With this many patents, Microsoft will win. Their intent is to kill all competition/freeware by patenting everything remotely interesting to them. They don't even put their name on any of their patents until they issue, so it's really hard to spot them. There's no telling exactly how many, or which patents they have in process at any time, unless you do a lot of educated snooping at the USPTO. And that tells you nothing about their international patents. Their pulling out of the organization will have little impact for them.
Why not just respect France's anti-Nazi law whilst doing business with the French?
Because it's untenable to observe all city, municipal, provincial and national laws of every country in the world. Why should every website in the world have to worry about the laws of every place that website might be viewed/used? So long as websites observe the laws of their originating country, as well as international law, they shouldn't have to worry any further about the mishmash of conflicting, puerile laws found in other countries.
If you would care to explain how checking ID's will keep bombs off planes I'm sure it would be very illuminating for all of the readers.
Did I say that? Let me check... Nope. The slashbot kneejerk is an amazing thing. I'm railing against his rhetoric, not his message. Maybe you guys should read my message more closely instead of just being a 'bot.
I fail to see how millions of passengers flying in the United States, each one who had to show ID, are demonstrating 'inconsistant pasage'.
[sic]
Let me explain, without further comment on your mangling of my statement. "...reserved for a particular purpose for which your passage is inconsistent..." means, for example, riding an ATV thought a nature preserve which bans motor vehicles. Doesn't seem that hard to understand. I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of my statement. Try reading it more closely.
As for your statement about people wandering around nuclear plants; this is not what Gillmore is speaking of at all, he is talking about our transportation system, so stick to the point.
He plainly said that restricting one's movement is kidnapping, without qualification. The topic of transportation happened to be the backdrop for this statement, but that doesn't change the fact that he never qualified his statement. Rather he seemed to make it as a an overarching truth, for which his transportation issue is only an example.
I could go on, deconstructing the rest of your arguments, but I just realized I was suckered into replying to a troll.
Sorry to disappoint, but no trolling here. It cracks me up that you could accuse me of trolling, when Gillmore's entire interview comes off as one giant troll session itself. It's rife with absurd rhetoric like the kidnapping statement. I admit I don't like him at all, but that doesn't make me a troll.
Q: Why are you suing the government over ID on airplanes?
A:...The right to travel, also known as the right of free movement, is essential in every free society. It's a crime to interfere with anyone's right of free movement (we call it kidnapping, among other things).
So, let's see. If I restrict the movement of strangers from entering into my house through my front door by locking it, I'm kidnapping them? I'm very selective with whom I let through my door, and have every right to be. The same goes for any private property, or property reserved for a particular purpose for which your passage is inconsistent. You just can't just have anyone wandering about nuclear plants, or onto planes while carrying bombs. His movement about the country is not restricted. He simply needs to get behind the wheel of his car and drive wherever the heck he wants to go, if he doesn't like airport security. And considering how rich he is, he could probably just get his own damn plane and stop worrying about it.
I just can't stand this guy. SO much of what he says is rhetorical, but he acts like it's apparent, obvious fact.
It's too freaking ugly, tries to be too cute, and is an odd and awkward shape. Why can't we just have a regular radio with pause/record/backwards buttons, and a memory slot?
Notice how the article says "up to 2TB"? That doesn't mean they will be releasing 2TB cards any time soon. What it most likely means is that the hardware design supports up to 2TB of *addressing*. A 2TB memory card that size would be nothing short of earth shattering, and wouldn't be relegated to a 3-paragraph article on single website.
I don't see how Google can claim ownership of froogles.com, or even get a trademark on "froogle". The "froogles.com" domain was first registered in December, 2000, while Google got "froogle.com" almost a year later. Tough s**t for Google.
Strangely, the original register date for "froogle.com" is listed in the whois database as September 11, 2001. Kinda surreal.
Was there a good reason for someone modding this as flamebait? I've always wondered about the failed eye surgeries out there, and here someone passes on an informative personal account and he gets modded down as flamebait. Go figure.
I'd hazard a guess that flying autonomous military robots like, oh, say, Tomahawk missiles, can pretty much do what these things do (except land, but of course you
don't want them to:). And they've been around a long time.
