Node.js stops being actively developed, as one user put, security vulnerability happens...or just a general bug. Maybe you come in one morning and one of the hotfixes for the OS cratered the Node.js server component and now all of your systems are down.
If the server that has just cratered is really mission-critical, it probably would have been wise to not allow the production systems to apply their own patches.
Yes, this sort of stuff happens all the time, but thinking that it would never happen with a commercial product is just not true. The open-source nature of node.js has nothing to do with it.
Agreed, keeping up to date with every possible patch level is unacceptable. But, running out-of-date, but stable, versions of code (open source or proprietary) is another option.
Gitlab, as others have mentioned, works a treat. There is a how-to on their site that walks you through everything needed. I had it up and running with LDAP integration in about half a day.
Redmine, with the redmine-git-hosting plugin, also makes a very nice central git server. It was more of a headache for me to set up, because there is no step-by-step instructions for getting it working that I could find. It's very powerful, and has issue tracking, etc. which may be useful for you. There are many plugins available to add or customize various areas of the system.
For strictly git hosting, my vote is for Gitlab. The integration with the repositories is fantastic and things like visualizing repository history, handling pull requests, etc. is very good. The wiki markup language is weak, and the issue tracker is very lightweight, but it has 90% of everything you love on Github.
Another solution I haven't evaluated but which looks strong is Stash, from Atlassian. But that doesn't meet your OSS requirement.
No, I don't think that's it at all. I think Wal-Mart won out because Sam Walton and the Wal-Mart execs realized the majority of Americans would rather have quantity over quality.
Maybe my opinion is biased by my experience with the K-Mart in my town, but when most Americans think "quality", I don't think that K-Mart jumps to mind.
Amen to this. I count the $8 I send to Netflix as some of the best value for the money I get all month. The ability to queue up movies or TV shows as a time-limited rental would make Netflix even better.
And every CPU that goes into the products will be pre-vetted for full GPL compliance, with software releases even before the product goes out the door. That's what we've promised to do: to provide Free Software developers with the opportunity to be involved with mass-volume product development every step of the way.
If "full GPL compliance" is a goal of the project, then it's doomed to mediocrity. Real chip vendors are not going to share their secret sauce, either because they can't due to patent/IP agreements or because they don't see a reason to risk handing the crown jewels to their competition. It just ain't gonna happen.
I'm strongly considering just dropping out with a Masters' degree, because several students who did that (because they failed a qualifying exam) left and had no trouble finding jobs that paid well--though even some of them had to omit the Masters from their resume.
That is definitely worth considering, if the point of your degree is purely employment-driven. If your goal is to teach, you probably need to keep going to reach the "terminal" degree in your field. There are also employment opportunities in some university-affiliated research positions, and there are still corporations looking for Ph.D holders, but you'd better be sure that your thesis topic is impressive enough to put you to work. Most places I've worked look at a Ph.D holder as "BS + 6 years of experience".
As to getting the Masters, I'll close on the experience of one of my best friends. Hugely brilliant guy; finished an honors BS in Chemistry, then went to a Ph.D. program in the same. As he tells it, from the first day on campus until he finally had to quit the program 6 years later, he was always "4 years away from finishing." He lived and breathed chemistry, was pursuing it out of love of the field and intended to end up as a researcher somewhere. He and his wife were involved in a nasty car accident 5 years into his studies, and was unable to keep up his research and teaching responsibilities for the next 6-9 months. They had two kids to support, and they just had to decide that a Real Job was what was best for their family. He very much regrets that he didn't first get the Masters done before starting the Ph.D., since now his resume shows a Bachelor's + lots of post grad work.
With two 5830's in XFire I can hash at 520 MH/s, will this increase that?
Before I dumped all my hardware and got out of the mining business, I was getting 300MH/s from each of my 5830s in non cross-fire mode. I had one card that could run solid at 330MH/s, but the others became flakey at anything over 305 or so. Try slightly overclocking?
