Statements like, "Evolution is accepted as fact by scientists and thinking people. It is no more or less a theory than physics or astronomy."
What would you have said when all thinking ppl, said that the earth was flat?
Maybe, 'look at the shape of the shadow of the earth on the moon', or 'look at how the length of a shadow cast by the sun from a rod of a fixed length at a fixed time varies based on latitude'.
That is, look at the evidence.
Just because something is supported by the majority does NOT make it fact. Understand this and you'll have a crack at making some real discoveries.
Science says that that which is supported by the best evidence should be granted the presumption of the closest fit with reality. Evolution is simply the best fit with all available physical evidence.
Another problem is that when dealing with mutations we don't gain information, we only change.
The information comes from the environment, it doesn't come from the mutation. An organism is born with is slightly different from its forebears and its siblings, and the environment says to it either 'nope, sorry, that won't work, time to die', or 'yeah, okay, whatever, you'll do about as okay as others of your kind', or 'hey, gold star for you, you'll get to have a better chance of having kids because you have solved such and such environmental challenge better than most'.
See? Nature grades the papers, and the students are enlightened thereby.
And what really irks me is when they have the unmitigated gall to assert that evolution is as a much a scientific fact as gravity. As if I can make a fly mutate into an elephant as easily as I can drop an apple and watch it fall!
So you're saying that because the theory of evolution postulates the common descent of elephants and flies from an ancestor that lived many hundreds of millions of years ago, you should be able to do the same feat as easily as dropping an apple? The theory of evolution doesn't say that you or I or anyone can quickly change an animal's genome in any kind of reasonable way. Quite the opposite, evolutionary theory postulates that the way that nature has developed complex organisms is through an ancient interplay between the chain of organisms and the environment, each changing and shaping the other.
We can, however, track mutations over time in the genetic makeup of all kinds of organisms, and we can do computer simulations of mutation and selection that demonstrate the principle. If you can demonstrate the theory of evolution on a computer and you can demonstrate the theory of gravitational attraction through a mathematical simulation, perhaps they are not so different as you think?
For all you folks who think that, you are WRONG, and your pathetic fools too. But don't take my word for it. READ A FEW BOOKS THAT DEMONSTRATE THE ABSURDITY OF PURELY NATURALIST EVOLUTION.
The thing is, I have read a whole bunch that try to demonstrate that, and I've not yet found one that was at all convincing. If you know of a book that demonstrates the absurdity of naturalistic evolution, by all means do share.
This particular problem has frequently been pointed out by creationists, but evolutionists have dismissed it as a non-issue. Until now. Now when they have found an answer to the problem, it suddenly makes sense to address the issue.
Creationists are some of the most dedicated (not best, just most dedicated) folks around at finding weaknesses, real or imagined, in our understanding of evolutionary mechanisms. So much so that many scientists are tempted to ignore the creationists. After all, why bother paying attention to a group that has insisted for 20+ years on misapplying the second law of thermodynamics?
The fact is, it's easier to ask questions than it is to answer them. If a creationist had come out and found this genetic switch and said 'oops, I guess nature really did find a way to do this. we were wrong.', I'd be more inclined to give the creationists props for this.
So a creationist claim that evolutionists cannot answer is irrelevant. A creationist claim that evolutionists can answer is relevant.
I really doubt this particular claim was ever considered irrelevant by biologists working in the field. The creationists bringing up this claim might have been treated so, but not this particular technical question.
Specifically, in what way are the Java bytecodes and VM "a bit more paranoid about things like security"? I've looked at both the specs and I don't see how this argument can be supported, but I'd seriously like to learn.
I spoke in ignorance, based on a belief that.NET supporters were serious when they were talking about the ability to run C, etc., in CLR. From looking at Microsoft's security overview, it does appear that they have things locked down pretty tight for the CLR's managed code execution.
Unfortunately, there aren't enough details there, and I was not able to find a good link to more details that would cover things like arbitrary memory access within a specific assembly, etc. Given the frequency of pointer passing in C based API's, though, I can't believe that any C code running in CLR would have much intra-assembly security.
