While I don't doubt your facts, they never get mentioned as a reason and they don't get acted upon either: - People reading heavy books aren't told to stow them - People sleeping aren't awoken so they pay attention - People with glasses aren't told to hang on to them
Furthermore, I would think that people will notice when they're about to crash and assume suitable positions, including quickly hanging on to loose items.
The electronic interference story is no good and everybody knows it. Heck, I don't turn off my laptop/phone - I switch it to sleep mode. It's still active...
The deadly projectile story is a lot better but presumably a lightweight phone or ebook reader won't be all that deadly, and whether it's on or off won't make a difference.
Wait, what? Oh I see - are you proposing to add a fully associative cache in front of the 4GB Flash memory to speed up cache lookups and thus lazily storing writes as well?
I thought you were caching the stored data in a cache. I must admit I kinda glossed over the "fully associative with write-back" bit:-)
I suppose that can work - SLC is great for caching writes on. However, it's a lot more work than simply copying hot reads onto the Flash and caching them there. What you're proposing means a lot of new work on the disk controller, whereas now they simply slapped a caching thing on top of what they had.
However, at http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/sum2003/cmsc311/Notes/Memory/fully.html they explain fully associative caches nicely and add that "The hardware for finding the right slot, then picking the slot if more than one choice is available is rather large, so fully associative caches are not used in practice".
I don't think it really matters how Seagate exactly decides to cache stuff - right now they do read-cache only and it would be nice if they did a write-cache as well. You can do that just fine without using fully associative caches for the addressing.
Doing caching right is just not a trivial thing, especially if you have to do it on a tiny embedded platform.
Three reasons: - RAM is expensive - The OS can do it better than the disk (except at boot time) - Doing it right is not trivial (complicated firmware is a bad thing)
If you want a disk cache with write-back, buy more memory for your system, that's what the OS does with it.
Argh, I replied to this post but the useless iPhone interface made me actually reply to the topic. Can you please explain what is broken about loopback nfs? I can't find a recent reference anywhere...
and then come back to educate other/.-ers. I'm a civil engineer and even I didn't know some of the stuff in there. Did you know that electrons flow through metal at a few cm/minute? I sure didn't, but after reading this text a lot of other stuff made a lot more sense to me.
Please don't confuse American prices with European prices. €359 is very reasonable over here - you won't find a laptop for that price over here either. The laptop you describe would be €600 if you're willing to stand in line at 8AM.
On top of that, it allows users to use the same web applications that they use on the iPhone on their Windows system. It will complement iTunes, in a way.
While I'm sad that you can't code for the bare hardware of the iPhone, I don't think it's a very bad decision of Apple to limit iPhone's 3rd party apps to web applications, since that means you get instant desktop compatibility. Think of all those schweet Dashboard Widgets, they will now presumably work on the iPhone and on your Windows desktop as well!
I think this is also a good time to point out http://gears.google.com/, the javascript SDK that Google made to support offline browsing of e.g. Google Reader. Definitely something awesome to have on the iPhone for rich Web 2.0 applications.
iPhone/Safari web applications will definitely not suck.
Actually, the problem is that you can't grow the number of columns in your RAIDZ set. This means that if you have a 4-disk RAIDZ storage, you can't make it a 5-disk RAIDZ storage.
What you can do however, is replace the disks one by one by bigger disks. This will give you a bigger RAIDZ pool with the same number of disks.
The rest of the stuff, pooling and mirroring and stuff is less interesting in my laptop.:-)
Quite to the contrary! The most unreliable element in your laptop is your drive. It will fail at some point, have no doubts about it. ZFS will detect silent failures through its checksumming.
ZFS also makes it possible to do super-fast backups to external disk. Combine that with snapshots and you have the kind of data security enterprises pay a whole lot of money for. Here's how it works:
Find an external disk that is at least as big as your laptop drive. For example, a 6th Gen iPod;-) (You could also protect only part of your disk, by partitioning it)
Now create a mirrored ZFS pool containing your laptop drive and your iPod. This pool is where your ZFS filesystems get their storage space.
