After a little research, I'm forced to admit that my comments on ZFS's limited value for desktop systems seems to be poorly informed. Here's a good summary:
Still, the interest in ZFS at Apple never seems to have gone beyond the "Hey, that's cool" phase. Probably they're just too committed to their own filesystem technology. They did put a lot of work into it.
The danger of collision may not be big news. But the fact that somebody has calculated that it's possible is, at least to a science geek. I'm actually very interested — I would have thought such a probability was too small even to be measured.
Most science is about boring little insights that most people don't care about. Doesn't mean that it isn't news when it happens.
Are you honestly trying to demean a debate to the point that you are portraying me as I consider the killing of my dog on par with the American Revolution?
I don't have to. You already did that when you argued that people have a general right to use violence to get what they want.
Everything that you hold dear, be it your (obviously higher than mine) morality, or your ideology, or what have you, was given to you, fought for in your absense, and kept safe by, people that....and I know it isn't "okay" anymore to say this, FOUGHT for that right.
What, because violence is sometimes the only option, it's always cool? Go live in Somalia.
Or try reading the Declaration of Independence, which is the classic case of somebody advocating violent action in defense of their rights. It does not say, "WE'RE PISSED AT KING GEORGE. WE'RE OUT OF THIS BULLSHIT EMPIRE AND NOBODY CAN STOP US!!!" No it goes more like this:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. -- Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
It then goes on to cite 25 or so of these "injuries and usurpation". All of which are rather more severe than "He killed my dog!"
Tell me, would you rather get the snot beat out of you, or spend tewnty years in prison after which you lose your right to vote, bear arms, find it impossible to get a job because of your record, and if you are wrongly convicted of a sex crime (like in one of the links I provided) have to be on a sex offender registry and have severe limitations on where you can live?
Kind of depends. If I choose getting the snot beat out of me, can I get a promise not to have permanent neurological damage? Being a free person with no legal or social stigma doesn't count for much if you have to spend the rest of your life in the veggie ward.
Anyway, your dichotomy is crap. It isn't a choice between one kind of punishment and another. It's a choice between a system that gives you a chance to rebut the case against you versus the poorly-informed decision-making of some random idiot with impulse control issues.
Of course I wouldn't blame you. Mob violence is perfectly reasonable if you're sufficiently provoked.
That was sarcastic of course. This isn't: You're an idiot. You're both a moral and a legal idiot. I know I'll never convince you of the moral side, so I'll stick with the law.
If you get 10 people together and plan a violent action, expect a lot more than a few months for "aggravated assault", never mind the provocation. And that's assuming that the violence doesn't escalate to where the guy you're attacking is seriously injured, permanently disabled, or even killed. And never mind that you don't plan to do that — a gang of angry assholes is hard to control.
But wait, there's more! I'm not even at the worst case scenario yet. Suppose the guy you're going after is armed. (Hey, doesn't the second amendment say he has the right to defend himself?) Or has his own gang of righteous idiots. Or one or more of his gang or your gang decides to bring a weapon. Much wackiness can ensue.
Still not done, though this only applies if you live in a "felony murder" state. FM is a charge you can face if somebody dies as the result of a felony you committed. That somebody doesn't have to be the guy you attack or his defenders. It can be an innocent bystander. It can even be one of the friends you brought along on your Mission of Justice. Oh yeah, and in some states, it's subject to the death penalty.
But on the bright side, you might get a TV movie made about you.
Actually, the victim here wasn't all that random. He was an Indian immigrant. Funny how racial minorities tend to be victims of "mistaken identity" more than the rest of us. Which leads us to a completely different reason to despise vigilante "justice".
Right, rules of evidence, jury trials, right to appeal, right to have legal representation, none of these make any difference.
The question isn't "which system never screws up". There's no such system. The question is which system screws up the least. I think that a system that relies on some random idiot saying, "Hey, that must be the guy!" isn't even close to the top of that list.
If you mean, has Oracle management quietly told Sun to back off the ZFS evangalism, I kind of doubt it. It's hard to see why they would even care, at least not enough to risk getting caught doing something that could have nasty consequences — Oracle's acquisition of Sun still hasn't had federal approval, and illegally interfering with Sun's management would be just the thing to get it turned down.
