We use a couple ACNC external RAID units at work, they have SATA drives inside and use a SCSI interface outside to the server.
That SCSI link to the server is the most problematic part of them! A 7 foot high quality SCSI cable is damn expensive, and we go through them often (about 1 per year) as they flake out when you breathe on them.
Not to mention apparently there's no standard for the way the thumbscrews to fit, so some cables on some controllers can't even screw in, they just have to sort of hang there!
We also run SATA 3ware internal RAIDs, those at least don't have to involve SCSI at all.
We have several terabytes of SATA storage at work to hold our main business-critical digital asset archive.
We've been using a ATA/SATA disk-only strategy for over 5 years now. It's worked great, and eliminated our slow and unreliable tape robot, which has greatly improved productivity.
Back in 1999/2000 SCSI wasn't an option for the main archive because a terabyte of SCSI would have broken the bank. We went ATA back then. It was a mess trying to route 24 ATA cables in a case, I admit. SATA fixes that nicely.
We keep three copies of our data, two onsite and one offsite. We use rsync-incremental snapshots to do disk-based incremental backups. Because the cost of SATA is less than 1/3rd the cost of SCSI, we get a high reliability solution for less than the price of a single SCSI RAID.
One more advantage of SATA is that the disks are so cheap, it's easy to just replace all of them every two or three years. The disks you replace them with generally are twice as large after 2 or 3 years, so every cycle your RAIDs get more reliable as the number of disks is slashed in half.
Most companies wouldn't replace every SCSI disk every two years, it would cost way too much. And considering the slow pace of SCSI size growth, you wouldn't see as much gain, a double hit against SCSI.
So basically unless you need the excellent latency performance of SCSI, higher than even the WD Raptor can offer, I see no compelling reason to use SCSI for anything anymore.
SATA is so much cheaper that it's easy to afford completely 2 or 3 redundant storage servers for the same price as a single SCSI array. We do this at work in fact.
With SCSI around $3-5 per gig, and SATA around 35-70 cents per gig, it's a no brainer if you need lots of storage and latency doesn't have to be top of the line.
If it's latency bound then SCSI or more expensive SATA 10,000 RPM Raptors would be better.
"This license does not permit the usage of the specification to create software which supports SWF file playback."
"Can I use the File Format Specification to create a Flash Video encoder or a Flash Video streaming service?
No, the File Format Specification is provided for the specific purpose of enabling software applications to export to the Macromedia Flash File Format (SWF). "
I guess if you use MS's definition of open. No comparision to the way PS and PDF are open though, which basically grants a license to do nearly anything you'd like with the specification.
Back when the big thing in IT was Postscript, MS and Apple worked together to try to make a Postscript killer to break Adobe's control. It was called TrueImage. It failed badly.
The only thing we still use from TrueImage today is TrueType fonts, which were the type of fonts that TrueImage used rather than Adobe's Type I fonts.
Some of these recent moves by MS to replace common presentation formats with their own remind me a lot of the TrueImage story.
Since Adobe owns Macromedia now, it's the same old clash, MS vs Adobe. Adobe has proven themselves to be very good at format wars. Because of TrueImage and other market pressures (like HP's PCL), Adobe opened up the Postscript and eventually PDF specifications and made implementation of them completely royalty free. This was a big long-term win for them.
So now MS is going against Adobe on two fronts, their new MS XPS format to try to kill PDF, and this Sparkle up against Flash. Adobe would do well to learn from the past and continue to use open specifications to keep MS in their place.
I have read the tutorials for Ruby on Rails and some of the PHP frameworks that rip it off. It seems like a hell of a lot of work just to avoid writing a few lines of code.
We are developing a CRUD-only framework at work, sort of in homage to this current fad, but ours won't be OO, and it won't keep you from having to write code either. It sure as hell won't use XML for anything. We might release it as free software after we see how well it works out.
I don't know why all these framework sites talk about how much fun it is to develop with their framework. What ever happened to being maintainable or scalable or even useful? "Fun" isn't a quality I generally look for in my programming tools.
You are buying into the hype. Apparently a miniscule but vocal minority of people have even heard of Ruby on Rails. Most of them seem to read this site.
If he spent that money, the companies and people he bought products from would be richer (as would all their suppliers), and he would get a product that he enjoyed more than the idea of having that much money in the bank. Win-win.
Anything not granted to the owner under copyright law is assumed to be allowed.