So, it looks as though the CLR, when running managed code, at least looks as though it is on a similar footing to Java's security specs. The proof will be to see how much code winds up running within the managed CLR and how much winds up going unmanaged.
And your argument about platform portability is specious. Because it's easier to make non-portable calls, you presume that developers will inexorably be drawn to write non-portable code? And if it's hard they won't do it? Please. I'll write the code I need to write to get the job done. If it can be portably written, I'll do that. But if I need a feature that I know will make my application non-portable, and I'm willing to make the non-portable tradeoff in order to get the feature, then I'll do it. Without regard to how hard or easy it is. I make tradeoffs all the time. It's a big part of what I do while writing code.
Surely, and properly so. But the whole point of C# and the.NET framework from Microsoft's point of view is that programmers working in it will be less likely to wander away from ties to Microsoft's underlying platform.
You can bet that Microsoft won't be attempting to duplicate all of the Java API's that Sun and its partners are promulgating in their yearly spec grants to ECMA. And, no, there's nothing wrong with that, just as there's nothing wrong with simply writing Win32 code and being happy with that.
By coding in Java, however, I get to (and have) run my code without recompilation or rework on a bunch of UNIXes, 32 bit Windows, Mac OS 9 and X, and OS/2. That's not what.NET is about.
ACID _is_ hard to do. At least if you do it right. Have you ever tried to create a system which survives a crash with partial written blocks and can still handle simultaneous writes? It can be done but it is not simple.
Well, I don't deny that doing full blown ACID in an SQL environment is hard. Doing ACID in systems that have less variability in terms of order and simultaneity of writes is not so difficult, however, but no one ever said that simultaneous writes were part of the ACID definition.
Ganymede is an ACID system, it just serializes transaction commits and uses a transaction journal to record changes to its RAM-resident database. As long as the operating system properly sequences appends from a single file handle, and as long as the operating system supports atomic file rename operations, Ganymede will always recover as many transactions on restart as can be cleanly read from the transaction journal.
Of course, with Mono you get all that neat stuff while still being able to code in _whatever_ language(s) you want and have it work transparently and consistently.
Whatever language you like so long as its semantics and runtime behavior have been massaged to work with the CLR.
Really, the CLI/CLR is just like the Jave byte codes and JVM, except that CLR's is a bit less strict about security and in that the CLR's support for 'unmanaged' code allows for cleaner support of native machine code than does Java's JNI interface. It's a convenience thing, much as Visual C++'s helpful COM automation wizards are a convenience thing.
The biggest difference between Java and the.NET framework is that Java's bytecodes and VM are a bit more paranoid about things like security, and that Java is designed with portability as a first order concern..NET code will probably never be as portable as Java, precisely because it is designed to make it super easy to interface with operating system level code. Java is designed to make it a pain to use any code that isn't itself portable.
I believe Microsoft actually obtained a software patent on at least one of the password hashing algorithms used in NT. If Microsoft ever pursued enforcement of that patent, anything that generated hashed passwords for use in the Samba password file could be at risk.
What's SVN? Does that have to do with Subversion, or is it a WebDAV thing?
Our tool is designed to allow arbitrary people with UNIX file access privileges (or Samba, or FTP) to manage the content on the internal staging server, then have a defined set of users with review and approval authority who can sign files through the GUI, which tracks md5 signatures for the files to be able to determine whether a given file has changed since it was last signed or not. If a file has changed, the GUI can present a nice graphical context diff between the last signed version and the version on the staging server. If an approved user signs the file, that file gets checked into CVS, and so will be part of the next web server synchronization.
So yes, workflow, auditing, and a staging server separated from the (very locked down, firewalled) external server.
Wow, that sounds really cool. Are you going to GPL this stuff too? I would love to get a hold of it.
