicles-and-apple-mac-os-x/
Even "snow leopard" is a German tank. Not sure how many German Tank names are left, but we'll have to see what happens after SL.
Seems a bit daft to create methane and other organic molecules using sunlight, and then burn the methane to make hydrogen for use a fuel cells! If methane is produced, then why not burn it directly for maximum efficiency. Or convert methane into a heavier, gasoline-like molecule to burn in a conventional engines.
None of the things you mention guarantee anything though. At best they are hedges against cost increases. But simple math dictates that as demand grows so will the costs.
Your math is quite interesting. Yes it's cheaper for you. But the current problem with natural gas and electricity is that your really just taking advantage of the fact that no one else is doing it yet. In other words the rest of us (on a macro scale) are subsidizing your commute, making it artificially cheap for you. Eventually what will happen is the cost of electricity will rise (dramatically), making it at least the same price per mile as gasoline. Not that that's a bad thing (well it will really kill certain industries like aluminum production, or even agriculture but hey we outsource anyway). Just that these rosy comments are really wishful thinking. If everyone drove these electric vehicles, we'd certainly have to pay for increased generation, beefing up the transmission system, etc.
Another counter point. You mention that over 10 years you'd save $16k over driving your current "clunker" truck at 10 mpg. But that's only if you paid much less than $16k for the Chevy Volt. In fact, if you bought the volt at $16k even, you'd have to wait 10 years before you broke even. The economics of that don't wash, since in 10 years the volt will likely be worn out and needing replacement. If the car is more expensive than $16k (even more likely) it will take you even longer to break even. If you're worried about simple economics, your truck seems like a better deal to me. Not green though.
Eh? You're the one bringing up the tired meme. Do you even read slashdot comments on anything Apple-related? If so you'd know that most people come down pretty hard on Apple. It's an equal-opportunity hating I think. And of course without fail on any google, apple, or microsoft post, we have someone repeating what you just said, which gets really tiring. As for understanding slashot posters' often hypocritical and contradictory statements, just realize we are all driven by the maxim, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
He's not talking about the Ribbon interface though. He's talking about the custom window decorations that all apps (including Outlook) have in Office 2007. And he's right. None of them fit with windows XP at all and you can't easily tell which windows are active and focused because of the color.