But, in fact, the military is actively developing flying robots of other kinds as well. You certainly don't hear all about it, but the stuff you do hear is pretty damn amazing.
Re:What a crock of...
on
VoIP Questioned
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The only valid point he has is that it's difficult to get yourself listed in the phone book, but that's not a technical issue and should be resolved shortly.
I don't even see that as a problem. I don't want my phone to be listed. My Vonage phone never rings unless it's
someone I have given my number to!
People are stupider. The education system in the US is rotting, and kids that can barely read and write are "graduating".
Video games are amazing. If I were a kid now, I might never emerge from the computer room. When I was a kid, games like pong were cool but couldn't hold your attention forever.
The web is here. There is a lot of stuff to read online, there's a lot of porn to surf, lots of music, software and movies to pirate, and a lot of chat to be chatted.
There are 150 TV channels now instead of 13.
Blockbuster and friends have an endless supply of DVDs to watch.
To compare this man to Edison does him a disservice. Edison was a capitalist to the core, to the point of pushing bad technology over good if it would make him more money. For example, he was an opponent of AC power, because with AC power you can have large central power centers; with DC power, you have to have many local power distribution centers because transmission is much less efficient over distance. He wanted DC power even though it sucks, because he wanted to have a stake in every one of the numerous distribution centers required to make it work. Lucky for all of us he lost that battle.
This Afghani sounds like a good person, one who actually cares about people more than money. That would set him far above Edison.
I don't care what arbitrary RAID controller you're quoting. Go get two non-RAID SCSI controllers and hook up a SCSI disk to each. Get a good RAID package like Veritas, etc., and set up software RAID.
You will experience better read performance with RAID 1 than RAID 0. No questions asked. Anyone worth their salt will tell you the same. Including myself, having developed RAID solutions in both hardware and kernel drivers for 15 years now - from scratch.
You want a test to see what I mean? Try creating two very large files on an empty filesystem, one at a time so they're contiguous. Try reading each one linearly, simultaneously, using two processes, one for each. The RAID 0 setup is forced to pingpong seek because of the alternating stripe. The mirror is not, and a good implementation will cause each process to end up each talking to their own disk with no seeking. Viola, you understand.
With the low end RAID chips like Highpoint and Sil, you ARE doing software RAID.
More explicitly, OS-level RAID, such as on Solaris, Linux, etc., tends to be very good. The CPU cost of mirroring or striping is negligible on a decent implementation. Also, some third party OS-level RAID 0/1 solutions, such as Veritas, are quite excellent.
No, you're referring to striping, not mirroring. In fact, mirroring shouldn't give you any speedup in transfer rate at all -- since the data is mirrored to both drives, you're writing 20MB each to both drives.
I'm talking about reading from the drives. Given a mirror of two identical drives, you have your choice of which to read from. This will not cause delays. It will speed things up. It is speedier than striping for reads overall, because you have your choice of which spindle to read from, and there is no stripe width to bound your maximum I/O size.
I think earlier on in this topic someone posted an incredulous message on how very confused people seem to be about what RAID is and how it actually works in theory and practice. I think he's right, and suggest you and others do a little research before drawing such conclusions as you have here.
I laugh in the general direction of the commenters to my post. Mirroring almost *always* gives performance gains. You can find a case with any implementation where performance is significantly worse, but in the large majority of cases mirroring helps. Given the choice of mirroring over single-disk volumes, I will always choose mirroring unless I know that the majority of my I/O operations are going to be writes. (And even then it doesn't really hurt too much, so it's worth it for the redundancy.) Mirroring is superior to striping for reads, so if I'm going to be doing mostly reads then I'll take mirroring. Else, I'll take striping. Both are better than just one, of course.
And, yes, agreed that low-end hardware solutions suck performancewise. That's why I use a software solution for all RAID except 5, which you really want hardware for.
In most cases, RAID is slower than single-disk access, and always will be.
This couldn't be less true. RAID 0 is *all* about performance. Its only other benefit is increasing the size of a virtual disk to N*disk size. RAID 1 is mainly about redundancy, of course, but the reason people use RAID 1 over RAID 5 is almost solely performance. It's safe to say that, in most cases, RAID 0/1 yield better performance than single-disk access. That's why people use them.
