Is there any way a local caching name server can detect this brokenness and return the right answer? I seem to remember some bind configs a few years back that would do that but I'm not sure if they would still work.
Or maybe a firefox plugin could detect this damage and restore the original, correct behavior somehow.
Wow. FUD flies fast and hard on slashdot. Zealots? Are you serious? Rather than mod your post as +1 Funny, I think I'll blow some karma and respond, just to set the record straight.
Laying aside misconceptions about the GPL, the main reason BtrFS is GPL is because it's part of the Linux kernel which is also GPL! How hard is it to grasp that? If Apple or anyone else wants to license Oracle's BtrFS code, they are welcome to negotiate and get the code under a different license than the GPL. It's that simple. BtrFS is an implementation of an idea, a specification. If Apple wants to write their own BtrFS driver, they are welcome to do that. Or Microsoft.
Why are developers who don't want their code to be ripped off (used without payment in a closed product) by companies and incorporated into a product are labeled zealots? How is this different than software companies requiring code to be licensed by third parties? So a company who creates some really cool technology that they license for a fee to others for use in products zealots? There really is no difference.
While I haven't written any software of note, I also use the GPLv2 (evaluating v3) since I want my software to be able to be freely used by those that want to use it, but if my code is that valuable to a company, I want to get paid for my trouble. If no one is willing to pay me, then that's fine. They are welcome to use my software without restriction, but if they redistribute it, to do so under the terms of the GPL. Guess that makes me a zealot.
Except that this isn't "space flight." It's merely going up really high (to the edge of space) and then falling back down for a short time. Basically a more expensive version of the vomit comet, or a safer way to sky dive. It does nothing to address and overcome the real problems of space travel. On the other hand, it does contribute to the development of suborbital transglobal travel. So maybe the fantasy in "Rocketship Galileo" of a world where passengers can travel anywhere in just a couple of hours maybe be closer to reality.
I can say a few of things. First I'm totally in favor of organic food because it lets farmers make more money without having to do much of anything differently (a tax on the gullible). Interestingly enough, I doubt most organic food connoisseurs really know what makes organic food "organic." It's not quite as simple as just "no chemicals," although that's a key part.
Secondly the unwashed masses have pretty much demanded pesticides on fruits and veggies since blemished fruit doesn't sell (except in organic markets where blemishes and insect infestations are "features). Until we can convince people that it's okay for your apple to not be a perfect shade of red, there will continue to be unnecessary pesticide use.
Thirdly, in the realm of weed control, years of over-tillage and over-use of herbicides have led us to a situation where herbicide resistance is a massive problem. Ironically this means that we're now more dependant than ever on new herbicides. But compared to pesticides, herbicides are quite benign. Most of them are not toxic after they touch the soil and break down into their constituent organic parts. Herbicides work in different ways. Some grow the plant to death. Others target photosynthesis, or stop plant growth. Personally I hate handling any chemicals. I'd love to be able to farm without them. But with weeds if you don't use herbicides the next year has an order of magnitude more weeds. So I think if they are used wisely we can get the food we need without harming the environment.
Despite what people say about sustainable agriculture, "organic" farming as many people would like to see, is actually quite harmful (without controlling weeds) and certainly not sustainable as a food source for the whole world. Entropy and the principles of chaos rule this world, I'm afraid. Weeds thrive when we remove the native plants that previously held them at bay, for the sake of farming.
As an aside, if people really understood how the food supply works in the developed world, they'd immediately stock up on food, at least a few months' worth. Our system is completely "just-in-time." All it would take is massive hemisphere crop failures from climate change or a volcano causing a cold spell,a nd we'd all be out of food. in just 3 or 4 months. Just like that. And massive crop failures have happened before (particularly in the southern hemisphere). I read once that the world wheat supply at any given time is about 3 months. Scary stuff.
Out of date? I'd be far more worried if my servers were running bleeding edge ubuntu that was upgraded to a new version every 6 months and everything that would be constantly breaking.
RHEL 5 and CentOS 5 are based on Fedora 8 I think. While that is old by the rapid, bleeding-edge standard of Fedora and Ubuntu, that is on purpose. CentOS 5 is stable and updated (or so we thought) with security fixes for something like 5 years. This means I can install a server and have it run reliably for years. Yes PHP is stuck at 5.1. Yes MySQL is version 5.1. That means I don't have to worry about things breaking when I do a yum update. You do realize that RH fixes security issues even on these so-called old versions. So there's no danger here. If you want the latest bleeding-edge features then you shouldn't be running an enterprise operating system, or compile the packages yourself. But if you do compile there's no way that Red Hat or CentOS can support you.
