ZFS had some licensing issues, but that was under Sun. Now that Sun == Oracle, and Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs are friends, apparently, maybe a deal can be reached.
I like the versioning filesystem, and I like the idea that you have to use sysadmin-level commands to allow a program to listen on a particular port (along with being able to hard-limit how many connections the app will handle). The built-in clustering is also pretty awesome, considering how long it's been available. Having a unified help system is also pretty slick too.
That said, Unix presents the user with a filesystem tree that is entirely directory-based; no need to worry about the underlying disks themselves. Maybe it's just the local admins, but whenever they replace a disk, for some reason it can't be named the same thing as the previous one, so I have to go in and fix my com jobs (luckily not very often).
And this may seem petty, but it bites me far more often than it should, but why does the system allow me to set def ("cd" in Unix/Windows parlance) into a non-existant directory? That is the one huge aspect that I have never ever understood.
I used Lotus Notes for many years, starting with version 3, and I got the impression that there was some sort of philosophy behind it, but I just couldn't figure out what it was; I admit I got tangled up in the interface. A good friend of mine was a Lotus Notes admin, and while I believe he "got it", the hoops the interface made him go through to do various tasks (backing up a database by copy-n-paste because it was the only "reliable" way?) negated whatever deeper benefits the platform provided.
Ultimately it comes down to execution; the web has its shortcomings, but it's simple enough that people "get it" and can use it effectively. Being relatively simple and text-based, it encourages experimentation without needing to worry that the underlying database can somehow can be corrupted or external links permanently invalidated. It doesn't hurt either the the web itself is basically "free", while Notes was (is still?) quite expensive.
I don't want to get all Godwin here, but I think a decent analogy is that Notes is a Tiger tank; sophisticated and extremely powerful, but ultimately done in by the cheap and plentiful Sherman. It doesn't mean that the Tiger wasn't better than the Sherman, it's just that the Sherman won by sheer volume.
Ozzie may be a brilliant guy, with an IQ of 100!, but if he can't execute his ideas in a way that people nowhere near as smart (say, 2!) as him can use, what's the point? History is littered with people who had brilliant ideas but are forgotten because they botched the execution. Having used both Notes and Groove (as I understand it the only other actual piece of software Ozzie actually worked on), he took a serious leap forward, just down the wrong evolutionary path.
First there was the "red" album: straightforward rock-n-roll with some interesting wordplay, but with only a few general themes. C++ was the same way: create some objects, work with 'em, pass 'em around. All good.
Then C++ discovered acid and got into its "blue album" phase: multiple inheritance, templates, operator overloading, namespaces. To read C++ now is like listening to the later Beatles: obtuse, baffling, with a fair amount of brilliance that makes you wonder "how did they do that?????" It confirms that there are always smarter people than me if only to be able to make sense of it all...
Look, I'm pretty upset by this, but want to figure something out: is it really Obama, sitting at the desk, stroking the white cat, saying "those pesky citizens with their encryption. Put a stop to it!"? It seems to me that a "presidential administration" is some weird variation on a big company, with hundreds of employees, with varying degrees of power, along with their own biases, etc.
I'm not going to let anyone off the hook, it's Obama's name on the door and he's ultimately responsible for whatever his administration does, but I sometimes wonder how much a president actually knows about every thing that goes on; if a bill came out proposing that all vehicles purchased by the Forestry Service must be Fords, that would (rightly) upset the Chevy-n-Dodge group, but why would a president, any president, worry about something seemingly so trivial?
I argue that encryption is just as much a trivial issue; the genie is so far out of the bottle that the whole thing sounds utterly ridiculous; if anything, it sounds more like an out-of-touch FBI manager (TFA only quotes an FBI person) who read a little too deeply into an article written in the in-flight magazine and convinced some middle manager in the administration that "teh terrorists are using the inter-tubes!"
Besides, aren't politicians citizens as well? If the law applies to everyone, it applies to them as well.
All I was saying was that it sounded similar; the idea of someone writing a worm to target a specific Siemens machine could have a similar level of "tinfoil-hattery" but for the fact that they have the code in-hand, as opposed to something that happened in the pre-Internet era.
