Backup software that even has the ability to delete files from the filesystem sounds like a major design flaw to me.
Reminds me of LoneTar, which helpfully will tell you that/dev/null is an insecure backup device, and ask you if you want to secure it. Who wouldn't want to secure it? Anyway, it chmods 000 it, which breaks everything under the sun, usually in mysterious ways.
The reason is because/dev/null is usually set up as a dummy tape device in lone tar, and it doesn't know it's not a real tape device, which you usually wouldn't want 666.
On the other hand, an operating system is considered inefficient these days if it doesn't use 100% of the RAM for something or another.
What use is "empty" disk space? The OS might as well use it for something, as long as it can ditch things that aren't important if there is a demand for space. As for your temp file issue, it's easy enough to just make/tmp and/var/tmp (and any others) a different file system that doesn't act this way.
Modern file systems don't need to have a limited number of inodes. Even ext3 by default creates way too many inodes on large file systems, if you are going to be storing files of any significant size.*
I think it's high time for filesystem reform, and it doesn't need anything revolutionary like databased buzzword filled paradigm shifting crap. It's just logical evolutionary improvements.
*And it wastes 5% of the space by default! That's 100 GB on a 2TB fs completely wasted! Always use -m0 on storage fs's or -m1 on system fs with mke2fs. Use -T largefile4 to make one inode per 4MB, which is fine for storing "large" files. Otherwise the fs takes hours to create all those damn unnecessary inodes on a large fs.
There's no reason an 11 year old can't learn to write standards compliant HTML or XHTML. It's not a complicated language. Just make sure to show her how to validate her pages.
There are some other ideas being discussed. One is a return to BJT technology from FET technology. Simplified explanation: A FET is kinda like a capacitor, it pulls a little current each time it changes state. This makes heat frequency dependent.
A BJT generally uses more power, because it is controlled by current rather than voltage, but the current it draws is mostly fixed, it doesn't vary with switching rate like a FET.
At some speed point, it will be more heat efficient to use BJTs than FETs. At least that's the theory.
handful of engineers could sit down with pencil and paper...
teams of PhDs in physics, math, and engineering to do the same, in multi-billion-dollar facilities
Some would argue that it's because it's PhD's that we need the multi-billion-dollar facilities.:)
Technology would progress, probably at a slower rate, even if there wasn't multibillion dollar facilities. You are correct, that would probably be the end of Moore's law, in it's original form regarding transistor density, but it wouldn't be the end of speed improvements.
Regarding your sig... I hope you are brave enough to keep that sig up for at least another year or two.
You make a dangerous assumption that I am a Republican. I'm not. I don't really agree with the whole Iraq thing.
The supporters of the right to bear arms do usually draw an arbitrary line.
I personally believe that the mere ownership (and by extension, the action of aquisition) of any particular thing should never be illegal. Crimes should be limited to criminal actions. When someone uses a thing to coerce, threaten, or kill someone, that's a crime.
Sure, it makes things a lot simpler to regulate and control obvious things that have very little non-destructive use, but then you are the one drawing the arbitrary line.
What's obviously something only used for destruction? There's not much. Carmack trying to get pure hydrogen peroxide is one example. It's obviously a potentially dangerous substance, but he plans to only use it for launching his rockets.
Should we ban his rocket research too, since he might fashion an ICBM of some sort?
I say it's the authoritarians who draw the real arbitrary line, and it's of a much wider scope than just guns.
That press release you linked to is very biased, it was issued by an anti-gun org.
Newsday.com says "The court has never said if the right to "keep and bear arms" applies to individuals."
Which is contrary to the anti-gun PR assertion that this decision not to hear this case somehow upheld a prior ruling that said there was no individual right to ownership.
It was special enough to recognize in our bill of rights. The highest law of the land recognizes it as a right, that's what makes it special.
Property is never recognized explicitely as a basic human right in the consitution, but several parts of the constitution imply property as a basic human right.
The right to bear arms is not granted. Rights aren't granted or taken away, they are inherent. The constitution only recognizes the right to keep and bear arms as a fundamental right of the people.