The process of refining bauxite to get aluminum is extremely energy intensive. Other than having a pure oxide to put in, it almost is pointless to bother recycling the "battery".
This is one of the last things I want to see in widespread use, unless we have modern nuclear plants, fusion, or some other next gen energy source, just because turning aluminum oxide back to a usable metal uses so much electricity.
Moving cars and people around is energy intensive. Any battery technology is lossy; it's all about storing the electrical energy in chemical form to make it transportable.
You are correct: this is about coal-powered cars until we have some better way to generate electricity.
And no AV scans or backups. Unfortunately, not an option for our org but thanks for the info. Any resources or public data available for figuring out the value of BC mining? I've looked but can't find any...
Would it not make sense to alter your AV scan and backup scripts to do their thing, then put the machines to sleep afterwards?
If the goal is truly to "go green", using less electricity is the only way. If you're not looking to go green, but are instead looking to offset some of the money that you're spending now on electricity, turning the machines off will be orders of magnitude more effective than trying to offset the cost by mining and selling BitCoins.
Plus, running 18,000 desktop machines at 100% will put an extra heat load on your HVAC systems, which aren't free to run from either environmental or monetary costs.
"Computers long ago reached the point where they were fast enough..."
For you, maybe - but not for everyone. I work with people daily who need more computing power, and in fact would benefit even further if processors were faster even than they are today. "Fast enough" is a fallacy - there is always, and will always be, room for improvement.
You two are discussing different markets; there's really no point arguing either side. Porsche and Kia will continue to build cars that can be used to buy groceries, and there will still be a market for both. $3000 desktop machines with DVD drives will still have their place, even with the existence of $49 DVD players.
The problem is lack of usage examples and feedback. When you follow the API and your program doesn't work, the solution is to google your problem to find the solution from the 1000 others who have hit the same problem.
If only there was a clear-cut way to tell Google, "Please hide all of the results that are on a forum with only one post in the thread". My 2nd biggest pet peeve about Googling for answers this way is the huge amount of search results asking the same question I have, with no answers.
My #1 peeve is people taking a crack at answering the question with no understanding themselves about the problem. Answers like "I've never done this myself, but I think blah blah blah" or "Why would you want to do that? Boost already has a function that mostly solves this problem."
And that is exactly why stackoverflow is great: these answers get voted down to oblivion and out of the way.
It's packed like a jack-in-box with poor heat management even in a consumer environment. Pack them together like sardines and you're just making the situation worse. Beef up the components and you're just complicating the already piss-poor heat management.
These things are bad enough as a "home server". Nevermind cramming an absurd number of them into a rack.
The only reason that this is even an issue is the whole "monopoly" Apple has on running MacOS binaries. Otherwise, this would be an obvious candidate for virtualization or running on hardware that's actually designed for the operating environment.
No arguments on your last point about virtualization on appropriate hardware. I do wonder, though, on the need for better cooling. In an appropriate rack, with forced air cooling in a properly designed server room, is the cooling really that much of an issue? I just popped over to Apple's website; it states a maximum power draw of 85W, which is not exactly unmanageable.
It is $1000. That's the thing here. They aren't all that powerful and they cost a grand. So you can pack 8 of them in to a 5RU shelf, apparently. Ok, that's $8k, presuming no upgrades... Well go have a look at what you get from Dell for $8k. You can get quite a bit of server, including things like ECC RAM and hot swap disks and all that.
I can understand getting a single cheap computer as a server if your needs are low, and thus you aren't going to spend a ton. But when you are talking about tossing a ton of them in a rack, well you have to evaluate what they'd be competing against.
But even for $8k, Dell can't sell you hardware that can run a blessed version of Apple's applications. That seems to be the only reason to go the Mac Mini route.
If I understand this correctly, the point is to be compatible with zlib decompression. Obviously, you can bet much better compression with xz/lzma, for example, but that would be out of range for most browsers.
