"Red Hat remains an anomaly -- it makes money in open source." I still think the biggest flaw in the open source model is that too many people think that all software should be free (as in free beer). Somebody spends massive amounts of time and money to get some software working really well and customers won't pony up an even trivial amount for a license. They would rather dump your elegant solution for a half-baked one that happens to be free instead. When there is almost no money to be made, where does the incentive come from to build something really good, get the bugs worked out, and give it first-class support?
Whenever we talk about open standards we get the argument about Free Speech vs Free Beer. When asked to defend our position, we talk about free speech but what we really mean is free beer. We want all our content to be free. Music, movies, news, etc. We want to get on the web and browse all day long with our Ad blockers enabled and see whatever we want without paying anything or letting the content owner make money from the advertisers. We want all our software to be free too. All those programmers can make their money some other magical way! Is it any wonder that content owners resort to such tactics when we try to cut them off from the very motivation they had for creating it in the first place?
All software needs to have the equivalent of that 'List of Ingredients' you find on the side of a soup can. It should tell you exactly what data it collects, what kind of privacy you have, and how to switch it off. That information should be listed in a short, concise manner with a few icons that will make it easy to recognize. You should not have to wade through a 10 page legal document (after clicking though a dozen pages to even find that) in order to find out what it is doing with your information (assuming you understand cryptic legalese). The company should not be able to change the terms at the next update without throwing up a big 'red flag' and tell you exactly what they changed. Maybe we could even get some kind of standards body to come up with a 'Rating' from 1 to 10 about how intrusive a piece of software is (1 = saves your screen name, 10 = records the contents of your medicine cabinet) and make the software display it in the 'about box'. Adherence would be optional, but market pressures could drive out anyone who refuses to show the information.
The headline saying Trump is going to jail tomorrow or the one saying Hillary wants to commit suicide are just made up? Now I feel better about not clicking on them, I was so worried that I missed out on the story of the century.
If only the Yankees had copyrighted their signals then they could have filed a DCMA takedown request and prevented the Apple Watch from sending it...right?
The people who really fear stuff like this are the progressives who are convinced that wealth is not something that is created but just fought over. To them the pie is always the same size and if someone gets a bigger piece, that means someone else got a smaller piece. Robots will not create any wealth. They will just take it from real people, right?
If I make $10, that means that somebody else didn't get it. Maybe I was one of those one-percenters who was privileged and did not earn or deserve it. It can't possibly be that I did something to create that money out of thin air and by also spending it, give other people the chance to build wealth too. Everyone knows that wealth does not 'trickle down', right?
Not only that but the MASS of the object is also important. Little rocks or grains of sand hit our atmosphere all the time going thousands of miles per hour (we call them shooting stars). I think it has to be about the size of a basketball before it has a chance of actually striking the ground before burning up.
You mean the average computer scientist can't walk up to an antiquated computer that they have never seen before and use it to break through the security of a bank, corporation, or prison in 30 seconds flat? I am shocked!
It seems their problem was that they did not work for NASA or the Military. Government is famous for spending $Millions to engineer and build something that could just as easily been done by buying a $2 hammer or wrench from Home Depot. As this proves, the free market does put up with that kind of thing.
Every entrepreneur who is struggling to get funding for their idea and/or product cringes whenever we see stuff like this. It just goes to show you that it is often not the merit of the actual idea that attracts the funding. There are at least a thousand ideas out there that are 10x better than the one behind the Juicero; yet each of those will struggle to find even $1M in funding, let alone $120M.
I have a project that I have been working on for years now. I think it is great and has huge potential, yet because I lack the 'funding skills', I am struggling to find investors who will give it even modest sums.
36 second stat is meaningless for the ThreadRipper 1950X without something to compare it against. How long it it take to compile the exact same kernel with the exact same configuration on another box with an i7-7700K or the Ryzen 1800X?
That is like me saying my new database program takes 15 seconds to do a certain SQL select statement against a 5 million row table. It means nothing until I tell you that the exact same statement running on Postgres on the same box takes 38 seconds.
If you order one now, will it have the fix or not? In other words are they still selling units that were made before the fix was incorporated into the production process?
I am building a heavily threaded Windows program that does data management. One of the things it does is break SQL queries into small pieces and run them in parallel on multi-core boxes. I have queries that run more than twice as fast (or is that less than half as long?) as the same queries on PostgreSQL v9.5 running on the same box. I am concerned that this bug might affect my software.
Good luck with that. The decline in SSD prices seems to have slowed to a crawl. I bought a 250GB SSD for about $75 a few years ago and they seem to be about the same price now. I now wonder if we will ever see TB SSDs for $50.
So when your revenue model is 'give away the software and sell the support', how much incentive is there to build a great product that is easy to install and understand and has few bugs? It seems to me that anything that would cut down on the need for support would get a low priority. Maybe it is just me.
