No, I don't wish to be anal about it; your correction is accepted.
I nonetheless now have to wonder whether we might be saying different things. What does 'individuality' mean? What does it mean to support it? The idea is, to borrow an expression you used against me, poetically vague; perhaps I incorrectly assumed that you meant the abuse of individuality I'm thinking of.
I cited one simple example of what I'm thinking of (people who abuse, trash, and ignore traditions not because they're wrong, but because they're traditions); perhaps it would help if you gave a little limit to what you mean by 'individuality'.
Perhaps there's less to disagree about than we think.
Of course, perhaps there's more, but we need to find out what we're disagreeing about first.
If it's false support, then it's not actual support now is it.
I'm glad you concede that it's possible to pay at least lip service to individuality while destroying freedom. This was my point, the only point I had, and it's clear we agree on it in spite of your original contradiction of it.
Now, consider that if an action can be done deliberately to harm freedom, it can also be done accidentally, and will have the exact same results regardless of intention. It's quite possible that people intending to help individuality will harm liberty by teaching individuality wrongly -- as the anti-traditionalists do, or as the powermongers do.
Again: contrary to your statement, not everyone who teaches individuality helps the cause of freedom.
This is false, and not only by the trivial solution (i.e. a false support for individuality which actually undermines it). The problem is that individualism can become as much a cult as collectivism; witness some of the mindless drivel on Slashdot decrying traditions for the simple, sole reason that they are traditions. We are individuals, but we are not/only/ individuals; I become my greatest when I accept others, not just myself.
Economically, the individual is the sole source of decisions for a huge number of reasons; but socially, a large number of additional conditions have to hold in order for freedom to mean anything, and individualism actively undermines some of these.
Hmm. I can't see your previous message saying that. All I see is a statement that you'd rather not delete the spams just in case one of them was a false positive. But anyhow, what you're saying makes sense, I think. But I still see a problem.
I guess I see now what you were trying to say -- that you know an easy way to _tolerate_ false positives. I disagree; you know a way to tolerate false positives ONLY when there's a small number of positives. Some people get WAY more spam than you do; any false positives for them would make a spamcatcher useless, since they wouldn't have the time to scan though the junk.
A spamfilter which had no false positives would be 100% beneficial, even if it had false negatives, because it wouldn't lose any important data; you could _always_ run it to reduce the amount of noise, and then if you wanted to reduce false positives using your method you could run another filter which was meaner.
You'd wind up with a much less full spambox, and no lost messages.
I'd rather have a software package that has 50% filtering and 0 false positives then 100% filtering and 1 false positive. I _never_ want to miss an actual email directed at me.
I have to respectfully disagree here. First, you should NEVER trust an automated mechanism to delete e-mail before you open it (I'm not say you are, just saying it should never be done).
I don't see how you're disagreeing -- he's saying that he wants to see less spam but ALL of his real email, and you're saying that you don't want to automatically delete any email.
Okay, use this software to move spam to a folder rather than deleting it. Difference solved.
According to the BBC, the Miami-Herald concluded that Bush had won. I'm not willing to pay MH to see its old article on the subject, especially when all the online sources I can find agree with the BBC here.
The fact is, you just lied. The MH determined the exact opposite of what you claimed.
The classic example is breaking out of deeply nested looping constructs. Note: This does not apply to languages that have exceptions.
I can't beat Knuth's paper; I have to refer you to it for a complete discussion of why and where gotos are useful.
I just wanted to say that exceptions do not, can not, and MUST not be used as a tool to avoid GOTOs. Exceptions are dynamic (runtime) events; GOTOs are static, constant effects. An uncaught exception results in a crash; an uncaught GOTO results in uncompilable code.
The mathematical facility of the character isn't a/the focus of the story. It is, really, quite incidental. You could have replaced "mathematics" with "woodworking" and the main story would still hold.
Of course. In which case it would be a story about a woodworking genius instead of a mathematical one. Just as A Beautiful Mind could have been about an insane metalworking genius instead of a mathematical one.
Good movies are about people, not professions or technologies. The fact that you can replace mathematics with something else doesn't suggest that GWH wasn't a mathematical movie; it simply means it was about MORE than math.