Odd that Google doesn't just push to extend the supported compression formats to include more of these more modern compression libraries if this is a serious concern for them. This sounds like two guys using their 20% time to figure out a way to optimize the deflate algorithm. Kudos to them, but this is not comparable to releasing a royalty-free video codec or other large Googly-type project.
According to the article, "Zopfli is 81 times slower than the fastest measured algorithm gzip -9" Almost two orders of magnitude of time taken, in return for a compression gain of 3%-8%. It would have been informative to know how much working memory was used vs. what gzip requires. This is a small gain of network bandwidth; trivial, even. But, if you're Google and already have millions of CPUs and petabytes of RAM running at less than 100% capacity, this is the type of small gain you might implement.
Who in this day and age still has pop-ups enabled in their browsers?
Beyond just pop-ups, what happens if I:
a) Have never checked whatever @comcast.com e-mail address was created for me when I set up the account. I literally have no idea what that address is, and need another e-mail address like a hole in the head.
and,
b) Never use a web browser at all? I do use browsers with AdBlock, but more and more my bandwidth is being used by game consoles, a Netflix-enabled Blu-ray player, and a smart phone that talks IMAP and Exchange, plus apps that pull their own data without opening a general-purpose web browser.
Seems like the day is fast approaching when sitting down at a desktop and launching a browser will be a quaint, old-fashioned notion with some people.
Less human beings to trust with hardware. Less points of failure. Human beings are the problem.
The pro-software crowd would view that in itself as a weak point: that the more people who are able to evaluate and hammer away on different implementations, the better. If the small group of people that implement the hardware can be trusted to do a proper job of it, then a small group can get it done.
Hardware encryption is superior to software encryption because at least with hardware encryption there is less room for error. Software usually has bugs, one bug in any implementation and its broken.
I'm not sure what you're saying here... hardware encryption has less room for error because you can implicitly trust the company baking the algorithm into the hardware? Hardware can have all of the implementation errors that a software approach might have.
Unless you compiled it yourself you can't trust the person who compiled it or the compiler itself not to have a bug or backdoor.
But at least someone versed in the art can inspect the software to look for these bugs. With hardware, it's just a black box that you have to trust or reverse engineer at a much higher cost.
Maybe it's time to stop spending billions on obsolete wars.
As long as you can get both sides to agree to that, it's a splendid idea. 7000+ years of human history seem to teach that we don't do that so well, as a species.
That's a bitter way of looking at the advice. Living in a smaller house isn't the same as spending the least amount of money possible (e.g. being homeless, living with parents, having a bad apartment in a bad part of town, etc). Thinking about the cost of things like a coffee a day or cable tv doesn't mean you can't buy them, merely that you should be aware of long-term aggregate costs for things that seem cheap. Avoiding interest payments by saving and paying in cash isn't the same as never buying the item you desire.
You are right; thank you for pointing that out. The post I was responding to just rubbed me the wrong way and came off very opinionated about how "you" are doing things wrong and wasting "your" money on creature comforts like coffee or cable TV.
Sure, I could retire in 30 years with $3,000 more if I cancelled my Netflix subscription, but I would rather spend the $8/month and enjoy the 30 years along the way, rather than wait until after I am retired to allow myself the luxury of a magazine subscription or two-ply toilet tissue.
You have to add at least $27000 to you savings account every month for 30 years to be a millionare, not sure skipping coffee is going to help much.
I'm sure if your math is off, or if you are trying to plan for a high rate of inflation to project a million dollars' worth of "buying power" in 30 years. To save $1million in a shoe box or other place at 0% interest, you would need to save: $1mm / (30 years * 12 months) = $2777.78.
Slashdot Mirror
Node.js stops being actively developed, as one user put, security vulnerability happens...or just a general bug. Maybe you come in one morning and one of the hotfixes for the OS cratered the Node.js server component and now all of your systems are down.
If the server that has just cratered is really mission-critical, it probably would have been wise to not allow the production systems to apply their own patches.
Yes, this sort of stuff happens all the time, but thinking that it would never happen with a commercial product is just not true. The open-source nature of node.js has nothing to do with it.