Now, every time you want to do a backup, simply connect the iPod. ZFS will see the re-attached mirror, and synchronize all changed blocks.
If your laptop disk breaks, simply mount up your backup disk, and you will have all of your data AND all of your snapshots.
See? It can be that simple. And there's more:
ZFS is always consistent on-disk, unlike any other filesystem. So you can unplug that iPod at any time, no harm done.
ZFS keeps checksums of everything, and is both the filesystem and the volume layer. This means that as soon as the data leaves the application, it is safe from undetected changes. No more bitrot.
You can have as many ZFS filesystems as you like, and each has independent snapshots. You could keep a snapshot of your $HOME/Documents/Important folder for every minute, if you make it into its own filesystem, and just make a snapshot of your root filesystem just before you upgrade your OS/install updates.
Compression can be enabled per-filesystem, which is great for laptops. Compression means higher read bandwidth and more diskspace.
Encryption is being worked on and will be per-filesystem. Apple's Filevault encryption is ok, but could do with a lot more stability.
So what if ZFS does things that VMS did. No-one else has made anything quite like the summit of cool stuff that ZFS is. Apple makes a living bringing cool stuff together and making it cooler. It's a natural match:)
ZFS would yet again boost OS X's position as ultimate laptop OS. Here's hoping that Apple does implement it.
While you could explain Google's actions in this way, it is misleading. Google started out as a research project by two guys that wanted to make a better search engine. It worked really well.
The ads are something they need to do to survive as a company, but it's not their main line of reasoning. From the get-go, Google has always been decidedly non-evil.
Try explaining them buying Picasa that way. I can imagine Larry or Sergei thinking "Hmmm, I need to organize my pictures... This looks nice... Maybe we should site-license it for the employees... Aah what the heck, we'll just buy it and release it for free!"
Putting those capitalistic lines of reasoning on it is just unfair. Note, raygundan, that I'm not saying you are doing it, you're extending the logic, but I disagree with the outset.
Sure, but NX doesn't allow you to disconnect and reconnect to a running session.
At my workplace we use VNC sessions to a big honking server for desktop sessions that are very fast, shareable, and can be looked at from work, home, lab, etc. Very handy.
(I know that NX allows you to disconnect and reconnect, but all it does is suspend the X server, so that programs that send X events just hang. Not very useful.)
The X keyboard stuff has autorepeat built in, for when your keyboard doesn't. Most keyboards have it, so it shouldn't be turned on to begin with.
When you press a key on the viewer side, the X server will, through vino, get a keypress event. When you release the key, X gets a key release event. If you take a "long" time between those two events, autorepeat kicks in. Now suppose you have a slightly laggy connection, then the chance that, through network lag, those two events are separated becomes much higher.
See?
Now do me a favor and report that as a bug with the vino folks. When its running it should do xset -r.
Well, they're not pictures of the Samsung display, but:
Philips has a nice informative press release of their display, together with pictures and even video (slashdot mumbles the url, go check it out on the press release).
Philips made a 13" PolyLED TV prototype that they hope to expand to 30" eventually. They use a 4-head, 256-nozzle inkjet printer to "print" the display.
There I was, visiting Ireland, spending money, getting extra money from the ATM, having my card swallowed. By an Ulster bank ATM.
After looking around I found an Ulster bank office with someone still there (it was around closing time), and the lady there told me it was handled by contractors and she would send me my card when it was serviced the next week.
Before you think "Well, that's nice", I'll have you know that she lost my address, and when I rang her to remind her, she once again promised me she would send it but never did. Sigh.
The money I wanted to withdraw was even taken from my account, but put back after I complained, since I didn't get it.
Oh, and since my card had about 20$ in electronic cash (proton in Belgium), I lost that, too:(
I'm not putting anything of mine into anything of Ulster bank, ever again.