If you want something other than this on your servers then I wouldn't want you working for me. Our policy (and the policy at many large installations) is that the OS generally does not change over the life of the machine, which is about 3-4 years, although this is flexible now that we've moved almost exclusively to virtual machines. We also don't allow major version changes either, since that leads to breakage. If I were to install PHP 5.3 so I could have the latest features for drupal or whatever, it's likely it would break at least one thing that someone depends on. Even if nothing broke, I no longer have any support channels. It would be very hard to maintain php 5.3 effectively on dozens of machines, for example. I can't expect RH to provide security updates for PHP 5.3. You just can't have this in an enterprise computing environment. This is something that web contractors often just don't get. Heck I have a file server that runs RHEL 4, which is almost 5 years old now. When the machine is replaced it will go to RHEL 5 or 6 depending on what's available.
For calling yourself a former Red Hat man, you don't seem to understand what RHEL is or how Red Hat does their releases. RHEL 6 is being worked on right now and it is being based on the stable parts of Fedora 10 and 11. Of course when it is released people will complain that it doesn't have PHP 6.2 or something. From what you say, it's likely that your needs aren't enterprise needs. In that case, then by all means RHEL or CentOS is too conservative for you. But if you're running dozens or hundreds of servers that run mission-critical things, then having a long-lived distribution is essential. When Fedora came out I thought I could use it on a server. Boy was I was wrong. What a maintenance nightmare.
Awesome to have you post this, Andrew. Actually I'm a bit embarrassed since I'm a typical ignorant slashdotter who only read the guardian summary article and not much of the paper itself--never expected to draw the attention of someone who actually knows what they are talking about, someone who was one of the original investigators!
In response to another poster who raised an eyebrow at my phrase "deja vu" I really meant that this article and experiment reminded me of the previous DNA experiment, which of course you are already familiar with.
Anyway, this line of research sounds intriguing. Cross-disciplinary research is always very interesting and novel. Keep up the good work.
It should be noted, however, that even though the DNA would be able to compute the routes in a massively parallel fashion, you still would have to search all the solutions to identify the shortest one, so that kind of defeats the purpose of it. Unless the DNA or the bacteria could compute all the results _and_ identify the correct and optimal answer, then as far as we are concerned the problem is still gotta be close to NP complete (IE strands of DNA to check go up exponentially with problem size). Sounds like these bacteria change color, so maybe that helps reduce the size of the answer set.
The NY Times essentially tried this. They sold subscriptions for their "premium" content. It didn't work. People either were satisfied with the nonpremium content, or went elsewhere. The problem was that the premium content really wasn't so premium and the other interesting content was available elsewhere. There was no added value. I used to regularly read Friedman's oped column in the NY Times. I thought he was very insightful. But then when they tried the premium content stuff, his articles were pay only. About that time I realized that his opinions on anything other than the middle east were irrelevant, so I just gave up entirely. Now that the nytimes has stopped premium content, I still haven't gone back.
Actually I think I stopped reading Friedman about the time I tried to read his book "The World is Flat." I about choked when he was quoting Balmer about how Microsoft had revolutionized the world with the internet. The entire book seemed to state the obvious about globalization, but he apparently thought he had discovered something amazing that none of the rest of us knew. Wasn't insightful at all, unlike his fantastic book "From Beirut to Jerusalem." Hence he should stick to what he knows: the Middle East.
MPG is such a useless metric. Any green fuel is going to be less MPG than gas. MPG only makes sense against other cars of the same fuel. For those that are worried about price alone, there's always miles per dollar. Depending on how you calculate it, hybrids are either really good in dollars per mile or really bad (total cost of ownership, battery replacement, etc).
Highly recommend the physics for future presidents lectures. He works it out quite clearly. Gasoline, harmful as it is, is about 6 cents per kilowatt. An electric car is about $6 per kilowatt. I don't see anything in this current MIT project that changes that just yet, but maybe we will in the future. I have my doubts about non-combustion technologies though.
I'm not sure where they come up with the 320 km being as good as a car. So far as I know most cars have gas tanks sized for about 400 miles.
While the article was good, many people will want likely want to read NASA's online book about computers in space travel, covering computers back in the Gemini program through to the space shuttle and unmanned probes. Fascinating stuff:
Australians are probably wondering why anyone would buy an e-book that's already in the public domain. These books probably would be here in the US too but for all the copyright extensions we've had purchased over the years by certain organizations like Disney.
Are you for real? You really don't actually understand what he wrote? The rest that he wrote was abrasive, but anything but silly. It was dead serious and right on correct. If you use any open source software at all on a daily basis and don't understand his points, then that is truly unfortunate, and such attitudes are a big cause of why he is ranting in the first place!