Agreed, keeping up to date with every possible patch level is unacceptable. But, running out-of-date, but stable, versions of code (open source or proprietary) is another option.
I am in awe and saddened at the same time by the level of truth in your comment.
Gitlab, as others have mentioned, works a treat. There is a how-to on their site that walks you through everything needed. I had it up and running with LDAP integration in about half a day.
Redmine, with the redmine-git-hosting plugin, also makes a very nice central git server. It was more of a headache for me to set up, because there is no step-by-step instructions for getting it working that I could find. It's very powerful, and has issue tracking, etc. which may be useful for you. There are many plugins available to add or customize various areas of the system.
For strictly git hosting, my vote is for Gitlab. The integration with the repositories is fantastic and things like visualizing repository history, handling pull requests, etc. is very good. The wiki markup language is weak, and the issue tracker is very lightweight, but it has 90% of everything you love on Github.
Another solution I haven't evaluated but which looks strong is Stash, from Atlassian. But that doesn't meet your OSS requirement.
No, I don't think that's it at all. I think Wal-Mart won out because Sam Walton and the Wal-Mart execs realized the majority of Americans would rather have quantity over quality.
Maybe my opinion is biased by my experience with the K-Mart in my town, but when most Americans think "quality", I don't think that K-Mart jumps to mind.
Amen to this. I count the $8 I send to Netflix as some of the best value for the money I get all month.
The ability to queue up movies or TV shows as a time-limited rental would make Netflix even better.
And every CPU that goes into the products will be pre-vetted for full GPL compliance, with software releases even before the product goes out the door. That's what we've promised to do: to provide Free Software developers with the opportunity to be involved with mass-volume product development every step of the way.
If "full GPL compliance" is a goal of the project, then it's doomed to mediocrity. Real chip vendors are not going to share their secret sauce, either because they can't due to patent/IP agreements or because they don't see a reason to risk handing the crown jewels to their competition. It just ain't gonna happen.
I'm strongly considering just dropping out with a Masters' degree, because several students who did that (because they failed a qualifying exam) left and had no trouble finding jobs that paid well--though even some of them had to omit the Masters from their resume.
That is definitely worth considering, if the point of your degree is purely employment-driven. If your goal is to teach, you probably need to keep going to reach the "terminal" degree in your field. There are also employment opportunities in some university-affiliated research positions, and there are still corporations looking for Ph.D holders, but you'd better be sure that your thesis topic is impressive enough to put you to work. Most places I've worked look at a Ph.D holder as "BS + 6 years of experience".
As to getting the Masters, I'll close on the experience of one of my best friends. Hugely brilliant guy; finished an honors BS in Chemistry, then went to a Ph.D. program in the same. As he tells it, from the first day on campus until he finally had to quit the program 6 years later, he was always "4 years away from finishing." He lived and breathed chemistry, was pursuing it out of love of the field and intended to end up as a researcher somewhere. He and his wife were involved in a nasty car accident 5 years into his studies, and was unable to keep up his research and teaching responsibilities for the next 6-9 months. They had two kids to support, and they just had to decide that a Real Job was what was best for their family. He very much regrets that he didn't first get the Masters done before starting the Ph.D., since now his resume shows a Bachelor's + lots of post grad work.
With two 5830's in XFire I can hash at 520 MH/s, will this increase that?
Before I dumped all my hardware and got out of the mining business, I was getting 300MH/s from each of my 5830s in non cross-fire mode. I had one card that could run solid at 330MH/s, but the others became flakey at anything over 305 or so. Try slightly overclocking?
The process of refining bauxite to get aluminum is extremely energy intensive. Other than having a pure oxide to put in, it almost is pointless to bother recycling the "battery".
This is one of the last things I want to see in widespread use, unless we have modern nuclear plants, fusion, or some other next gen energy source, just because turning aluminum oxide back to a usable metal uses so much electricity.
