CodeWeaver routinely does contract work with companies to improve support for specific applications, which sounds exactly like what you are talking about.
Do you have a link to that? In all of the interviews that I have read with Bram Cohen he's stated that his main purpose in creating Bittorrent was to allow content creators the ability to host distribute their own content efficiently and affordably. He further goes on to say that he thinks BitTorrent is a pretty stupid tool to use for piracy because it does absolutely nothing to hide the identity of the trackers and clients.
This is related to ZFS, but it sounds like you aren't familiar with how RAID works, and since ZFS uses the same fundamental principles for redundancy, I'll start there.
Both RAID and ZFS use striping and parity checking to distribute blocks across the devices - you don't mirror an entire disk when adding devices. Say you have a RAID-5 with N disks. For each stripe (chunk of the disk) you store original data on N-1 disks, and on the remaining disk you instead store a checksum of the data in the first N-1 disks.
Then when you loose any one disk, you can recover the data what was on that disk by calculating the checksum from the remaining disks (with a checksum Z = A + B + C, it is just as easy to recover B = A + C - Z, as it is to recover Z). This single parity gives you a storage space of N-1 of N disks, and allows for a single disk failure. It also means that every write operation has to write to two disks, rather than just one.
There is also a double-parity scheme, RAID-6, that allows for two simultaneous disk failures with a storage space of N-2 of N disks. There are also schemes that give no-redundancy - just a logical pool of data (RAID-0), or complete redundancy - mirroring (RAID-1). ZFS is pretty much the same, but is more flexible when it comes to adding drives of different size. RAID-Z is ZFS's single-parity scheme, and RAID-Z2 is its double-parity scheme.
Furthermore, ZFS's snapshots don't use deltas. Each file contains a list of all the blocks containing its data. When you create a snapshot, it just creates a new file entry that points to the same blocks as the old file. If one of the files later wants to write to one of these blocks, it instead writes to a new block and then updates its pointer to this new block while the old file keeps pointing to the original block (this is where the term copy-on-write comes from).
So it isn't like traditional incremental backups where you have to take the original full backup and then apply all the deltas to get the current state of the file. All of the data for all the snapshots is there in blocks and the blocks of a single file can be (and are) distributed across multiple disks - whether a block is used by multiple files or not is irrelevant to ZFS.
The thing about presidential campaigns in the US is that they, more than any other event, get people talking about public policy. Half of the stuff that gets debated really has nothing to do with the presidency - it is really more the job of congress. But it is these campaigns that frame the political conversation for the next 1-3 years to come. So if you want your ideas, and your issues to have a place in this media short-list, then you are best off if you can get them into discussion surrounding the presidential election.
That is really what "no-chance" third party runs are about. And the Ron-Paul campaign has succeeded in creating a lot of discussion that wouldn't have happened if it was just an activist group. Now that the primaries are over there is no more venue to do this. Neither he nor his cause has anything to gain from being an annoying thorn-in-the side at the GOP Convention. He knew from the beginning that he wasn't going to win the nomination, and stepping down gracefully is the best thing to do.
Furthermore, I don't think there is really anything to be gained from running as an independent. First off, for good or bad, Paul has decided to work within the Republican party. Secondly, I don't really know who his campaign would draw more voters from - McCain, Obama or the Libertarian candidate. Most importantly, Paul wants to return to his congressional seat which he would have to forfeit if he made a run for the presidency. He can do more good serving another term as congressman then he would by extending this campaign another half year.
Well the reason that Opera does it is because the do sell modified versions of the browser for cellphones and other embedded devices like the Wii. I imagine these products share a large portion of their code with the desktop browser, so it makes since that they want to keep it proprietary.
One feature of ZFS is copy-on-write file snapshots, which allow you to "copy" a file, but the common portions of the file will be shared between the two copies, decreasing disk space.
This is great for backing up large files containing frequent but small changes. For example encrypted disk-images, parallels windows disk images, database files, the Entourage email box, or home videos you are in the process of editing etc.
Right now Time Machine creates an entire copy of the file each time it changes, making it unsuitable for backing up these types of files, and so you are encourage to exclude those files from backup. ZFS could fix that.