He uses a fragment program to do some extra processing, thereby optimizing the demo.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't NVidia do the same thing and speed up the demo?
Anyway, NVidia still is the one that looks at their customer (drivers...), which is more important than slightly better performace imho.
Re:Sysadmin view - could be useful
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
I don't think it would be pointless, nor hard to do. Maybe it would be overkill for a single workstation, but we maintain some 2000 workstations. Then it starts to be worth it having to check which binaries you'll want root to be able to run.
Every time you install something new, you look at the binaries, and decide which are ok. 5 minutes, tops?
And the kernel doesn't need to be recompiled, it (probably) contains the public key of the signer, so it can check the binary for validity. This doesn't change with new program versions.
The checksum method you propose does exactly the same, checking for valid binaries, but only at intervals instead of at runtime, and it won't prevent root from executing programs you don't know.
Remember, DRM will let you know both the source and the fact the binary wasn't tampered with.
I know this won't help with all root exploits, but it will help with some. There is (so far) no magic bullet for all root exploits.
This technique could also be used in windows, so that users can't run screensavers and viruses and so on that people send them through email, even if they seem to be word documents. (but neither will they be able to run programs they download somewhere, with the sysadmin having to install it for them...)
Sysadmin view - could be useful
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
Ok, so suppose there is a working DRM implementation in the kernel.
I work as a sysadmin, providing desktop services on unix systems. Something like this would be great!
I could sign all binaries that I trust to run with root privileges, and as long as my private key is safe, running unknown binaries as root becomes impossible.
This will make root exploits somewhat more difficult, and if the BIOS supports it too, hacking the system with boot floppies/netboot etc. will be really hard.
Well, not exactly. As you can see in the drawings, they add air bubbles to the mix where the Giffard Injector doesn't.
My theory is that the steam mixes with the bubbles, and given the low caloric density of air, these will expand rapidly, leading to a volume increase and therefore providing extra boost. Further down, they mix with cold water and become cool again, but then it's already out of the jet. Should make for interesting current patterns...
Re:Other way around?
on
H2O/IP
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree, at the very least, it should be IP/H2O. But the story also doesn't tell us if the creator actually uses IP.
If I was making something like this, it would probably have a low-bandwidth protocol. I mean, look at that grayscale picture. That just spells "My Network Is Very Slow". I wouldn't go encapsulating the packets in IP....
In Dutch, we would call his naming "Dichterlijke vrijheid", which translates to "Poetic freedom". It doesn't have to make sense, it should just convey the idea:). H2O/IP is probably wrong, but it conveys the idea.
Give your switches enough memory and let them keep a history of 20 IP addresses per host. (this number needs to be tweaked according to usage of course) When you get a IP packet going to a new host, record the address and start a 1-second timer. While the timer runs, drop all IP packets to hosts not on the list.
The packets you drop will be resent, and you get the wanted behaviour.
Another advantage is that you only need to change the switches, not the systems.
Only problem I can see: What about web pages with lots of images from different servers? Those will take forever to load. You could tell everyone to use a proxy, but you wouldn't be able to run this throttling on the proxy...
A 133MHz 486? Let's say that the Pentium chips are more efficient so that this translates to a 100MHz Pentium II. KDE2 ran on my Pentium 133MHz laptop and it was useable.
Remember that window managers are event driven, so it might take a while to open a window, but eventually it will be there, and then you can use it almost normally.
A bigger problem will be memory and disk space.
I you strip out enough stuff from KDE3, and go easy on the theming, I guess you could keep the memory consumption low. These systems will have 96MB flash disks, so I guess swap space is out:)
Qt-3.0.5 is 13MB worth of libs on my system. My full installation of KDE3 has 86MB of libs, and 230MB total. I think that the 96MB will be cramped. Maybe with network mounting? Put a normal pc on the mountaintop, work from that? 11Mbps will be good, I guess.