In the beginning there were mainframes with dumb terminals connected to them. This was because hardware was very expensive and few people understood how computers really worked. Serious men in lab coats ran the hardware and software that was 'the computer'. They had all the power. If you wanted your program changed you had to put in a change request and hope someone in a lab coat listened.
Then along came personal computers. Suddenly, computer power was put in the hands of the unwashed masses. Anybody could buy one and start writing software programs. Much of the power now became distributed as people managed their own data and controlled everything on their own devices. Then, people started connecting all those computers so that they could share information and for a while, the web was very decentralized as millions of independent web sites were created.
But the emergence of big players like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook changed everything back toward the earlier model. Suddenly a large portion of the data was again centralized because of convenience. As the saying goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The new 'gatekeepers' on the web want to control access and the content. They want to decide (like the mainframe operators) what we get to see and how we use their platforms.
It is time for a shift back in the other direction. We need our data once again distributed out to devices that we control, but have the convenience of interconnecting that data with other, relevant data found within other's data domains. We have the infrastructure (billions of smart devices, powerful processors, and high speed interconnects) that we need to build a fully distributed data management platform. We just need the right software to tie everything together while still giving the end users control over their own information. This is a project that I have been working on for a few years now. It still has a lot of work left to be done, but it is well on its way.
I call it the Didget Realm. A world-wide data network of interconnected data nodes that are each essentially a really smart object store. The data objects are called Didgets (short for Data Widgets). They can contain either structured or unstructured data and each Didget can have a variable number of meta-data tags attached. Each node can act like a really smart file system; a relation database; or one of the NoSql solutions (key-value stores, document stores, graph databases, etc.). It supports multiple data models (hierarchical, relational, etc.) and is really, really fast.
Think of it like a file system that has 100 million files in it, but you can still get a list of all your JPEG photos or a list of all your documents with the tag 'Author = Bob' attached in just a couple of seconds (without having to first go through some multi-hour indexing process).
So...before you create any file, you have to check your list of backup folders to make sure you are not creating something in one of them you don't want to back up. If your directory tree has a few million files spread across 10,000 folders, this task can be very daunting.
Let's assume for a second that you actually would want all your important stuff backed up to the Google cloud (I don't). This kind of thing almost never works. File systems allow you (and the applications you run) to store a file almost anywhere in the directory tree. You can create new folders all the time. Maybe you have found a way to make sure ALL your important stuff gets saved to a few folders that are backed up and that some huge file containing unimportant data never gets put there, but I have found file systems woefully lacking in this area. You also have to make sure all your important folders get listed in the backup list, otherwise you end up missing something. I create huge test files all the time on my system and the last thing I would want is those files pushed up to the cloud. They would eat up bandwidth and storage space and I don't care about the data in them.
Nobody suggested you should buy things you won't use. The OP said "If you are paying for apps, you're doing it wrong". I assume he meant apps that he would actually use. Try again.
If you are paying for software or content you are doing it right. People who make software, music, movies, or other things we want to use actually want to get paid for their work (imagine that). If no one is willing to actually pay for the stuff they use, the creators have to turn to other sources of revenue. Your app (or web page, or movie, or...) has to be loaded with ads or other 'revenue generators', instead of just focusing on providing you with great value that you are willing to pay for.
...it is what it is connected to! I like the idea of devices all around me sending information to a central information hub that I can query and control. I don't like the idea of each device sending sensitive information to its 'true owner's web server' somewhere in the cloud where it can be mined, hacked, or outright stolen by an employee. I don't want all those companies able to disconnect me from my data just because I don't feel like paying some exorbitant monthly fee. There are a whole host of issues with the current IoT architecture. We need a completely different architecture where all MY devices send and receive data to/from MY central controller. I get to choose how the data is used and who I want to share it with.
I think you missed the point entirely. It has nothing to do with indexes, deduplication, or normalization. It has everything to do with the ability for the software to break up steps within an algorithm and run parts of it in parallel. If you have an algorithm that lets you do task X in 100 seconds on a given core, then if you run that same task on a CPU with 4 cores (each core being approximately identical to the core in the single core CPU) and it completes in 30 seconds, then THAT is the point. PostgreSQL and other databases have been able to run lots of separate queries simultaneously for a long time. What they have not been able to do is have a single query run much faster just because more cores are available. Postgres 9.6 has added some parallel support in a few areas (if I read the news right), but plenty of tasks are still run as a single thread.
Slashdot Mirror
"Red Hat remains an anomaly -- it makes money in open source." I still think the biggest flaw in the open source model is that too many people think that all software should be free (as in free beer). Somebody spends massive amounts of time and money to get some software working really well and customers won't pony up an even trivial amount for a license. They would rather dump your elegant solution for a half-baked one that happens to be free instead. When there is almost no money to be made, where does the incentive come from to build something really good, get the bugs worked out, and give it first-class support?