Moving cars and people around is energy intensive. Any battery technology is lossy; it's all about storing the electrical energy in chemical form to make it transportable.
You are correct: this is about coal-powered cars until we have some better way to generate electricity.
And no AV scans or backups. Unfortunately, not an option for our org but thanks for the info. Any resources or public data available for figuring out the value of BC mining? I've looked but can't find any...
Would it not make sense to alter your AV scan and backup scripts to do their thing, then put the machines to sleep afterwards?
If the goal is truly to "go green", using less electricity is the only way. If you're not looking to go green, but are instead looking to offset some of the money that you're spending now on electricity, turning the machines off will be orders of magnitude more effective than trying to offset the cost by mining and selling BitCoins.
Plus, running 18,000 desktop machines at 100% will put an extra heat load on your HVAC systems, which aren't free to run from either environmental or monetary costs.
Being persecuted is often viewed as a badge of honor or justification that their view is correct by many religious people.
Just so I'm clear... we're talking about Westboro Baptist Church now, right?
"Computers long ago reached the point where they were fast enough..."
For you, maybe - but not for everyone. I work with people daily who need more computing power, and in fact would benefit even further if processors were faster even than they are today. "Fast enough" is a fallacy - there is always, and will always be, room for improvement.
You two are discussing different markets; there's really no point arguing either side. Porsche and Kia will continue to build cars that can be used to buy groceries, and there will still be a market for both. $3000 desktop machines with DVD drives will still have their place, even with the existence of $49 DVD players.
The problem is lack of usage examples and feedback. When you follow the API and your program doesn't work, the solution is to google your problem to find the solution from the 1000 others who have hit the same problem.
If only there was a clear-cut way to tell Google, "Please hide all of the results that are on a forum with only one post in the thread". My 2nd biggest pet peeve about Googling for answers this way is the huge amount of search results asking the same question I have, with no answers.
My #1 peeve is people taking a crack at answering the question with no understanding themselves about the problem. Answers like "I've never done this myself, but I think blah blah blah" or "Why would you want to do that? Boost already has a function that mostly solves this problem."
And that is exactly why stackoverflow is great: these answers get voted down to oblivion and out of the way.
> Look at the MacMini specs
It's packed like a jack-in-box with poor heat management even in a consumer environment. Pack them together like sardines and you're just making the situation worse. Beef up the components and you're just complicating the already piss-poor heat management.
These things are bad enough as a "home server". Nevermind cramming an absurd number of them into a rack.
The only reason that this is even an issue is the whole "monopoly" Apple has on running MacOS binaries. Otherwise, this would be an obvious candidate for virtualization or running on hardware that's actually designed for the operating environment.
No arguments on your last point about virtualization on appropriate hardware. I do wonder, though, on the need for better cooling. In an appropriate rack, with forced air cooling in a properly designed server room, is the cooling really that much of an issue? I just popped over to Apple's website; it states a maximum power draw of 85W, which is not exactly unmanageable.
It is $1000. That's the thing here. They aren't all that powerful and they cost a grand. So you can pack 8 of them in to a 5RU shelf, apparently. Ok, that's $8k, presuming no upgrades... Well go have a look at what you get from Dell for $8k. You can get quite a bit of server, including things like ECC RAM and hot swap disks and all that.
I can understand getting a single cheap computer as a server if your needs are low, and thus you aren't going to spend a ton. But when you are talking about tossing a ton of them in a rack, well you have to evaluate what they'd be competing against.
But even for $8k, Dell can't sell you hardware that can run a blessed version of Apple's applications. That seems to be the only reason to go the Mac Mini route.
Underneath Android is still Linux, anything that needs to avoid garbage collection can easily run outside of the dalvik VM.
Then it's up to the whims of the overcommit memory killer in Linux. I'm not sure if turning that off will cause fits in Android...
I know, using the 2010 budget for 2013. Complete madness!
Well, it's about time they passed a budget for 2010. Think they'll have the 2011 budget ready and approved for 2014?