Copyright law does not create a right to control most uses, it only grants a right to exclusive control over distribution, copying and modification, with a few exceptions such as public performance that don't apply here.
Fine, I'll rephrase. Modification is not allowed of work that you do not own the copyright on, in the absence of a license of some sort.
Use of a lawfully recieved copy is not a protection granted to the copyright holder by copyright law, which is why mere use of GPL programs does not require you to agree or comply with the GPL.
Modifying without distribution does not require anything of you.
Under the current GPL, correct. My point is they can and probably will add requirements that are triggered by modification in the absence of distribution in GPLv3.
The GPL doesn't grant you use rights. You got those if the person that distributed it to you complied with the GPL.
Even if you violated the GPL, mere use would still be legal. You don't need the GPL to have the right to use the software, only to have the right to modify, copy, or distribute the software.
Correct. While you may indeed trigger the GPL with mere modification, it doesn't have many practical implications.... yet at least.
If GPLv3 includes some stuff about using GPL code in a server-side capacity of a network application, you won't have to comply with any of that stuff unless you modify the app, then you would have to comply with the GPL in those regards even if you weren't distributing the app itself.
Modification can also trigger copyright protections. The FSF has said they don't care about modifications that you don't distribute, but legally the GPL does apply to you if you merely modify without distributing, since it is the only license that grants you rights that you would not normally have under copyright law.
Oh I found a choice quote from Wasabi's main site:
"Wasabi Certified BSD, a certified, tested, and optimized version of the BSD operating system, offers the rich functionality of BSD Unix without Linux's troublesome GPL License."
according to a research published by Wasabi Systems.
The same Wasabi Systems that sells products based on NetBSD?
Yeah, no bias there.
In the past, such violators were merely required to release their code to the public
The article is also wrong in that it spreads the "forced open source" myth. GPL violators aren't required to release their source code. They FSF generally asks them stop infringing on the copyright of the GPL software.
One way to do that is to comply with the GPL, another is to stop using GPL software. They don't have to release any code they don't want to.
I think people like the grandparent post feel challenged by something like Mythbusters.
I'm going to make some big assumptions about the grandparent poster, but I bet they are someone mired in acedemia. I can see how it would burn up someone like that to see people actually can get meaningful results without all the bullshit that acedemic research entails, and without the cushy welfare money that educational researchers get.
I think mythbusters is better than higher education research in some ways too, because they show you their methodologies in clear terms and not jargon designed to make it inaccessible to most people outside a certain field.
While they are guilty of lots of non-scientific practice, it's easy to see that right away. If some bogus acedemic study comes out, we get stupid headlines based on the study and then a month later someone else writes a journal article challenging the results and methodology. With mythbusters it's all laid out in the open, you get to see how scientific or unscientific they were right from the start.
Yeah, and it only costs a ton of money. $2 for a whole month of a premium channel vs one episode. Apple stuff is for people with more money than sense.
I was on the selling side of such services when I was in college.
It was fun writing papers for 5xxx and 6xxx level courses. I learned a lot too, since the material was slightly more interesting than the crap they feed undergraduates.
I don't see anything wrong with being on the selling side of such a transaction. The only reason anyone ever buys anything is that they don't want to learn the skills or gather the resources necessary to perform the service they need or produce the product they want. It's the foundation of capitalism.
When you hire a mechanic to fix your car, you are both paying him money and losing the opportunity to learn about car repair. Same situation here. The mechanic isn't wrong for taking your money or repairing your car, it's your lost opportunity.
If you then later on claim you repaired the car yourself for your own personal gain, then you are committing a sort of fraud. In that way the buying of such services I do see as wrong.
So in summary the only ethical problem here is the buyer presenting the work as their own. The seller and the venue are doing nothing wrong.
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3ware shows up to the OS as a SCSI controller, so its performance does not depend on the SATA kernel parts.
You aren't kidding.
We use a couple ACNC external RAID units at work, they have SATA drives inside and use a SCSI interface outside to the server.
That SCSI link to the server is the most problematic part of them! A 7 foot high quality SCSI cable is damn expensive, and we go through them often (about 1 per year) as they flake out when you breathe on them.
Not to mention apparently there's no standard for the way the thumbscrews to fit, so some cables on some controllers can't even screw in, they just have to sort of hang there!
We also run SATA 3ware internal RAIDs, those at least don't have to involve SCSI at all.