Don't you mean you just flew your 3D printed flying car out....? And why were you controlling it anyway? Isn't it 'self-driving'?
Whenever we talk about open standards we get the argument about Free Speech vs Free Beer. When asked to defend our position, we talk about free speech but what we really mean is free beer. We want all our content to be free. Music, movies, news, etc. We want to get on the web and browse all day long with our Ad blockers enabled and see whatever we want without paying anything or letting the content owner make money from the advertisers. We want all our software to be free too. All those programmers can make their money some other magical way! Is it any wonder that content owners resort to such tactics when we try to cut them off from the very motivation they had for creating it in the first place?
All software needs to have the equivalent of that 'List of Ingredients' you find on the side of a soup can. It should tell you exactly what data it collects, what kind of privacy you have, and how to switch it off. That information should be listed in a short, concise manner with a few icons that will make it easy to recognize. You should not have to wade through a 10 page legal document (after clicking though a dozen pages to even find that) in order to find out what it is doing with your information (assuming you understand cryptic legalese). The company should not be able to change the terms at the next update without throwing up a big 'red flag' and tell you exactly what they changed. Maybe we could even get some kind of standards body to come up with a 'Rating' from 1 to 10 about how intrusive a piece of software is (1 = saves your screen name, 10 = records the contents of your medicine cabinet) and make the software display it in the 'about box'. Adherence would be optional, but market pressures could drive out anyone who refuses to show the information.
The headline saying Trump is going to jail tomorrow or the one saying Hillary wants to commit suicide are just made up? Now I feel better about not clicking on them, I was so worried that I missed out on the story of the century.
Hopefully, the penalty in this case will be severe enough that next time this is how the typical conversation will go:
You: "We can do it cheap, or we can do it right!"
Boss: "Do it cheap."
You: "Oh, you mean like Equifax did?"
Boss: "On second thought..."
If only the Yankees had copyrighted their signals then they could have filed a DCMA takedown request and prevented the Apple Watch from sending it...right?
The people who really fear stuff like this are the progressives who are convinced that wealth is not something that is created but just fought over. To them the pie is always the same size and if someone gets a bigger piece, that means someone else got a smaller piece. Robots will not create any wealth. They will just take it from real people, right?
If I make $10, that means that somebody else didn't get it. Maybe I was one of those one-percenters who was privileged and did not earn or deserve it. It can't possibly be that I did something to create that money out of thin air and by also spending it, give other people the chance to build wealth too. Everyone knows that wealth does not 'trickle down', right?
Not only that but the MASS of the object is also important. Little rocks or grains of sand hit our atmosphere all the time going thousands of miles per hour (we call them shooting stars). I think it has to be about the size of a basketball before it has a chance of actually striking the ground before burning up.
You mean the average computer scientist can't walk up to an antiquated computer that they have never seen before and use it to break through the security of a bank, corporation, or prison in 30 seconds flat? I am shocked!
It seems their problem was that they did not work for NASA or the Military. Government is famous for spending $Millions to engineer and build something that could just as easily been done by buying a $2 hammer or wrench from Home Depot. As this proves, the free market does put up with that kind of thing.
Every entrepreneur who is struggling to get funding for their idea and/or product cringes whenever we see stuff like this. It just goes to show you that it is often not the merit of the actual idea that attracts the funding. There are at least a thousand ideas out there that are 10x better than the one behind the Juicero; yet each of those will struggle to find even $1M in funding, let alone $120M.
I have a project that I have been working on for years now. I think it is great and has huge potential, yet because I lack the 'funding skills', I am struggling to find investors who will give it even modest sums.
36 second stat is meaningless for the ThreadRipper 1950X without something to compare it against. How long it it take to compile the exact same kernel with the exact same configuration on another box with an i7-7700K or the Ryzen 1800X?
That is like me saying my new database program takes 15 seconds to do a certain SQL select statement against a 5 million row table. It means nothing until I tell you that the exact same statement running on Postgres on the same box takes 38 seconds.
If you order one now, will it have the fix or not? In other words are they still selling units that were made before the fix was incorporated into the production process?
I am building a heavily threaded Windows program that does data management. One of the things it does is break SQL queries into small pieces and run them in parallel on multi-core boxes. I have queries that run more than twice as fast (or is that less than half as long?) as the same queries on PostgreSQL v9.5 running on the same box. I am concerned that this bug might affect my software.
It wasn't just the CPU. Those old CRT monitors could crank out the heat pretty well too!
Good luck with that. The decline in SSD prices seems to have slowed to a crawl. I bought a 250GB SSD for about $75 a few years ago and they seem to be about the same price now. I now wonder if we will ever see TB SSDs for $50.