Yup, that's the intent, once things settle down a bit more. The thing started out using PHP, Python, and MySQL, then we added in a CVS layer and the ability to view a copy of our external web server's configuration at any given time. Then the PHP layer got ripped out in favor of mod_python, and now we're looking at adding in a WebWare layer to handle session management, caching, etc., rather than simple http basic authentication.
Give us another month or two to get some user testing and documentation done and we should be making an announcement and putting it out under the GPL.
But really, who cares? For a couple hundred bucks you could set up a RAID array that would hold every line of source that you ever wrote in your life, 1000 times over. Plus, you really only have to check out the stuff you are working on, and if you are currently working on gigabytes worth of source code, then whoa. I know you're talented Jon, but jeez...
Heh, not even close. The last 6 years of work by everyone who has done anything for Ganymede amounts to 19 megs in cvsroot plus change.
However, source code isn't the only thing you'd like to be able to manage with a CVS-like system. We've spent the last few months building a web management/authorization tool that is based on mod_python, CVS, and MySQL. People put their content on our staging server, then use our web tool to browse the staging server and sign files to approve the exporting of those files to our new external web server. When the periodic sync happens, a daemon does a CVS export to a working directory, tars it up, and ssh's it out to the heavily secured external web server.
Works great, except we have a person who has loaded 500 megabytes of data onto the staging server for a project of his. I don't imagine the content will be changing very rapidly, but I'd hate to have several 500 megabyte copies of his content hanging around in our staging server's CVS repository, cheap disks or no cheap disks.
Really, revision control management systems are getting specialized enough that one size tool simply won't fit all. Bitkeeper, arch, and the other 'new wave' of SCM systems are explicitly designed to manage distributed source code development, which is not really what we are using our signing/authorizing tool for.
Well, at the least it seems less space efficient than CVS. The arch repositories seem rather frighteningly brittle as well, given that anyone could use file access tools to subtly corrupt the repositories.
Will be interesting to see what sort of response all this sudden hype for Arch provokes from Larry McVoy and his Bitkeeper project. arch seems unique enough to be worthy of comment from the revision control big boys.;-)
Well, that doesn't do me much good when what I need to do is change directory permissions. What's the officially recommended way for an Administrator to do permissions fixing in the filesystem without having to logout and log in again as Administrator?
Are you familiar with the "Run As" feature in both W2K and XP? When starting an app, hold down the Ctrl key, right-click on the icon, and choose to run as Administrator (or whatever account you want). No need to login under multiple accounts (even though, yes, this is now possible under XP).
Hm, I am now. I imagine running Windows Explorer as an administrator would solve the particular problem I had fairly well, although I am still faster and more proficient on a UNIX-style command line.
I get the impression that W2k is a single-user system because the great majority of software for use on W2k is written with single-user assumptions in mind, and because the operating system provides precious little support for multiple concurrent users. I had to fix a permissions problem on a W2k box, and it was just about the most frustrating experience in my life. The software I was installing couldn't cope with being installed without administrator privileges, so I had to try to install the software, see that there was a problem, *log out*, log in again as administrator, fix the first directory permissions problem, *log out*, log in again as the user, try the install again, see that there was another permissions problem, *log out*, log in again as administrator, fix the second directory permissions problem, *log out*, log in again as the user...
Repeat that 3 more times and you'll know why I was cursing. I *never* curse at work, and certainly not around people I'm supporting.
Just remember, it's far easier to use Windows than it is to do something wacky like opening a shell window, typing 'su', and proceed to fix a problem relating to multi-user permissions.
To be fair, WinXP is supposed to be somewhat better about concurrent use with their quick user switcher.
The biggest speed issues in Java are not from the JVM being an interpreter or JIT, they are from the API and the very high level of safety guarantees provided by Java.
Java code can be very fast, but you have to take the API and the nature of Java into account in your design. If you want to do nothing but sling strings around, you're going to pay a massive penalty for doing it in Java, because all of the Java API's (at least in 1.3 and prior) require String objects for any string activity, and String objects are non-mutable due to a concern for thread safe API calls. If you want to change the third character in a String, you get to either create a new String with that change in place, or you get to create a StringBuffer class that will spew non-mutable String copies for each time you want to use the characters in your StringBuffer.