It does cost more to provide the data faster. Your modem is only used by yourself, so you have all that capacity; but the T1s and OC3s and so on up are shared by many users (including leased lines which only have one user at a time), and they have only so much capacity at one time.
If 30 low-use customers can use the same pipe, but only 10 high-use customer can -- why not charge the low-use customers less? Actually, how could it make sense to NOT charge them less?
I'm actually looking forward to the thing you probably most fear: accurately metered demand-based billing from _everything_, ISPs and backbones and so on, with the ability to configure your system to reject offers of service at rates you don't want to pay. I don't know whether it would be cheaper or more expensive than the Internet now, but I do know that it would be economicly stable enough to support as many people as wanted to get on -- and as more people got on it would become obviously profitable to provide services on the Internet.
No need to remind you that... recounts determined that without the Supreme Court's intervention they would have lost Florida and the electoral vote as well.
Remind me, please -- cite your source. Everything I've read (in mainline newspapers, Union-Tribune and North County Times) indicated that all the recounts indicated the opposite. That's why there was no big media splash; no change is no news.
We do have the entire OS installation backed up. That's what a hard drive "image" is.
Of course. But you lose a lot with that versus the more flexible combined backup -- for example, you become unable to track changing uses, and unable to notice when something which shouldn't change does. In a combined dynamic backup, you'll notice quickly that 700 workstations have the same file (word.exe) but two of them have a different file in the same name and place. Why? Could it be a virus infection? Easy to check -- and easy to fix, once you recognise it.
And we can't allow most people to locally store their files, because most of them are accessed by more than one person.
This is a CLASSICAL example of putting the cart before the horse. The IS department isn't here to "allow" people to do things in order to make the people do their job; it's there to help them do things as they do their job. You don't FORCE the people to put files on the network in order to share; they do it because it's the easiest way. They don't need the additional motivation of having no other way to ensure a backup; they would do so without that motivation, for the reasons you specify.
Anyhow, in your original post, you spoke about backing up personal shares, which don't have anything to do with data sharing anyhow. The ONLY reason to have personal shares is to allow backups using old technology.
Good prejudice -- Mises is awesome reading, and I agree with the rest of your points here. Except that you have no other prejudices, of course:-), but that's obvious.
Well... you imply that no people calling themselves Libertarians are idiots, which is false on its face. I won't attempt to compute a L/l idiodicy ratio, but I will laugh at the thought...:-)
But the free market is a free market of value (not cash), and open source fits right in. And that was my point.
This nails the fine distinction the author of the original paper was making. He lists two expected motives for participating in a project: 1) their boss told them to, or 2) someone offered them money to.
The full scope of the free market is much larger than that (as you state), expanding in general to include me doing something because I judge that the benefit to be gained from doing it is higher than the benefit to be gained by doing something else (including doing nothing).
In other words, his definition of the "market" is an older, more restrictive one (as you'd expect for someone basing his work on a 1930 economic work). Mises' definition includes his, and is in fact much more useful -- but his is nonetheless a valuable subcategory of the market, since it forms the basis for a theory of business growth.
So essentially, his paper does what his abstract says: it fits open source into a theory of corporate growth, thereby producing results which attempt to predict and evaluate data on project size.
I'm still digesting the paper as a whole, but so far it seems quite good, neglecting the terminology error of mistaking the "market" for a small subset of the market (I think we could more accurately call his so-called "market" the "cash-up-front demand market", since it's based on someone offering you a fixed amount of cash).
It's interesting that he also misses a major group which IS outside of the market: bureaucracies.
Because a hobby is FAR from the only way of gaining the result we're discussing. Many open-source programs are initially written as a hobby; but much work on them is written as part of a company.
There's no need for him to look at just one of the many diverse motivations possible; the goal is to look at the results, and check whether they're sustainable.
Yes, classical liberal economics (the a priori discipline) encompasses open source, and explains its success quite well; but at the same time, there are broad financial models within that discipline which fail to explain open source, even though open source has financial consequences. This paper examines open source with the intent of fitting it into some of those models.
I'm using the term 'economics' to describe the science which examines the results of human actions and choices, while 'finance' is the subcategory of that which examines only intercomparable human actions and choices, and which uses money as the instrument of comparison. A better choice of words would be to use 'praxeology' for the first term, and 'economics' for the second.
