Wow. Am I out of the loop, or what? We're up to ext*4* now? I'm still using (happily) ext2. Yeah, I've heard of btrfs, but why change if what you're using works? Journaling makes sense for servers; not so much for personal boxes.
Yes, you are way behind. Ext3 became part of Linux eleven years ago and added journaling to ext2. Some of us have been using superior journaling file systems like Reiserfs3, XFS, JFS and Reiserfs4 for many years. Journaling is a good idea for all file systems because it allows much stronger metadata and sometimes data consistency guarantees. In other words, though hardware failures and unexpected shutdowns can cause data loss on any file system, journaled ones are more likely to know which data are corrupt and which aren't. Btrfs improves on that by also checksumming everything so no corruption can ever go unnoticed. This is increasingly important as disks get bigger and errors become more likely. Another thing that's perhaps especially nice for desktop and laptop systems is that journeled filesystems can generally be checked for consistency very quickly, meaning you much less oftend need to do a lengthy fsck.
The problems with Pulseaudio were partly caused by buggy drivers, partly by buggy programs and partly by distributions switching to Pulseaudio before the other problems were sufficiently addressed. There were plenty of audio problems before it came along and neither keeping things as they were nor using jack for everyone would have been trouble-free. Jack developers have never advocated it for ordinary desktop users. My experience on both desktop and laptop has been that after a couple of problematic releases of Ubuntu, audio became much less painful overall. Now, dealing with audio is generally much easier than before Pulseaudio came along.
Re:btrfs needed the work
on
Linux 3.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Checksumming, built-in RAID support, snapshotting, transparent compression, online volume resizing, et alia. Basically, a lot of stuff that is very interesting at the enterprise level and to serious nerds who like to do strange things with their volume management, but nothing particularly important to the average user. It's basically a non-Oracle-owned version of ZFS, if you know what that is.
Checksumming is useful to anyone who doesn't like corrupt data. Transparent compression is useful to anyone who likes to fit more stuff on their drives and access it faster. Btrfs is technically superior to ZFS though currently less mature. For better or worse, Btrfs is largely developed by Oracle employees so they do own part of it. Oracle could simply stop paying people to develop it but they can't take it away from Linux. Both ZFS and and Btrfs are available under Free and Open Source licenses though the licenses are are not compatible which is the primary reason ZFS cannot be included as part of Linux.
I currently use Firefox most of the time, but I don't think there's anything wrong with people using Chromium. Competition is good. Mozilla took on Microsoft while they were complacent and helped improve things for everyone. I don't think Mozilla was ever as complacent as Microsoft, but the increased competition from both Google and Microsoft is now pushing them to try new things. It may not always look pretty, but I think the end result can only be higher quality Free Software for everyone.
I'd agree if I thought the project was worthwhile overall. However, I don't see much point in "installing" a web app in a platform-dependent way since that's antithetical to the basic concept of a web app. I think a better area to work on is more general management of browser sessions, processes and profiles. I can currently launch Firefox with a different profile and have independent sessions going on but it's not as convenient as it should be.
I don't think the issue is the existance or basic functionality of a "marketplace". The Linux support is for "installing" web apps so they appear to be native. I don't think the app itself behaves any differently regardless of whether it came from a "marketplace."
There is no need to discuss forking since Mozilla is already working on it. It's simply that the Linux support has been given a lower priority than OSX and Windows. If you want it to happen more quickly, contribute to the already existing Mozilla project rather than talk about forking.
The issue is hardware support. If you buy a Mac, Apple has made sure the hardware works with their drivers. Machines sold with Windows usually work well because either Microsoft or the manufacturer has made sure the drivers and hardware are compatible. If you installing an OS on a machine which was sold with a different OS, you can never expect the same level of hardware compatibility. Try installing OSX on a machine sold with Windows. Installing Windows on most Macs today will work, but some of the devices like internal video might not be fully functional.
If you buy a computer from a vendor that supports Ubuntu or other GNU/Linux distribution, it can "just work." I convinced my sister to buy a Dell laptop with Ubuntu and she saved a lot of money compared to similar hardware with Windows. It hasn't been perfect in every respect, but there have not been problems with driver compatibility. Also don't forget about the millions of Android phones that "just work" without their users even knowing what Linux is.