Almost. The GPL protects the freedoms of the users of _code_ down the line. It actually has nothing to say about users themselves. Basically it says, "you do not have to agree with this licences to use the product, only if you distribute the product". As a developer, I feel that the GPL protects me. It protects me from companies competing against me with my own products. It likewise protects all the developers who would derive code from my code (or any GPL code).
Sadly his rant almost kills the effects of his arguments, though. I think if these six points were written up in a more professional-sounding way, you'd get many more level-headed developers nodding in agreement, rather than knee-jerk reactions.
In a word, no. Biometrics is only a part of identifying someone and controlling access. In essence, classic security thought says that there are three things to authorizing and authenticating a principal: 1. Something you are 2. Something you have 3. Something you know
So if biometrics provided #1, a smart card could be #2, and a password could be #3.
I've known of several high-security installations that required all three things. A thumb print, the smart card, and a passphrase (or passcode) to go through a door. Whether or not this really granted real security I don't know.
Certainly it's clear that biometrics cannot replace passwords as biometrics are not secret really (you leave your fingerprints everywhere). And as Mythbusters showed, you can fool even the most sophisticated fingerprint scanners quite easily. But they are still an important part of positively authorizing someone.
As the blog was slashdotted anyway, I found the information through google anyway. But the point is why should I have to click through to some blog which may or may not have ads (how can I know without clicking) to see the references to the source? All one needs to do is put the source links in the slashdot summary. I don't mind that people are interested in things and blog about them, but lets have a bit of due diligence on the part of posters. Slashdot is turfed enough by bloggers trying to drive traffic to their sites. That was my point. Obviously you 4) lacked the reading skills necessary to understand the point that was being made. My apologies.
While this is extremely interesting, we need a link to the actual journal article, or to some source material, not just a link to a blog. Without that we can only assume this is an attempt to turf slashdot to drive traffic to your blog and generate ad revenues.
The backslash name separator looks awful to me, although I've always found PHP code kind of garish with all the dollar signs and curly braces. Although it's at least readable compared to some perl I've seen!
Looking at the "what's new" list I see the cool new feature of php archives..phar files are zips or tarballs that can be included all at once in your program. Seeing that brings up something I've always struggled with in PHP. When should one use "include," "include_once," "require," or "require_once?" Seems like include normally just inserts the included file into the current source code as if it was there to begin with, no? I guess in the past without namespaces that's probably what most people needed most of the time. And after converting my development wholesale to python with it's inherent namespaces (which are really just singleton objects bound to a local name), it seems like PHP's system is a bit convoluted.
I have yet to see any evidence that launching rockets from high-altitude balloons is feasible, nor that saves that much fuel or money. While it's true that slogging through the lower atmosphere takes a lot of energy (that's what the SRBs are for after all, plus the first 4000 mph boost), it still takes an entire external tank of hydrogen and oxygen to accelerate to orbital velocity after the SRBs are gone. So best case scenario you don't need SRBs anymore, but you still have to carry enough fuel *and* oxidizer to accelerate your ship to 17,500 mph (at minimum). A space plane, even from 171k feet is still not going to make it to orbit without hauling a huge external-tank-sized bunch of fuel and oxidizer. Simple physics here.
When it comes to space planes, I'm always amused by that since flying gradually to a given altitude always consumes more energy than going straight up to it. Until we have unlimited "impulse-drive" energy that won't require hauling tons of fuel, it will never be practical to fly up to orbit gradually like a plane.
Of course shooting cargo into space with a rail gun is conceivably practical, but not from a balloon (darn Newton and his laws!).
I agree that the summary is bad, and the clutter website is also very poor at communicating its purpose. However you should have stopped there before going on to make a number of very ignorant assertions.
First of all, yes it is C-based. This is probably the right language for the job, seeing as it is trivial to make automatic bindings to all of the appropriate application development languages. Under the hood, Clutter is object-oriented through and through, but in a way that's more easily compatible with other languages than, say, C++.
I'm not sure why you mention web use at all here. We need to have low-level APIs in the OS to make the fancy web stuff possible, don't we? How else will Flash display in the browser except through drawing APIs provided by the operating system. On OS X Flash uses, you guessed it, CoreImage and the like to display. Clutter is definitely accurately described as a CoreImage, CoreAnimations, etc for X11. And it looks like it will enable some pretty amazing things. If Clutter were to become dominant, it could be used to great effect in Android, for example, to enable the kind of polished user interfaces with feedback animations, etc, that users have come to expect. Something that GTK and, to a lesser extent, Qt cannot do very well. There's a reason that Palm and Android don't use standard widget toolkits; they currently just don't allow the polish and flexibility needed outside of conventional, traditional apps.