See von Mises' text 'Human Action' for MANY more details. In that text he covers praxeology in general and economics in specific. Highly recommended, and available as a free ebook on mises.org.
Oh, and although Mises is the poster child of the Libertarians, he wasn't one and couldn't have been one (there weren't any at the time). So check your prejudices at the door. A lot of what he says is valid even under non-Libertarian assumptions, and much of the rest is valid as long as you don't try to apply it too far (as most Libertarians do).
Note the big L -- I'm a libertarian, but I'm not a Libertarian.
It's a FAQ, not a paper. In other words, its designed to help orient readers to the design space and give them a staring point for research and comparison. I assume that the FAQ's readers are smart enough not to try to use the FAQ as a CS textbook.
What on earth does that have to do with your claim that "with arch, you can use standard tools to access past revisions" (implying VERY specifically that you can't do that with Subversion). The entire point of the document is to compare Subversion and arch; instead, you're allegedly comparing databases versus file systems.
"Allegedly" because you're actually comparing your special-purpose database to Subversion's use of BDB (or whatever they switch to when they've had enough of that).
That second point isn't some loopy overgeneralization about databases: it's an observation about how the implementation "came together" around simple file formats.
In a FAQ about the history of arch, that makes sense. In a FAQ about comparing Subversion versus arch, it doesn't. Frankly, your statement here doesn't even make sense, considering what you're actually SAYING in that document. You're NOT giving a history; you're making a very specific claim about present capability.
I'm REALLY impressed with arch. I like the documentation I've read, like the software. I'm not an enemy. But I HATE, abhor, detest this kind of sniping against other projects.
Second, what I've tried to say in the FAQ is not that databases are overapplied (that's for another discussion) but rather that arch's standard-file-formats and ordinary filesystem tree orientation resulted in a very tiny, simple implementation that nevertheless has many of the desirable semantic and performance characteristics people often presume require a database.
Again, context is very important. The context of this FAQ is a contrast between Subversion and arch; in this FAQ, any bullet list claiming a feature especially for arch is implicitly a claim that the same feature is unavailable or very difficult in Subversion.
In fact, I would definitely say that by the definition of the term "database" you've written your own database. It's probably not relational, but RDBs aren't the only type, nor are they unambiguously the best. So you aren't scoring any points on the "databases are not needed" scoreboard. All you're doing is proving "I can write my own database which serves my needs better than some general-purpose database" (I would tend to agree, even without the beautiful evidence of arch to support your argument).
Of course, this sort of claim doesn't belong in a comparison with Subversion either, although it's certainly worth some good discussion.
You know what, I'm wondering if you're talking about the same FAQ I am. Look at the link which started this, and make sure we're on the same page.
With all due respect, maybe I'm not the one who needs to work on his reading comprehension;-).
Oh, I agree with you entirely, then. Yes, I've also been watching ReiserFS for some time.
I have to note, though, that high performance databases don't run as layers on top of the filesystem; they run directly on the drives, with no filesystem intervention. ReiserFS won't change that; it may be better than ext2fs for database tasks, but it's still not tuned for big-league work. And it never will be -- it's not targetted for that.
Okay. Why did you compare local version storage versus remote version storage, then? This isn't a database versus files issue; it's a local versus remote issue.
Anyhow, I certainly agree that arch has this, and other, advantages. (Many others.) None of them make arch "more managable" or "more usable" or anything else than subversion; they simply give the two different characteristics. Remote files have HUGE advantages as well, in the right environment.
You mention using standard database tools to manage subversion. What's so wrong about standard filesystem tools to manage arch then?
Nothing. Nothing's wrong with using standard filesystem tools to manage arch. Nothing's wrong with arch -- or at least I have nothing to criticise.
What's wrong is arch's idiodic propaganda stating that Subversion is magically inferior because it uses a database rather than a file system.
The one weakness in arch is that it manages the existing filesystem as a database but accepts the use of non-database tools to alter it. You can use grep and so on to maintain it, but you'll certainly destroy it if you don't know exactly what you're doing, since filesystem tools can't possibly know how to maintain a database, while database tools must.