The slashdot crowd doesn't understand that and thus they don't understand why Apple is so successful. The "marketing" crap is your best attempt to rationalize Apple's success without having to expand your tiny little world.
Meanwhile, Apple is on their way to being the first $1 trillion company because nearly everyone else in the world understands something that you don't: "The ONLY point of technology is to make life easier for humans"--by that definition, Apple cranks out the best technology using the best engineering. Deal with it.
Your expert analysis fails to account for the continued existence of Microsoft, Android and pretty much every non-Apple technology. Could it be that you think "nearly everyone else in the world" means "everyone who agrees with me"?
You can't talk about "actually committed the phyical crime" without defining the crime. There could be a law that makes it a crime to stuff a frozen chicken up one's jumper, something much more observable than what goes on inside someone's head. AFAICT from TFA, all this guy did was communicate with "an alleged contact in al-Qaeda" and express willingness to become part of an "active terrorist unit." If that's enough to make him a terrorist, a woman saying "I'm going to kill my husband" could be convicted of attempted murder.
Contemplating violence is quite different from taking concrete, provable steps toward that goal. The article is extremely light on what this guy planned to do or what steps he took.
You seem to be forgetting that much of Europe is part of NATO, the purpose of which is the mutual security of all members. Also, I would have thought that an attack from Iran or North Korea is a lot more likely than from Russia, possibly validating NATO's possition. However, I'm not so sure any more where the greater threat lies.
I think the Russians are being unreasonable, but diplomacy is certainly essential. It could turn out that installing missile defenses decreases security overall and I certainly don't want the US government spending money on any unnecessary weapon systems. Don't be too hasty to knock MAD. It's worked so far.
Paying for media playback is lame, but Microsoft is only part of the problem. Apple, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Sony, Dolby and many others are also part of the MPEG-LA which is the primary organization responsible for the shakedown.
Think of it as an age where the Wright brothers have just pulled their plane to a stop only to be greeted by an army of process servers serving them with dozens of expensive patent lawsuits on the shape of the prop, the design of the stick, even the IDEA of a "craft that flies."
Actually, the Wright brothers were the ones attempting to prevent others from innovating in aviation in their time. Thankfully they didn't have the army of lawyers to accomplish this and competitors like Curtiss passed them by. Despite what the Wrights may have thought, they were only two men involved in a diverse worldwide movement of innovation toward powered flight. They managed to make the first powered flights but they weren't that far ahead of contemporaries.
He never said the two are the same. The key word here is "indistinguishable", i.e. they appear the same.
The problem with magical thinking is that it applies a false cause-and-effect relationship to the world. You assume that if you do X, then Y will follow, in a case where no such relationship actually exists, beyond maybe the coincidental. Tim Minchin has a nice sketch about it: http://youtu.be/pQjqxayxwt4
Appearance is what I'm talking about. I'm always asking questions and trying to reexamine my assumptions and beliefs. If "magical thinking" means unquestioning belief despite evidence to the contrary, that's not what I'm talking about.
I doubt even Oracle has many programmers who would agree with this ludicrous position. Perhaps the exodus of smart Sun people has inspired the same in the rest of Oracle and it's just executives, lawyers and marketing people left.
Just don't expect anyone to take interest in your language if you copyright it.
I'm pretty sure Sun never made any ludicrous claim that they held a copyright on the Java language rather than specific implementations of it. There's a long history of independent implementations (as opposed to Microsoft's derivative of Sun's code) based on the good public specifications from Sun that they never attacked. The fact that Oracle is completely reversing this stance is not only illogical, but extremely anti-competitive. We've been worried about Microsoft patents on DotNet stuff for a long time, but it seems we were looking at the wrong anti-competitive behemoth. Perhaps the deepest irony is that while Sun sued Microsoft because Microsoft's version wasn't compatible with theirs, Oracle is suing Google because Google's implementation is compatible with theirs at a source level.