But all in all, I think it will be doable. Even the voice stuff they want to do will work. My Pentium 133 can play mp3s with 6% cpu (and realvideo at 2 frames per second:-) )
Browsing the web will suck bigtime, though. And in 10 years, who knows what technology will be predominant on the web?
Slashdot Mirror
You missed one: ordering shelves in hot zones so less used shelves are farther away.
Safaribooks already does that, and cheaper too. You even get tokens for watermarked drm-free offline versions.
While I don't doubt your facts, they never get mentioned as a reason and they don't get acted upon either:
- People reading heavy books aren't told to stow them
- People sleeping aren't awoken so they pay attention
- People with glasses aren't told to hang on to them
Furthermore, I would think that people will notice when they're about to crash and assume suitable positions, including quickly hanging on to loose items.
The electronic interference story is no good and everybody knows it. Heck, I don't turn off my laptop/phone - I switch it to sleep mode. It's still active...
The deadly projectile story is a lot better but presumably a lightweight phone or ebook reader won't be all that deadly, and whether it's on or off won't make a difference.
Wait, what? Oh I see - are you proposing to add a fully associative cache in front of the 4GB Flash memory to speed up cache lookups and thus lazily storing writes as well?
I thought you were caching the stored data in a cache. I must admit I kinda glossed over the "fully associative with write-back" bit :-)
I suppose that can work - SLC is great for caching writes on. However, it's a lot more work than simply copying hot reads onto the Flash and caching them there. What you're proposing means a lot of new work on the disk controller, whereas now they simply slapped a caching thing on top of what they had.
However, at http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/sum2003/cmsc311/Notes/Memory/fully.html they explain fully associative caches nicely and add that "The hardware for finding the right slot, then picking the slot if more than one choice is available is rather large, so fully associative caches are not used in practice".
I don't think it really matters how Seagate exactly decides to cache stuff - right now they do read-cache only and it would be nice if they did a write-cache as well. You can do that just fine without using fully associative caches for the addressing.
Doing caching right is just not a trivial thing, especially if you have to do it on a tiny embedded platform.
Three reasons:
- RAM is expensive
- The OS can do it better than the disk (except at boot time)
- Doing it right is not trivial (complicated firmware is a bad thing)
If you want a disk cache with write-back, buy more memory for your system, that's what the OS does with it.
Argh, I replied to this post but the useless iPhone interface made me actually reply to the topic. Can you please explain what is broken about loopback nfs? I can't find a recent reference anywhere...
Can you elaborate on that broken loopback NFS in Linux? I couldn't find anything about that, last mention of it being broken was in 2002.
You know, a lot of people use loopback nfs for crypto homedirs and I think fuse. I'd like to think that it isn't broken...
Read this: http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/miscon/elect.html
and then come back to educate other /.-ers. I'm a civil engineer and even I didn't know some of the stuff in there. Did you know that electrons flow through metal at a few cm/minute? I sure didn't, but after reading this text a lot of other stuff made a lot more sense to me.
Please don't confuse American prices with European prices. €359 is very reasonable over here - you won't find a laptop for that price over here either. The laptop you describe would be €600 if you're willing to stand in line at 8AM.
Remember, we pay around 20% in sales tax.
I was thinking the very same thing!
On top of that, it allows users to use the same web applications that they use on the iPhone on their Windows system. It will complement iTunes, in a way.
While I'm sad that you can't code for the bare hardware of the iPhone, I don't think it's a very bad decision of Apple to limit iPhone's 3rd party apps to web applications, since that means you get instant desktop compatibility.
Think of all those schweet Dashboard Widgets, they will now presumably work on the iPhone and on your Windows desktop as well!
I think this is also a good time to point out http://gears.google.com/, the javascript SDK that Google made to support offline browsing of e.g. Google Reader. Definitely something awesome to have on the iPhone for rich Web 2.0 applications.
iPhone/Safari web applications will definitely not suck.
Wout.
