Nah nah nah. It's going to be great. Picture this. You manage a university computer lab. The computers all have identical software, and all of the students files are stored on a network share. When computers are not in use, you'd like to dedicate the cycles to a long-standing distributed computation for experiments carried out by one of the departments.
The student logs in and a disk image runs their OS of choice, they don't have to reboot or know much, they just click an icon saying which OS, which instantly is presented to them. A batch process manager removes the load from the distributed experiment from their machine.
Or, perhaps something that's already fielded. You're a graduate student, and want to emulate 1000 compute nodes for a distributed computing experiment, you log into emulab, and tell the 50 that you've signed up for to boot 20 OS's a piece, and emulate a 1000 node network.
Or, perhaps you're studying viruses (this has also been done), and want to build an Internet scale honeynet.
Or, perhaps you're running a large server farm. You want an easy way to load balance a multitude of services, so you can run something that looks like 100 servers on perhaps 50. By dynamically balancing across nodes, services can automatically adjust themselves, independently of mechanisms built into their software (to some degree). When you want to add new hardware to the network, you just plug in the machine, and tasks start being farmed to it. When you want to retire some, you just tell the manager to stop moving tasks onto that machine, and wait for the tasks on that machine to move off.
Briefly put, VMMs rock. You have to think outside of "geeks playing with VMWare" to really see the interesting applications though.
You know, if you pirate the DVD, the folks will usually cut that warning and the adds out to save space and bandwidth.
That's not so much a thought for the pirates out there, but for the movie studios. I enjoy a solid 20 years of commercials for movies that I'm uninterested in whenever I watch "Animal House." Of course, the RIAA doesn't have to worry about this. They can hammer their customers pretty soundly and nothing bad will ever happen to them.
They don't even need a monopoly for this, their customers practically beg for more, thanks to how easily high school kids are manipulated, and the fact that the public caters to them.
Neither, both look like modern realizations of a number of technologies that exist and/or have existed for a while. If nobody's suing, what difference does it make?
Yes. I hate when noise blazes out of my laptop as well. I had forgotten that it wasn't muted.
And, yeah, I wasn't sure that it was a joke either when he said that. Those white-power folks are nuts, so, you never know! Just to clarify... definitely not one.
I use LaTeX for documents that I want to look nice, or KWord if I want to open a Word document.
I use gnumeric as a spreadsheet.
I find OpenOffice to be kind of sluggish by relation, which is my biggest criticism of it. I'm sure it's a nice product and all, but I just think that it doesn't quite live up to the hype.
I think that everyone's like "ok, we kind of win the web browser wars... lets move to Office," the difference is, firefox really is better than IE. Can you really say that OpenOffice is better than MS Office?
I don't know, is it? I don't tend to think of it as such. When I say that, I mean, it makes it easy for me to put references, citations, and equations into my paper. When I am putting together a submission, I can count on a LaTeX submission packet from the conference, and it formats everything correctly with the minimal necessary hassle.
So, that's where I'm coming from when I say that. To cite that others can't live without it, I'm taking a small survey of the people who surround me (M.Eng and PhD students and postdocs and professors in computer science, heck, I'll even mention that I know a few who use Word instead). Perhaps my sampling is skewed, because, yes, I'm talking about one of those few limited disciplines, but, even then, it's based on my own (admittedly limited) experience.
I don't wear a LaTeX hat. I don't go to LaTeX conventions. I don't have a bunch of LaTeX merchandise. I don't rant on and on about it in discussion boards (I think that this is the second time I've ever mentioned it on Slashdot (the first being the GP)). I don't tell my friends to all go out and use LaTeX.
Honestly, I don't think that it fits the profile of fanboyism, rather, that's just an anecdote. You could cite a lot of reasons not to use it, and I'd probably defer to those reasons (it's not WYSIWYG).
Warn us next time! I'm at Cornell University, the most politically correct place on the planet... sitting here, minding my own business. We load this video to check it out, and people hear the words "white power" screaming from my laptop.
Wow. I appreciate the reply. I always kind of worry about offending people, unless I'm in some sort of serious discussion, then I bare my teeth. It comes from being an AI guy... get me around Systems folks too long, and I play just as rough as they do, haha!