It could also make adding disk space more seamless, if desired. Slap on an external Firewire drive or even airport, click the "Add to storage pool button", and suddenly it just acts like part of your system drive. You don't have to worry about what is stored where.
But, the Site Identity thing -- and it recognizing how may times you've visited a site, looks like a whole bundle of trouble waiting to happen. Uhm, that info has been available for years, they just made the interface a bit more user friendly. If you really don't want the browser to track where you've been you should disable the browser history. If you just want to clear out a specific site after visiting it, bring up the history side-bar with CTRL-H and delete it. If you have old stuff you want to clear out without completely nuking your history, you can search your history in the sidebar.
Although if you know that you are going to be browsing a site that you don't want tracked the best thing is to have a separate browser that is configured not to track anything.
Say you are a webmaster. You serve pages that you generate and trust them. However, some third parties would like to include content on your pages that is served from servers that you don't control. For example advertisements - these are almost always served from a different computer than the main webpage. Another example is embedded content from another site like a YouTube movie, or all these little panels that the social networking sites are starting to introduce. This gets worse when users themselves are allowed to put this sort of content on your site (say you run a forum or social networking site).
Because you don't control these web servers, the content they are serving could be replaced with malicious content, or just content that goes beyond what you gave them permission to do. Or a user could intentionally post malicious content.
This allows a webmaster to indicate what third party content is allowed on any page (if any), and what that third party content is allowed to do (text, images, animated images, javascript, plugins, etc). The web-browser then enforces the rules that the webmaster set.
It's possible that the malware isn't there intentionally. It is not uncommon for a website to be hijacked and have malicious javascript inserted but leave the rest of the site the same. Given the relatively small number of sites in the hk TLD, if a major hk hosting provider was hacked that could account for some of it.
It doesn't look like McAfee has posted this year's report yet. Here is last year's.
I just want to second this. Both universities that I have attended have had a Numerical Methods class taught in Matlab, and that class is fantastic for scientists and engineers. On one hand they learn all the fundamental, theoretical issues related to approximating calculations on computers, and on the other they learn a practical, industry-standard tool that they will use for the rest of their careers.
During my undergraduate I had issues with them teaching a proprietary language, but with the phenomenal progress that the Octave team has made in the 3.0 release, that simply isn't a concern anymore.
If you are going to have them take one class on programming this is it. If they are taking two, then they should learn C as performance still counts very much in this area.
I don't know, do comic book writers ever have movie rights? I had always assumed that they assigned copyright to the comic publisher, and at best got royalties from movie adaptations, but no say in the decision making processes.
Nah, it's just slashdot. W3C allows you to specify any character set you want in the HTML header and/or HTTP server. I've been switching my pages over to UTF-8 as I modify them, which is really easy for static pages.
For dynamic pages with existing content it is a bit more work because in addition to serving the pages with the correct character-map, you have to also make sure that the database and all the software that manipulates the text along the way supports unicode correctly. And on top of that you need a hybrid system since all the old comments are stored as ISO-8859-1 which does have some characters that are different from unicode.
I have some questions for the cosmologists among us.
When talking about a closed (positive curvature) geometry like the one described here physicists say that the universe will have enough mass to eventually stop expanding and then begin to collapse on itself. However, when I imagine a 2D version of this I see a circle expanding on a sphere (or donut) until it wraps around, at which point the mass will recollect on the opposite side. In that model, the universe isn't so much stopping expansion, but continuing it until the universe turns inside out and the edges of the (matter within the) universe become the center, and the center becomes edges. Is this is how it would occur, or would the current edges remain edges, and it would just stop expanding and start collapsing?
Or is the idea of an edge just not valid? In my example the universe only took up a partial amount of the geometry, and then expanded and moved within it. Is it instead the case that the universe has occupied the entire geometry from the very beginning, and the donut itself is expanding, and will latter collapse? (umm raisin bunt cake)
All the discussions of universal geometry are explained as depending on the mass of the universe bending it as per General Relativity. Wouldn't that then mean that we don't have a static geometry, but one that is changing as the universe expands?