A C program would never ever do things this way, and so you get insanely better performance. But if you write a C++ program that does do things this way, you'll actually get performance that is very close to Java's, except you have no guarantees as to the integrity of any of your objects because some random piece of code can scribble all over anything it wants to. Plus no universal set of exception classes that everything knows about, no portable thread synchronization primitives, etc., etc., etc.
There needs to be ONE place for ALL information about each computer on a network. There needs to be a GUI tool for having a quick look at this information. Is there a better infrastructure already available than Ganymede? Ganymede may not be very close to being able to do this, but can you mention a better starting point?
Michael, if you want to see a system designed more along the lines I think you are suggesting, do take a look at Caldera's Volution network management product.
I think that we should want only ONE repository of information about each computer. I think that, philosophically, a repository should not be anything else than a repository. We don't want the database of information to go out and start changing things. We don't want this because of a realization that the program that takes action based on information should be different than the program that contains the information.
Sure, but Ganymede actually is designed to actively respond to data loaded into it. If you want a simple repository, you want something like MySQL, or PostgresSQL, or a simple LDAP server.
For software distribution and management, tools like apt-get or rpm, when combined with something like cfengine
or OpenNMS
might make better sense, I would think.
I think modesty is fine, but not when it becomes misleading. The facts seem to be that Ganymede is an excellent start on something that needs to be everywhere.
Well, I'm pleased that you have a high opinion of Ganymede, and I certainly wouldn't want to discourage anyone from making a go of building something like what you are suggesting based on it, but as I say, it's not really what I was designing for.
If you'd like to throw ideas of this kind around, by all means, send email to the Ganymede-dev mailing list and see if you can find someone else who's interested in pursuing this sort of thing. If nothing else, it would be more appropriate for me to respond in depth there.
Ganymede could be extended to do a lot of things, due to its intrinsic flexibility and programmability, but it was never made for management of software distribution. If you wanted to have the Ganymede server act as a repository of software installation information on multiple systems, you probably could do that, but most of the interesting work to handle software distribution would have to be developed from scratch. If someone were so moved, Ganymede might be a nice starting point for something like that, but I imagine that by the time you were done, it wouldn't look a very great deal like the current system.
By which I meant Red Hat Linux 7.1, of course. Sorry, I do know better.;-)
Re:So, wait a second...Yeah Right!
on
Lindows Reviewed
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· Score: 2
Which, of course, raises the question: what hardware were you using?
My work desktop has been rock solid reliable. Linux 7.1, 167 days uptime. My home system has been much less reliable.. X seems to lock up once every couple of weeks. I can usually ssh to my home system from another box and kill off the X server and things come back, but not always. I don't know whether it is the hardware or my extremely heavily customized kernel and library set, but that's the cost of rolling your own.
I would imagine that client communicates with a centralized server to check MD5 sums and also check filenames so the only way to actually put up a illegal file for sharing is change its name to something like 11.29.98-Phish-David-Bowie03.shn and post it as a new file so a MD5sum is created.
Why would one even need to look at the filename? Calculate the md5 signature, look it up in the database, and if you find a match, you're good to go, regardless of the filename. An md5 signature is 16 bytes long, that's the same length as an IPv6 address, the kind they describe as being sufficient as allowing every atom on earth to have its own I.P. address. Shouldn't it be vanishingly unlikely that someone could alter a piece of music so that its md5 matches with something previously registered?
That's assuming that someone is actually checking out these files before entering md5's into the database, I guess. Is the safety factor just based on the fact that you won't approve a filename that doesn't match the known list of acceptable bands? I suppose if you can't search for something illegal based on name that it doesn't matter in some sense whether it is in the system or not..
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Statements like, "Evolution is accepted as fact by scientists and thinking people. It is no more or less a theory than physics or astronomy." What would you have said when all thinking ppl, said that the earth was flat?