If I understand this correctly, the point is to be compatible with zlib decompression. Obviously, you can bet much better compression with xz/lzma, for example, but that would be out of range for most browsers.
Odd that Google doesn't just push to extend the supported compression formats to include more of these more modern compression libraries if this is a serious concern for them. This sounds like two guys using their 20% time to figure out a way to optimize the deflate algorithm. Kudos to them, but this is not comparable to releasing a royalty-free video codec or other large Googly-type project.
According to the article, "Zopfli is 81 times slower than the fastest measured algorithm gzip -9" Almost two orders of magnitude of time taken, in return for a compression gain of 3%-8%. It would have been informative to know how much working memory was used vs. what gzip requires. This is a small gain of network bandwidth; trivial, even. But, if you're Google and already have millions of CPUs and petabytes of RAM running at less than 100% capacity, this is the type of small gain you might implement.
Looking at the data presented in the pdf, it seems to me that gzip does a fantastic job for the amount of time it takes to do it.
So the obvious conclusion is that what we need is a gzip -11 option.
Who in this day and age still has pop-ups enabled in their browsers?
Beyond just pop-ups, what happens if I:
a) Have never checked whatever @comcast.com e-mail address was created for me when I set up the account. I literally have no idea what that address is, and need another e-mail address like a hole in the head.
and,
b) Never use a web browser at all? I do use browsers with AdBlock, but more and more my bandwidth is being used by game consoles, a Netflix-enabled Blu-ray player, and a smart phone that talks IMAP and Exchange, plus apps that pull their own data without opening a general-purpose web browser.
Seems like the day is fast approaching when sitting down at a desktop and launching a browser will be a quaint, old-fashioned notion with some people.
Less human beings to trust with hardware. Less points of failure. Human beings are the problem.
The pro-software crowd would view that in itself as a weak point: that the more people who are able to evaluate and hammer away on different implementations, the better. If the small group of people that implement the hardware can be trusted to do a proper job of it, then a small group can get it done.
Hardware encryption is superior to software encryption because at least with hardware encryption there is less room for error. Software usually has bugs, one bug in any implementation and its broken.
I'm not sure what you're saying here... hardware encryption has less room for error because you can implicitly trust the company baking the algorithm into the hardware? Hardware can have all of the implementation errors that a software approach might have.
Unless you compiled it yourself you can't trust the person who compiled it or the compiler itself not to have a bug or backdoor.
But at least someone versed in the art can inspect the software to look for these bugs. With hardware, it's just a black box that you have to trust or reverse engineer at a much higher cost.
Maybe it's time to stop spending billions on obsolete wars.
As long as you can get both sides to agree to that, it's a splendid idea. 7000+ years of human history seem to teach that we don't do that so well, as a species.
That's a bitter way of looking at the advice. Living in a smaller house isn't the same as spending the least amount of money possible (e.g. being homeless, living with parents, having a bad apartment in a bad part of town, etc). Thinking about the cost of things like a coffee a day or cable tv doesn't mean you can't buy them, merely that you should be aware of long-term aggregate costs for things that seem cheap. Avoiding interest payments by saving and paying in cash isn't the same as never buying the item you desire.
You are right; thank you for pointing that out. The post I was responding to just rubbed me the wrong way and came off very opinionated about how "you" are doing things wrong and wasting "your" money on creature comforts like coffee or cable TV.
Sure, I could retire in 30 years with $3,000 more if I cancelled my Netflix subscription, but I would rather spend the $8/month and enjoy the 30 years along the way, rather than wait until after I am retired to allow myself the luxury of a magazine subscription or two-ply toilet tissue.
You have to add at least $27000 to you savings account every month for 30 years to be a millionare, not sure skipping coffee is going to help much.
I'm sure if your math is off, or if you are trying to plan for a high rate of inflation to project a million dollars' worth of "buying power" in 30 years.
To save $1million in a shoe box or other place at 0% interest, you would need to save: $1mm / (30 years * 12 months) = $2777.78.