Remember seeing a documentary on an ultra-deep salt mine in Utah, now largely played out. Big empty space, no light except for what you bring with you. Lots of worn out machinery that's just abandoned because its value as scrap is less than the cost of bringing it back up. Creepy.
I think I speak for everybody here when I say: Huh? "Hello, Legal? Public Relations here. Would you mind launching a multi-million dollar lawsuit? What, you want to check with the CEO first? Whatever for?"
Pretty much. But it's worth noting that many companies in Sun's position would sue Google. Not only did Google clone Sun's Java technology, they hired some of Sun's best Java people to do it. Of course, suing wouldn't accomplish much, but some ego-driven CEOs wouldn't let that stop them.
Hey, get your pop culture references straight. The aliens on Star Trek don't speak English, their voices are automatically translated by the "universal translator" which also has the ability to warp the light around their faces so their lips stay in sync with the English version of what they're saying.
The Fair Use Doctrine has an official text? I doubt it. It's just a popular (though not universally accepted) interpretation of traditional copyright law.
There are laws that attempt to define "fair use". But that's legislation, not doctrine.
It could be a slasher waiting outside your house, but it's probably an errant computer at a telemarketer.
Not errant at all. Telemarketing computer systems are designed so that the call center people are never idle. That means there always has to be an incoming queue of suckers, er, potential customers waited to be talked to. Of course that means that a lot of people will just hang up before they get a chance to hear about the wonders of Timeshares and Male Enhancement Herbs, which is really sad, but an acceptable cost of doing business.
I'm curious and inquisitive about things that are interesting. The way you simply contradict without bothering to argue your case, does nothing to pique my interest.
Dude, if you can't be bothered to back up your own arguments, why should I pay any attention to you? Your opinions don't matter just because you feel strongly about them.
No I guess not. Just a guy saying "I told you so."
And he's full of crap. Not that much has changed. Nuclear power is still expensive, still has a nasty meltdown risk (yeah yeah, modern designs have never failed; doesn't mean they never will, especially with complex technology tempting both Captain Murphy and your friendly neighborhood terrorist), still has a huge potential for bomb material falling into the wrong hands, still creates waste that will have to be stored and carefully guarded for thousands of years.
And note that the supply of fissionable fuels isn't all that big. So in a century or so we'll have all the fallout of nuclear power (pardon the pun) and be back where we started.
What are the benefits? Well, there's no toxic gases emitted during normal power generation. That's pretty much it, except now the reduced CO2 emission matter more than it used to. And notice that I said "reduced" not "zero". Fuel doesn't just magically appear. You have to dig it up, process it, and transport it. Still produces less CO2 than burning coal (almost anything does), but a long way from zero.
I don't think the dangers-versus-benefits balance has made much of a shift in the favor of nukes. Actually, it's gone the other way. On the plus side you have a slight benefit to the fight against global warming. That wouldn't be enough to tip the scales, even if there weren't a nasty counterweight: a huge increase in the prevalence of terrorism. Do you really think it's a good idea to give terrorists so many juicy targets in the form of vulnerable nuclear plants and huge repositories of dirty bomb material?
Let me put the question another way: are you totally insane???!!!
Nuclear true believers (Jerry? You there?) like to blame the failure of their beloved technology on technically illiterate hippies and knee-jerk pacifists. Those groups exist — they're even as stupid as their detractors claim — but they're a red herring. Nuclear power didn't fail because of hysteria; it failed because it was a bad idea.
My post was stupid because I neglected to note that the parent post mentioned the mechanical advantage of an SSD in a high-available server. But yours is even more stupid, since you failed to even register that we were talking about servers!
Believe it or not, the advantages of an SSD in a portable computer have occurred to me.I've actually considered getting an SSD for my tablet. But there are too many technical, cost, and reliability issues. In particular, there's the limited number of write cycles you can get with flash memory. Not an issue with most flash devices (let's see, on my desk or in my pockets, there's a cell phone with extra memory in the form of an MMC card, a Palm M515 PDA, and an iAudio MP3 player), but none of these write over files as often as your typical laptop or tablet.
OK, the cost is small, but even so, is it really worth it? What you get in return for your investment is systems that boot faster, and a small savings in power. Is there really any reason you need to be able to boot your servers in 30 seconds instead of 3 minutes?