But this isn't a big deal to me -- after all, you can have a perfectly good database which isn't a version control system, so your database management tools can cause a lot of problems as well when used by an idiot. So again, I have no complaints with arch's approach. Only its marketing.
It's hard to read a document which starts out so fundamentally/wrong/. It claims that using "ordinary files" makes its format somehow more managable -- what baloney. By using "ordinary files" it's actually choosing to implement its own proprietary database. If you want to manage it, you have to learn its format.
Subversion's not ahead here; but by using a standard database, at least you can use standard database tools to manage it. You still have to learn, of course.
I like arch. It's a cool system. But nonsense like that...
You're confusing cause and effect. The reason that you don't back up info that's on user's PCs isn't that there isn't any backupable info; it's that it's too hard right now. If it were easy, you'd be doing it, because you're dead wrong that there's nothing worth backing up.
For example, I'd say that the entire OS installation is worth a backup -- especially since you'll only have to keep one backup for the entire network (plus a few minor variations). I'd also say that any info which you would have put on the big global drive should usually be on the user's computer instead, so they don't have to contend for bandwidth when working on it (when all they want is safety).
There are already programs which can backup user desktops -- Previo works very much like what's described here, for example.
How do you do offsite backups of every machine in your enterprise right now? Whoops -- you DON'T. You only offsite-backup the servers.
With this system backing up every PC offsite becomes possible: you simply add a PC to the network with its own daily tape backup, and configure the Mojonation network to store one reconstruction of every unique file on it. Then drive or mail that tape every day/week to your offsite storage.
Boom -- offsite backup for the whole network, without having to backup multiple copies of the same file.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I don't wish to be anal about it; your correction is accepted.
I nonetheless now have to wonder whether we might be saying different things. What does 'individuality' mean? What does it mean to support it? The idea is, to borrow an expression you used against me, poetically vague; perhaps I incorrectly assumed that you meant the abuse of individuality I'm thinking of.
I cited one simple example of what I'm thinking of (people who abuse, trash, and ignore traditions not because they're wrong, but because they're traditions); perhaps it would help if you gave a little limit to what you mean by 'individuality'.
Perhaps there's less to disagree about than we think.
Of course, perhaps there's more, but we need to find out what we're disagreeing about first.
-Billy
If it's false support, then it's not actual support now is it.
I'm glad you concede that it's possible to pay at least lip service to individuality while destroying freedom. This was my point, the only point I had, and it's clear we agree on it in spite of your original contradiction of it.
Now, consider that if an action can be done deliberately to harm freedom, it can also be done accidentally, and will have the exact same results regardless of intention. It's quite possible that people intending to help individuality will harm liberty by teaching individuality wrongly -- as the anti-traditionalists do, or as the powermongers do.
Again: contrary to your statement, not everyone who teaches individuality helps the cause of freedom.
-Billy
Any support of individuality supports freedom.
/only/ individuals; I become my greatest when I accept others, not just myself.
This is false, and not only by the trivial solution (i.e. a false support for individuality which actually undermines it). The problem is that individualism can become as much a cult as collectivism; witness some of the mindless drivel on Slashdot decrying traditions for the simple, sole reason that they are traditions. We are individuals, but we are not
Economically, the individual is the sole source of decisions for a huge number of reasons; but socially, a large number of additional conditions have to hold in order for freedom to mean anything, and individualism actively undermines some of these.
-Billy
Hmm. I can't see your previous message saying that. All I see is a statement that you'd rather not delete the spams just in case one of them was a false positive. But anyhow, what you're saying makes sense, I think. But I still see a problem.
I guess I see now what you were trying to say -- that you know an easy way to _tolerate_ false positives. I disagree; you know a way to tolerate false positives ONLY when there's a small number of positives. Some people get WAY more spam than you do; any false positives for them would make a spamcatcher useless, since they wouldn't have the time to scan though the junk.
A spamfilter which had no false positives would be 100% beneficial, even if it had false negatives, because it wouldn't lose any important data; you could _always_ run it to reduce the amount of noise, and then if you wanted to reduce false positives using your method you could run another filter which was meaner.
You'd wind up with a much less full spambox, and no lost messages.