Surely then, the anti position should be considered the least plausible, since the status quo is to recgonize the basic human right to keep and bear arms.
People are doing many other (prescription) drugs recreationally. Many of which are much more addictive and dangerous than pot, and yet they are schedule II or III, and pot remains schedule I, even though there is obviously potential medical benefit.
There are some government shills in the medical field that go on political shows and present such arguments.
Interestingly, it's by no means every government employed MD, there are many within the NIH and other government organizations who have rational ideas about illegal drugs, they are just regularly ignored if they speak out.
Funny how the medical field is quick to adopt things like leeches, but when it comes to medical marijuana, they don't want to legalize it because "it's not an isolated and purified medication".
Integrated video is nice for servers. It's nearly impossible to buy a cheap video card that doesn't have 3D anymore. My hardware buying coworker recently put a ATI 7000 series into a server, because it was the cheapest thing he could find!
When you don't even need graphics at all, onboard video works great, and doesn't waste a PCI slot on something you don't really care about.
Integrated NIC... Who cares? Again, it saves a PCI slot, and if you need to stick a new one in, they cost $10. Squirt hot glue into the old port if you are afraid of a braindead tech (or yourself) accidentally trying to use the dead one.
Integrated sound, I'm more inclined to agree with you about. On board sound is usually kind of shoddy, but sufficient for most people.
It seems your primary bitch is when it's difficult to disable on-board stuff. The only thing that I've ran into recently with that was "shared ram" on-board video that couldn't be totally disabled, so it still took up some ram even though it wasn't doing anything.
That's not really a problem inherent with on-board stuff, that's just crappiness on the part of the motherboard assembler.
Yeah, but it's a question of long term sustainibility, vs short term gambles.
Letting gameplay suffer so that they can get a whiz-bang nice looking demo at a conference, and generate hype, is a short term play. People that buy the game and are dissapointed will be a lot less likely to buy more games from that franchise or from that publisher.
I liked C&C Generals (playing on a "borrowed" copy), so I bought both it and Zero Hour. The numerous serious bugs, and lack of prompt patching really turned me off to that franshise now.
It didn't help that a couple weeks after I bought both, they came out with a box set that included both that would have saved me $30 over buying both separately.
You talk about choice, but when journalists recently flied on Air Force One, the SS told them to take the batteries out of their cell phones, not just to turn them off.
Makes you wonder how much that off button really does anyway. It's not like the old days when it was a physical disconnection of power, these days the off button just sends a signal to power most of the way down. By necessity some parts of the phone must stay on to intercept the signal to power back up.
Who's to say that they don't also keep the part awake that sends out pings to towers every now and then? Wouldn't take too much power to ping a tower every 15 minutes or so.
Some gamers might jizz their pants over the eye candy, but I think a lot of people would much rather good gameplay to life-like graphics. I know most of the people at LAN parties turn down the graphics options to get smoother gameplay, even the ones with high end video cards.
The graphics might be what sells a game, but it's not what keeps people playing it.
I work for a company, that does, in part, prepress work.
We keep two versions of each item, one is the Mac files, illustrator, quark, embedded raster art, etc. They are like the "source code".
Previously we never had the room to effectively store rasterized and print-ready 300 dpi separated files, the "output files". We had a tape based solution, but at the volumes of files we needed every day, it sucked big time. We needed random access.
When big hard disks became available for cheap, I helped the company migrate to a solely (ATA!) disk based archival solution, and it has drastically increased throughput.
Sometimes it's much cheaper to store large output files than recreate them each time you need them. The only way you can do that is tons of ready storage. More storage=less labor. Large, cheap, relatively slow hard disks are a godsend for large file archival.
A little overhyped? More like completely overhyped. I mean, most of the time they just drive the "project" around in some staged fake "competition" at the end, that's really cheesy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd guess malda, with UID 1. Maybe if there are other accounts with UID 2-9 that are still active, they might have a chance. :)
Won't help with patents.
Hey, come on, that's not offtopic, it's hilarious!
Backup software that even has the ability to delete files from the filesystem sounds like a major design flaw to me.