A day doesn't pass on this site without some asshole presenting a debunked, discredited and obsolete idea (hardware virtualization, non-network-transparent graphics environment, free market, now religion and superstition) as something new and useful, without even presenting an evidence that he is familiar with the reason why it is considered debunked, discredited and obsolete. Leave alone, making an argument against those reasons.
It must be nice to be so secure in your well-supported arguments.
I've found that that kind of anthropomorphization is useful as placeholders for other, complex causations. Perhaps the car has a mechanical or design flaw that makes full throttle when it's cold problematic. Perhaps the beer bottle has a manufacturer defect making it extra-hard to open. In either case, anthropomorphizing it can be a useful placeholder for the exact cause of your difficulties.
I think that's a very good distillation of TFA. I would go a little farther and question the inherent difference between something you can't explain and magic. I think of the supernatural as things that we can't yet understand rather than things that no one can ever understand. As Arthur C. Clarke said, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
So much of what happens around us is far to complex for to understand in every detail. So to make up for what we don't understand, everyday life requires operating on many assumptions and intuitions that can't be tested scientifically. Just because I believe that there exists a rational explanation for everything that happens, it doesn't follow that I do or ever will know all those explanations. Indeed, without omnipotence, how can anyone be sure that there is a rational explanation for everything? Operating on that unprovable assumption is what enables scientific discovery.
What kind of moron takes something that "look[s] like a cell phone attached to a remote control car with some exposed wires protruding" onto an airplane?
What kind of moron supports those eroding all of our constitutional rights by accepting the idea that just because someone does something out of the ordinary, they must be a threat? If the person who brought the device on the plane were a terrorist, he would be a moron. Hopefully there are many such terrorists. The fact that all of us have to start thinking like terrorists to avoid looking suspicious is the best evidence that the terrorists are winning.
This isn't a criminal charge, but a civil suit. I wouldn't be surprised if shouting "Jump!" at someone on a rooftop could expose one to such liability as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Am I out of the loop, or what? We're up to ext*4* now? I'm still using (happily) ext2. Yeah, I've heard of btrfs, but why change if what you're using works? Journaling makes sense for servers; not so much for personal boxes.
Yes, you are way behind. Ext3 became part of Linux eleven years ago and added journaling to ext2. Some of us have been using superior journaling file systems like Reiserfs3, XFS, JFS and Reiserfs4 for many years. Journaling is a good idea for all file systems because it allows much stronger metadata and sometimes data consistency guarantees. In other words, though hardware failures and unexpected shutdowns can cause data loss on any file system, journaled ones are more likely to know which data are corrupt and which aren't. Btrfs improves on that by also checksumming everything so no corruption can ever go unnoticed. This is increasingly important as disks get bigger and errors become more likely. Another thing that's perhaps especially nice for desktop and laptop systems is that journeled filesystems can generally be checked for consistency very quickly, meaning you much less oftend need to do a lengthy fsck.
The problems with Pulseaudio were partly caused by buggy drivers, partly by buggy programs and partly by distributions switching to Pulseaudio before the other problems were sufficiently addressed. There were plenty of audio problems before it came along and neither keeping things as they were nor using jack for everyone would have been trouble-free. Jack developers have never advocated it for ordinary desktop users. My experience on both desktop and laptop has been that after a couple of problematic releases of Ubuntu, audio became much less painful overall. Now, dealing with audio is generally much easier than before Pulseaudio came along.
Checksumming, built-in RAID support, snapshotting, transparent compression, online volume resizing, et alia. Basically, a lot of stuff that is very interesting at the enterprise level and to serious nerds who like to do strange things with their volume management, but nothing particularly important to the average user. It's basically a non-Oracle-owned version of ZFS, if you know what that is.
Checksumming is useful to anyone who doesn't like corrupt data. Transparent compression is useful to anyone who likes to fit more stuff on their drives and access it faster. Btrfs is technically superior to ZFS though currently less mature. For better or worse, Btrfs is largely developed by Oracle employees so they do own part of it. Oracle could simply stop paying people to develop it but they can't take it away from Linux. Both ZFS and and Btrfs are available under Free and Open Source licenses though the licenses are are not compatible which is the primary reason ZFS cannot be included as part of Linux.