Maybe, 'look at the shape of the shadow of the earth on the moon', or 'look at how the length of a shadow cast by the sun from a rod of a fixed length at a fixed time varies based on latitude'.
That is, look at the evidence.
Just because something is supported by the majority does NOT make it fact. Understand this and you'll have a crack at making some real discoveries.
Science says that that which is supported by the best evidence should be granted the presumption of the closest fit with reality. Evolution is simply the best fit with all available physical evidence.
Another problem is that when dealing with mutations we don't gain information, we only change.
The information comes from the environment, it doesn't come from the mutation. An organism is born with is slightly different from its forebears and its siblings, and the environment says to it either 'nope, sorry, that won't work, time to die', or 'yeah, okay, whatever, you'll do about as okay as others of your kind', or 'hey, gold star for you, you'll get to have a better chance of having kids because you have solved such and such environmental challenge better than most'.
See? Nature grades the papers, and the students are enlightened thereby.
And what really irks me is when they have the unmitigated gall to assert that evolution is as a much a scientific fact as gravity. As if I can make a fly mutate into an elephant as easily as I can drop an apple and watch it fall!
So you're saying that because the theory of evolution postulates the common descent of elephants and flies from an ancestor that lived many hundreds of millions of years ago, you should be able to do the same feat as easily as dropping an apple? The theory of evolution doesn't say that you or I or anyone can quickly change an animal's genome in any kind of reasonable way. Quite the opposite, evolutionary theory postulates that the way that nature has developed complex organisms is through an ancient interplay between the chain of organisms and the environment, each changing and shaping the other.
We can, however, track mutations over time in the genetic makeup of all kinds of organisms, and we can do computer simulations of mutation and selection that demonstrate the principle. If you can demonstrate the theory of evolution on a computer and you can demonstrate the theory of gravitational attraction through a mathematical simulation, perhaps they are not so different as you think?
For all you folks who think that, you are WRONG, and your pathetic fools too. But don't take my word for it. READ A FEW BOOKS THAT DEMONSTRATE THE ABSURDITY OF PURELY NATURALIST EVOLUTION.
The thing is, I have read a whole bunch that try to demonstrate that, and I've not yet found one that was at all convincing. If you know of a book that demonstrates the absurdity of naturalistic evolution, by all means do share.
This particular problem has frequently been pointed out by creationists, but evolutionists have dismissed it as a non-issue. Until now. Now when they have found an answer to the problem, it suddenly makes sense to address the issue.
Creationists are some of the most dedicated (not best, just most dedicated) folks around at finding weaknesses, real or imagined, in our understanding of evolutionary mechanisms. So much so that many scientists are tempted to ignore the creationists. After all, why bother paying attention to a group that has insisted for 20+ years on misapplying the second law of thermodynamics?
The fact is, it's easier to ask questions than it is to answer them. If a creationist had come out and found this genetic switch and said 'oops, I guess nature really did find a way to do this. we were wrong.', I'd be more inclined to give the creationists props for this.
So a creationist claim that evolutionists cannot answer is irrelevant. A creationist claim that evolutionists can answer is relevant.
I really doubt this particular claim was ever considered irrelevant by biologists working in the field. The creationists bringing up this claim might have been treated so, but not this particular technical question.
Specifically, in what way are the Java bytecodes and VM "a bit more paranoid about things like security"? I've looked at both the specs and I don't see how this argument can be supported, but I'd seriously like to learn.
I spoke in ignorance, based on a belief that .NET supporters were serious when they were talking about the ability to run C, etc., in CLR. From looking at Microsoft's security overview, it does appear that they have things locked down pretty tight for the CLR's managed code execution.
Unfortunately, there aren't enough details there, and I was not able to find a good link to more details that would cover things like arbitrary memory access within a specific assembly, etc. Given the frequency of pointer passing in C based API's, though, I can't believe that any C code running in CLR would have much intra-assembly security.
So, it looks as though the CLR, when running managed code, at least looks as though it is on a similar footing to Java's security specs. The proof will be to see how much code winds up running within the managed CLR and how much winds up going unmanaged.
