Granted, demonstrably the chinese government have ways of making their *authority* known; but I don't see what makes people accept their *influence* on the matter. The fact that they disappear you if you claim to be the new Dalai Llama without their permission...
Companies do not exist outside of the people that comprise them. Humans ARE capable of controlling their actions. A company's "nature" is totally dictated by the people that comprise it. Lets put it another way.
We should expect people to behave like scheming pricks when we're designing systems which confer influence; Like electoral systems, ISO standards etc. Because there are psychopaths, sociopaths and others with defective personalities out there who'll simply use them to their personal advantage.
To do otherwise is not just naive or unwise, it's downright stupid.
As it stands, human rights laws are flouted the world over because corporations and governments get away with it. If everybody stopped doing business with the companies and regimes responsible, the world would be a slightly nicer place.
Nothing says "fuck you and your oppressive dictatorial policies" than the rest of the world refusing to take part in your GDP growth exercise: China's capital reserves wouldn't last forever, after all. It doesn't work. It would simply push the chinese people back to the level of subsistence farmers and strengthen the hold of their leaders on power.
The first thing that dictators do is get rid of potential rivals. They get rid of the middle classes who have enough independent resources and contacts to cause them problems. They drive their people down to little more than subsistence level to make sure they don't have the time or strength to oppose them.
I guarantee you, some day, when the cowards at the top and the corrupt in the middle are finally taken out, Yahoo and its ilk will not be remembered as liberators of China, but as profiteers. Yay. The new Marx. Back to the idyll of subsistence farming! The proletariat deserve nothing less.
Isn't this just highlighting the fact that we should not be doing business with our enemies? China is the United States enemy?
Isn't letting them hide behind the laws of an oppressive nation creating a global economy at the expense of freedoms the western world fought long and hard for? It's the middle classes who effect political change. Not the working class, not the upper class. Why do you think Pol Pot wiped them out in Cambodia?
If you want political change in China, they have to have a middle class first. To get them, you have to introduce wealth. You do that through trade. Given a decade or so there will be the beginnings of political change.
PC's are very expensive to maintain and support.
But ultimately, the root cause is that bandwidth is relatively cheap again. Indeed. Servers and bandwidth are cheaper than managing desktops. Much cheaper if you go the Linux route.
BTW, this is the same phenomenon which caused the centralisation of textile manufacturing in large mills. Fast transport made it possible to do it all in one place and power made it possible to churn the stuff out. Today, the transport is network bandwidth and the power is cheap CPU.
Servers sitting in the machine room don't go down? Of course they do. And they often go down for far longer than 24 hours.
If you want real reliability then you've got to pay for it. And by that I mean a real data center, redundant servers, redundant networks and people competent to manage it all. You know what? It's expensive. The ASPs and SAAS people can do it for less, a lot less.
It sounds like you are doing multiple edits on files on a filesystem from multiple locations simultaneously. None of the sync tools are designed for that, including Unison. Take a look at configuration management tools like Subversion, CVS, ClearCase, Perforce. Then there's git which I've never played with.
For simplicity and cross platform support with integration into just about anything: Subversion. Add Tortoise for ease of Windows users use.
Conflict resolution depends on the data. Anything more than plain text and you may have to look at a commercial system, something like Visual SourceSafe.
an this be used for small workgroups who want to work on a file and keep it synced No locking... Files can't be edited simultaneously (without corruption) unless there's some form of locking between the machines doing the editing. Network filesystems all have some form of locking built in.
With disconnected operation it isn't possible to transmit locks on a file or bits of file between machines so simultaneous edits will not work unless you have a versioning system like CVS or Subversion which can show you the differences between the files and allow you to merge them manually. And that generally only works for plain text files.
Rsync, Unison and this Dropbox tool are sync tools. No locking and no versioning. Simultaneous edits on a file are a very bad idea in that environment.
For disconnected operation try something like Subversion, though that's not much use if it's something like a Word document. Alternatively, if you want to use a sync tool, avoid editing the same document on different machines.
Sure there is another way: newest file wins. But this means that any number of intermediate edits by arbitrary numbers of people will simply and silently be removed if someone updates an obsolete version between syncs.
nevertheless I couldn't find software that would support this, thus had to write it by myself... Eh? Rsync supports it. rsync -u...
If I ask on any forums, I'm either told to just use NFS homes (which of course doesn't work when your laptop might be a) on the other side of the planet and b) not plugged into the internet). So I need a way of syncing my server:/home/user with laptop:/home/user bi-directionally. Since there doesn't seem to be any easy way of doing it built into any Linux distro, The reason it's not built in is that it's really non trivial, it is not a solved problem. How does the software decide which version is the correct one?
Your solution/unison is about as good as it gets. With home dirs I make the laptop the master in the event of a conflict the version on the laptop is considered to be the real version.
But this stupid economic model that is the stockmarket rewards growth (even artificial growth) Actually, this is a feature of the monetary system. It is now based on debt. Debt which increases at 5% per year, which is an exponential function. The monetary system now requires companies to grow... Change the monetary system and you'll change business behaviour.
China, or any other socialist/communist country for that matter? They haven't been communist for decades. Your idea of them is something out of the 1970s.
China is an authoritarian capitalist country and they're eating your lunch.
But the dollar is sliding and that debt isn't a good deal any more. They need to diversify. That means selling the debt and buying other stuff... Like Lenovo and Seagate.
An economist dreams that fancy accounting can fix things, Depends on the economist. Read Mises.
Seems like they are trying to create a couple of generations in our country that have no idea how to design or manufacture anything, by undercutting us and removing any incentive to learn. They are trying to make better lives for their people and themselves. They are trying to get rich. You do that through trade, and all they've done is set their currency so that they're cheap (at anything, as long as it brings in business). They have a billion people to drag out of subsistence living.