And how does time fit into all this - when the geometry wraps around, is it only the spacial dimensions that wrap around and time still extends to infinity in both directions, or is time also closed? (Thinking about that hurts my brain).
DSL is also a good choice for a set-top box - only 50MB of disk space required, and it is based on Debian so pretty much any application you want/need is already packaged and available in the repository.
That said, if you are going to be doing Mono development you will want a full desktop environment - for that any distro will work fine. I'd go with a full Debian install on your development machine so you have the same library versions/builds on both systems.
For the final media center PC, you don't actually need a window manager - you can run X11 applications without a WM, and if all you are doing is running a single fullscreen app that is often preferable. I used to do that when running quake on memory starved systems. Do a search for the xinitrc file to learn how to set that up.
It will only take a couple hours to slap together the parts once you get them, but if you aren't up to speed on current hardware, it can take days to research what hardware works with linux, is good quality, and is a good deal. And if you are going for the lower end, you usually don't end up saving money anyhow.
I hate shopping for components - companies that were producing reliable parts 5 years ago might be producing crap today, and the sweet spot for cost/benefit trade-off is constantly changing. The last computer I assembled, almost every component has had to be replaced - first the Micron memory failed a memtest out of the box, then the IBM harddrive (first of the deskstars), then an ASUS motherboard (bad caps), then the CPU fan seized up (I was an idiot and kept the fan that came with the processor, since the warranty required it). That pretty much turned me off of building my own computers:)
The next time around (after a detour with Apple) I just got a Dell with Linux preloaded, and contrary to the submitter, it did cost less that the same computer with windows installed. Saved a bunch of time, I haven't had any problems with it. I suppose if I wanted a gaming machine I would build my own, since those are ridiculously overpriced, but for a simple desktop prebuilt is easier.
Is that 40mb counting when you have a Nautilus window open? That memory hog is a major reason why I stopped using GNOME. I might try it again if it's gotten better.
The difference is that those chicken would have never even existed if they weren't being raised for food, and killing them has zero impact on the "natural" (current) ecosystem (raising them is another issue).
I have no moral qualms whatsoever about killing animals for usefull purposes. I do have issues with killing so many wild animals that it affects the sustainability of the species as a whole, or shifts the local ecosystem in undesirable (or unpredictable) ways. Which is why I'll eat as much cow and chicken as I want but rarely eat (unfarmed) fish.
Of course, the number of birds that are killed by skyscrapers and windmills is completely inconsequential.
Yeah, that was my first though. It does say "vertically parking", so maybe that is what the image is depicting. Ah here are some more pictures. That said, it looks scary as hell to ride - when the two wheels move forward, you would also tilt forward, but there is nothing underneath you! You are being help up by the straps around your chest, while the road rushes beneath you. Plus having the helmet attached to the bike seems like a bad idea.
There are literally thousands of FPGA prototyping boards on the market, many of which cost much less than this one. So while you could use this for other things, I can't imagine why anyone would spend the extra money unless they wanted to use the video specific features like the dual DVI interface. Furthermore, the purpose of the project is to develop an open source video card, and this card was created as a tool for those developers to experiment with.
So, it was created to prototype a video card, and it's only practical uses are real-time video (output) processing, thus it is a video card.
I was about to recommend that and then realized that the the database engine that OO Base uses (HDBC), as well as the interface with other databases (JDBC) both require Java.
All my belongings used to fit into a large duffel bag, and I would still loose things just as often. It is more about people not putting things back when they are done using them (or having a very loose definition of when they are done using them) then it is about clutter.
Re:rendering could use gpgpu / cell support
on
Blender 2.46 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually, nVidia released a free version lately. It doesn't allow multiprocessor or networked rendering, but is nice for individuals. Also, it looks like blender includes a plugin for Gelato now.
But you loose control when using OpenGL. It is fine for games and real-time graphics where speed is most important (and blender already uses OpenGL for its interface of course). But different cards can render things significantly different and so it isn't particularly useful for final rendering, which is what I think the parent was talking about. However because it is more deterministic, CUDA/CTM could be useful for rendering, especially now that cards are getting 32-bit floating point. Gelato is an example of a hybrid CPU/GPU render that uses CUDA (or whatever NVIDA used internally before that) to make a fast, but high-quality renderer.