And your argument about platform portability is specious. Because it's easier to make non-portable calls, you presume that developers will inexorably be drawn to write non-portable code? And if it's hard they won't do it? Please. I'll write the code I need to write to get the job done. If it can be portably written, I'll do that. But if I need a feature that I know will make my application non-portable, and I'm willing to make the non-portable tradeoff in order to get the feature, then I'll do it. Without regard to how hard or easy it is. I make tradeoffs all the time. It's a big part of what I do while writing code.
Surely, and properly so. But the whole point of C# and the .NET framework from Microsoft's point of view is that programmers working in it will be less likely to wander away from ties to Microsoft's underlying platform.
You can bet that Microsoft won't be attempting to duplicate all of the Java API's that Sun and its partners are promulgating in their yearly spec grants to ECMA. And, no, there's nothing wrong with that, just as there's nothing wrong with simply writing Win32 code and being happy with that.
By coding in Java, however, I get to (and have) run my code without recompilation or rework on a bunch of UNIXes, 32 bit Windows, Mac OS 9 and X, and OS/2. That's not what .NET is about.
ACID _is_ hard to do. At least if you do it right. Have you ever tried to create a system which survives a crash with partial written blocks and can still handle simultaneous writes? It can be done but it is not simple.
Well, I don't deny that doing full blown ACID in an SQL environment is hard. Doing ACID in systems that have less variability in terms of order and simultaneity of writes is not so difficult, however, but no one ever said that simultaneous writes were part of the ACID definition.
Ganymede is an ACID system, it just serializes transaction commits and uses a transaction journal to record changes to its RAM-resident database. As long as the operating system properly sequences appends from a single file handle, and as long as the operating system supports atomic file rename operations, Ganymede will always recover as many transactions on restart as can be cleanly read from the transaction journal.
Of course, with Mono you get all that neat stuff while still being able to code in _whatever_ language(s) you want and have it work transparently and consistently.
Whatever language you like so long as its semantics and runtime behavior have been massaged to work with the CLR.
Really, the CLI/CLR is just like the Jave byte codes and JVM, except that CLR's is a bit less strict about security and in that the CLR's support for 'unmanaged' code allows for cleaner support of native machine code than does Java's JNI interface. It's a convenience thing, much as Visual C++'s helpful COM automation wizards are a convenience thing.
The biggest difference between Java and the .NET framework is that Java's bytecodes and VM are a bit more paranoid about things like security, and that Java is designed with portability as a first order concern. .NET code will probably never be as portable as Java, precisely because it is designed to make it super easy to interface with operating system level code. Java is designed to make it a pain to use any code that isn't itself portable.
I believe Microsoft actually obtained a software patent on at least one of the password hashing algorithms used in NT. If Microsoft ever pursued enforcement of that patent, anything that generated hashed passwords for use in the Samba password file could be at risk.
What's SVN? Does that have to do with Subversion, or is it a WebDAV thing?
Our tool is designed to allow arbitrary people with UNIX file access privileges (or Samba, or FTP) to manage the content on the internal staging server, then have a defined set of users with review and approval authority who can sign files through the GUI, which tracks md5 signatures for the files to be able to determine whether a given file has changed since it was last signed or not. If a file has changed, the GUI can present a nice graphical context diff between the last signed version and the version on the staging server. If an approved user signs the file, that file gets checked into CVS, and so will be part of the next web server synchronization.
So yes, workflow, auditing, and a staging server separated from the (very locked down, firewalled) external server.
Wow, that sounds really cool. Are you going to GPL this stuff too? I would love to get a hold of it.
Yup, that's the intent, once things settle down a bit more. The thing started out using PHP, Python, and MySQL, then we added in a CVS layer and the ability to view a copy of our external web server's configuration at any given time. Then the PHP layer got ripped out in favor of mod_python, and now we're looking at adding in a WebWare layer to handle session management, caching, etc., rather than simple http basic authentication.