Anyway, on a lighter note, this new engine looks pretty hot, and like it could take MySQL in a lot of directions that I never really foresaw it going.
I hope that it goes well, and you don't mind my gentle prodding at MySQL fanboyism, which I lump together with OpenOffice and Linux fanboyism. I've used all three (I'm typing from a Linux box, and used MySQL with InnoDB plenty (though, still dislike MyISAM), and used to use OpenOffice.org (a long time ago, before discovering what I consider to be superior alternatives for my needs).
Well, I wouldn't go as far into insulting the team as you did, but, I'll have a pop at it, because it really bothers me.
It's 99.95% fanboyism.
Simply put, MySQL is a well-known FOSS database, and, so, it picked up a lot of fanboys. It was the only thing that they learned to use, and they didn't know much about databases in general, so, they touted its glories at the top of their lungs (not realizing how stupid they sounded).
It happens a lot. It probably really hurts the open source community too.
Think about it. Will 99.95% of the user community switch to open source products because they think that software developers don't deserve to get paid for writing software but, rather, should be paid for providing services? Do most of them hate Microsoft? Does Windows XP really crash very much? Is the version of Linux that they are likely to run all that fast, or up-to-date? Is OpenOffice.org really better than MS Office in any way that someone who doesn't hold these ideals likely to identify with?
For bonus points, do most of the people who proclaim this most vehemently mean it, or are they just barking it out because they think it will make them cool?
At the end of the day, I see in MySQL fanboyism a lot of what's wrong with the sort of "barking out whatever sounds cool," contingent of the community. Is Abiword better than OpenOffice's writer application? Probably, though, I use LaTeX (which most grad students couldn't live without). Is gnumeric better than the spreadsheet app?
If you ask people to just pick whatever application is popular, because of some mob-rule sentiment, you're likely to have more things blow up in people's faces than you are likely to win converts. Just wait until thousands of offices and schools with super-out-dated computers figure out that OpenOffice runs slower than MS word, and have to upgrade hardware. I got a lousy taste in my mouth when I tried to directly convert a database from Oracle to MySQL, and suddenly had bad records inserted, because the database counted on getting errors back from referential integrity constraints.
I don't want to offend MySQL devs, but, eh, here goes.
MyISAM isn't so hot. It doesn't support transactions... it won't enforce your referential integrity constraints... it doesn't work like, probably, it should. It indexes things so you can look them up quickly with SQL queries.
InnoDB on the other hand, sticks all of the features into MySQL that it needs in order to be considered a serious database engine.
When Oracle bought InnoDB, they bought all of the stuff that makes MySQL actually useful. In order to stay competitive, MySQL will need a new storage engine... or perhaps keep updating the GPL'd version of InnoDB. The response has been to get a new commerical engine that works out of the box open sourced, so they can keep the edge that they need in order to stay in the game.
Ok, you go be like that. I'm just sitting over here way too dumb to comment. I think that I'll go be an annoying little shill like you elsewhere on Slashdot.
You can choose not to shop at Wal*Mart if you like. Ironically, that's part of the free market as well. The market forces that the consumer places upon the market.
Perhaps if others follow suit, Wal*Mart will be less powerful.
And, eh, I'll point out what I like. It's not like I didn't get a thousand replies going, "nuh uh, Wal*Mart has a lot of money, and, as such, is evil."
That's called the free market. Game design studios could choose other retail outlets if they chose to do so. Wal*Mart doesn't have to carry anything that they don't like.
There are probably lots better reasons to hate Wal*Mart than for having buyers and communicating their intentions to vendors.
You know what would be amazing? If we could talk about technology on Slashdot again, and leave Bush out of the conversation. Seriously. What prompted you to say that? Was it political, or about technology (and the troll who tells me that technology is political should lay off)?
Slashdot Mirror
Nah nah nah. It's going to be great. Picture this. You manage a university computer lab. The computers all have identical software, and all of the students files are stored on a network share. When computers are not in use, you'd like to dedicate the cycles to a long-standing distributed computation for experiments carried out by one of the departments.
The student logs in and a disk image runs their OS of choice, they don't have to reboot or know much, they just click an icon saying which OS, which instantly is presented to them. A batch process manager removes the load from the distributed experiment from their machine.