/dev/null is an insecure backup device, and ask you if you want to secure it. Who wouldn't want to secure it? Anyway, it chmods 000 it, which breaks everything under the sun, usually in mysterious ways.
/dev/null is usually set up as a dummy tape device in lone tar, and it doesn't know it's not a real tape device, which you usually wouldn't want 666.
Reminds me of LoneTar, which helpfully will tell you that
The reason is because
On the other hand, an operating system is considered inefficient these days if it doesn't use 100% of the RAM for something or another.
/tmp and /var/tmp (and any others) a different file system that doesn't act this way.
What use is "empty" disk space? The OS might as well use it for something, as long as it can ditch things that aren't important if there is a demand for space. As for your temp file issue, it's easy enough to just make
Modern file systems don't need to have a limited number of inodes. Even ext3 by default creates way too many inodes on large file systems, if you are going to be storing files of any significant size.*
I think it's high time for filesystem reform, and it doesn't need anything revolutionary like databased buzzword filled paradigm shifting crap. It's just logical evolutionary improvements.
*And it wastes 5% of the space by default! That's 100 GB on a 2TB fs completely wasted! Always use -m0 on storage fs's or -m1 on system fs with mke2fs. Use -T largefile4 to make one inode per 4MB, which is fine for storing "large" files. Otherwise the fs takes hours to create all those damn unnecessary inodes on a large fs.
There's no reason an 11 year old can't learn to write standards compliant HTML or XHTML. It's not a complicated language. Just make sure to show her how to validate her pages.
There are some other ideas being discussed. One is a return to BJT technology from FET technology. Simplified explanation: A FET is kinda like a capacitor, it pulls a little current each time it changes state. This makes heat frequency dependent.
A BJT generally uses more power, because it is controlled by current rather than voltage, but the current it draws is mostly fixed, it doesn't vary with switching rate like a FET.
At some speed point, it will be more heat efficient to use BJTs than FETs. At least that's the theory.
handful of engineers could sit down with pencil and paper...
:)
teams of PhDs in physics, math, and engineering to do the same, in multi-billion-dollar facilities
Some would argue that it's because it's PhD's that we need the multi-billion-dollar facilities.
Technology would progress, probably at a slower rate, even if there wasn't multibillion dollar facilities. You are correct, that would probably be the end of Moore's law, in it's original form regarding transistor density, but it wouldn't be the end of speed improvements.
Regarding your sig... I hope you are brave enough to keep that sig up for at least another year or two.
You make a dangerous assumption that I am a Republican. I'm not. I don't really agree with the whole Iraq thing.
The supporters of the right to bear arms do usually draw an arbitrary line.
I personally believe that the mere ownership (and by extension, the action of aquisition) of any particular thing should never be illegal. Crimes should be limited to criminal actions. When someone uses a thing to coerce, threaten, or kill someone, that's a crime.
Sure, it makes things a lot simpler to regulate and control obvious things that have very little non-destructive use, but then you are the one drawing the arbitrary line.
What's obviously something only used for destruction? There's not much. Carmack trying to get pure hydrogen peroxide is one example. It's obviously a potentially dangerous substance, but he plans to only use it for launching his rockets.
Should we ban his rocket research too, since he might fashion an ICBM of some sort?
I say it's the authoritarians who draw the real arbitrary line, and it's of a much wider scope than just guns.
That press release you linked to is very biased, it was issued by an anti-gun org.
Newsday.com says "The court has never said if the right to "keep and bear arms" applies to individuals."
Which is contrary to the anti-gun PR assertion that this decision not to hear this case somehow upheld a prior ruling that said there was no individual right to ownership.
It was special enough to recognize in our bill of rights. The highest law of the land recognizes it as a right, that's what makes it special.
Property is never recognized explicitely as a basic human right in the consitution, but several parts of the constitution imply property as a basic human right.
The right to bear arms is not granted. Rights aren't granted or taken away, they are inherent. The constitution only recognizes the right to keep and bear arms as a fundamental right of the people.
Surely then, the anti position should be considered the least plausible, since the status quo is to recgonize the basic human right to keep and bear arms.
What, no posts about Go yet?