OK, hear mine then.
We have several terabytes of SATA storage at work to hold our main business-critical digital asset archive.
We've been using a ATA/SATA disk-only strategy for over 5 years now. It's worked great, and eliminated our slow and unreliable tape robot, which has greatly improved productivity.
Back in 1999/2000 SCSI wasn't an option for the main archive because a terabyte of SCSI would have broken the bank. We went ATA back then. It was a mess trying to route 24 ATA cables in a case, I admit. SATA fixes that nicely.
We keep three copies of our data, two onsite and one offsite. We use rsync-incremental snapshots to do disk-based incremental backups. Because the cost of SATA is less than 1/3rd the cost of SCSI, we get a high reliability solution for less than the price of a single SCSI RAID.
One more advantage of SATA is that the disks are so cheap, it's easy to just replace all of them every two or three years. The disks you replace them with generally are twice as large after 2 or 3 years, so every cycle your RAIDs get more reliable as the number of disks is slashed in half.
Most companies wouldn't replace every SCSI disk every two years, it would cost way too much. And considering the slow pace of SCSI size growth, you wouldn't see as much gain, a double hit against SCSI.
So basically unless you need the excellent latency performance of SCSI, higher than even the WD Raptor can offer, I see no compelling reason to use SCSI for anything anymore.
You have redundant servers.
Exactly.
SATA is so much cheaper that it's easy to afford completely 2 or 3 redundant storage servers for the same price as a single SCSI array. We do this at work in fact.
With SCSI around $3-5 per gig, and SATA around 35-70 cents per gig, it's a no brainer if you need lots of storage and latency doesn't have to be top of the line.
If it's latency bound then SCSI or more expensive SATA 10,000 RPM Raptors would be better.
The SWF format is actually an open format.
Hardly!
"This license does not permit the usage of the specification to create software which supports SWF file playback."
"Can I use the File Format Specification to create a Flash Video encoder or a Flash Video streaming service?
No, the File Format Specification is provided for the specific purpose of enabling software applications to export to the Macromedia Flash File Format (SWF). "
I guess if you use MS's definition of open. No comparision to the way PS and PDF are open though, which basically grants a license to do nearly anything you'd like with the specification.
Back when the big thing in IT was Postscript, MS and Apple worked together to try to make a Postscript killer to break Adobe's control. It was called TrueImage. It failed badly.
The only thing we still use from TrueImage today is TrueType fonts, which were the type of fonts that TrueImage used rather than Adobe's Type I fonts.
Some of these recent moves by MS to replace common presentation formats with their own remind me a lot of the TrueImage story.
Since Adobe owns Macromedia now, it's the same old clash, MS vs Adobe. Adobe has proven themselves to be very good at format wars. Because of TrueImage and other market pressures (like HP's PCL), Adobe opened up the Postscript and eventually PDF specifications and made implementation of them completely royalty free. This was a big long-term win for them.
So now MS is going against Adobe on two fronts, their new MS XPS format to try to kill PDF, and this Sparkle up against Flash. Adobe would do well to learn from the past and continue to use open specifications to keep MS in their place.
Following the maze of redundant blog posts you end up at this, which appears to be the original article.
Framed a little differently though, as it's titled "E3 Censorship".
Excellent post.
I have read the tutorials for Ruby on Rails and some of the PHP frameworks that rip it off. It seems like a hell of a lot of work just to avoid writing a few lines of code.
We are developing a CRUD-only framework at work, sort of in homage to this current fad, but ours won't be OO, and it won't keep you from having to write code either. It sure as hell won't use XML for anything. We might release it as free software after we see how well it works out.
I don't know why all these framework sites talk about how much fun it is to develop with their framework. What ever happened to being maintainable or scalable or even useful? "Fun" isn't a quality I generally look for in my programming tools.
I'm not sure what sort of compliance you mean.
Our 15,000 line app went from PHP4 to PHP5 with very few changes.
Unless you are relying on very legacy things that have been depricated throughout the PHP4 tree, you should have nearly no problems.
Lately, however, a lot of programmers have moved onto Ruby on Rail
No, they haven't
You are buying into the hype. Apparently a miniscule but vocal minority of people have even heard of Ruby on Rails. Most of them seem to read this site.
If he spent that money, the companies and people he bought products from would be richer (as would all their suppliers), and he would get a product that he enjoyed more than the idea of having that much money in the bank. Win-win.
