I ran across a FUSE module (mhddfs) that seemed relevant when I wanted to combine several USB drives into a single file system. My main goal was to make each drive usable independently for file recovery if I had to move it to another system.
The module appears to be a fairly thin wrapper over an existing file system. It only appears to choose which of the sub-file systems to write new data to, automatically writing files to whichever drive has the most space. This provides nothing in the way of redundancy, however.
What is nice is that you can easily access the files on a drive without needing the other drives. May be helpful for someone.
I actually agree with the idea of an appliance-like approach for some things. I can wrap my mind around the connected and disconnected application scenarios based on HTML5 technologies. What I can't quite figure out is if this is a user's only computing device, how do you connect it to a home printer, scanner, etc. devices? I'll admit I have not read up on this particular device, but, in general, I am not certain how well such a scenario plays out.
Since Linux is running underneath, a certain level of device support would be available, but there is a large amount of user-space software that is usually needed to operate peripherals. Again, it could just be that this isn't part of this product's intended appeal. But I suppose I just can easily hear in the back of my mind of a family member buying one of these because of a low cost and then wondering why they can't connect their iPod, printer, or camera to it. I don't see how you can get away from the need of a "real" desktop system at some point. Perhaps we simply aren't "there" yet.
I have recently begun looking into developing for the iPhone and similar mobile devices, with a desire to be able to draw arbitrary diagrams/images/etc. I honestly did not notice how far the Javascript and HTML stuff had come along in the recent versions of browsers. With the addition of the canvas tag to most popular browsers, lots of useful applications are now feasible without heavily relying on the server-side for much.
While I wouldn't consider myself "old school", the bulk of my HTML coding skills were picked up by extensive use of the "view source" option of Netscape in the mid-90's. Javascript/Livescript were of limited use back then, by comparison. Newer web browsers combined with tools like JQuery and JQueryUI make doing all of the dynamic HTML stuff that was a nightmare only a few years ago, fairly tolerable for web applications.
In summary, unless it is just a horrible fit, I plan on targeting web applications when possible. I'd suggest you at least give it a look....you might be impressed with what is now available and possible.
As you stated, this point is always something that has to be reviewed every time there is a "bring technology to the third world" article. Tons of medicines and food have been sent to these regions (which is good and helps, I have no problems with this certainly), but have these places become as self-maintaining as they should be? I have no statistics to quote, but I am guessing that there are still lots of starving and unmedicated people there.
So why not try giving them technology that may help them get to the point where they can take care of themselves. Give them the tools and teach them how to use them. Hopefully their own desire to be free of handouts will push them into the desired state of self-reliance.
Hopefully I was not too redundant. Thanks for an informative post.
Even if that were the case, if a business absolutely required such a "top" individual for their business plan(s) to succeed, they should be prepared to fight the market (in this case by offering comparable pay) for what or who they need to survive and flourish. Simply complaining that some other company is (legally) inflating the price of a needed asset is pretty pathetic in my opinion. If all they can do is whine, they should just pack up and go home.
I'm sure I'd be complaining, too, if I were one of these companies. But I certainly wouldn't expect crying about it to suddenly make some external force swoop in and try to give me some type of pity party and smack Google and Yahoo on the nose for making my business more difficult to keep afloat.
I don't mean to be so negative about the whole thing. I just really get tired of businesses and society as a whole constantly crying foul when things don't go their way. What really ticks me off is when government officials are persuaded (or of their own accord decide) to interfere with an otherwise working system...even if it means not everyone will come out rich/ahead/happy.
I'm sure there may be some important ramifications to this whole thing that are eluding me, but it pretty much seems like a non-issue to me.
I could not agree more. If Google and Yahoo want to spend all of their money hiring these top talents, good for them. They both seem to be churning out new services by the dozen lately. I would expect that eventually they will reach a point where the law of diminishing returns will kick in and they will stop hiring so many big names.
This, of course, depends on how they are making use of their new talent. If they give each one a project to lead that is in their specialty, they will likely keep hiring as they need new ideas. If, however, they are trying to coordinate more and more brains on a handful of ideas, they'll eventually find that throwing more brains at the problem may not work out as intended.
Getting back on point, I expect there is still plenty of talent in the United States (and abroad) to fill the positions at start ups and other companies. A business complaining about not having any talent to hire because the "top" 500 or so talented people are taken by the search engine giants likely just means that there is a real problem with their business plan and that it is doomed in the long run.
"Finally, remember that SFO was going to allow him to fly without ID. He chose not to because he did not want to submit to a search."
Actually, my reading of the article seemed to indicate that he did submit to an additional, more intrusive search in exchange for not showing identification. It was after this additional search, while standing in line, that he was not permitted to board his flight.