Give us another month or two to get some user testing and documentation done and we should be making an announcement and putting it out under the GPL.
But really, who cares? For a couple hundred bucks you could set up a RAID array that would hold every line of source that you ever wrote in your life, 1000 times over. Plus, you really only have to check out the stuff you are working on, and if you are currently working on gigabytes worth of source code, then whoa. I know you're talented Jon, but jeez...
Heh, not even close. The last 6 years of work by everyone who has done anything for Ganymede amounts to 19 megs in cvsroot plus change.
However, source code isn't the only thing you'd like to be able to manage with a CVS-like system. We've spent the last few months building a web management/authorization tool that is based on mod_python, CVS, and MySQL. People put their content on our staging server, then use our web tool to browse the staging server and sign files to approve the exporting of those files to our new external web server. When the periodic sync happens, a daemon does a CVS export to a working directory, tars it up, and ssh's it out to the heavily secured external web server.
Works great, except we have a person who has loaded 500 megabytes of data onto the staging server for a project of his. I don't imagine the content will be changing very rapidly, but I'd hate to have several 500 megabyte copies of his content hanging around in our staging server's CVS repository, cheap disks or no cheap disks.
Really, revision control management systems are getting specialized enough that one size tool simply won't fit all. Bitkeeper, arch, and the other 'new wave' of SCM systems are explicitly designed to manage distributed source code development, which is not really what we are using our signing/authorizing tool for.
Well, at the least it seems less space efficient than CVS. The arch repositories seem rather frighteningly brittle as well, given that anyone could use file access tools to subtly corrupt the repositories.
Will be interesting to see what sort of response all this sudden hype for Arch provokes from Larry McVoy and his Bitkeeper project. arch seems unique enough to be worthy of comment from the revision control big boys. ;-)
ACID (Automicity, Consitancy, Isolation and Durability) is only something that has been implemented and tested well on high read RDBMS such as Oracle.
Oh, come on. ACID isn't that hard to do. Lots of systems implement ACID. Why do you imagine that only Oracle, etc., can do it?
Well, that doesn't do me much good when what I need to do is change directory permissions. What's the officially recommended way for an Administrator to do permissions fixing in the filesystem without having to logout and log in again as Administrator?
Are you familiar with the "Run As" feature in both W2K and XP? When starting an app, hold down the Ctrl key, right-click on the icon, and choose to run as Administrator (or whatever account you want). No need to login under multiple accounts (even though, yes, this is now possible under XP).
Hm, I am now. I imagine running Windows Explorer as an administrator would solve the particular problem I had fairly well, although I am still faster and more proficient on a UNIX-style command line.
Thanks for the tip.
I get the impression that W2k is a single-user system because the great majority of software for use on W2k is written with single-user assumptions in mind, and because the operating system provides precious little support for multiple concurrent users. I had to fix a permissions problem on a W2k box, and it was just about the most frustrating experience in my life. The software I was installing couldn't cope with being installed without administrator privileges, so I had to try to install the software, see that there was a problem, *log out*, log in again as administrator, fix the first directory permissions problem, *log out*, log in again as the user, try the install again, see that there was another permissions problem, *log out*, log in again as administrator, fix the second directory permissions problem, *log out*, log in again as the user...
Repeat that 3 more times and you'll know why I was cursing. I *never* curse at work, and certainly not around people I'm supporting.
Just remember, it's far easier to use Windows than it is to do something wacky like opening a shell window, typing 'su', and proceed to fix a problem relating to multi-user permissions.
To be fair, WinXP is supposed to be somewhat better about concurrent use with their quick user switcher.
The biggest speed issues in Java are not from the JVM being an interpreter or JIT, they are from the API and the very high level of safety guarantees provided by Java.