Your comment about it being too little for 3D games and too much for business apps is pretty odd too. For business apps, clutter probably won't really be used directly by developers at all. Instead it will be used by the widget toolkits to provide very smooth, alpha-blended animated controls and widgets that don't consume a ton of CPU (or battery) power. For 3D gaming, clutter could definitely help provide nice UIs that all games, even 3D games need, especially if it's with OpenGL, clutter can operate on the same canvas as the fancy 3D graphics. Right now a lot of open source games often have to either create their own 2D UI libraries on top of OpenGL.
Before you criticize, perhaps take a look at where Linux desktops and devices are now and where they need to go. Clutter seems to be one of the best ways to get there, even if you don't understand what it does.
Anyway as a developer I'm not quite sure where clutter directly fits into my programs, but I'm looking forward to seeing what Clutter enables in the higher level toolkits that I do use, such as GTK. Currently trying to make an animated UI element (say a page element that pops up and flips over to show a new page) is very very difficult in GTK. Clutter promises to make this much much easier. Note that Qt already has its own Clutter-like API--maybe they will base their API on a clutter backend much as they've switched their event engine to glib).
With OpenOffice using the OpenDocument format for files, which is XML (plain text) in a zip file, or even MS Office's non-standard XML formats, it would be nice if version control systems could efficiently track and store changes of these files. I have found plugins for SVN and GIT that can reach inside the zip container and do simplistic diffs on the text, but each revision is still stored as a complete binary file.
I guess I really just need to learn LaTeX and do everything in plain text files with a good editor like vim. But in the meantime, having a XML-in-zip-file- aware version control system would be nice.
Ahh bring out the car analogies! But if I buy tires does that mean I have to put them on a car? I can see your point, though. Software RAID does imply JBOD in some form or another.
I'm not quite sure that most people would think of "loopback-mounted files" as a use for JBOD, but I can think of quite a few uses for JBOD without RAID. The MythTV thing I mentioned, for one. In some cases you might want to throw a disk in the array and export it as a LUN for use as a virtual machine hard drive via a fiber channel switch. Or maybe you have a backup system where each disk should be able to stand alone for recovery purposes. Or maybe you need some temporary space so you throw a 1 TB drive in the array and mount the LUN on some server temporarily (have done this on several occasions).
The current trend is very much to do high-quality photography and video with the same camera body. I expect that in the range we're dealing with (mid-range), we'll soon see a complete convergence with the sale of HD-video only cameras disappearing entirely. It makes sense if you think about it too. The quality of lenses available for SLR cameras is very good and readily available. So while today the 5D has video as an afterthought, the future cameras will be natively built for good, high-quality, HD video. I think Canon's latest offering has all this if I recall correctly. A number of my photography friends were drooling over it because of this.
On the higher end, Red cameras are also moving towards cameras that do both video and stills very well.
No, it's not redundant. JBOD has nothing to do with RAID. JBOD is just raw LUNs (disks) over a bus. You can put them together however you want. Software RAID is the most common thing to use with JBOD-exported LUNs.
I'm not surprised that you haven't made the distinction, though. JBOD is an enterprise term and tends to be used when working with large external (Fiber Channel) disk arrays, either as a mode of operation, or meaning a chassis of disks without a hardware RAID backplane, over a SCSI bus or Fibre Channel.
Most home users with internal disks don't ever technically deal with JBOD in the enterprise parlance. An eSATA adapter and a chassis of eSATA disks is very similar to JBOD, although it's accessing disks over individual eSATA busses, rather than a fiber bus. But I think the idea is the same.
With my mythtv system, I never bother with RAID or LVM anyway. I just add disks individually since I'm more worried about raw space than data loss. If I lose a disk I only lose whatever programs were on that disk. Eventually I suppose I should do a proper RAID-5, but I only have 2 disks right now and can't be bothered I suppose.
No that's not correct. JBOD is just that. Just a bunch of disks. Has nothing to do with redundancy (or lack of redundancy). What you do with them is completely up to you. You can implement a RAID-Z with them on solaris (which is actually faster on my Enterprise-class disk array than the built-in RAID-6 in hardware!), Linux RAID-5, RAID-10, or whatever. Except for issues of battery-backed caching, I have come to the opinion that for most low- to middle-end storage needs, a large JBOD and software RAID is the way to go.
For grokking other people's C++ code, cscope is an invaluable tool. It should make it very easy to find typedefs, macro definitions, variable definitions, etc, among entire groups of files. One of the more positive legacies of SCO!
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Is there any way a local caching name server can detect this brokenness and return the right answer? I seem to remember some bind configs a few years back that would do that but I'm not sure if they would still work.