The poster mentioned Java support. I didn't see anything that indicated if this was in reference to using gcj for Java support, or if IBM had contributed a full Java implementation. I would be curious to know which it might be. Since this effort seems more oriented towards a server system, it is likely not needed to support the Java GUI frameworks (AWT, Swing). This would seem to lean towards gcj (and Classpath) since it does not currently support most of the GUI functionality. But with IBM already having created a number of JVM's in the past, I wouldn't be surprised if they contributed something in this area to the Linux PPC64 effort.
My current PDA is a Pocket PC (Dell Axim for those interested). The only builtin way to manage calendar information with the Pocket PC seemed to be through syncing with Outlook (no big surprise...it is all MS after all). I wanted to have my calendar available on the web, and use something other than Outlook on my desktop to manage my calendar. Plus, I wanted this all available on my Axim. So I decided to use the iCal format. This lead me to Mozilla calendar, which could sync with ical files on a web site using WebDAV. I then found PHPiCalendar which does a decent job of using an ical file to generate a web-based calendar. Since there appears to be no mechanism with the calendaring software on Pocket PC for exporting to ical format, I wrote a little application to export the contents of my Axim's calendar and upload it to my website via WebDAV. Since I use WiFi at home on my PDA from time to time, I update my calendar on my PDA and upload the changes to my website. My web-based calendar is instantly updated, and Mozilla calendar can simply refresh and grab the latest copy of the ical file from the web site. So far I've been pleased with the results. The Pocket PC app is currently limited to exporting only. I plan on adding the ability to import and resolve any conflicts, but so far that has not been a priority. Don't know if that helps any of the Palm folks much, but maybe some of the Pocket PC users out there may be interested.
I certainly am a big fan of Open Source and use it daily. I program for a living, and it makes it hard to do as a hobby as well. So I certainly agree with your comment. After a long day of staring at code for work, the last thing I usually feel like doing is going home and staring at more code.
In fact, I think there was some behavioral study done on monkeys where they gave a some monkeys a ball to play with, and they loved it. Then they made them play with the ball in order to get fed. The monkeys didn't seem to like playing with the ball as much since it was essentially work.
In general, I would expect many OSS developers are students who are not burned out on programming as a job yet. (Just my guess. I am sure someone has statistics to prove me wrong.)
I suppose that bonding several of these network interfaces would be possible. I guess you would have to ensure that the radio signals were set to different frequencies or something as well. Still not enormous quantities of speed, but if it does give you a 20 mile range, still could prove useful.
I think there was a story on/. a while back where GPBB was available for download in electronic form.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/23/194254 &mode=thread&tid=156
Thank God someone else notices this too! If it isn't a buzzword or buzzletter, my managers want nothing to do with it. The marketing of most technology-oriented companies and groups are certainly right on target on getting the guys with the money hooked on buzz-mania.
The thing I find most distressing is that many people don't try to learn how to use the tools they have to solve a problem, and instead wait for a new tool to emerge and solve the problem for them. We all know that tools don't solve problems, people (with or without tools) solve problems.
While I can certainly see your position, I believe that learning what industry and business are using is pretty much irrelavant for all but high school students. Elementary school children are blank slates and highly adaptable, and really need not be concerned about industry and business IT decisions. High school students usually have jobs both during high school, and certainly afterward, so they need to be aware and familiar with the business IT environment.
The biggest problem is that many of these schools are switching to Linux for financial reasons....they simply don't have the money for much else. So in a choice between computers with Linux with few "business and industry standard" apps, and no computers and apps at all, I believe Linux will prevail.
I know that is taking it a bit to the extreme, but that is how most people see it. A large Linux base with a handful of Windows and Mac boxes would certainly be a more attainable goal....hopefully providing a decent compromise.
I will admit that college is not for everyone. But if you are interested in the least about pursuing higher education, I highly suggest you go to college now. Others have mentioned that it is expensive and time consuming. I have to agree, but I like to think of it more as an investment in yourself. You are still young. I didn't know anything about anything when I was in high school, and I would expect that is the same for everyone. College gives you a place to grow and mature your attitudes....I certainly needed the time to find some form of direction in life. In the end, do what you want. School gets tougher the longer you wait. If you think you may have any regrets about skipping college in the future, I recommend you go now rather than later.
Could this be a new means of watermarking audio? The note about mp3 and other lossy compressions distorting/removing the image from the music makes me wonder if this couldn't be used as a form of DRM. It would require a special audio player to enforce it I suppose. Food for thought...or maybe just food.
Slashdot Mirror
I ran across a FUSE module (mhddfs) that seemed relevant when I wanted to combine several USB drives into a single file system. My main goal was to make each drive usable independently for file recovery if I had to move it to another system.