Java code can be very fast, but you have to take the API and the nature of Java into account in your design. If you want to do nothing but sling strings around, you're going to pay a massive penalty for doing it in Java, because all of the Java API's (at least in 1.3 and prior) require String objects for any string activity, and String objects are non-mutable due to a concern for thread safe API calls. If you want to change the third character in a String, you get to either create a new String with that change in place, or you get to create a StringBuffer class that will spew non-mutable String copies for each time you want to use the characters in your StringBuffer.
A C program would never ever do things this way, and so you get insanely better performance. But if you write a C++ program that does do things this way, you'll actually get performance that is very close to Java's, except you have no guarantees as to the integrity of any of your objects because some random piece of code can scribble all over anything it wants to. Plus no universal set of exception classes that everything knows about, no portable thread synchronization primitives, etc., etc., etc.
There needs to be ONE place for ALL information about each computer on a network. There needs to be a GUI tool for having a quick look at this information. Is there a better infrastructure already available than Ganymede? Ganymede may not be very close to being able to do this, but can you mention a better starting point?
Michael, if you want to see a system designed more along the lines I think you are suggesting, do take a look at Caldera's Volution network management product.
I think that we should want only ONE repository of information about each computer. I think that, philosophically, a repository should not be anything else than a repository. We don't want the database of information to go out and start changing things. We don't want this because of a realization that the program that takes action based on information should be different than the program that contains the information.
Sure, but Ganymede actually is designed to actively respond to data loaded into it. If you want a simple repository, you want something like MySQL, or PostgresSQL, or a simple LDAP server.
For software distribution and management, tools like apt-get or rpm, when combined with something like cfengine or OpenNMS might make better sense, I would think.
I think modesty is fine, but not when it becomes misleading. The facts seem to be that Ganymede is an excellent start on something that needs to be everywhere.
Well, I'm pleased that you have a high opinion of Ganymede, and I certainly wouldn't want to discourage anyone from making a go of building something like what you are suggesting based on it, but as I say, it's not really what I was designing for.
If you'd like to throw ideas of this kind around, by all means, send email to the Ganymede-dev mailing list and see if you can find someone else who's interested in pursuing this sort of thing. If nothing else, it would be more appropriate for me to respond in depth there.
Ganymede could be extended to do a lot of things, due to its intrinsic flexibility and programmability, but it was never made for management of software distribution. If you wanted to have the Ganymede server act as a repository of software installation information on multiple systems, you probably could do that, but most of the interesting work to handle software distribution would have to be developed from scratch. If someone were so moved, Ganymede might be a nice starting point for something like that, but I imagine that by the time you were done, it wouldn't look a very great deal like the current system.
Which is perfectly fine with me, of course. ;-)
Linux 7.1, 167 days uptime.
By which I meant Red Hat Linux 7.1, of course. Sorry, I do know better. ;-)
Which, of course, raises the question: what hardware were you using?
My work desktop has been rock solid reliable. Linux 7.1, 167 days uptime. My home system has been much less reliable.. X seems to lock up once every couple of weeks. I can usually ssh to my home system from another box and kill off the X server and things come back, but not always. I don't know whether it is the hardware or my extremely heavily customized kernel and library set, but that's the cost of rolling your own.
I would imagine that client communicates with a centralized server to check MD5 sums and also check filenames so the only way to actually put up a illegal file for sharing is change its name to something like 11.29.98-Phish-David-Bowie03.shn and post it as a new file so a MD5sum is created.
Why would one even need to look at the filename? Calculate the md5 signature, look it up in the database, and if you find a match, you're good to go, regardless of the filename. An md5 signature is 16 bytes long, that's the same length as an IPv6 address, the kind they describe as being sufficient as allowing every atom on earth to have its own I.P. address. Shouldn't it be vanishingly unlikely that someone could alter a piece of music so that its md5 matches with something previously registered?
That's assuming that someone is actually checking out these files before entering md5's into the database, I guess. Is the safety factor just based on the fact that you won't approve a filename that doesn't match the known list of acceptable bands? I suppose if you can't search for something illegal based on name that it doesn't matter in some sense whether it is in the system or not..
The point is that you need to stop believing the hype.
So you're saying that the revolution will not be indexed?