People are doing many other (prescription) drugs recreationally. Many of which are much more addictive and dangerous than pot, and yet they are schedule II or III, and pot remains schedule I, even though there is obviously potential medical benefit.
There are some government shills in the medical field that go on political shows and present such arguments.
Interestingly, it's by no means every government employed MD, there are many within the NIH and other government organizations who have rational ideas about illegal drugs, they are just regularly ignored if they speak out.
Funny how the medical field is quick to adopt things like leeches, but when it comes to medical marijuana, they don't want to legalize it because "it's not an isolated and purified medication".
Integrated video is nice for servers. It's nearly impossible to buy a cheap video card that doesn't have 3D anymore. My hardware buying coworker recently put a ATI 7000 series into a server, because it was the cheapest thing he could find!
When you don't even need graphics at all, onboard video works great, and doesn't waste a PCI slot on something you don't really care about.
Integrated NIC... Who cares? Again, it saves a PCI slot, and if you need to stick a new one in, they cost $10. Squirt hot glue into the old port if you are afraid of a braindead tech (or yourself) accidentally trying to use the dead one.
Integrated sound, I'm more inclined to agree with you about. On board sound is usually kind of shoddy, but sufficient for most people.
It seems your primary bitch is when it's difficult to disable on-board stuff. The only thing that I've ran into recently with that was "shared ram" on-board video that couldn't be totally disabled, so it still took up some ram even though it wasn't doing anything.
That's not really a problem inherent with on-board stuff, that's just crappiness on the part of the motherboard assembler.
It's kind of a stretch that Microsoft cranks out people called "certified software engineers" too.
What really drives me insane about slashdot is the message system navigation.
Click "New Messages"
You see the list of messages.
You click on a message "Someone replied to "
It comes up and says "SuchAndSuch has posted a reply to your comment "
Click again and finally get to the reply.
What the hell is up with that? I'm on satellite Internet, so each page takes 600ms minimum to load. Why put in that useless intermediate page??
Yeah, but it's a question of long term sustainibility, vs short term gambles.
Letting gameplay suffer so that they can get a whiz-bang nice looking demo at a conference, and generate hype, is a short term play. People that buy the game and are dissapointed will be a lot less likely to buy more games from that franchise or from that publisher.
I liked C&C Generals (playing on a "borrowed" copy), so I bought both it and Zero Hour. The numerous serious bugs, and lack of prompt patching really turned me off to that franshise now.
It didn't help that a couple weeks after I bought both, they came out with a box set that included both that would have saved me $30 over buying both separately.
You talk about choice, but when journalists recently flied on Air Force One, the SS told them to take the batteries out of their cell phones, not just to turn them off.
Makes you wonder how much that off button really does anyway. It's not like the old days when it was a physical disconnection of power, these days the off button just sends a signal to power most of the way down. By necessity some parts of the phone must stay on to intercept the signal to power back up.
Who's to say that they don't also keep the part awake that sends out pings to towers every now and then? Wouldn't take too much power to ping a tower every 15 minutes or so.
Some gamers might jizz their pants over the eye candy, but I think a lot of people would much rather good gameplay to life-like graphics. I know most of the people at LAN parties turn down the graphics options to get smoother gameplay, even the ones with high end video cards.
The graphics might be what sells a game, but it's not what keeps people playing it.
I work for a company, that does, in part, prepress work.
We keep two versions of each item, one is the Mac files, illustrator, quark, embedded raster art, etc. They are like the "source code".
Previously we never had the room to effectively store rasterized and print-ready 300 dpi separated files, the "output files". We had a tape based solution, but at the volumes of files we needed every day, it sucked big time. We needed random access.
When big hard disks became available for cheap, I helped the company migrate to a solely (ATA!) disk based archival solution, and it has drastically increased throughput.
Sometimes it's much cheaper to store large output files than recreate them each time you need them. The only way you can do that is tons of ready storage. More storage=less labor. Large, cheap, relatively slow hard disks are a godsend for large file archival.
A little overhyped? More like completely overhyped. I mean, most of the time they just drive the "project" around in some staged fake "competition" at the end, that's really cheesy.