The module appears to be a fairly thin wrapper over an existing file system. It only appears to choose which of the sub-file systems to write new data to, automatically writing files to whichever drive has the most space. This provides nothing in the way of redundancy, however.
What is nice is that you can easily access the files on a drive without needing the other drives. May be helpful for someone.
http://romanrm.ru/en/mhddfs
I actually agree with the idea of an appliance-like approach for some things. I can wrap my mind around the connected and disconnected application scenarios based on HTML5 technologies. What I can't quite figure out is if this is a user's only computing device, how do you connect it to a home printer, scanner, etc. devices? I'll admit I have not read up on this particular device, but, in general, I am not certain how well such a scenario plays out.
Since Linux is running underneath, a certain level of device support would be available, but there is a large amount of user-space software that is usually needed to operate peripherals. Again, it could just be that this isn't part of this product's intended appeal. But I suppose I just can easily hear in the back of my mind of a family member buying one of these because of a low cost and then wondering why they can't connect their iPod, printer, or camera to it. I don't see how you can get away from the need of a "real" desktop system at some point. Perhaps we simply aren't "there" yet.
I have recently begun looking into developing for the iPhone and similar mobile devices, with a desire to be able to draw arbitrary diagrams/images/etc. I honestly did not notice how far the Javascript and HTML stuff had come along in the recent versions of browsers. With the addition of the canvas tag to most popular browsers, lots of useful applications are now feasible without heavily relying on the server-side for much.
While I wouldn't consider myself "old school", the bulk of my HTML coding skills were picked up by extensive use of the "view source" option of Netscape in the mid-90's. Javascript/Livescript were of limited use back then, by comparison. Newer web browsers combined with tools like JQuery and JQueryUI make doing all of the dynamic HTML stuff that was a nightmare only a few years ago, fairly tolerable for web applications.
In summary, unless it is just a horrible fit, I plan on targeting web applications when possible. I'd suggest you at least give it a look....you might be impressed with what is now available and possible.
I just had to give you kudos for the "hashtable burned into my brain" comment. I wonder what other data structures are in my brain!!
As you stated, this point is always something that has to be reviewed every time there is a "bring technology to the third world" article. Tons of medicines and food have been sent to these regions (which is good and helps, I have no problems with this certainly), but have these places become as self-maintaining as they should be? I have no statistics to quote, but I am guessing that there are still lots of starving and unmedicated people there.
So why not try giving them technology that may help them get to the point where they can take care of themselves. Give them the tools and teach them how to use them. Hopefully their own desire to be free of handouts will push them into the desired state of self-reliance.
Hopefully I was not too redundant. Thanks for an informative post.
Even if that were the case, if a business absolutely required such a "top" individual for their business plan(s) to succeed, they should be prepared to fight the market (in this case by offering comparable pay) for what or who they need to survive and flourish. Simply complaining that some other company is (legally) inflating the price of a needed asset is pretty pathetic in my opinion. If all they can do is whine, they should just pack up and go home.
I'm sure I'd be complaining, too, if I were one of these companies. But I certainly wouldn't expect crying about it to suddenly make some external force swoop in and try to give me some type of pity party and smack Google and Yahoo on the nose for making my business more difficult to keep afloat.
I don't mean to be so negative about the whole thing. I just really get tired of businesses and society as a whole constantly crying foul when things don't go their way. What really ticks me off is when government officials are persuaded (or of their own accord decide) to interfere with an otherwise working system...even if it means not everyone will come out rich/ahead/happy.
I'm sure there may be some important ramifications to this whole thing that are eluding me, but it pretty much seems like a non-issue to me.
Again, just my 2 cents.
I could not agree more. If Google and Yahoo want to spend all of their money hiring these top talents, good for them. They both seem to be churning out new services by the dozen lately. I would expect that eventually they will reach a point where the law of diminishing returns will kick in and they will stop hiring so many big names.
This, of course, depends on how they are making use of their new talent. If they give each one a project to lead that is in their specialty, they will likely keep hiring as they need new ideas. If, however, they are trying to coordinate more and more brains on a handful of ideas, they'll eventually find that throwing more brains at the problem may not work out as intended.
Getting back on point, I expect there is still plenty of talent in the United States (and abroad) to fill the positions at start ups and other companies. A business complaining about not having any talent to hire because the "top" 500 or so talented people are taken by the search engine giants likely just means that there is a real problem with their business plan and that it is doomed in the long run.
Just my 2 cents.
"Finally, remember that SFO was going to allow him to fly without ID. He chose not to because he did not want to submit to a search."
Actually, my reading of the article seemed to indicate that he did submit to an additional, more intrusive search in exchange for not showing identification. It was after this additional search, while standing in line, that he was not permitted to board his flight.