Or maybe a firefox plugin could detect this damage and restore the original, correct behavior somehow.
Wow. FUD flies fast and hard on slashdot. Zealots? Are you serious? Rather than mod your post as +1 Funny, I think I'll blow some karma and respond, just to set the record straight.
Laying aside misconceptions about the GPL, the main reason BtrFS is GPL is because it's part of the Linux kernel which is also GPL! How hard is it to grasp that? If Apple or anyone else wants to license Oracle's BtrFS code, they are welcome to negotiate and get the code under a different license than the GPL. It's that simple. BtrFS is an implementation of an idea, a specification. If Apple wants to write their own BtrFS driver, they are welcome to do that. Or Microsoft.
Why are developers who don't want their code to be ripped off (used without payment in a closed product) by companies and incorporated into a product are labeled zealots? How is this different than software companies requiring code to be licensed by third parties? So a company who creates some really cool technology that they license for a fee to others for use in products zealots? There really is no difference.
While I haven't written any software of note, I also use the GPLv2 (evaluating v3) since I want my software to be able to be freely used by those that want to use it, but if my code is that valuable to a company, I want to get paid for my trouble. If no one is willing to pay me, then that's fine. They are welcome to use my software without restriction, but if they redistribute it, to do so under the terms of the GPL. Guess that makes me a zealot.
Except that this isn't "space flight." It's merely going up really high (to the edge of space) and then falling back down for a short time. Basically a more expensive version of the vomit comet, or a safer way to sky dive. It does nothing to address and overcome the real problems of space travel. On the other hand, it does contribute to the development of suborbital transglobal travel. So maybe the fantasy in "Rocketship Galileo" of a world where passengers can travel anywhere in just a couple of hours maybe be closer to reality.
I can say a few of things. First I'm totally in favor of organic food because it lets farmers make more money without having to do much of anything differently (a tax on the gullible). Interestingly enough, I doubt most organic food connoisseurs really know what makes organic food "organic." It's not quite as simple as just "no chemicals," although that's a key part.
Secondly the unwashed masses have pretty much demanded pesticides on fruits and veggies since blemished fruit doesn't sell (except in organic markets where blemishes and insect infestations are "features). Until we can convince people that it's okay for your apple to not be a perfect shade of red, there will continue to be unnecessary pesticide use.
Thirdly, in the realm of weed control, years of over-tillage and over-use of herbicides have led us to a situation where herbicide resistance is a massive problem. Ironically this means that we're now more dependant than ever on new herbicides. But compared to pesticides, herbicides are quite benign. Most of them are not toxic after they touch the soil and break down into their constituent organic parts. Herbicides work in different ways. Some grow the plant to death. Others target photosynthesis, or stop plant growth. Personally I hate handling any chemicals. I'd love to be able to farm without them. But with weeds if you don't use herbicides the next year has an order of magnitude more weeds. So I think if they are used wisely we can get the food we need without harming the environment.
Despite what people say about sustainable agriculture, "organic" farming as many people would like to see, is actually quite harmful (without controlling weeds) and certainly not sustainable as a food source for the whole world. Entropy and the principles of chaos rule this world, I'm afraid. Weeds thrive when we remove the native plants that previously held them at bay, for the sake of farming.
As an aside, if people really understood how the food supply works in the developed world, they'd immediately stock up on food, at least a few months' worth. Our system is completely "just-in-time." All it would take is massive hemisphere crop failures from climate change or a volcano causing a cold spell,a nd we'd all be out of food. in just 3 or 4 months. Just like that. And massive crop failures have happened before (particularly in the southern hemisphere). I read once that the world wheat supply at any given time is about 3 months. Scary stuff.
Out of date? I'd be far more worried if my servers were running bleeding edge ubuntu that was upgraded to a new version every 6 months and everything that would be constantly breaking.
RHEL 5 and CentOS 5 are based on Fedora 8 I think. While that is old by the rapid, bleeding-edge standard of Fedora and Ubuntu, that is on purpose. CentOS 5 is stable and updated (or so we thought) with security fixes for something like 5 years. This means I can install a server and have it run reliably for years. Yes PHP is stuck at 5.1. Yes MySQL is version 5.1. That means I don't have to worry about things breaking when I do a yum update. You do realize that RH fixes security issues even on these so-called old versions. So there's no danger here. If you want the latest bleeding-edge features then you shouldn't be running an enterprise operating system, or compile the packages yourself. But if you do compile there's no way that Red Hat or CentOS can support you.