-Billy
I'd rather have a software package that has 50% filtering and 0 false positives then 100% filtering and 1 false positive. I _never_ want to miss an actual email directed at me.
I have to respectfully disagree here. First, you should NEVER trust an automated mechanism to delete e-mail before you open it (I'm not say you are, just saying it should never be done).
I don't see how you're disagreeing -- he's saying that he wants to see less spam but ALL of his real email, and you're saying that you don't want to automatically delete any email.
Okay, use this software to move spam to a folder rather than deleting it. Difference solved.
-Billy
Why do you say tradition has little value?
Why do you think that all people who flaunt rings are rudderless and out of control?
-Billy
According to the BBC, the Miami-Herald concluded that Bush had won. I'm not willing to pay MH to see its old article on the subject, especially when all the online sources I can find agree with the BBC here.
The fact is, you just lied. The MH determined the exact opposite of what you claimed.
-Billy
The classic example is breaking out of deeply nested looping constructs. Note: This does not apply to languages that have exceptions.
I can't beat Knuth's paper; I have to refer you to it for a complete discussion of why and where gotos are useful.
I just wanted to say that exceptions do not, can not, and MUST not be used as a tool to avoid GOTOs. Exceptions are dynamic (runtime) events; GOTOs are static, constant effects. An uncaught exception results in a crash; an uncaught GOTO results in uncompilable code.
-Billy
The mathematical facility of the character isn't a/the focus of the story. It is, really, quite incidental. You could have replaced "mathematics" with "woodworking" and the main story would still hold.
Of course. In which case it would be a story about a woodworking genius instead of a mathematical one. Just as A Beautiful Mind could have been about an insane metalworking genius instead of a mathematical one.
Good movies are about people, not professions or technologies. The fact that you can replace mathematics with something else doesn't suggest that GWH wasn't a mathematical movie; it simply means it was about MORE than math.
As every good movie inevitably will be.
-Billy
It does cost more to provide the data faster. Your modem is only used by yourself, so you have all that capacity; but the T1s and OC3s and so on up are shared by many users (including leased lines which only have one user at a time), and they have only so much capacity at one time.
If 30 low-use customers can use the same pipe, but only 10 high-use customer can -- why not charge the low-use customers less? Actually, how could it make sense to NOT charge them less?
I'm actually looking forward to the thing you probably most fear: accurately metered demand-based billing from _everything_, ISPs and backbones and so on, with the ability to configure your system to reject offers of service at rates you don't want to pay. I don't know whether it would be cheaper or more expensive than the Internet now, but I do know that it would be economicly stable enough to support as many people as wanted to get on -- and as more people got on it would become obviously profitable to provide services on the Internet.
-Billy
No need to remind you that ... recounts determined that without the Supreme Court's intervention they would have lost Florida and the electoral vote as well.
Remind me, please -- cite your source. Everything I've read (in mainline newspapers, Union-Tribune and North County Times) indicated that all the recounts indicated the opposite. That's why there was no big media splash; no change is no news.
-Billy
I enjoyed it, and it definitely was about mathematics -- the main character was a mathematical genius.
-Billy
We do have the entire OS installation backed up. That's what a hard drive "image" is.
Of course. But you lose a lot with that versus the more flexible combined backup -- for example, you become unable to track changing uses, and unable to notice when something which shouldn't change does. In a combined dynamic backup, you'll notice quickly that 700 workstations have the same file (word.exe) but two of them have a different file in the same name and place. Why? Could it be a virus infection? Easy to check -- and easy to fix, once you recognise it.
And we can't allow most people to locally store their files, because most of them are accessed by more than one person.
This is a CLASSICAL example of putting the cart before the horse. The IS department isn't here to "allow" people to do things in order to make the people do their job; it's there to help them do things as they do their job. You don't FORCE the people to put files on the network in order to share; they do it because it's the easiest way. They don't need the additional motivation of having no other way to ensure a backup; they would do so without that motivation, for the reasons you specify.
Anyhow, in your original post, you spoke about backing up personal shares, which don't have anything to do with data sharing anyhow. The ONLY reason to have personal shares is to allow backups using old technology.