Actually, the problem is that you can't grow the number of columns in your RAIDZ set. This means that if you have a 4-disk RAIDZ storage, you can't make it a 5-disk RAIDZ storage.
a geID=118614#118614
What you can do however, is replace the disks one by one by bigger disks. This will give you a bigger RAIDZ pool with the same number of disks.
See a thread discussing this and other options here:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?mess
Wout.
Quite to the contrary! The most unreliable element in your laptop is your drive. It will fail at some point, have no doubts about it. ZFS will detect silent failures through its checksumming.
ZFS also makes it possible to do super-fast backups to external disk. Combine that with snapshots and you have the kind of data security enterprises pay a whole lot of money for. Here's how it works:
See? It can be that simple. And there's more:
So what if ZFS does things that VMS did. No-one else has made anything quite like the summit of cool stuff that ZFS is. Apple makes a living bringing cool stuff together and making it cooler. It's a natural match :)
ZFS would yet again boost OS X's position as ultimate laptop OS. Here's hoping that Apple does implement it.
While you could explain Google's actions in this way, it is misleading. Google started out as a research project by two guys that wanted to make a better search engine. It worked really well.
The ads are something they need to do to survive as a company, but it's not their main line of reasoning. From the get-go, Google has always been decidedly non-evil.
Try explaining them buying Picasa that way. I can imagine Larry or Sergei thinking "Hmmm, I need to organize my pictures... This looks nice... Maybe we should site-license it for the employees... Aah what the heck, we'll just buy it and release it for free!"
Putting those capitalistic lines of reasoning on it is just unfair. Note, raygundan, that I'm not saying you are doing it, you're extending the logic, but I disagree with the outset.
Ten things I didn't know about Google
There is no sig.
It's not a trivial app, but a whole new way of doing things.
:-/
QuickSilver does the same, but better IMHO, and is free. The author promised to opensource it at one point, but hasn't so far
Sure, but NX doesn't allow you to disconnect and reconnect to a running session.
At my workplace we use VNC sessions to a big honking server for desktop sessions that are very fast, shareable, and can be looked at from work, home, lab, etc. Very handy.
(I know that NX allows you to disconnect and reconnect, but all it does is suspend the X server, so that programs that send X events just hang. Not very useful.)
Turn of the autorepeat in X.
Seriously. Use "xset -r".
The X keyboard stuff has autorepeat built in, for when your keyboard doesn't. Most keyboards have it, so it shouldn't be turned on to begin with.
When you press a key on the viewer side, the X server will, through vino, get a keypress event.
When you release the key, X gets a key release event.
If you take a "long" time between those two events, autorepeat kicks in.
Now suppose you have a slightly laggy connection, then the chance that, through network lag, those two events are separated becomes much higher.
See?
Now do me a favor and report that as a bug with the vino folks. When its running it should do xset -r.
Philips has a nice informative press release of their display, together with pictures and even video (slashdot mumbles the url, go check it out on the press release).
Philips made a 13" PolyLED TV prototype that they hope to expand to 30" eventually. They use a 4-head, 256-nozzle inkjet printer to "print" the display.
Cool :)
The same thing happened to me!
:(
There I was, visiting Ireland, spending money, getting extra money from the ATM, having my card swallowed. By an Ulster bank ATM.
After looking around I found an Ulster bank office with someone still there (it was around closing time), and the lady there told me it was handled by contractors and she would send me my card when it was serviced the next week.
Before you think "Well, that's nice", I'll have you know that she lost my address, and when I rang her to remind her, she once again promised me she would send it but never did. Sigh.
The money I wanted to withdraw was even taken from my account, but put back after I complained, since I didn't get it.
Oh, and since my card had about 20$ in electronic cash (proton in Belgium), I lost that, too
I'm not putting anything of mine into anything of Ulster bank, ever again.
I think he's cheating.
He uses a fragment program to do some extra processing, thereby optimizing the demo.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't NVidia do the same thing and speed up the demo?