The only fact is that we really don't truly know the facts, either then nor now (unless someone stands up and waves and says "Ooh! Ooh! I did it! I did it!"
...to sue everybody who buys an Atmel development board. Wasn't it some satellite that went down the list of people who had bought mag card writers and threatened to sue them, regardless of what the mag card writer was being used for?
After the knee-jerk reaction of removing Linux support from the PS3 (which I actually used), I can really imagine Sony contemplating such stupidity.
F them, I'm going to play Nethack; still better than most of the games available on the PS3 anyway.
It's very possible that old LIFE book came from a mom-n-pop store that also sells online. I know a woman who has a small bookstore in upstate New York and she keeps the actual storefront open to give her a place to go (she's pushing 80), as a place for book readings, but also as warehouse; she sells most of her stuff via Amazon, with apparently one or two really rare things going on ebay.
If anything, it was a brilliant move on Amazon's part to adopt this model; now lots of mom-n-pops can stay open and be more of a social place (if only for the cats) and still have give people the opportunity to browse.
Those hard to find books are typically at the funky local book store you might find in the "arty" part of town, and while they're feeling it as much as B&N, they've responded the same way I think a lot of local record stores have, focusing on having those hard-to-find books as well as readings, events, etc.
I stopped buying from B&N and similar stores years ago when they started stocking a bajillion copies of the latest tell-all of the celeb du jour, and relegated everything else to a couple of rows each. So I buy all my tech books from Amazon (still miss Fat Brain...), get my "classics" from Project Gutenberg for the iPad, and will happily walk in and spend an hour browsing and chatting with the local bookstore owner, and I never walk out without buying something; not as a "pity" sale, but because I found something genuinely interesting that would have been too obscure even for B&N.
Twenty years ago, would a similar study have said the same about people who have home computers? Why does anyone need them except to play games? They can't do any real work, right?
Ten years ago presumably the same could have been said about cell phones; using a payphone too good for you?
I specifically ordered the glossy display on my MacBook Pro; the colors are far more vibrant and the screen brighter. I have not had any issues with glare, though I don't take it outside in the direct sunlight and use it in a room with dim lighting.
I much prefer it to the matte screens, that always seem dull and fuzzy to me; I had a previous laptop with a matte screen and I always thought it seemed like it was out of focus.
Apple apparently uses FreeType in the iPhone. Go to settings->General->Legal and you get the long list of projects uses in the iPhone; the Freetype project is mentioned about a third of the way down (right below the copyright notice for ncurses).
I suppose Apple had no issue recompiling with the flag turned on.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to do this, but since we've been taking our kids to the museum (their favorite as well as mine), I've noticed that a lot of the exhibits I loved have been replaced by dumbed-down equivalents. Take the original computer exhibit that used to be there; yes it was sponsored by IBM (who provided all the equipment), but that exhibit taught the actual nitty-gritty about how computers work; I can still remember "getting" how binary worked standing there and to a 10 year old geek-wannabe, that was awesome. Now they've got a half-hearted "net" exhibit that is more on "wow" than the specifics of how it works. Did they feel that really trying to explain things would turn people off?
I'm also disappointed that they removed so many of the planes; I *loved* walking in and seeing that F-104 right above my head, now there's just empty space. Why? The whole place was stuffed with... stuff... to look at and be excited by, and somewhere along the way they decided to rip so much of it out; they turned many an exhibit area into offices or "swing" spaces that are just empty.
On the plus side, they ripped out the ancient model train layout and replaced it with a sweet HO gauge one that is a lot cooler (Chicago to Seattle), and they have more than one or two trains running now..
All in all, I'd sign up and stay for a month. Wouldn't think twice. It's just that great a museum, even if, IMHO, it just isn't as great as it was.
I admit that the first time I saw the Rupee symbol on the iPhone I thought I was looking at the symbol for the Yen. I wonder if the designers take into consideration that the symbols, when scaled way down, start to all look the same. Maybe that's the point?
Not specifically thinking about the Rupee, I would imagine that, in this day and age, a designer would know that the symbol/icon/logo/whatever needs to be recognizable at a potentially very small size.