-Billy
Good prejudice -- Mises is awesome reading, and I agree with the rest of your points here. Except that you have no other prejudices, of course :-), but that's obvious.
:-)
Well... you imply that no people calling themselves Libertarians are idiots, which is false on its face. I won't attempt to compute a L/l idiodicy ratio, but I will laugh at the thought...
But the free market is a free market of value (not cash), and open source fits right in. And that was my point.
This nails the fine distinction the author of the original paper was making. He lists two expected motives for participating in a project: 1) their boss told them to, or 2) someone offered them money to.
The full scope of the free market is much larger than that (as you state), expanding in general to include me doing something because I judge that the benefit to be gained from doing it is higher than the benefit to be gained by doing something else (including doing nothing).
In other words, his definition of the "market" is an older, more restrictive one (as you'd expect for someone basing his work on a 1930 economic work). Mises' definition includes his, and is in fact much more useful -- but his is nonetheless a valuable subcategory of the market, since it forms the basis for a theory of business growth.
So essentially, his paper does what his abstract says: it fits open source into a theory of corporate growth, thereby producing results which attempt to predict and evaluate data on project size.
I'm still digesting the paper as a whole, but so far it seems quite good, neglecting the terminology error of mistaking the "market" for a small subset of the market (I think we could more accurately call his so-called "market" the "cash-up-front demand market", since it's based on someone offering you a fixed amount of cash).
It's interesting that he also misses a major group which IS outside of the market: bureaucracies.
-Billy
Because a hobby is FAR from the only way of gaining the result we're discussing. Many open-source programs are initially written as a hobby; but much work on them is written as part of a company.
There's no need for him to look at just one of the many diverse motivations possible; the goal is to look at the results, and check whether they're sustainable.
Hobbys or no hobbys.
-Billy
You're right and you're wrong.
Yes, classical liberal economics (the a priori discipline) encompasses open source, and explains its success quite well; but at the same time, there are broad financial models within that discipline which fail to explain open source, even though open source has financial consequences. This paper examines open source with the intent of fitting it into some of those models.
I'm using the term 'economics' to describe the science which examines the results of human actions and choices, while 'finance' is the subcategory of that which examines only intercomparable human actions and choices, and which uses money as the instrument of comparison. A better choice of words would be to use 'praxeology' for the first term, and 'economics' for the second.
See von Mises' text 'Human Action' for MANY more details. In that text he covers praxeology in general and economics in specific. Highly recommended, and available as a free ebook on mises.org.
Oh, and although Mises is the poster child of the Libertarians, he wasn't one and couldn't have been one (there weren't any at the time). So check your prejudices at the door. A lot of what he says is valid even under non-Libertarian assumptions, and much of the rest is valid as long as you don't try to apply it too far (as most Libertarians do).
Note the big L -- I'm a libertarian, but I'm not a Libertarian.
-Billy
It's a FAQ, not a paper. In other words, its designed to help orient readers to the design space and give them a staring point for research and comparison. I assume that the FAQ's readers are smart enough not to try to use the FAQ as a CS textbook.
;-).
What on earth does that have to do with your claim that "with arch, you can use standard tools to access past revisions" (implying VERY specifically that you can't do that with Subversion). The entire point of the document is to compare Subversion and arch; instead, you're allegedly comparing databases versus file systems.
"Allegedly" because you're actually comparing your special-purpose database to Subversion's use of BDB (or whatever they switch to when they've had enough of that).
That second point isn't some loopy overgeneralization about databases: it's an observation about how the implementation "came together" around simple file formats.
In a FAQ about the history of arch, that makes sense. In a FAQ about comparing Subversion versus arch, it doesn't. Frankly, your statement here doesn't even make sense, considering what you're actually SAYING in that document. You're NOT giving a history; you're making a very specific claim about present capability.
I'm REALLY impressed with arch. I like the documentation I've read, like the software. I'm not an enemy. But I HATE, abhor, detest this kind of sniping against other projects.
Second, what I've tried to say in the FAQ is not that databases are overapplied (that's for another discussion) but rather that arch's standard-file-formats and ordinary filesystem tree orientation resulted in a very tiny, simple implementation that nevertheless has many of the desirable semantic and performance characteristics people often presume require a database.