Just because you read Slashdot doesn't mean you have any idea what you're talking about!
How does RAID 1 help loading times? RAID 1 is all about mirroring.
Mirroring generally improves performance, which most users and most inexperienced engineers don't realize. Because you have the exact same data on at least two different spindles, you can transfer data with twice the concurrency, and at times approaching twice as fast. When reading a large file, for instance, if each disk can transfer, say, 10 MB/second and the file is 20 MB in size, the file can be loaded in one second with mirroring and two seconds without.
In addition, concurrency allows you to load two different files simultaneously on different disks. Not only do you get faster transfer times, you don't suffer from disk head seeks back and forth as you read the files. This can actually improve "load time" by much more than twice.
Since most filesystem operations are reads, the concurrency gained by mirroring usually helps immensely. However, writes do not suffer significantly either. When you write to a file on a mirrored filesystem, it obviously must be written out to both sides of the mirror. But, it doesn't take twice as long, as one might immediately think. Data can be written simultaneously to both drives, at a cost which is only marginally slower than writing to a single disk (assuming they are attached to different disk controllers/buses, as best practices dictate).
All-around, mirroring is very good for performance.
This is hopeless wishful thinking. Spammers are just as bright as anyone else. In addition, they generally seem to have a fair share of low cunning. Don't underestimate them.
I think it's true, spec writing does often fall by the wayside. However, I think it's far more prevalent at small companies, and non-tech-oriented companies that nevertheless have engineers. It's often a money or time thing, because it takes a lot of time and effort to pre-document things before developing them, and small companies don't often have such luxury. But there is also a lot of laziness involved. I don't know many engineers who like documenting things at all, much less weeks or months before they get to knock out even a line of code. Given the chance, they will generally blow off docs and start hacking.
I think this has very little to do with extreme programming, and everything to do with motivation (or lack thereof). Though I think this phenomenon has one thing in common with EP, in absolute seriousness - laziness with regard to writing specifications.
Wasn't it back in the late 70's and early 80's that everyone was freaked out about what looked like an upcoming ice age? We just do not have enough historical data to know what a "normal" temperature pattern is. No question that pollution is not good, but we just don't know what effect it's having on global temperatures.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, home connection speeds have went from 512/768 to 2,3 and soon 4 and 5mbit/second.
I already get 4Mb at home, and 6Mb is offered in my area. In Japan, apparently 20-30Mbit is common. My colleages there get that speed, at least.
Should have said "little negative impact".
With this many patents, Microsoft will win. Their intent is to kill all competition/freeware by patenting everything remotely interesting to them. They don't even put their name on any of their patents until they issue, so it's really hard to spot them. There's no telling exactly how many, or which patents they have in process at any time, unless you do a lot of educated snooping at the USPTO. And that tells you nothing about their international patents. Their pulling out of the organization will have little impact for them.
Why not just respect France's anti-Nazi law whilst doing business with the French?
Because it's untenable to observe all city, municipal, provincial and national laws of every country in the world. Why should every website in the world have to worry about the laws of every place that website might be viewed/used? So long as websites observe the laws of their originating country, as well as international law, they shouldn't have to worry any further about the mishmash of conflicting, puerile laws found in other countries.
If you would care to explain how checking ID's will keep bombs off planes I'm sure it would be very illuminating for all of the readers.
Did I say that? Let me check... Nope. The slashbot kneejerk is an amazing thing. I'm railing against his rhetoric, not his message. Maybe you guys should read my message more closely instead of just being a 'bot.
I fail to see how millions of passengers flying in the United States, each one who had to show ID, are demonstrating 'inconsistant pasage'. [sic]
Let me explain, without further comment on your mangling of my statement. "...reserved for a particular purpose for which your passage is inconsistent..." means, for example, riding an ATV thought a nature preserve which bans motor vehicles. Doesn't seem that hard to understand. I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of my statement. Try reading it more closely.
As for your statement about people wandering around nuclear plants; this is not what Gillmore is speaking of at all, he is talking about our transportation system, so stick to the point.
He plainly said that restricting one's movement is kidnapping, without qualification. The topic of transportation happened to be the backdrop for this statement, but that doesn't change the fact that he never qualified his statement. Rather he seemed to make it as a an overarching truth, for which his transportation issue is only an example.