Do you want to know the truth? Your problem is that the US dollar is the world reserve currency. This means that there's huge demand for it from other countries to buy stuff like oil. It makes you lazy because all you've got to do is print some and you can buy what you like. It makes you expensive because you gave yourselves massive pay raises compared to the rest of the world using the free money. You (Nixon) did this to yourselves.
The outsourcing of manufacturing, the apathy, is all American.
Unison can be scripted, added to a login script. As can rsync on windows. Alternatively you can add a polling batch file which wakes up every so often and checks to see if the server lives. (Yes, even on Windows)
Rsync can sync in both directions, but you decide one of the sides is the master and sync that one first, in the case of conflicts the master rules. It isn't possible to choose on a file by file basis at sync time as you can with Unison.
Oh, and NTP is absolutely vital when doing any synchronisation.
Basically. Either you do it manually and manage conflicts at sync time, or you do it automatically and define one of the sides as a master in the case of conflict. There's really no way round this, software just isn't sophisticated enough to decide what you're thinking.
The truth is that filesystem syncing isn't ideal for a very dynamically updated file system. It is best used on fairly static filesystems or one way syncing. Documentation, backups and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
We should expect people to behave like scheming pricks when we're designing systems which confer influence; Like electoral systems, ISO standards etc. Because there are psychopaths, sociopaths and others with defective personalities out there who'll simply use them to their personal advantage.
To do otherwise is not just naive or unwise, it's downright stupid.
Or... How to kill someone with a bloody great sword.
...
You never know
Nothing says "fuck you and your oppressive dictatorial policies" than the rest of the world refusing to take part in your GDP growth exercise: China's capital reserves wouldn't last forever, after all. It doesn't work. It would simply push the chinese people back to the level of subsistence farmers and strengthen the hold of their leaders on power.
The first thing that dictators do is get rid of potential rivals. They get rid of the middle classes who have enough independent resources and contacts to cause them problems. They drive their people down to little more than subsistence level to make sure they don't have the time or strength to oppose them.
And you want to help them?
They would have been the intellectuals.
If you want political change in China, they have to have a middle class first. To get them, you have to introduce wealth. You do that through trade. Given a decade or so there will be the beginnings of political change.
You might as well say that the US government is distributing SuSE.
BTW, this is the same phenomenon which caused the centralisation of textile manufacturing in large mills. Fast transport made it possible to do it all in one place and power made it possible to churn the stuff out. Today, the transport is network bandwidth and the power is cheap CPU.
Servers sitting in the machine room don't go down? Of course they do. And they often go down for far longer than 24 hours.
If you want real reliability then you've got to pay for it. And by that I mean a real data center, redundant servers, redundant networks and people competent to manage it all. You know what? It's expensive. The ASPs and SAAS people can do it for less, a lot less.
I charge $100 per hour.
There you go.
Subversion/TortoiseSVN
It sounds like you are doing multiple edits on files on a filesystem from multiple locations simultaneously. None of the sync tools are designed for that, including Unison. Take a look at configuration management tools like Subversion, CVS, ClearCase, Perforce. Then there's git which I've never played with.
For simplicity and cross platform support with integration into just about anything: Subversion. Add Tortoise for ease of Windows users use.
Conflict resolution depends on the data. Anything more than plain text and you may have to look at a commercial system, something like Visual SourceSafe.
Oops. Dropbox seems to have versioning built in which is quite nifty, though it looks rather like tortoisesvn in that case.
With disconnected operation it isn't possible to transmit locks on a file or bits of file between machines so simultaneous edits will not work unless you have a versioning system like CVS or Subversion which can show you the differences between the files and allow you to merge them manually. And that generally only works for plain text files.
Rsync, Unison and this Dropbox tool are sync tools. No locking and no versioning. Simultaneous edits on a file are a very bad idea in that environment.
For disconnected operation try something like Subversion, though that's not much use if it's something like a Word document. Alternatively, if you want to use a sync tool, avoid editing the same document on different machines.
Laughable...
Do they have 15 year olds designing their operating system?
He's a reverend. Logic and evidence doesn't work on them. An answer which might is "The big green network faeries".
No, they didn't. Today we have file locking. The problem is when the network is disconnected and we have several versions of a file.
Your solution/unison is about as good as it gets. With home dirs I make the laptop the master in the event of a conflict the version on the laptop is considered to be the real version.
This is a classic version control/configuration management scenario.
Look at Subversion. It's good enough for most people. Easy to use clients and servers for Linux/unix/mac/windows.
China is an authoritarian capitalist country and they're eating your lunch.
Do you want to know the truth? Your problem is that the US dollar is the world reserve currency. This means that there's huge demand for it from other countries to buy stuff like oil. It makes you lazy because all you've got to do is print some and you can buy what you like. It makes you expensive because you gave yourselves massive pay raises compared to the rest of the world using the free money. You (Nixon) did this to yourselves.
The outsourcing of manufacturing, the apathy, is all American.
Unison can be scripted, added to a login script. As can rsync on windows. Alternatively you can add a polling batch file which wakes up every so often and checks to see if the server lives. (Yes, even on Windows)
Rsync can sync in both directions, but you decide one of the sides is the master and sync that one first, in the case of conflicts the master rules. It isn't possible to choose on a file by file basis at sync time as you can with Unison.
Oh, and NTP is absolutely vital when doing any synchronisation.
Basically. Either you do it manually and manage conflicts at sync time, or you do it automatically and define one of the sides as a master in the case of conflict. There's really no way round this, software just isn't sophisticated enough to decide what you're thinking.
The truth is that filesystem syncing isn't ideal for a very dynamically updated file system. It is best used on fairly static filesystems or one way syncing. Documentation, backups and the like.