The whole ZFS-on-MacOS thing is part of Sun's broader efforts to fight the marginalization of its technologies by open-sourcing them and then evangelizing everybody in sight to adopt them. This has happened not just with ZFS, but also with Solaris, the Sun implementation of Java, and even the Sparc CPU.
One aspect of this effort has been to push OpenSolaris and ZFS at desktop users. Pushing Apple to fully support ZFS (right now, they only provide a read-only driver) is part of this, as is a big push to get CS students and other hackers to download and use OpenSolaris on their personal PCs.
There's a certain amount of wishful thinking here. Solaris and ZFS do have very real and important technical advantages over their alternatives. But for a desktop user these advantages are pretty minimal. And to get them, you have to pay a big price in learning to use more complex tools and in not being able to participate in in bigger user communities.
Apple's response to Sun's ZFS evangelism was initial polite interest, but little positive effort over the long term. Not at all surprising: what use is ZFS to the typical Mac user? If servers were a bigger part of Apple's business it might be different.
"English writer" can mean "person who writes in English"
If you're going to nitpick nitpicks, get your facts straight. Have you ever heard "English writer" used that way? Understanding language is more than simply applying grammar and logic. There are a huge number of informal conventions. Thus you can say "Time flies like an arrow" and everybody understands that you're talking about the fleetingness of experience and not the affinity of insects with projectiles.
Stanislaw Lem was arguably the greatest non-English science fiction writer
I think Robert Heinlein was a better writer. Pretty sure he wasn't English.
Oh, you mean "greatest SF writer who didn't write in English". Oh, do you think I'm nitpicking? Well, if you care that little about what words mean, you probably shouldn't write book reviews.
Or was Oracle/Sun tentatively testing the waters to see the community's reaction?
It's a little early to talk about Sun as a part of Oracle. It's probable that the acquisition will clear regulatory approval, but until it does, Oracle can't play anything resembling a decision-making role in something like this.
I work at Sun, and right now our contacts with Oracle are actually more circumscribed than they'd normally be.
Note the phrase "mockery of the promise and fitness of things". You seem to be interpreting it to apply to any outcome that's a surprise. By that definition, "I thought the store was open on Sunday, but it's not" is irony. There has to be some kind of jarring note, as in "The Boston Celtics are mostly African-American".
I suppose there's a jarring note here — if you assume that where one cell network has coverage, they all do. But that's a pretty dumb assumption.
When I first got into computing during the 70s, there were still a lot of analog computers around. Solid-state circuitry was just getting cheap enough to eliminate their advantage for specialized computing. Never worked with them, but UCSC, where I transferred in 1974, had just recently removed one that the Social Sciences division had been using for statistical work. Somebody told me it had a gigantic lense. No idea why.
Hey, if an American broadband provider offered that, I'd sign up instantly. But the broadband market here is less competitive than the one in Europe. Which is funny, because right-wing American politicians and pundits love to trash "European socialism".
Re:Mentioned as "Greatest Adventure Games"
on
Vintage Games
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Notice that all the games listed are best known for their home console or computer versions. All the games you mention are arcade games; they did get ported to other platforms, but lost something in the process.
Still, you have a point. A book that claims to be about the most influential electronic games but completely ignores the arcade is kind of missing the boat.
The biggest challenge facing Windows is its size and hardware requirements
Well, most people would say its reliability and security issues. But I guess those are also effects of feature bloat, driven by a desire to please lots of diverse customers.
Nobody seems immune from this. Apple people I know blame it for the meltdown in OS 8 development. I work at Sun, and I noticed that our latest crop of Sun Ray thin clients come with RS-232 ports — this at a time when such ports are disappearing from most products, including previous Sun Rays. When I asked about it, I was told that it was to accommodate a big customer deploying point-of-sale systems. (Bar code scanners, card swipers, etc., still haven't migrated to USB.)
Slashdot Mirror
After a little research, I'm forced to admit that my comments on ZFS's limited value for desktop systems seems to be poorly informed. Here's a good summary:
Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there. It's a **** URL!
Still, the interest in ZFS at Apple never seems to have gone beyond the "Hey, that's cool" phase. Probably they're just too committed to their own filesystem technology. They did put a lot of work into it.