I could go on, deconstructing the rest of your arguments, but I just realized I was suckered into replying to a troll.
Sorry to disappoint, but no trolling here. It cracks me up that you could accuse me of trolling, when Gillmore's entire interview comes off as one giant troll session itself. It's rife with absurd rhetoric like the kidnapping statement. I admit I don't like him at all, but that doesn't make me a troll.
From the interview:
...The right to travel, also known as the right of free movement, is essential in every free society. It's a crime to interfere with anyone's right of free movement (we call it kidnapping, among other things).
Q: Why are you suing the government over ID on airplanes?
A:
So, let's see. If I restrict the movement of strangers from entering into my house through my front door by locking it, I'm kidnapping them? I'm very selective with whom I let through my door, and have every right to be. The same goes for any private property, or property reserved for a particular purpose for which your passage is inconsistent. You just can't just have anyone wandering about nuclear plants, or onto planes while carrying bombs. His movement about the country is not restricted. He simply needs to get behind the wheel of his car and drive wherever the heck he wants to go, if he doesn't like airport security. And considering how rich he is, he could probably just get his own damn plane and stop worrying about it.
I just can't stand this guy. SO much of what he says is rhetorical, but he acts like it's apparent, obvious fact.
It's too freaking ugly, tries to be too cute, and is an odd and awkward shape. Why can't we just have a regular radio with pause/record/backwards buttons, and a memory slot?
Notice how the article says "up to 2TB"? That doesn't mean they will be releasing 2TB cards any time soon. What it most likely means is that the hardware design supports up to 2TB of *addressing*. A 2TB memory card that size would be nothing short of earth shattering, and wouldn't be relegated to a 3-paragraph article on single website.
I don't see how Google can claim ownership of froogles.com, or even get a trademark on "froogle". The "froogles.com" domain was first registered in December, 2000, while Google got "froogle.com" almost a year later. Tough s**t for Google.
Strangely, the original register date for "froogle.com" is listed in the whois database as September 11, 2001. Kinda surreal.
Was there a good reason for someone modding this as flamebait? I've always wondered about the failed eye surgeries out there, and here someone passes on an informative personal account and he gets modded down as flamebait. Go figure.
I'd hazard a guess that flying autonomous military robots like, oh, say, Tomahawk missiles, can pretty much do what these things do (except land, but of course you don't want them to :). And they've been around a long time.
But, in fact, the military is actively developing flying robots of other kinds as well. You certainly don't hear all about it, but the stuff you do hear is pretty damn amazing.
The only valid point he has is that it's difficult to get yourself listed in the phone book, but that's not a technical issue and should be resolved shortly.
I don't even see that as a problem. I don't want my phone to be listed. My Vonage phone never rings unless it's someone I have given my number to!
Add your list here ->
To compare this man to Edison does him a disservice. Edison was a capitalist to the core, to the point of pushing bad technology over good if it would make him more money. For example, he was an opponent of AC power, because with AC power you can have large central power centers; with DC power, you have to have many local power distribution centers because transmission is much less efficient over distance. He wanted DC power even though it sucks, because he wanted to have a stake in every one of the numerous distribution centers required to make it work. Lucky for all of us he lost that battle.
This Afghani sounds like a good person, one who actually cares about people more than money. That would set him far above Edison.
I don't care what arbitrary RAID controller you're quoting. Go get two non-RAID SCSI controllers and hook up a SCSI disk to each. Get a good RAID package like Veritas, etc., and set up software RAID. You will experience better read performance with RAID 1 than RAID 0. No questions asked. Anyone worth their salt will tell you the same. Including myself, having developed RAID solutions in both hardware and kernel drivers for 15 years now - from scratch.
You want a test to see what I mean? Try creating two very large files on an empty filesystem, one at a time so they're contiguous. Try reading each one linearly, simultaneously, using two processes, one for each. The RAID 0 setup is forced to pingpong seek because of the alternating stripe. The mirror is not, and a good implementation will cause each process to end up each talking to their own disk with no seeking. Viola, you understand.
With the low end RAID chips like Highpoint and Sil, you ARE doing software RAID.