The economy doesn't work if no one spends money.
someone starts designing new diseases so you can then trot out the cure to them as a new product...
They do that already, it's called psychology.
against the use of this software in the "field of endeavor" known as business.
Selling the software is not using the software.
Anything not granted to the owner under copyright law is assumed to be allowed.
Copyright law does not create a right to control most uses, it only grants a right to exclusive control over distribution, copying and modification, with a few exceptions such as public performance that don't apply here.
Since you are being pedantic I better clarify:
...
[Controlling the] use of a lawfully recieved copy
Fine, I'll rephrase. Modification is not allowed of work that you do not own the copyright on, in the absence of a license of some sort.
Use of a lawfully recieved copy is not a protection granted to the copyright holder by copyright law, which is why mere use of GPL programs does not require you to agree or comply with the GPL.
Modifying without distribution does not require anything of you.
Under the current GPL, correct. My point is they can and probably will add requirements that are triggered by modification in the absence of distribution in GPLv3.
The GPL doesn't grant you use rights. You got those if the person that distributed it to you complied with the GPL.
Even if you violated the GPL, mere use would still be legal. You don't need the GPL to have the right to use the software, only to have the right to modify, copy, or distribute the software.
Correct. While you may indeed trigger the GPL with mere modification, it doesn't have many practical implications.... yet at least.
If GPLv3 includes some stuff about using GPL code in a server-side capacity of a network application, you won't have to comply with any of that stuff unless you modify the app, then you would have to comply with the GPL in those regards even if you weren't distributing the app itself.
Modification can also trigger copyright protections. The FSF has said they don't care about modifications that you don't distribute, but legally the GPL does apply to you if you merely modify without distributing, since it is the only license that grants you rights that you would not normally have under copyright law.
Wonder how much Microsoft paid IT Observer for that FUD?
They didn't. See my other posts. Wasabi systems is a BSD vendor with a strong bias against the GPL.
Oh I found a choice quote from Wasabi's main site:
"Wasabi Certified BSD, a certified, tested, and optimized version of the BSD operating system, offers the rich functionality of BSD Unix without Linux's troublesome GPL License."
Hah, come on now.
according to a research published by Wasabi Systems.
The same Wasabi Systems that sells products based on NetBSD?
Yeah, no bias there.
In the past, such violators were merely required to release their code to the public
The article is also wrong in that it spreads the "forced open source" myth. GPL violators aren't required to release their source code. They FSF generally asks them stop infringing on the copyright of the GPL software.
One way to do that is to comply with the GPL, another is to stop using GPL software. They don't have to release any code they don't want to.
I think people like the grandparent post feel challenged by something like Mythbusters.
I'm going to make some big assumptions about the grandparent poster, but I bet they are someone mired in acedemia. I can see how it would burn up someone like that to see people actually can get meaningful results without all the bullshit that acedemic research entails, and without the cushy welfare money that educational researchers get.
I think mythbusters is better than higher education research in some ways too, because they show you their methodologies in clear terms and not jargon designed to make it inaccessible to most people outside a certain field.
While they are guilty of lots of non-scientific practice, it's easy to see that right away. If some bogus acedemic study comes out, we get stupid headlines based on the study and then a month later someone else writes a journal article challenging the results and methodology. With mythbusters it's all laid out in the open, you get to see how scientific or unscientific they were right from the start.
Yeah, and it only costs a ton of money. $2 for a whole month of a premium channel vs one episode. Apple stuff is for people with more money than sense.
I was on the selling side of such services when I was in college.
It was fun writing papers for 5xxx and 6xxx level courses. I learned a lot too, since the material was slightly more interesting than the crap they feed undergraduates.
I don't see anything wrong with being on the selling side of such a transaction. The only reason anyone ever buys anything is that they don't want to learn the skills or gather the resources necessary to perform the service they need or produce the product they want. It's the foundation of capitalism.
When you hire a mechanic to fix your car, you are both paying him money and losing the opportunity to learn about car repair. Same situation here. The mechanic isn't wrong for taking your money or repairing your car, it's your lost opportunity.
If you then later on claim you repaired the car yourself for your own personal gain, then you are committing a sort of fraud. In that way the buying of such services I do see as wrong.
So in summary the only ethical problem here is the buyer presenting the work as their own. The seller and the venue are doing nothing wrong.