The danger of collision may not be big news. But the fact that somebody has calculated that it's possible is, at least to a science geek. I'm actually very interested — I would have thought such a probability was too small even to be measured.
Most science is about boring little insights that most people don't care about. Doesn't mean that it isn't news when it happens.
Thanks, guy. A bit busy now, but I'm looking forward to playing with it.
Are you honestly trying to demean a debate to the point that you are portraying me as I consider the killing of my dog on par with the American Revolution?
I don't have to. You already did that when you argued that people have a general right to use violence to get what they want.
Everything that you hold dear, be it your (obviously higher than mine) morality, or your ideology, or what have you, was given to you, fought for in your absense, and kept safe by, people that....and I know it isn't "okay" anymore to say this, FOUGHT for that right.
What, because violence is sometimes the only option, it's always cool? Go live in Somalia.
Or try reading the Declaration of Independence, which is the classic case of somebody advocating violent action in defense of their rights. It does not say, "WE'RE PISSED AT KING GEORGE. WE'RE OUT OF THIS BULLSHIT EMPIRE AND NOBODY CAN STOP US!!!" No it goes more like this:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. -- Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
It then goes on to cite 25 or so of these "injuries and usurpation". All of which are rather more severe than "He killed my dog!"
You seem to be invoking a meme with which I am totally unfamiliar.
Tell me, would you rather get the snot beat out of you, or spend tewnty years in prison after which you lose your right to vote, bear arms, find it impossible to get a job because of your record, and if you are wrongly convicted of a sex crime (like in one of the links I provided) have to be on a sex offender registry and have severe limitations on where you can live?
Kind of depends. If I choose getting the snot beat out of me, can I get a promise not to have permanent neurological damage? Being a free person with no legal or social stigma doesn't count for much if you have to spend the rest of your life in the veggie ward.
Anyway, your dichotomy is crap. It isn't a choice between one kind of punishment and another. It's a choice between a system that gives you a chance to rebut the case against you versus the poorly-informed decision-making of some random idiot with impulse control issues.
Of course I wouldn't blame you. Mob violence is perfectly reasonable if you're sufficiently provoked.
That was sarcastic of course. This isn't: You're an idiot. You're both a moral and a legal idiot. I know I'll never convince you of the moral side, so I'll stick with the law.
If you get 10 people together and plan a violent action, expect a lot more than a few months for "aggravated assault", never mind the provocation. And that's assuming that the violence doesn't escalate to where the guy you're attacking is seriously injured, permanently disabled, or even killed. And never mind that you don't plan to do that — a gang of angry assholes is hard to control.
But wait, there's more! I'm not even at the worst case scenario yet. Suppose the guy you're going after is armed. (Hey, doesn't the second amendment say he has the right to defend himself?) Or has his own gang of righteous idiots. Or one or more of his gang or your gang decides to bring a weapon. Much wackiness can ensue.
Still not done, though this only applies if you live in a "felony murder" state. FM is a charge you can face if somebody dies as the result of a felony you committed. That somebody doesn't have to be the guy you attack or his defenders. It can be an innocent bystander. It can even be one of the friends you brought along on your Mission of Justice. Oh yeah, and in some states, it's subject to the death penalty.
But on the bright side, you might get a TV movie made about you.
Actually, the victim here wasn't all that random. He was an Indian immigrant. Funny how racial minorities tend to be victims of "mistaken identity" more than the rest of us. Which leads us to a completely different reason to despise vigilante "justice".
Right, rules of evidence, jury trials, right to appeal, right to have legal representation, none of these make any difference.
The question isn't "which system never screws up". There's no such system. The question is which system screws up the least. I think that a system that relies on some random idiot saying, "Hey, that must be the guy!" isn't even close to the top of that list.
Oracle workload profiles for which ZFS causes some massive performance hits especially when the disks are close to full
I can't speak to the general performance issue. But I seem to recall that any file system performs poorly if there isn't a lot of free space.
If you mean, has Oracle management quietly told Sun to back off the ZFS evangalism, I kind of doubt it. It's hard to see why they would even care, at least not enough to risk getting caught doing something that could have nasty consequences — Oracle's acquisition of Sun still hasn't had federal approval, and illegally interfering with Sun's management would be just the thing to get it turned down.