More explicitly, OS-level RAID, such as on Solaris, Linux, etc., tends to be very good. The CPU cost of mirroring or striping is negligible on a decent implementation. Also, some third party OS-level RAID 0/1 solutions, such as Veritas, are quite excellent.
No, you're referring to striping, not mirroring. In fact, mirroring shouldn't give you any speedup in transfer rate at all -- since the data is mirrored to both drives, you're writing 20MB each to both drives.
I'm talking about reading from the drives. Given a mirror of two identical drives, you have your choice of which to read from. This will not cause delays. It will speed things up. It is speedier than striping for reads overall, because you have your choice of which spindle to read from, and there is no stripe width to bound your maximum I/O size.
I think earlier on in this topic someone posted an incredulous message on how very confused people seem to be about what RAID is and how it actually works in theory and practice. I think he's right, and suggest you and others do a little research before drawing such conclusions as you have here.
I laugh in the general direction of the commenters to my post. Mirroring almost *always* gives performance gains. You can find a case with any implementation where performance is significantly worse, but in the large majority of cases mirroring helps. Given the choice of mirroring over single-disk volumes, I will always choose mirroring unless I know that the majority of my I/O operations are going to be writes. (And even then it doesn't really hurt too much, so it's worth it for the redundancy.) Mirroring is superior to striping for reads, so if I'm going to be doing mostly reads then I'll take mirroring. Else, I'll take striping. Both are better than just one, of course.
And, yes, agreed that low-end hardware solutions suck performancewise. That's why I use a software solution for all RAID except 5, which you really want hardware for.
In most cases, RAID is slower than single-disk access, and always will be.
This couldn't be less true. RAID 0 is *all* about performance. Its only other benefit is increasing the size of a virtual disk to N*disk size. RAID 1 is mainly about redundancy, of course, but the reason people use RAID 1 over RAID 5 is almost solely performance. It's safe to say that, in most cases, RAID 0/1 yield better performance than single-disk access. That's why people use them.
Just because you read Slashdot doesn't mean you have any idea what you're talking about!
As you've so well illustrated.
How does RAID 1 help loading times? RAID 1 is all about mirroring.
Mirroring generally improves performance, which most users and most inexperienced engineers don't realize. Because you have the exact same data on at least two different spindles, you can transfer data with twice the concurrency, and at times approaching twice as fast. When reading a large file, for instance, if each disk can transfer, say, 10 MB/second and the file is 20 MB in size, the file can be loaded in one second with mirroring and two seconds without.
In addition, concurrency allows you to load two different files simultaneously on different disks. Not only do you get faster transfer times, you don't suffer from disk head seeks back and forth as you read the files. This can actually improve "load time" by much more than twice.
Since most filesystem operations are reads, the concurrency gained by mirroring usually helps immensely. However, writes do not suffer significantly either. When you write to a file on a mirrored filesystem, it obviously must be written out to both sides of the mirror. But, it doesn't take twice as long, as one might immediately think. Data can be written simultaneously to both drives, at a cost which is only marginally slower than writing to a single disk (assuming they are attached to different disk controllers/buses, as best practices dictate).
All-around, mirroring is very good for performance.
That mod is so 70's. They should have used burlwood for the exterior to complete the image!
Hopefully the spammers aren't that bright...
This is hopeless wishful thinking. Spammers are just as bright as anyone else. In addition, they generally seem to have a fair share of low cunning. Don't underestimate them.
I think it's true, spec writing does often fall by the wayside. However, I think it's far more prevalent at small companies, and non-tech-oriented companies that nevertheless have engineers. It's often a money or time thing, because it takes a lot of time and effort to pre-document things before developing them, and small companies don't often have such luxury. But there is also a lot of laziness involved. I don't know many engineers who like documenting things at all, much less weeks or months before they get to knock out even a line of code. Given the chance, they will generally blow off docs and start hacking.
I think this has very little to do with extreme programming, and everything to do with motivation (or lack thereof). Though I think this phenomenon has one thing in common with EP, in absolute seriousness - laziness with regard to writing specifications.
Wasn't it back in the late 70's and early 80's that everyone was freaked out about what looked like an upcoming ice age? We just do not have enough historical data to know what a "normal" temperature pattern is. No question that pollution is not good, but we just don't know what effect it's having on global temperatures.