If you want something other than this on your servers then I wouldn't want you working for me. Our policy (and the policy at many large installations) is that the OS generally does not change over the life of the machine, which is about 3-4 years, although this is flexible now that we've moved almost exclusively to virtual machines. We also don't allow major version changes either, since that leads to breakage. If I were to install PHP 5.3 so I could have the latest features for drupal or whatever, it's likely it would break at least one thing that someone depends on. Even if nothing broke, I no longer have any support channels. It would be very hard to maintain php 5.3 effectively on dozens of machines, for example. I can't expect RH to provide security updates for PHP 5.3. You just can't have this in an enterprise computing environment. This is something that web contractors often just don't get. Heck I have a file server that runs RHEL 4, which is almost 5 years old now. When the machine is replaced it will go to RHEL 5 or 6 depending on what's available.
For calling yourself a former Red Hat man, you don't seem to understand what RHEL is or how Red Hat does their releases. RHEL 6 is being worked on right now and it is being based on the stable parts of Fedora 10 and 11. Of course when it is released people will complain that it doesn't have PHP 6.2 or something. From what you say, it's likely that your needs aren't enterprise needs. In that case, then by all means RHEL or CentOS is too conservative for you. But if you're running dozens or hundreds of servers that run mission-critical things, then having a long-lived distribution is essential. When Fedora came out I thought I could use it on a server. Boy was I was wrong. What a maintenance nightmare.
Awesome to have you post this, Andrew. Actually I'm a bit embarrassed since I'm a typical ignorant slashdotter who only read the guardian summary article and not much of the paper itself--never expected to draw the attention of someone who actually knows what they are talking about, someone who was one of the original investigators!
In response to another poster who raised an eyebrow at my phrase "deja vu" I really meant that this article and experiment reminded me of the previous DNA experiment, which of course you are already familiar with.
Anyway, this line of research sounds intriguing. Cross-disciplinary research is always very interesting and novel. Keep up the good work.
Hmm. Deja vu here. DNA was used to solve this exact problem:
http://www.jyi.org/volumes/volume8/issue2/features/srivastava.html
It should be noted, however, that even though the DNA would be able to compute the routes in a massively parallel fashion, you still would have to search all the solutions to identify the shortest one, so that kind of defeats the purpose of it. Unless the DNA or the bacteria could compute all the results _and_ identify the correct and optimal answer, then as far as we are concerned the problem is still gotta be close to NP complete (IE strands of DNA to check go up exponentially with problem size). Sounds like these bacteria change color, so maybe that helps reduce the size of the answer set.
The NY Times essentially tried this. They sold subscriptions for their "premium" content. It didn't work. People either were satisfied with the nonpremium content, or went elsewhere. The problem was that the premium content really wasn't so premium and the other interesting content was available elsewhere. There was no added value. I used to regularly read Friedman's oped column in the NY Times. I thought he was very insightful. But then when they tried the premium content stuff, his articles were pay only. About that time I realized that his opinions on anything other than the middle east were irrelevant, so I just gave up entirely. Now that the nytimes has stopped premium content, I still haven't gone back.
Actually I think I stopped reading Friedman about the time I tried to read his book "The World is Flat." I about choked when he was quoting Balmer about how Microsoft had revolutionized the world with the internet. The entire book seemed to state the obvious about globalization, but he apparently thought he had discovered something amazing that none of the rest of us knew. Wasn't insightful at all, unlike his fantastic book "From Beirut to Jerusalem." Hence he should stick to what he knows: the Middle East.
MPG is such a useless metric. Any green fuel is going to be less MPG than gas. MPG only makes sense against other cars of the same fuel. For those that are worried about price alone, there's always miles per dollar. Depending on how you calculate it, hybrids are either really good in dollars per mile or really bad (total cost of ownership, battery replacement, etc).
Highly recommend the physics for future presidents lectures. He works it out quite clearly. Gasoline, harmful as it is, is about 6 cents per kilowatt. An electric car is about $6 per kilowatt. I don't see anything in this current MIT project that changes that just yet, but maybe we will in the future. I have my doubts about non-combustion technologies though.
I'm not sure where they come up with the 320 km being as good as a car. So far as I know most cars have gas tanks sized for about 400 miles.
While the article was good, many people will want likely want to read NASA's online book about computers in space travel, covering computers back in the Gemini program through to the space shuttle and unmanned probes. Fascinating stuff:
http://history.nasa.gov/computers/contents.html
Australians are probably wondering why anyone would buy an e-book that's already in the public domain. These books probably would be here in the US too but for all the copyright extensions we've had purchased over the years by certain organizations like Disney.
Are you for real? You really don't actually understand what he wrote? The rest that he wrote was abrasive, but anything but silly. It was dead serious and right on correct. If you use any open source software at all on a daily basis and don't understand his points, then that is truly unfortunate, and such attitudes are a big cause of why he is ranting in the first place!