Again, context is very important. The context of this FAQ is a contrast between Subversion and arch; in this FAQ, any bullet list claiming a feature especially for arch is implicitly a claim that the same feature is unavailable or very difficult in Subversion.
In fact, I would definitely say that by the definition of the term "database" you've written your own database. It's probably not relational, but RDBs aren't the only type, nor are they unambiguously the best. So you aren't scoring any points on the "databases are not needed" scoreboard. All you're doing is proving "I can write my own database which serves my needs better than some general-purpose database" (I would tend to agree, even without the beautiful evidence of arch to support your argument).
Of course, this sort of claim doesn't belong in a comparison with Subversion either, although it's certainly worth some good discussion.
You know what, I'm wondering if you're talking about the same FAQ I am. Look at the link which started this, and make sure we're on the same page.
With all due respect, maybe I'm not the one who needs to work on his reading comprehension
-Billy
Oh, I agree with you entirely, then. Yes, I've also been watching ReiserFS for some time.
I have to note, though, that high performance databases don't run as layers on top of the filesystem; they run directly on the drives, with no filesystem intervention. ReiserFS won't change that; it may be better than ext2fs for database tasks, but it's still not tuned for big-league work. And it never will be -- it's not targetted for that.
-Billy
Okay. Why did you compare local version storage versus remote version storage, then? This isn't a database versus files issue; it's a local versus remote issue.
Anyhow, I certainly agree that arch has this, and other, advantages. (Many others.) None of them make arch "more managable" or "more usable" or anything else than subversion; they simply give the two different characteristics. Remote files have HUGE advantages as well, in the right environment.
-Billy
Why are you replying to me with this? It doesn't seem to fit any of my posts. Perhaps you meant to reply to someone else?
-Billy
You mention using standard database tools to manage subversion. What's so wrong about standard filesystem tools to manage arch then?
Nothing. Nothing's wrong with using standard filesystem tools to manage arch. Nothing's wrong with arch -- or at least I have nothing to criticise.
What's wrong is arch's idiodic propaganda stating that Subversion is magically inferior because it uses a database rather than a file system.
The one weakness in arch is that it manages the existing filesystem as a database but accepts the use of non-database tools to alter it. You can use grep and so on to maintain it, but you'll certainly destroy it if you don't know exactly what you're doing, since filesystem tools can't possibly know how to maintain a database, while database tools must.
But this isn't a big deal to me -- after all, you can have a perfectly good database which isn't a version control system, so your database management tools can cause a lot of problems as well when used by an idiot. So again, I have no complaints with arch's approach. Only its marketing.
-Billy
It's hard to read a document which starts out so fundamentally /wrong/. It claims that using "ordinary files" makes its format somehow more managable -- what baloney. By using "ordinary files" it's actually choosing to implement its own proprietary database. If you want to manage it, you have to learn its format.
Subversion's not ahead here; but by using a standard database, at least you can use standard database tools to manage it. You still have to learn, of course.
I like arch. It's a cool system. But nonsense like that...
-Billy
You're confusing cause and effect. The reason that you don't back up info that's on user's PCs isn't that there isn't any backupable info; it's that it's too hard right now. If it were easy, you'd be doing it, because you're dead wrong that there's nothing worth backing up.
For example, I'd say that the entire OS installation is worth a backup -- especially since you'll only have to keep one backup for the entire network (plus a few minor variations). I'd also say that any info which you would have put on the big global drive should usually be on the user's computer instead, so they don't have to contend for bandwidth when working on it (when all they want is safety).
There are already programs which can backup user desktops -- Previo works very much like what's described here, for example.
-Billy
Debian's bug management system. It tracks bug for packages; it's helped me fix a few bugs in my software just as a side effect.
-Billy
How do you do offsite backups of every machine in your enterprise right now? Whoops -- you DON'T. You only offsite-backup the servers.
With this system backing up every PC offsite becomes possible: you simply add a PC to the network with its own daily tape backup, and configure the Mojonation network to store one reconstruction of every unique file on it. Then drive or mail that tape every day/week to your offsite storage.
Boom -- offsite backup for the whole network, without having to backup multiple copies of the same file.
-Billy