Slashdot Mirror
CodeWeaver routinely does contract work with companies to improve support for specific applications, which sounds exactly like what you are talking about.
Do you have a link to that? In all of the interviews that I have read with Bram Cohen he's stated that his main purpose in creating Bittorrent was to allow content creators the ability to host distribute their own content efficiently and affordably. He further goes on to say that he thinks BitTorrent is a pretty stupid tool to use for piracy because it does absolutely nothing to hide the identity of the trackers and clients.
This is related to ZFS, but it sounds like you aren't familiar with how RAID works, and since ZFS uses the same fundamental principles for redundancy, I'll start there.
Both RAID and ZFS use striping and parity checking to distribute blocks across the devices - you don't mirror an entire disk when adding devices. Say you have a RAID-5 with N disks. For each stripe (chunk of the disk) you store original data on N-1 disks, and on the remaining disk you instead store a checksum of the data in the first N-1 disks.
Then when you loose any one disk, you can recover the data what was on that disk by calculating the checksum from the remaining disks (with a checksum Z = A + B + C, it is just as easy to recover B = A + C - Z, as it is to recover Z). This single parity gives you a storage space of N-1 of N disks, and allows for a single disk failure. It also means that every write operation has to write to two disks, rather than just one.
There is also a double-parity scheme, RAID-6, that allows for two simultaneous disk failures with a storage space of N-2 of N disks. There are also schemes that give no-redundancy - just a logical pool of data (RAID-0), or complete redundancy - mirroring (RAID-1). ZFS is pretty much the same, but is more flexible when it comes to adding drives of different size. RAID-Z is ZFS's single-parity scheme, and RAID-Z2 is its double-parity scheme.
Furthermore, ZFS's snapshots don't use deltas. Each file contains a list of all the blocks containing its data. When you create a snapshot, it just creates a new file entry that points to the same blocks as the old file. If one of the files later wants to write to one of these blocks, it instead writes to a new block and then updates its pointer to this new block while the old file keeps pointing to the original block (this is where the term copy-on-write comes from).
So it isn't like traditional incremental backups where you have to take the original full backup and then apply all the deltas to get the current state of the file. All of the data for all the snapshots is there in blocks and the blocks of a single file can be (and are) distributed across multiple disks - whether a block is used by multiple files or not is irrelevant to ZFS.
The thing about presidential campaigns in the US is that they, more than any other event, get people talking about public policy. Half of the stuff that gets debated really has nothing to do with the presidency - it is really more the job of congress. But it is these campaigns that frame the political conversation for the next 1-3 years to come. So if you want your ideas, and your issues to have a place in this media short-list, then you are best off if you can get them into discussion surrounding the presidential election.
That is really what "no-chance" third party runs are about. And the Ron-Paul campaign has succeeded in creating a lot of discussion that wouldn't have happened if it was just an activist group. Now that the primaries are over there is no more venue to do this. Neither he nor his cause has anything to gain from being an annoying thorn-in-the side at the GOP Convention. He knew from the beginning that he wasn't going to win the nomination, and stepping down gracefully is the best thing to do.
Furthermore, I don't think there is really anything to be gained from running as an independent. First off, for good or bad, Paul has decided to work within the Republican party. Secondly, I don't really know who his campaign would draw more voters from - McCain, Obama or the Libertarian candidate. Most importantly, Paul wants to return to his congressional seat which he would have to forfeit if he made a run for the presidency. He can do more good serving another term as congressman then he would by extending this campaign another half year.
I don't have birds in my neighborhood you insensitive clod.
Must be why I have voted third party so often.
Well the reason that Opera does it is because the do sell modified versions of the browser for cellphones and other embedded devices like the Wii. I imagine these products share a large portion of their code with the desktop browser, so it makes since that they want to keep it proprietary.
One feature of ZFS is copy-on-write file snapshots, which allow you to "copy" a file, but the common portions of the file will be shared between the two copies, decreasing disk space.