So when your revenue model is 'give away the software and sell the support', how much incentive is there to build a great product that is easy to install and understand and has few bugs? It seems to me that anything that would cut down on the need for support would get a low priority. Maybe it is just me.
In the beginning there were mainframes with dumb terminals connected to them. This was because hardware was very expensive and few people understood how computers really worked. Serious men in lab coats ran the hardware and software that was 'the computer'. They had all the power. If you wanted your program changed you had to put in a change request and hope someone in a lab coat listened.
Then along came personal computers. Suddenly, computer power was put in the hands of the unwashed masses. Anybody could buy one and start writing software programs. Much of the power now became distributed as people managed their own data and controlled everything on their own devices. Then, people started connecting all those computers so that they could share information and for a while, the web was very decentralized as millions of independent web sites were created.
But the emergence of big players like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook changed everything back toward the earlier model. Suddenly a large portion of the data was again centralized because of convenience. As the saying goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The new 'gatekeepers' on the web want to control access and the content. They want to decide (like the mainframe operators) what we get to see and how we use their platforms.
It is time for a shift back in the other direction. We need our data once again distributed out to devices that we control, but have the convenience of interconnecting that data with other, relevant data found within other's data domains. We have the infrastructure (billions of smart devices, powerful processors, and high speed interconnects) that we need to build a fully distributed data management platform. We just need the right software to tie everything together while still giving the end users control over their own information. This is a project that I have been working on for a few years now. It still has a lot of work left to be done, but it is well on its way.
I call it the Didget Realm. A world-wide data network of interconnected data nodes that are each essentially a really smart object store. The data objects are called Didgets (short for Data Widgets). They can contain either structured or unstructured data and each Didget can have a variable number of meta-data tags attached. Each node can act like a really smart file system; a relation database; or one of the NoSql solutions (key-value stores, document stores, graph databases, etc.). It supports multiple data models (hierarchical, relational, etc.) and is really, really fast.
Think of it like a file system that has 100 million files in it, but you can still get a list of all your JPEG photos or a list of all your documents with the tag 'Author = Bob' attached in just a couple of seconds (without having to first go through some multi-hour indexing process).
So...before you create any file, you have to check your list of backup folders to make sure you are not creating something in one of them you don't want to back up. If your directory tree has a few million files spread across 10,000 folders, this task can be very daunting.
Let's assume for a second that you actually would want all your important stuff backed up to the Google cloud (I don't). This kind of thing almost never works. File systems allow you (and the applications you run) to store a file almost anywhere in the directory tree. You can create new folders all the time. Maybe you have found a way to make sure ALL your important stuff gets saved to a few folders that are backed up and that some huge file containing unimportant data never gets put there, but I have found file systems woefully lacking in this area. You also have to make sure all your important folders get listed in the backup list, otherwise you end up missing something. I create huge test files all the time on my system and the last thing I would want is those files pushed up to the cloud. They would eat up bandwidth and storage space and I don't care about the data in them.
Nobody suggested you should buy things you won't use. The OP said "If you are paying for apps, you're doing it wrong". I assume he meant apps that he would actually use. Try again.
If you are paying for software or content you are doing it right. People who make software, music, movies, or other things we want to use actually want to get paid for their work (imagine that). If no one is willing to actually pay for the stuff they use, the creators have to turn to other sources of revenue. Your app (or web page, or movie, or...) has to be loaded with ads or other 'revenue generators', instead of just focusing on providing you with great value that you are willing to pay for.
...it is what it is connected to! I like the idea of devices all around me sending information to a central information hub that I can query and control. I don't like the idea of each device sending sensitive information to its 'true owner's web server' somewhere in the cloud where it can be mined, hacked, or outright stolen by an employee. I don't want all those companies able to disconnect me from my data just because I don't feel like paying some exorbitant monthly fee. There are a whole host of issues with the current IoT architecture. We need a completely different architecture where all MY devices send and receive data to/from MY central controller. I get to choose how the data is used and who I want to share it with.
While they are at it, how about a browser option that prevents the advertisements from playing at 5x the sound volume of your regular streaming video?
I think you missed the point entirely. It has nothing to do with indexes, deduplication, or normalization. It has everything to do with the ability for the software to break up steps within an algorithm and run parts of it in parallel. If you have an algorithm that lets you do task X in 100 seconds on a given core, then if you run that same task on a CPU with 4 cores (each core being approximately identical to the core in the single core CPU) and it completes in 30 seconds, then THAT is the point. PostgreSQL and other databases have been able to run lots of separate queries simultaneously for a long time. What they have not been able to do is have a single query run much faster just because more cores are available. Postgres 9.6 has added some parallel support in a few areas (if I read the news right), but plenty of tasks are still run as a single thread.