I currently use Firefox most of the time, but I don't think there's anything wrong with people using Chromium. Competition is good. Mozilla took on Microsoft while they were complacent and helped improve things for everyone. I don't think Mozilla was ever as complacent as Microsoft, but the increased competition from both Google and Microsoft is now pushing them to try new things. It may not always look pretty, but I think the end result can only be higher quality Free Software for everyone.
I'd agree if I thought the project was worthwhile overall. However, I don't see much point in "installing" a web app in a platform-dependent way since that's antithetical to the basic concept of a web app. I think a better area to work on is more general management of browser sessions, processes and profiles. I can currently launch Firefox with a different profile and have independent sessions going on but it's not as convenient as it should be.
The reign of the lizard is dead. I, for one, welcome our shiny synthetic overlords.
I don't think the issue is the existance or basic functionality of a "marketplace". The Linux support is for "installing" web apps so they appear to be native. I don't think the app itself behaves any differently regardless of whether it came from a "marketplace."
There is no need to discuss forking since Mozilla is already working on it. It's simply that the Linux support has been given a lower priority than OSX and Windows. If you want it to happen more quickly, contribute to the already existing Mozilla project rather than talk about forking.
It does fire the entire foam dart.
The issue is hardware support. If you buy a Mac, Apple has made sure the hardware works with their drivers. Machines sold with Windows usually work well because either Microsoft or the manufacturer has made sure the drivers and hardware are compatible. If you installing an OS on a machine which was sold with a different OS, you can never expect the same level of hardware compatibility. Try installing OSX on a machine sold with Windows. Installing Windows on most Macs today will work, but some of the devices like internal video might not be fully functional.
If you buy a computer from a vendor that supports Ubuntu or other GNU/Linux distribution, it can "just work." I convinced my sister to buy a Dell laptop with Ubuntu and she saved a lot of money compared to similar hardware with Windows. It hasn't been perfect in every respect, but there have not been problems with driver compatibility. Also don't forget about the millions of Android phones that "just work" without their users even knowing what Linux is.
The slashdot crowd doesn't understand that and thus they don't understand why Apple is so successful. The "marketing" crap is your best attempt to rationalize Apple's success without having to expand your tiny little world.
Meanwhile, Apple is on their way to being the first $1 trillion company because nearly everyone else in the world understands something that you don't: "The ONLY point of technology is to make life easier for humans"--by that definition, Apple cranks out the best technology using the best engineering. Deal with it.
Your expert analysis fails to account for the continued existence of Microsoft, Android and pretty much every non-Apple technology. Could it be that you think "nearly everyone else in the world" means "everyone who agrees with me"?
You can't talk about "actually committed the phyical crime" without defining the crime. There could be a law that makes it a crime to stuff a frozen chicken up one's jumper, something much more observable than what goes on inside someone's head. AFAICT from TFA, all this guy did was communicate with "an alleged contact in al-Qaeda" and express willingness to become part of an "active terrorist unit." If that's enough to make him a terrorist, a woman saying "I'm going to kill my husband" could be convicted of attempted murder.
Contemplating violence is quite different from taking concrete, provable steps toward that goal. The article is extremely light on what this guy planned to do or what steps he took.
You seem to be forgetting that much of Europe is part of NATO, the purpose of which is the mutual security of all members. Also, I would have thought that an attack from Iran or North Korea is a lot more likely than from Russia, possibly validating NATO's possition. However, I'm not so sure any more where the greater threat lies.
I think the Russians are being unreasonable, but diplomacy is certainly essential. It could turn out that installing missile defenses decreases security overall and I certainly don't want the US government spending money on any unnecessary weapon systems. Don't be too hasty to knock MAD. It's worked so far.
Paying for media playback is lame, but Microsoft is only part of the problem. Apple, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Sony, Dolby and many others are also part of the MPEG-LA which is the primary organization responsible for the shakedown.
This is only partly Microsoft's fault. You can blame the DVD Forum and anyone else MS has to get patent licenses from just as much.