I suppose the power issue is important if you're taking the "turn off that light if you're not using it!" approach to the global warming crisis. Not sure that's a good approach, though.
I'm going to change my sig to refer to this post. Nothing against you: your post is quite funny. But the two people who modded you up labeled your post "insightful" and "informative" rather than "funny". Possibly they don't get the joke (wouldn't surprise me) but more likely they felt the need to reward you with karma points, which you don't get with "funny". That's doubly stupid: not only does it misuse moderator points, but you obviously don't need the karma anyway.
You cite the main reason I use a tablet instead of a laptop. My wrists ache at the mere thought of doing serious keyboarding on a laptop. If I'm going to a meeting where I need a keyboard, I bring the USB Goldtouch from my office. Otherwise I make do with a stylus. I just wish I had the courage to upgrade to Vista: it's the first version of Windows with decent handwriting recognition.
You're right, these are important filesystem features — now. I fail to see how their absence in an API designed almost 40 years ago means that API is "broken".
Modern Unix systems do come with modern file systems. (My own employers are trying get everybody to adopt ZFS, which I believe supports all the semantics you want and much more.) Perhaps my ignorance of the relevant APIs is showing, but it's hard for me to see how the core Section 2 APIs fail to support these semantics. Perhaps you could educate me?
That's everyone's favorite solution. But it ignores a rather basic fact: it's possible to forge paper ballots too. After all, people were stealing elections long before voting machines were invented.
True, the paper ballots give you a way to doublecheck the results. But if the paper ballots and the electronic count don't agree, which one do you believe?
Of course, there are ways to safeguard paper ballots that have been worked out over many years. But they all boil down to one thing: make ballot counting process as open as possible, so that nobody has a chance to cheat. And you can do that with electronic voting much more easily than you can do it with paper ballots. You just have to make sure that everything about your voting system — hardware designs, software source, data transmission, handling procedures — is out in the open for anybody to see.
The big problem is that voting technology vendors want to keep their proprietary technology proprietary, and that's just not going to work. Probably the only solution is for the government, either the federal government or a consortium of state governments, to actually design the systems, with the private sector restricting itself to manufacturing and support.
Well of course the version you used felt like a research version — it was being used to research OS development. But there was a commercial version; Honeywell grossed a few hundred million selling machines that ran it. The last commercial installations (at the NSA and RCAF) shut down in 2000.
Let's consider the first moment in history where a physicist convinced himself (after many years of effort and for mostly the right reasons) that a classical description of light could not possibly work. Hardly a ringing endorsement of his work so far.
That's a pretty dumb comparison. Nobody connected with the Multics project said, "Oh, gee, we've been going about this all wrong. Let's invent Unix instead!" In fact, Multics eventually became a commercial product, though it never became a big profit center for its owners. Honeywell only stopped selling in in 1987; the federal government shut down its last Multics system only 7 years ago.
I'd be the last to deny that you learn a lot from mistakes. But I don't think Multics's mistakes have been very influential. The big lesson to be learned is that the future doesn't belong to mainframes that lack byte-level addressing. And IBM figured that one out before Multics was even released.
I don't agree that without Multics, Unix wouldn't exist. And come to think of it, I don't agree that it was an influential negative example. Its main influence at Bell Labs was its failure to go gold soon enough for Bell Labs to adopt it for internal use. This left Thompson and Ritchie without an OS to work with and motivated them to write their own. They weren't looking for a way to squeeze Multics into their tiny PDP-8, they were doing original work, with their creativity energized by the very limitations of their working environment. Things like byte streams, pipelines, and device files aren't adaptations of Multics concepts, they're completely new inventions.
Actually, Multics might well have killed Unix in its infancy. If the project had gone a little faster, Bell Labs might have stuck with it, and had no incentive to develop its own OS.
There's a lot of mythology about Multics, and you seem to have bought into a lot of it. Check out multicians.org for corrective details.
When I say "Multics doesn't matter" I mean it didn't have any accomplishments we should care about. You can read "doesn't matter" any number of ways, but I think it's pretty clear from context which way I meant it to be read.
but UNIX has also introduced the mindset of "just barely good enough"; the notion that a solution is acceptable if it solves 80% of a problem rather than all of it.