Yes, at 16 we stayed after school for an hour, got some classroom instruction that really amounted to being able to recognize a stop sign, had a written test that, I think, gave you a passing grade if you wrote your full name, and then I was given a "blue card".
This card let me sign up for "range", which was, for me, sitting in a broken simulator, in a freezing trailer in a Chicago winter, watching 16mm movies of driving around sunny Pasadena, California, in the early 1960s.
Having passed that (not sure how I "passed" it...), we got to get behind a real car, on real streets, for two one-hour sessions, where we proved that we knew how to drive. After that, I could apply and got my real drivers license, and I was off to the races, so to speak.
It definitely qualifies as a WTF, but as that was basically mine and all my friends experiences, we didn't have anything else to compare to; I hear it's much harder in Europe.
The NASA I grew up with is truly dead and gone. NASA was about going somewhere; we could go to the moon, I can't wait to see what's next. It's so hard looking at the pictures at the Apollo Archive without feeling melancholy about what NASA was, back in the 60s, and has never been since.
I wonder what Neil, Buzz and Michael are doing for fun these days.
159 comments, as of this writing, and not a *single* Colossal Cave reference? Narry an XYZZY to be found anywhere here? And you call yourselves geeks and nerds. Why, back in my day....now get off my lawn!
That said, I did a little bit, a very little bit, of cave diving in Hawaii, and while you have to trust your equipment completely when underwater, there was always (to me) the comfort that "escape" is just going straight up. In a cave, you don't even have that. It was quite unnerving and, while I'll always say I had a good time, I was glad when I was back on the surface, climbing into the boat.
Slashdot Mirror
ZFS had some licensing issues, but that was under Sun. Now that Sun == Oracle, and Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs are friends, apparently, maybe a deal can be reached.
I like the versioning filesystem, and I like the idea that you have to use sysadmin-level commands to allow a program to listen on a particular port (along with being able to hard-limit how many connections the app will handle). The built-in clustering is also pretty awesome, considering how long it's been available. Having a unified help system is also pretty slick too.
That said, Unix presents the user with a filesystem tree that is entirely directory-based; no need to worry about the underlying disks themselves. Maybe it's just the local admins, but whenever they replace a disk, for some reason it can't be named the same thing as the previous one, so I have to go in and fix my com jobs (luckily not very often).
And this may seem petty, but it bites me far more often than it should, but why does the system allow me to set def ("cd" in Unix/Windows parlance) into a non-existant directory? That is the one huge aspect that I have never ever understood.
I used Lotus Notes for many years, starting with version 3, and I got the impression that there was some sort of philosophy behind it, but I just couldn't figure out what it was; I admit I got tangled up in the interface. A good friend of mine was a Lotus Notes admin, and while I believe he "got it", the hoops the interface made him go through to do various tasks (backing up a database by copy-n-paste because it was the only "reliable" way?) negated whatever deeper benefits the platform provided.
Ultimately it comes down to execution; the web has its shortcomings, but it's simple enough that people "get it" and can use it effectively. Being relatively simple and text-based, it encourages experimentation without needing to worry that the underlying database can somehow can be corrupted or external links permanently invalidated. It doesn't hurt either the the web itself is basically "free", while Notes was (is still?) quite expensive.
I don't want to get all Godwin here, but I think a decent analogy is that Notes is a Tiger tank; sophisticated and extremely powerful, but ultimately done in by the cheap and plentiful Sherman. It doesn't mean that the Tiger wasn't better than the Sherman, it's just that the Sherman won by sheer volume.
Ozzie may be a brilliant guy, with an IQ of 100!, but if he can't execute his ideas in a way that people nowhere near as smart (say, 2!) as him can use, what's the point? History is littered with people who had brilliant ideas but are forgotten because they botched the execution. Having used both Notes and Groove (as I understand it the only other actual piece of software Ozzie actually worked on), he took a serious leap forward, just down the wrong evolutionary path.
He's stepping down to spend more time with his baby, Lotus Notes.
First there was the "red" album: straightforward rock-n-roll with some interesting wordplay, but with only a few general themes. C++ was the same way: create some objects, work with 'em, pass 'em around. All good.