The whole ZFS-on-MacOS thing is part of Sun's broader efforts to fight the marginalization of its technologies by open-sourcing them and then evangelizing everybody in sight to adopt them. This has happened not just with ZFS, but also with Solaris, the Sun implementation of Java, and even the Sparc CPU.
One aspect of this effort has been to push OpenSolaris and ZFS at desktop users. Pushing Apple to fully support ZFS (right now, they only provide a read-only driver) is part of this, as is a big push to get CS students and other hackers to download and use OpenSolaris on their personal PCs.
There's a certain amount of wishful thinking here. Solaris and ZFS do have very real and important technical advantages over their alternatives. But for a desktop user these advantages are pretty minimal. And to get them, you have to pay a big price in learning to use more complex tools and in not being able to participate in in bigger user communities.
Apple's response to Sun's ZFS evangelism was initial polite interest, but little positive effort over the long term. Not at all surprising: what use is ZFS to the typical Mac user? If servers were a bigger part of Apple's business it might be different.
"English writer" can mean "person who writes in English"
If you're going to nitpick nitpicks, get your facts straight. Have you ever heard "English writer" used that way? Understanding language is more than simply applying grammar and logic. There are a huge number of informal conventions. Thus you can say "Time flies like an arrow" and everybody understands that you're talking about the fleetingness of experience and not the affinity of insects with projectiles.
Stanislaw Lem was arguably the greatest non-English science fiction writer
I think Robert Heinlein was a better writer. Pretty sure he wasn't English.
Oh, you mean "greatest SF writer who didn't write in English". Oh, do you think I'm nitpicking? Well, if you care that little about what words mean, you probably shouldn't write book reviews.
Dude, most of us owe our jobs to the commercialization of the Internet!
I remember using ClariNet to read Dilbert before it was widely syndicated. That was back when it was still funny.
That's absolutely the lamest of your many lame I'm-never-wrong comebacks.
http://www.google.com/search?q=recording+tapped+phone
And you know this to be true because...
Or was Oracle/Sun tentatively testing the waters to see the community's reaction?
It's a little early to talk about Sun as a part of Oracle. It's probable that the acquisition will clear regulatory approval, but until it does, Oracle can't play anything resembling a decision-making role in something like this.
I work at Sun, and right now our contacts with Oracle are actually more circumscribed than they'd normally be.
Totally offtopic, but I have to share the following link with you. It relates to a very misinformed post you made about a month ago.
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/09/27/clinton.surplus/
Note the phrase "mockery of the promise and fitness of things". You seem to be interpreting it to apply to any outcome that's a surprise. By that definition, "I thought the store was open on Sunday, but it's not" is irony. There has to be some kind of jarring note, as in "The Boston Celtics are mostly African-American".
I suppose there's a jarring note here — if you assume that where one cell network has coverage, they all do. But that's a pretty dumb assumption.
You have to have words. A play without words is just mime. ;)
When I first got into computing during the 70s, there were still a lot of analog computers around. Solid-state circuitry was just getting cheap enough to eliminate their advantage for specialized computing. Never worked with them, but UCSC, where I transferred in 1974, had just recently removed one that the Social Sciences division had been using for statistical work. Somebody told me it had a gigantic lense. No idea why.
Hey, if an American broadband provider offered that, I'd sign up instantly. But the broadband market here is less competitive than the one in Europe. Which is funny, because right-wing American politicians and pundits love to trash "European socialism".
Notice that all the games listed are best known for their home console or computer versions. All the games you mention are arcade games; they did get ported to other platforms, but lost something in the process.
Still, you have a point. A book that claims to be about the most influential electronic games but completely ignores the arcade is kind of missing the boat.
The biggest challenge facing Windows is its size and hardware requirements
Well, most people would say its reliability and security issues. But I guess those are also effects of feature bloat, driven by a desire to please lots of diverse customers.
Nobody seems immune from this. Apple people I know blame it for the meltdown in OS 8 development. I work at Sun, and I noticed that our latest crop of Sun Ray thin clients come with RS-232 ports — this at a time when such ports are disappearing from most products, including previous Sun Rays. When I asked about it, I was told that it was to accommodate a big customer deploying point-of-sale systems. (Bar code scanners, card swipers, etc., still haven't migrated to USB.)