I'm sorry, I don't see that. I've used pre-UNIX OSs (IBM OS360, DEC RSTS), and I don't see any great decline in quality between them and UNIX. Do you have a counterexample?
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I'm still trying to figure out how the dude can be Bill O'Reilly's boss and still be good friends with Hillary Clinton.
Remember seeing a documentary on an ultra-deep salt mine in Utah, now largely played out. Big empty space, no light except for what you bring with you. Lots of worn out machinery that's just abandoned because its value as scrap is less than the cost of bringing it back up. Creepy.
One other use: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vo4vEgxHtI
I think I speak for everybody here when I say: Huh? "Hello, Legal? Public Relations here. Would you mind launching a multi-million dollar lawsuit? What, you want to check with the CEO first? Whatever for?"
Pretty much. But it's worth noting that many companies in Sun's position would sue Google. Not only did Google clone Sun's Java technology, they hired some of Sun's best Java people to do it. Of course, suing wouldn't accomplish much, but some ego-driven CEOs wouldn't let that stop them.
Went sailing past mine too. ATM? DC?
Hey, get your pop culture references straight. The aliens on Star Trek don't speak English, their voices are automatically translated by the "universal translator" which also has the ability to warp the light around their faces so their lips stay in sync with the English version of what they're saying.
I'm sure that all aliens within TV range speak English.
The Fair Use Doctrine has an official text? I doubt it. It's just a popular (though not universally accepted) interpretation of traditional copyright law.
There are laws that attempt to define "fair use". But that's legislation, not doctrine.
Or maybe less parochial? If there are any inhabitants of planets circling nearby suns, I imagine they'd object to our referring to our sun as the sun.
Which is why SF often refers to "the sun" as "Sol", "the moon" as "Luna", etc. Probably where the poster picked up the habit.
I'm curious and inquisitive about things that are interesting. The way you simply contradict without bothering to argue your case, does nothing to pique my interest.
Dude, if you can't be bothered to back up your own arguments, why should I pay any attention to you? Your opinions don't matter just because you feel strongly about them.
In Soviet Russia, the positive scores you! Yeah, that adds a lot to the conversation.
No I guess not. Just a guy saying "I told you so."
And he's full of crap. Not that much has changed. Nuclear power is still expensive, still has a nasty meltdown risk (yeah yeah, modern designs have never failed; doesn't mean they never will, especially with complex technology tempting both Captain Murphy and your friendly neighborhood terrorist), still has a huge potential for bomb material falling into the wrong hands, still creates waste that will have to be stored and carefully guarded for thousands of years.
And note that the supply of fissionable fuels isn't all that big. So in a century or so we'll have all the fallout of nuclear power (pardon the pun) and be back where we started.
What are the benefits? Well, there's no toxic gases emitted during normal power generation. That's pretty much it, except now the reduced CO2 emission matter more than it used to. And notice that I said "reduced" not "zero". Fuel doesn't just magically appear. You have to dig it up, process it, and transport it. Still produces less CO2 than burning coal (almost anything does), but a long way from zero.
I don't think the dangers-versus-benefits balance has made much of a shift in the favor of nukes. Actually, it's gone the other way. On the plus side you have a slight benefit to the fight against global warming. That wouldn't be enough to tip the scales, even if there weren't a nasty counterweight: a huge increase in the prevalence of terrorism. Do you really think it's a good idea to give terrorists so many juicy targets in the form of vulnerable nuclear plants and huge repositories of dirty bomb material?
Let me put the question another way: are you totally insane???!!!
Nuclear true believers (Jerry? You there?) like to blame the failure of their beloved technology on technically illiterate hippies and knee-jerk pacifists. Those groups exist — they're even as stupid as their detractors claim — but they're a red herring. Nuclear power didn't fail because of hysteria; it failed because it was a bad idea.
My post was stupid because I neglected to note that the parent post mentioned the mechanical advantage of an SSD in a high-available server. But yours is even more stupid, since you failed to even register that we were talking about servers!