This is great for backing up large files containing frequent but small changes. For example encrypted disk-images, parallels windows disk images, database files, the Entourage email box, or home videos you are in the process of editing etc.
Right now Time Machine creates an entire copy of the file each time it changes, making it unsuitable for backing up these types of files, and so you are encourage to exclude those files from backup. ZFS could fix that.
It could also make adding disk space more seamless, if desired. Slap on an external Firewire drive or even airport, click the "Add to storage pool button", and suddenly it just acts like part of your system drive. You don't have to worry about what is stored where.
Although if you know that you are going to be browsing a site that you don't want tracked the best thing is to have a separate browser that is configured not to track anything.
Say you are a webmaster. You serve pages that you generate and trust them. However, some third parties would like to include content on your pages that is served from servers that you don't control. For example advertisements - these are almost always served from a different computer than the main webpage. Another example is embedded content from another site like a YouTube movie, or all these little panels that the social networking sites are starting to introduce. This gets worse when users themselves are allowed to put this sort of content on your site (say you run a forum or social networking site).
Because you don't control these web servers, the content they are serving could be replaced with malicious content, or just content that goes beyond what you gave them permission to do. Or a user could intentionally post malicious content.
This allows a webmaster to indicate what third party content is allowed on any page (if any), and what that third party content is allowed to do (text, images, animated images, javascript, plugins, etc). The web-browser then enforces the rules that the webmaster set.
It's possible that the malware isn't there intentionally. It is not uncommon for a website to be hijacked and have malicious javascript inserted but leave the rest of the site the same. Given the relatively small number of sites in the hk TLD, if a major hk hosting provider was hacked that could account for some of it.
It doesn't look like McAfee has posted this year's report yet. Here is last year's.
I just want to second this. Both universities that I have attended have had a Numerical Methods class taught in Matlab, and that class is fantastic for scientists and engineers. On one hand they learn all the fundamental, theoretical issues related to approximating calculations on computers, and on the other they learn a practical, industry-standard tool that they will use for the rest of their careers.
During my undergraduate I had issues with them teaching a proprietary language, but with the phenomenal progress that the Octave team has made in the 3.0 release, that simply isn't a concern anymore.
If you are going to have them take one class on programming this is it. If they are taking two, then they should learn C as performance still counts very much in this area.
I don't know, do comic book writers ever have movie rights? I had always assumed that they assigned copyright to the comic publisher, and at best got royalties from movie adaptations, but no say in the decision making processes.
Nah, it's just slashdot. W3C allows you to specify any character set you want in the HTML header and/or HTTP server. I've been switching my pages over to UTF-8 as I modify them, which is really easy for static pages.
For dynamic pages with existing content it is a bit more work because in addition to serving the pages with the correct character-map, you have to also make sure that the database and all the software that manipulates the text along the way supports unicode correctly. And on top of that you need a hybrid system since all the old comments are stored as ISO-8859-1 which does have some characters that are different from unicode.
I have some questions for the cosmologists among us.
When talking about a closed (positive curvature) geometry like the one described here physicists say that the universe will have enough mass to eventually stop expanding and then begin to collapse on itself. However, when I imagine a 2D version of this I see a circle expanding on a sphere (or donut) until it wraps around, at which point the mass will recollect on the opposite side. In that model, the universe isn't so much stopping expansion, but continuing it until the universe turns inside out and the edges of the (matter within the) universe become the center, and the center becomes edges. Is this is how it would occur, or would the current edges remain edges, and it would just stop expanding and start collapsing?
Or is the idea of an edge just not valid? In my example the universe only took up a partial amount of the geometry, and then expanded and moved within it. Is it instead the case that the universe has occupied the entire geometry from the very beginning, and the donut itself is expanding, and will latter collapse? (umm raisin bunt cake)
All the discussions of universal geometry are explained as depending on the mass of the universe bending it as per General Relativity. Wouldn't that then mean that we don't have a static geometry, but one that is changing as the universe expands?
And how does time fit into all this - when the geometry wraps around, is it only the spacial dimensions that wrap around and time still extends to infinity in both directions, or is time also closed? (Thinking about that hurts my brain).