Think of it as an age where the Wright brothers have just pulled their plane to a stop only to be greeted by an army of process servers serving them with dozens of expensive patent lawsuits on the shape of the prop, the design of the stick, even the IDEA of a "craft that flies."
Actually, the Wright brothers were the ones attempting to prevent others from innovating in aviation in their time. Thankfully they didn't have the army of lawyers to accomplish this and competitors like Curtiss passed them by. Despite what the Wrights may have thought, they were only two men involved in a diverse worldwide movement of innovation toward powered flight. They managed to make the first powered flights but they weren't that far ahead of contemporaries.
The silent, automatic updates only work on systems lacking decent package management (Windows and OSX), just like Chrome.
The Clarke quote is being overused.
He never said the two are the same. The key word here is "indistinguishable", i.e. they appear the same.
The problem with magical thinking is that it applies a false cause-and-effect relationship to the world. You assume that if you do X, then Y will follow, in a case where no such relationship actually exists, beyond maybe the coincidental. Tim Minchin has a nice sketch about it: http://youtu.be/pQjqxayxwt4
Appearance is what I'm talking about. I'm always asking questions and trying to reexamine my assumptions and beliefs. If "magical thinking" means unquestioning belief despite evidence to the contrary, that's not what I'm talking about.
I doubt even Oracle has many programmers who would agree with this ludicrous position. Perhaps the exodus of smart Sun people has inspired the same in the rest of Oracle and it's just executives, lawyers and marketing people left.
Just don't expect anyone to take interest in your language if you copyright it.
I'm pretty sure Sun never made any ludicrous claim that they held a copyright on the Java language rather than specific implementations of it. There's a long history of independent implementations (as opposed to Microsoft's derivative of Sun's code) based on the good public specifications from Sun that they never attacked. The fact that Oracle is completely reversing this stance is not only illogical, but extremely anti-competitive. We've been worried about Microsoft patents on DotNet stuff for a long time, but it seems we were looking at the wrong anti-competitive behemoth. Perhaps the deepest irony is that while Sun sued Microsoft because Microsoft's version wasn't compatible with theirs, Oracle is suing Google because Google's implementation is compatible with theirs at a source level.
A day doesn't pass on this site without some asshole presenting a debunked, discredited and obsolete idea (hardware virtualization, non-network-transparent graphics environment, free market, now religion and superstition) as something new and useful, without even presenting an evidence that he is familiar with the reason why it is considered debunked, discredited and obsolete. Leave alone, making an argument against those reasons.
It must be nice to be so secure in your well-supported arguments.
I've found that that kind of anthropomorphization is useful as placeholders for other, complex causations. Perhaps the car has a mechanical or design flaw that makes full throttle when it's cold problematic. Perhaps the beer bottle has a manufacturer defect making it extra-hard to open. In either case, anthropomorphizing it can be a useful placeholder for the exact cause of your difficulties.
I think that's a very good distillation of TFA. I would go a little farther and question the inherent difference between something you can't explain and magic. I think of the supernatural as things that we can't yet understand rather than things that no one can ever understand. As Arthur C. Clarke said, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
So much of what happens around us is far to complex for to understand in every detail. So to make up for what we don't understand, everyday life requires operating on many assumptions and intuitions that can't be tested scientifically. Just because I believe that there exists a rational explanation for everything that happens, it doesn't follow that I do or ever will know all those explanations. Indeed, without omnipotence, how can anyone be sure that there is a rational explanation for everything? Operating on that unprovable assumption is what enables scientific discovery.
What kind of moron takes something that "look[s] like a cell phone attached to a remote control car with some exposed wires protruding" onto an airplane?
What kind of moron supports those eroding all of our constitutional rights by accepting the idea that just because someone does something out of the ordinary, they must be a threat? If the person who brought the device on the plane were a terrorist, he would be a moron. Hopefully there are many such terrorists. The fact that all of us have to start thinking like terrorists to avoid looking suspicious is the best evidence that the terrorists are winning.
This isn't a criminal charge, but a civil suit. I wouldn't be surprised if shouting "Jump!" at someone on a rooftop could expose one to such liability as well.