Or, perhaps something that's already fielded. You're a graduate student, and want to emulate 1000 compute nodes for a distributed computing experiment, you log into emulab, and tell the 50 that you've signed up for to boot 20 OS's a piece, and emulate a 1000 node network.
Or, perhaps you're studying viruses (this has also been done), and want to build an Internet scale honeynet.
Or, perhaps you're running a large server farm. You want an easy way to load balance a multitude of services, so you can run something that looks like 100 servers on perhaps 50. By dynamically balancing across nodes, services can automatically adjust themselves, independently of mechanisms built into their software (to some degree). When you want to add new hardware to the network, you just plug in the machine, and tasks start being farmed to it. When you want to retire some, you just tell the manager to stop moving tasks onto that machine, and wait for the tasks on that machine to move off.
Briefly put, VMMs rock. You have to think outside of "geeks playing with VMWare" to really see the interesting applications though.
You know, if you pirate the DVD, the folks will usually cut that warning and the adds out to save space and bandwidth.
That's not so much a thought for the pirates out there, but for the movie studios. I enjoy a solid 20 years of commercials for movies that I'm uninterested in whenever I watch "Animal House." Of course, the RIAA doesn't have to worry about this. They can hammer their customers pretty soundly and nothing bad will ever happen to them.
They don't even need a monopoly for this, their customers practically beg for more, thanks to how easily high school kids are manipulated, and the fact that the public caters to them.
Neither, both look like modern realizations of a number of technologies that exist and/or have existed for a while. If nobody's suing, what difference does it make?
Two words: Diversity Arches.
Yes. I hate when noise blazes out of my laptop as well. I had forgotten that it wasn't muted.
And, yeah, I wasn't sure that it was a joke either when he said that. Those white-power folks are nuts, so, you never know! Just to clarify... definitely not one.
I use LaTeX for documents that I want to look nice, or KWord if I want to open a Word document.
I use gnumeric as a spreadsheet.
I find OpenOffice to be kind of sluggish by relation, which is my biggest criticism of it. I'm sure it's a nice product and all, but I just think that it doesn't quite live up to the hype.
I think that everyone's like "ok, we kind of win the web browser wars... lets move to Office," the difference is, firefox really is better than IE. Can you really say that OpenOffice is better than MS Office?
We all know that China is going to be the first to line up and protect American corporate interests.
Hold on a second, I'm getting a message on my RedBerry.
I don't know, is it? I don't tend to think of it as such. When I say that, I mean, it makes it easy for me to put references, citations, and equations into my paper. When I am putting together a submission, I can count on a LaTeX submission packet from the conference, and it formats everything correctly with the minimal necessary hassle.
So, that's where I'm coming from when I say that. To cite that others can't live without it, I'm taking a small survey of the people who surround me (M.Eng and PhD students and postdocs and professors in computer science, heck, I'll even mention that I know a few who use Word instead). Perhaps my sampling is skewed, because, yes, I'm talking about one of those few limited disciplines, but, even then, it's based on my own (admittedly limited) experience.
I don't wear a LaTeX hat. I don't go to LaTeX conventions. I don't have a bunch of LaTeX merchandise. I don't rant on and on about it in discussion boards (I think that this is the second time I've ever mentioned it on Slashdot (the first being the GP)). I don't tell my friends to all go out and use LaTeX.
Honestly, I don't think that it fits the profile of fanboyism, rather, that's just an anecdote. You could cite a lot of reasons not to use it, and I'd probably defer to those reasons (it's not WYSIWYG).
SCO has customers?
That's really screwed up. I think, however, that the heritage of those laws is to prevent brothels.
Warn us next time! I'm at Cornell University, the most politically correct place on the planet... sitting here, minding my own business. We load this video to check it out, and people hear the words "white power" screaming from my laptop.
Wow. I appreciate the reply. I always kind of worry about offending people, unless I'm in some sort of serious discussion, then I bare my teeth. It comes from being an AI guy... get me around Systems folks too long, and I play just as rough as they do, haha!
Anyway, on a lighter note, this new engine looks pretty hot, and like it could take MySQL in a lot of directions that I never really foresaw it going.