Believe it or not, the advantages of an SSD in a portable computer have occurred to me.I've actually considered getting an SSD for my tablet. But there are too many technical, cost, and reliability issues. In particular, there's the limited number of write cycles you can get with flash memory. Not an issue with most flash devices (let's see, on my desk or in my pockets, there's a cell phone with extra memory in the form of an MMC card, a Palm M515 PDA, and an iAudio MP3 player), but none of these write over files as often as your typical laptop or tablet.
OK, that was sloppy/stupid of me. But I do wonder how many servers can serve all their data from a 6 GB SSD?
OK, the cost is small, but even so, is it really worth it? What you get in return for your investment is systems that boot faster, and a small savings in power. Is there really any reason you need to be able to boot your servers in 30 seconds instead of 3 minutes?
I suppose the power issue is important if you're taking the "turn off that light if you're not using it!" approach to the global warming crisis. Not sure that's a good approach, though.
I'm going to change my sig to refer to this post. Nothing against you: your post is quite funny. But the two people who modded you up labeled your post "insightful" and "informative" rather than "funny". Possibly they don't get the joke (wouldn't surprise me) but more likely they felt the need to reward you with karma points, which you don't get with "funny". That's doubly stupid: not only does it misuse moderator points, but you obviously don't need the karma anyway.
You cite the main reason I use a tablet instead of a laptop. My wrists ache at the mere thought of doing serious keyboarding on a laptop. If I'm going to a meeting where I need a keyboard, I bring the USB Goldtouch from my office. Otherwise I make do with a stylus. I just wish I had the courage to upgrade to Vista: it's the first version of Windows with decent handwriting recognition.
You're right, these are important filesystem features — now. I fail to see how their absence in an API designed almost 40 years ago means that API is "broken".
Modern Unix systems do come with modern file systems. (My own employers are trying get everybody to adopt ZFS, which I believe supports all the semantics you want and much more.) Perhaps my ignorance of the relevant APIs is showing, but it's hard for me to see how the core Section 2 APIs fail to support these semantics. Perhaps you could educate me?
That's everyone's favorite solution. But it ignores a rather basic fact: it's possible to forge paper ballots too. After all, people were stealing elections long before voting machines were invented.
True, the paper ballots give you a way to doublecheck the results. But if the paper ballots and the electronic count don't agree, which one do you believe?
Of course, there are ways to safeguard paper ballots that have been worked out over many years. But they all boil down to one thing: make ballot counting process as open as possible, so that nobody has a chance to cheat. And you can do that with electronic voting much more easily than you can do it with paper ballots. You just have to make sure that everything about your voting system — hardware designs, software source, data transmission, handling procedures — is out in the open for anybody to see.
The big problem is that voting technology vendors want to keep their proprietary technology proprietary, and that's just not going to work. Probably the only solution is for the government, either the federal government or a consortium of state governments, to actually design the systems, with the private sector restricting itself to manufacturing and support.
Well of course the version you used felt like a research version — it was being used to research OS development. But there was a commercial version; Honeywell grossed a few hundred million selling machines that ran it. The last commercial installations (at the NSA and RCAF) shut down in 2000.
I'd be the last to deny that you learn a lot from mistakes. But I don't think Multics's mistakes have been very influential. The big lesson to be learned is that the future doesn't belong to mainframes that lack byte-level addressing. And IBM figured that one out before Multics was even released.
I don't agree that without Multics, Unix wouldn't exist. And come to think of it, I don't agree that it was an influential negative example. Its main influence at Bell Labs was its failure to go gold soon enough for Bell Labs to adopt it for internal use. This left Thompson and Ritchie without an OS to work with and motivated them to write their own. They weren't looking for a way to squeeze Multics into their tiny PDP-8, they were doing original work, with their creativity energized by the very limitations of their working environment. Things like byte streams, pipelines, and device files aren't adaptations of Multics concepts, they're completely new inventions.
Actually, Multics might well have killed Unix in its infancy. If the project had gone a little faster, Bell Labs might have stuck with it, and had no incentive to develop its own OS.
There's a lot of mythology about Multics, and you seem to have bought into a lot of it. Check out multicians.org for corrective details.
When I say "Multics doesn't matter" I mean it didn't have any accomplishments we should care about. You can read "doesn't matter" any number of ways, but I think it's pretty clear from context which way I meant it to be read.