DSL is also a good choice for a set-top box - only 50MB of disk space required, and it is based on Debian so pretty much any application you want/need is already packaged and available in the repository.
That said, if you are going to be doing Mono development you will want a full desktop environment - for that any distro will work fine. I'd go with a full Debian install on your development machine so you have the same library versions/builds on both systems.
For the final media center PC, you don't actually need a window manager - you can run X11 applications without a WM, and if all you are doing is running a single fullscreen app that is often preferable. I used to do that when running quake on memory starved systems. Do a search for the xinitrc file to learn how to set that up.
It will only take a couple hours to slap together the parts once you get them, but if you aren't up to speed on current hardware, it can take days to research what hardware works with linux, is good quality, and is a good deal. And if you are going for the lower end, you usually don't end up saving money anyhow.
:)
I hate shopping for components - companies that were producing reliable parts 5 years ago might be producing crap today, and the sweet spot for cost/benefit trade-off is constantly changing. The last computer I assembled, almost every component has had to be replaced - first the Micron memory failed a memtest out of the box, then the IBM harddrive (first of the deskstars), then an ASUS motherboard (bad caps), then the CPU fan seized up (I was an idiot and kept the fan that came with the processor, since the warranty required it). That pretty much turned me off of building my own computers
The next time around (after a detour with Apple) I just got a Dell with Linux preloaded, and contrary to the submitter, it did cost less that the same computer with windows installed. Saved a bunch of time, I haven't had any problems with it. I suppose if I wanted a gaming machine I would build my own, since those are ridiculously overpriced, but for a simple desktop prebuilt is easier.
Is that 40mb counting when you have a Nautilus window open? That memory hog is a major reason why I stopped using GNOME. I might try it again if it's gotten better.
The difference is that those chicken would have never even existed if they weren't being raised for food, and killing them has zero impact on the "natural" (current) ecosystem (raising them is another issue).
I have no moral qualms whatsoever about killing animals for usefull purposes. I do have issues with killing so many wild animals that it affects the sustainability of the species as a whole, or shifts the local ecosystem in undesirable (or unpredictable) ways. Which is why I'll eat as much cow and chicken as I want but rarely eat (unfarmed) fish.
Of course, the number of birds that are killed by skyscrapers and windmills is completely inconsequential.
Considering that this was done by a student at an Art Design Center, I'm sure that the numbers given are just very rough optimistic guestimates.
Yeah, that was my first though. It does say "vertically parking", so maybe that is what the image is depicting. Ah here are some more pictures. That said, it looks scary as hell to ride - when the two wheels move forward, you would also tilt forward, but there is nothing underneath you! You are being help up by the straps around your chest, while the road rushes beneath you. Plus having the helmet attached to the bike seems like a bad idea.
There are literally thousands of FPGA prototyping boards on the market, many of which cost much less than this one. So while you could use this for other things, I can't imagine why anyone would spend the extra money unless they wanted to use the video specific features like the dual DVI interface. Furthermore, the purpose of the project is to develop an open source video card, and this card was created as a tool for those developers to experiment with.
So, it was created to prototype a video card, and it's only practical uses are real-time video (output) processing, thus it is a video card.
I was about to recommend that and then realized that the the database engine that OO Base uses (HDBC), as well as the interface with other databases (JDBC) both require Java.
All my belongings used to fit into a large duffel bag, and I would still loose things just as often. It is more about people not putting things back when they are done using them (or having a very loose definition of when they are done using them) then it is about clutter.
Actually, nVidia released a free version lately. It doesn't allow multiprocessor or networked rendering, but is nice for individuals. Also, it looks like blender includes a plugin for Gelato now.
But you loose control when using OpenGL. It is fine for games and real-time graphics where speed is most important (and blender already uses OpenGL for its interface of course). But different cards can render things significantly different and so it isn't particularly useful for final rendering, which is what I think the parent was talking about. However because it is more deterministic, CUDA/CTM could be useful for rendering, especially now that cards are getting 32-bit floating point. Gelato is an example of a hybrid CPU/GPU render that uses CUDA (or whatever NVIDA used internally before that) to make a fast, but high-quality renderer.