Almost. The GPL protects the freedoms of the users of _code_ down the line. It actually has nothing to say about users themselves. Basically it says, "you do not have to agree with this licences to use the product, only if you distribute the product". As a developer, I feel that the GPL protects me. It protects me from companies competing against me with my own products. It likewise protects all the developers who would derive code from my code (or any GPL code).
Sadly his rant almost kills the effects of his arguments, though. I think if these six points were written up in a more professional-sounding way, you'd get many more level-headed developers nodding in agreement, rather than knee-jerk reactions.
In a word, no. Biometrics is only a part of identifying someone and controlling access. In essence, classic security thought says that there are three things to authorizing and authenticating a principal:
1. Something you are
2. Something you have
3. Something you know
So if biometrics provided #1, a smart card could be #2, and a password could be #3.
I've known of several high-security installations that required all three things. A thumb print, the smart card, and a passphrase (or passcode) to go through a door. Whether or not this really granted real security I don't know.
Certainly it's clear that biometrics cannot replace passwords as biometrics are not secret really (you leave your fingerprints everywhere). And as Mythbusters showed, you can fool even the most sophisticated fingerprint scanners quite easily. But they are still an important part of positively authorizing someone.
As the blog was slashdotted anyway, I found the information through google anyway. But the point is why should I have to click through to some blog which may or may not have ads (how can I know without clicking) to see the references to the source? All one needs to do is put the source links in the slashdot summary. I don't mind that people are interested in things and blog about them, but lets have a bit of due diligence on the part of posters. Slashdot is turfed enough by bloggers trying to drive traffic to their sites. That was my point. Obviously you 4) lacked the reading skills necessary to understand the point that was being made. My apologies.
While this is extremely interesting, we need a link to the actual journal article, or to some source material, not just a link to a blog. Without that we can only assume this is an attempt to turf slashdot to drive traffic to your blog and generate ad revenues.
The backslash name separator looks awful to me, although I've always found PHP code kind of garish with all the dollar signs and curly braces. Although it's at least readable compared to some perl I've seen!
Looking at the "what's new" list I see the cool new feature of php archives. .phar files are zips or tarballs that can be included all at once in your program. Seeing that brings up something I've always struggled with in PHP. When should one use "include," "include_once," "require," or "require_once?" Seems like include normally just inserts the included file into the current source code as if it was there to begin with, no? I guess in the past without namespaces that's probably what most people needed most of the time. And after converting my development wholesale to python with it's inherent namespaces (which are really just singleton objects bound to a local name), it seems like PHP's system is a bit convoluted.
I have yet to see any evidence that launching rockets from high-altitude balloons is feasible, nor that saves that much fuel or money. While it's true that slogging through the lower atmosphere takes a lot of energy (that's what the SRBs are for after all, plus the first 4000 mph boost), it still takes an entire external tank of hydrogen and oxygen to accelerate to orbital velocity after the SRBs are gone. So best case scenario you don't need SRBs anymore, but you still have to carry enough fuel *and* oxidizer to accelerate your ship to 17,500 mph (at minimum). A space plane, even from 171k feet is still not going to make it to orbit without hauling a huge external-tank-sized bunch of fuel and oxidizer. Simple physics here.
When it comes to space planes, I'm always amused by that since flying gradually to a given altitude always consumes more energy than going straight up to it. Until we have unlimited "impulse-drive" energy that won't require hauling tons of fuel, it will never be practical to fly up to orbit gradually like a plane.
Of course shooting cargo into space with a rail gun is conceivably practical, but not from a balloon (darn Newton and his laws!).
I agree that the summary is bad, and the clutter website is also very poor at communicating its purpose. However you should have stopped there before going on to make a number of very ignorant assertions.
First of all, yes it is C-based. This is probably the right language for the job, seeing as it is trivial to make automatic bindings to all of the appropriate application development languages. Under the hood, Clutter is object-oriented through and through, but in a way that's more easily compatible with other languages than, say, C++.
I'm not sure why you mention web use at all here. We need to have low-level APIs in the OS to make the fancy web stuff possible, don't we? How else will Flash display in the browser except through drawing APIs provided by the operating system. On OS X Flash uses, you guessed it, CoreImage and the like to display. Clutter is definitely accurately described as a CoreImage, CoreAnimations, etc for X11. And it looks like it will enable some pretty amazing things. If Clutter were to become dominant, it could be used to great effect in Android, for example, to enable the kind of polished user interfaces with feedback animations, etc, that users have come to expect. Something that GTK and, to a lesser extent, Qt cannot do very well. There's a reason that Palm and Android don't use standard widget toolkits; they currently just don't allow the polish and flexibility needed outside of conventional, traditional apps.