Then C++ discovered acid and got into its "blue album" phase: multiple inheritance, templates, operator overloading, namespaces. To read C++ now is like listening to the later Beatles: obtuse, baffling, with a fair amount of brilliance that makes you wonder "how did they do that?????" It confirms that there are always smarter people than me if only to be able to make sense of it all...
Look, I'm pretty upset by this, but want to figure something out: is it really Obama, sitting at the desk, stroking the white cat, saying "those pesky citizens with their encryption. Put a stop to it!"? It seems to me that a "presidential administration" is some weird variation on a big company, with hundreds of employees, with varying degrees of power, along with their own biases, etc.
I'm not going to let anyone off the hook, it's Obama's name on the door and he's ultimately responsible for whatever his administration does, but I sometimes wonder how much a president actually knows about every thing that goes on; if a bill came out proposing that all vehicles purchased by the Forestry Service must be Fords, that would (rightly) upset the Chevy-n-Dodge group, but why would a president, any president, worry about something seemingly so trivial?
I argue that encryption is just as much a trivial issue; the genie is so far out of the bottle that the whole thing sounds utterly ridiculous; if anything, it sounds more like an out-of-touch FBI manager (TFA only quotes an FBI person) who read a little too deeply into an article written in the in-flight magazine and convinced some middle manager in the administration that "teh terrorists are using the inter-tubes!"
Besides, aren't politicians citizens as well? If the law applies to everyone, it applies to them as well.
All I was saying was that it sounded similar; the idea of someone writing a worm to target a specific Siemens machine could have a similar level of "tinfoil-hattery" but for the fact that they have the code in-hand, as opposed to something that happened in the pre-Internet era.
The only fact is that we really don't truly know the facts, either then nor now (unless someone stands up and waves and says "Ooh! Ooh! I did it! I did it!"
Sounds eerily similar to the Siberian Pipeline explosion but, had it actually worked, the consequences could have been much much worse.
We have these in Chicago; one died in my back yard. They're just like rats, but bigger. I can't believe anyone thought this was a good idea.
...to sue everybody who buys an Atmel development board. Wasn't it some satellite that went down the list of people who had bought mag card writers and threatened to sue them, regardless of what the mag card writer was being used for?
After the knee-jerk reaction of removing Linux support from the PS3 (which I actually used), I can really imagine Sony contemplating such stupidity.
F them, I'm going to play Nethack; still better than most of the games available on the PS3 anyway.
It's very possible that old LIFE book came from a mom-n-pop store that also sells online. I know a woman who has a small bookstore in upstate New York and she keeps the actual storefront open to give her a place to go (she's pushing 80), as a place for book readings, but also as warehouse; she sells most of her stuff via Amazon, with apparently one or two really rare things going on ebay.
If anything, it was a brilliant move on Amazon's part to adopt this model; now lots of mom-n-pops can stay open and be more of a social place (if only for the cats) and still have give people the opportunity to browse.
Those hard to find books are typically at the funky local book store you might find in the "arty" part of town, and while they're feeling it as much as B&N, they've responded the same way I think a lot of local record stores have, focusing on having those hard-to-find books as well as readings, events, etc.
I stopped buying from B&N and similar stores years ago when they started stocking a bajillion copies of the latest tell-all of the celeb du jour, and relegated everything else to a couple of rows each. So I buy all my tech books from Amazon (still miss Fat Brain...), get my "classics" from Project Gutenberg for the iPad, and will happily walk in and spend an hour browsing and chatting with the local bookstore owner, and I never walk out without buying something; not as a "pity" sale, but because I found something genuinely interesting that would have been too obscure even for B&N.
So, tell me how long you've owned an iPad?
(I kid, I kid!)
Twenty years ago, would a similar study have said the same about people who have home computers? Why does anyone need them except to play games? They can't do any real work, right?
Ten years ago presumably the same could have been said about cell phones; using a payphone too good for you?
The question is whether they'd sell that information...Google perhaps?
Sorry, I meant to say that, while I do take it with me, I don't use it outside, e.g. coding at the coffee shop, etc.