I hope that it goes well, and you don't mind my gentle prodding at MySQL fanboyism, which I lump together with OpenOffice and Linux fanboyism. I've used all three (I'm typing from a Linux box, and used MySQL with InnoDB plenty (though, still dislike MyISAM), and used to use OpenOffice.org (a long time ago, before discovering what I consider to be superior alternatives for my needs).
Well, I wouldn't go as far into insulting the team as you did, but, I'll have a pop at it, because it really bothers me.
It's 99.95% fanboyism.
Simply put, MySQL is a well-known FOSS database, and, so, it picked up a lot of fanboys. It was the only thing that they learned to use, and they didn't know much about databases in general, so, they touted its glories at the top of their lungs (not realizing how stupid they sounded).
It happens a lot. It probably really hurts the open source community too.
Think about it. Will 99.95% of the user community switch to open source products because they think that software developers don't deserve to get paid for writing software but, rather, should be paid for providing services? Do most of them hate Microsoft? Does Windows XP really crash very much? Is the version of Linux that they are likely to run all that fast, or up-to-date? Is OpenOffice.org really better than MS Office in any way that someone who doesn't hold these ideals likely to identify with?
For bonus points, do most of the people who proclaim this most vehemently mean it, or are they just barking it out because they think it will make them cool?
At the end of the day, I see in MySQL fanboyism a lot of what's wrong with the sort of "barking out whatever sounds cool," contingent of the community. Is Abiword better than OpenOffice's writer application? Probably, though, I use LaTeX (which most grad students couldn't live without). Is gnumeric better than the spreadsheet app?
If you ask people to just pick whatever application is popular, because of some mob-rule sentiment, you're likely to have more things blow up in people's faces than you are likely to win converts. Just wait until thousands of offices and schools with super-out-dated computers figure out that OpenOffice runs slower than MS word, and have to upgrade hardware. I got a lousy taste in my mouth when I tried to directly convert a database from Oracle to MySQL, and suddenly had bad records inserted, because the database counted on getting errors back from referential integrity constraints.
That's kind of the thing.
I don't want to offend MySQL devs, but, eh, here goes.
MyISAM isn't so hot. It doesn't support transactions... it won't enforce your referential integrity constraints... it doesn't work like, probably, it should. It indexes things so you can look them up quickly with SQL queries.
InnoDB on the other hand, sticks all of the features into MySQL that it needs in order to be considered a serious database engine.
When Oracle bought InnoDB, they bought all of the stuff that makes MySQL actually useful. In order to stay competitive, MySQL will need a new storage engine... or perhaps keep updating the GPL'd version of InnoDB. The response has been to get a new commerical engine that works out of the box open sourced, so they can keep the edge that they need in order to stay in the game.
Did you really need to ask that in order for it to be answered?
People visit real.com?
I need some help here. I've been interested in X10 products for a while, and wanted to get one of the kits and such.
Is X10 a standard, or a brand name? Is this the same company that pioneered outrageously annoying popup ads?
I'm not sure my conscience could live with that.
Woof. OO.O is almost becoming usable, mostly because, as hardware advances, its slowness will become less noticable.
Slashdot has changed.
Ok, you go be like that. I'm just sitting over here way too dumb to comment. I think that I'll go be an annoying little shill like you elsewhere on Slashdot.
You can choose not to shop at Wal*Mart if you like. Ironically, that's part of the free market as well. The market forces that the consumer places upon the market.
Perhaps if others follow suit, Wal*Mart will be less powerful.
And, eh, I'll point out what I like. It's not like I didn't get a thousand replies going, "nuh uh, Wal*Mart has a lot of money, and, as such, is evil."
That's called the free market. Game design studios could choose other retail outlets if they chose to do so. Wal*Mart doesn't have to carry anything that they don't like.
There are probably lots better reasons to hate Wal*Mart than for having buyers and communicating their intentions to vendors.
Yeah. Isn't Real Networks dead already?
On the other hand, lots of people pirate their software to run "radio stations."
You seem to think that the majority of Slashdot readers have some scientific background ;-)
:-D
I assumed that this never happens, but did actually bump into a few recently
You know what would be amazing? If we could talk about technology on Slashdot again, and leave Bush out of the conversation. Seriously. What prompted you to say that? Was it political, or about technology (and the troll who tells me that technology is political should lay off)?