Your comment about it being too little for 3D games and too much for business apps is pretty odd too. For business apps, clutter probably won't really be used directly by developers at all. Instead it will be used by the widget toolkits to provide very smooth, alpha-blended animated controls and widgets that don't consume a ton of CPU (or battery) power. For 3D gaming, clutter could definitely help provide nice UIs that all games, even 3D games need, especially if it's with OpenGL, clutter can operate on the same canvas as the fancy 3D graphics. Right now a lot of open source games often have to either create their own 2D UI libraries on top of OpenGL.
Before you criticize, perhaps take a look at where Linux desktops and devices are now and where they need to go. Clutter seems to be one of the best ways to get there, even if you don't understand what it does.
Anyway as a developer I'm not quite sure where clutter directly fits into my programs, but I'm looking forward to seeing what Clutter enables in the higher level toolkits that I do use, such as GTK. Currently trying to make an animated UI element (say a page element that pops up and flips over to show a new page) is very very difficult in GTK. Clutter promises to make this much much easier. Note that Qt already has its own Clutter-like API--maybe they will base their API on a clutter backend much as they've switched their event engine to glib).
With OpenOffice using the OpenDocument format for files, which is XML (plain text) in a zip file, or even MS Office's non-standard XML formats, it would be nice if version control systems could efficiently track and store changes of these files. I have found plugins for SVN and GIT that can reach inside the zip container and do simplistic diffs on the text, but each revision is still stored as a complete binary file.
I guess I really just need to learn LaTeX and do everything in plain text files with a good editor like vim. But in the meantime, having a XML-in-zip-file- aware version control system would be nice.
Ahh bring out the car analogies! But if I buy tires does that mean I have to put them on a car? I can see your point, though. Software RAID does imply JBOD in some form or another.
I'm not quite sure that most people would think of "loopback-mounted files" as a use for JBOD, but I can think of quite a few uses for JBOD without RAID. The MythTV thing I mentioned, for one. In some cases you might want to throw a disk in the array and export it as a LUN for use as a virtual machine hard drive via a fiber channel switch. Or maybe you have a backup system where each disk should be able to stand alone for recovery purposes. Or maybe you need some temporary space so you throw a 1 TB drive in the array and mount the LUN on some server temporarily (have done this on several occasions).
The current trend is very much to do high-quality photography and video with the same camera body. I expect that in the range we're dealing with (mid-range), we'll soon see a complete convergence with the sale of HD-video only cameras disappearing entirely. It makes sense if you think about it too. The quality of lenses available for SLR cameras is very good and readily available. So while today the 5D has video as an afterthought, the future cameras will be natively built for good, high-quality, HD video. I think Canon's latest offering has all this if I recall correctly. A number of my photography friends were drooling over it because of this.
On the higher end, Red cameras are also moving towards cameras that do both video and stills very well.
No, it's not redundant. JBOD has nothing to do with RAID. JBOD is just raw LUNs (disks) over a bus. You can put them together however you want. Software RAID is the most common thing to use with JBOD-exported LUNs.
I'm not surprised that you haven't made the distinction, though. JBOD is an enterprise term and tends to be used when working with large external (Fiber Channel) disk arrays, either as a mode of operation, or meaning a chassis of disks without a hardware RAID backplane, over a SCSI bus or Fibre Channel.
Most home users with internal disks don't ever technically deal with JBOD in the enterprise parlance. An eSATA adapter and a chassis of eSATA disks is very similar to JBOD, although it's accessing disks over individual eSATA busses, rather than a fiber bus. But I think the idea is the same.
With my mythtv system, I never bother with RAID or LVM anyway. I just add disks individually since I'm more worried about raw space than data loss. If I lose a disk I only lose whatever programs were on that disk. Eventually I suppose I should do a proper RAID-5, but I only have 2 disks right now and can't be bothered I suppose.
No that's not correct. JBOD is just that. Just a bunch of disks. Has nothing to do with redundancy (or lack of redundancy). What you do with them is completely up to you. You can implement a RAID-Z with them on solaris (which is actually faster on my Enterprise-class disk array than the built-in RAID-6 in hardware!), Linux RAID-5, RAID-10, or whatever. Except for issues of battery-backed caching, I have come to the opinion that for most low- to middle-end storage needs, a large JBOD and software RAID is the way to go.
For grokking other people's C++ code, cscope is an invaluable tool. It should make it very easy to find typedefs, macro definitions, variable definitions, etc, among entire groups of files. One of the more positive legacies of SCO!