I specifically ordered the glossy display on my MacBook Pro; the colors are far more vibrant and the screen brighter. I have not had any issues with glare, though I don't take it outside in the direct sunlight and use it in a room with dim lighting.
I much prefer it to the matte screens, that always seem dull and fuzzy to me; I had a previous laptop with a matte screen and I always thought it seemed like it was out of focus.
Apple apparently uses FreeType in the iPhone. Go to settings->General->Legal and you get the long list of projects uses in the iPhone; the Freetype project is mentioned about a third of the way down (right below the copyright notice for ncurses).
I suppose Apple had no issue recompiling with the flag turned on.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to do this, but since we've been taking our kids to the museum (their favorite as well as mine), I've noticed that a lot of the exhibits I loved have been replaced by dumbed-down equivalents. Take the original computer exhibit that used to be there; yes it was sponsored by IBM (who provided all the equipment), but that exhibit taught the actual nitty-gritty about how computers work; I can still remember "getting" how binary worked standing there and to a 10 year old geek-wannabe, that was awesome. Now they've got a half-hearted "net" exhibit that is more on "wow" than the specifics of how it works. Did they feel that really trying to explain things would turn people off?
I'm also disappointed that they removed so many of the planes; I *loved* walking in and seeing that F-104 right above my head, now there's just empty space. Why? The whole place was stuffed with ... stuff ... to look at and be excited by, and somewhere along the way they decided to rip so much of it out; they turned many an exhibit area into offices or "swing" spaces that are just empty.
On the plus side, they ripped out the ancient model train layout and replaced it with a sweet HO gauge one that is a lot cooler (Chicago to Seattle), and they have more than one or two trains running now..
All in all, I'd sign up and stay for a month. Wouldn't think twice. It's just that great a museum, even if, IMHO, it just isn't as great as it was.
Sigh...now get off my lawn!
I admit that the first time I saw the Rupee symbol on the iPhone I thought I was looking at the symbol for the Yen. I wonder if the designers take into consideration that the symbols, when scaled way down, start to all look the same. Maybe that's the point?
Not specifically thinking about the Rupee, I would imagine that, in this day and age, a designer would know that the symbol/icon/logo/whatever needs to be recognizable at a potentially very small size.
Yes, at 16 we stayed after school for an hour, got some classroom instruction that really amounted to being able to recognize a stop sign, had a written test that, I think, gave you a passing grade if you wrote your full name, and then I was given a "blue card".
This card let me sign up for "range", which was, for me, sitting in a broken simulator, in a freezing trailer in a Chicago winter, watching 16mm movies of driving around sunny Pasadena, California, in the early 1960s.
Having passed that (not sure how I "passed" it...), we got to get behind a real car, on real streets, for two one-hour sessions, where we proved that we knew how to drive. After that, I could apply and got my real drivers license, and I was off to the races, so to speak.
It definitely qualifies as a WTF, but as that was basically mine and all my friends experiences, we didn't have anything else to compare to; I hear it's much harder in Europe.
...as long as the bad teacher isn't the metal/wood shop teacher or driving instructor.
Microsoft’s pitch will be that these slates will be sanctioned by corporate IT departments, enabling customers to use them at work and at home.
Translation: We will aggressively shove these down the throats of everyone though the CIOs who saw our ad in the in-flight magazine.
The NASA I grew up with is truly dead and gone. NASA was about going somewhere; we could go to the moon, I can't wait to see what's next. It's so hard looking at the pictures at the Apollo Archive without feeling melancholy about what NASA was, back in the 60s, and has never been since.
I wonder what Neil, Buzz and Michael are doing for fun these days.
159 comments, as of this writing, and not a *single* Colossal Cave reference? Narry an XYZZY to be found anywhere here? And you call yourselves geeks and nerds. Why, back in my day....now get off my lawn!
That said, I did a little bit, a very little bit, of cave diving in Hawaii, and while you have to trust your equipment completely when underwater, there was always (to me) the comfort that "escape" is just going straight up. In a cave, you don't even have that. It was quite unnerving and, while I'll always say I had a good time, I was glad when I was back on the surface, climbing into the boat.