Anyway, NVidia still is the one that looks at their customer (drivers...), which is more important than slightly better performace imho.
I don't think it would be pointless, nor hard to do. Maybe it would be overkill for a single workstation, but we maintain some 2000 workstations. Then it starts to be worth it having to check which binaries you'll want root to be able to run.
Every time you install something new, you look at the binaries, and decide which are ok. 5 minutes, tops?
And the kernel doesn't need to be recompiled, it (probably) contains the public key of the signer, so it can check the binary for validity. This doesn't change with new program versions.
The checksum method you propose does exactly the same, checking for valid binaries, but only at intervals instead of at runtime, and it won't prevent root from executing programs you don't know.
Remember, DRM will let you know both the source and the fact the binary wasn't tampered with.
I know this won't help with all root exploits, but it will help with some. There is (so far) no magic bullet for all root exploits.
This technique could also be used in windows, so that users can't run screensavers and viruses and so on that people send them through email, even if they seem to be word documents. (but neither will they be able to run programs they download somewhere, with the sysadmin having to install it for them...)
Ok, so suppose there is a working DRM implementation in the kernel.
I work as a sysadmin, providing desktop services on unix systems. Something like this would be great!
I could sign all binaries that I trust to run with root privileges, and as long as my private key is safe, running unknown binaries as root becomes impossible.
This will make root exploits somewhat more difficult, and if the BIOS supports it too, hacking the system with boot floppies/netboot etc. will be really hard.
Think about it.
Well, not exactly. As you can see in the drawings, they add air bubbles to the mix where the Giffard Injector doesn't.
My theory is that the steam mixes with the bubbles, and given the low caloric density of air, these will expand rapidly, leading to a volume increase and therefore providing extra boost. Further down, they mix with cold water and become cool again, but then it's already out of the jet. Should make for interesting current patterns...
I agree, at the very least, it should be IP/H2O. But the story also doesn't tell us if the creator actually uses IP.
:). H2O/IP is probably wrong, but it conveys the idea.
If I was making something like this, it would probably have a low-bandwidth protocol. I mean, look at that grayscale picture. That just spells "My Network Is Very Slow". I wouldn't go encapsulating the packets in IP....
In Dutch, we would call his naming "Dichterlijke vrijheid", which translates to "Poetic freedom". It doesn't have to make sense, it should just convey the idea
Give your switches enough memory and let them keep a history of 20 IP addresses per host. (this number needs to be tweaked according to usage of course) When you get a IP packet going to a new host, record the address and start a 1-second timer. While the timer runs, drop all IP packets to hosts not on the list.
The packets you drop will be resent, and you get the wanted behaviour.
Another advantage is that you only need to change the switches, not the systems.
Only problem I can see: What about web pages with lots of images from different servers? Those will take forever to load. You could tell everyone to use a proxy, but you wouldn't be able to run this throttling on the proxy...
Well, I guess that depends.
:)
:-) )
A 133MHz 486? Let's say that the Pentium chips are more efficient so that this translates to a 100MHz Pentium II. KDE2 ran on my Pentium 133MHz laptop and it was useable.
Remember that window managers are event driven, so it might take a while to open a window, but eventually it will be there, and then you can use it almost normally.
A bigger problem will be memory and disk space.
I you strip out enough stuff from KDE3, and go easy on the theming, I guess you could keep the memory consumption low. These systems will have 96MB flash disks, so I guess swap space is out
Qt-3.0.5 is 13MB worth of libs on my system. My full installation of KDE3 has 86MB of libs, and 230MB total. I think that the 96MB will be cramped. Maybe with network mounting? Put a normal pc on the mountaintop, work from that? 11Mbps will be good, I guess.
But all in all, I think it will be doable. Even the voice stuff they want to do will work. My Pentium 133 can play mp3s with 6% cpu (and realvideo at 2 frames per second
Browsing the web will suck bigtime, though. And in 10 years, who knows what technology will be predominant on the web?