The poster mentioned Java support. I didn't see anything that indicated if this was in reference to using gcj for Java support, or if IBM had contributed a full Java implementation. I would be curious to know which it might be. Since this effort seems more oriented towards a server system, it is likely not needed to support the Java GUI frameworks (AWT, Swing). This would seem to lean towards gcj (and Classpath) since it does not currently support most of the GUI functionality. But with IBM already having created a number of JVM's in the past, I wouldn't be surprised if they contributed something in this area to the Linux PPC64 effort.
My current PDA is a Pocket PC (Dell Axim for those interested). The only builtin way to manage calendar information with the Pocket PC seemed to be through syncing with Outlook (no big surprise...it is all MS after all). I wanted to have my calendar available on the web, and use something other than Outlook on my desktop to manage my calendar. Plus, I wanted this all available on my Axim. So I decided to use the iCal format. This lead me to Mozilla calendar, which could sync with ical files on a web site using WebDAV. I then found PHPiCalendar which does a decent job of using an ical file to generate a web-based calendar. Since there appears to be no mechanism with the calendaring software on Pocket PC for exporting to ical format, I wrote a little application to export the contents of my Axim's calendar and upload it to my website via WebDAV. Since I use WiFi at home on my PDA from time to time, I update my calendar on my PDA and upload the changes to my website. My web-based calendar is instantly updated, and Mozilla calendar can simply refresh and grab the latest copy of the ical file from the web site. So far I've been pleased with the results. The Pocket PC app is currently limited to exporting only. I plan on adding the ability to import and resolve any conflicts, but so far that has not been a priority. Don't know if that helps any of the Palm folks much, but maybe some of the Pocket PC users out there may be interested.
I certainly am a big fan of Open Source and use it daily. I program for a living, and it makes it hard to do as a hobby as well. So I certainly agree with your comment. After a long day of staring at code for work, the last thing I usually feel like doing is going home and staring at more code.
In fact, I think there was some behavioral study done on monkeys where they gave a some monkeys a ball to play with, and they loved it. Then they made them play with the ball in order to get fed. The monkeys didn't seem to like playing with the ball as much since it was essentially work.
In general, I would expect many OSS developers are students who are not burned out on programming as a job yet. (Just my guess. I am sure someone has statistics to prove me wrong.)
I suppose that bonding several of these network interfaces would be possible. I guess you would have to ensure that the radio signals were set to different frequencies or something as well. Still not enormous quantities of speed, but if it does give you a 20 mile range, still could prove useful.
I think there was a story on /. a while back where GPBB was available for download in electronic form.4 &mode=thread&tid=156
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/23/19425
Don't know if it is still available though.
Thank God someone else notices this too! If it isn't a buzzword or buzzletter, my managers want nothing to do with it. The marketing of most technology-oriented companies and groups are certainly right on target on getting the guys with the money hooked on buzz-mania.
The thing I find most distressing is that many people don't try to learn how to use the tools they have to solve a problem, and instead wait for a new tool to emerge and solve the problem for them. We all know that tools don't solve problems, people (with or without tools) solve problems.
Anyways....I'm buzzing...
While I can certainly see your position, I believe that learning what industry and business are using is pretty much irrelavant for all but high school students. Elementary school children are blank slates and highly adaptable, and really need not be concerned about industry and business IT decisions. High school students usually have jobs both during high school, and certainly afterward, so they need to be aware and familiar with the business IT environment.
The biggest problem is that many of these schools are switching to Linux for financial reasons....they simply don't have the money for much else. So in a choice between computers with Linux with few "business and industry standard" apps, and no computers and apps at all, I believe Linux will prevail.
I know that is taking it a bit to the extreme, but that is how most people see it. A large Linux base with a handful of Windows and Mac boxes would certainly be a more attainable goal....hopefully providing a decent compromise.
I will admit that college is not for everyone. But if you are interested in the least about pursuing higher education, I highly suggest you go to college now. Others have mentioned that it is expensive and time consuming. I have to agree, but I like to think of it more as an investment in yourself. You are still young. I didn't know anything about anything when I was in high school, and I would expect that is the same for everyone. College gives you a place to grow and mature your attitudes....I certainly needed the time to find some form of direction in life. In the end, do what you want. School gets tougher the longer you wait. If you think you may have any regrets about skipping college in the future, I recommend you go now rather than later.
Just my 2 cents.
Could this be a new means of watermarking audio? The note about mp3 and other lossy compressions distorting/removing the image from the music makes me wonder if this couldn't be used as a form of DRM. It would require a special audio player to enforce it I suppose. Food for thought...or maybe just food.