It's cool to bash Linksys because some idiot with posting rights to O'Reillynet.com doesn't know enough to download the source code and check out the configure options, but SCO makes accusations and everybody flips out.
In both cases, I say, prove it. Prove that Linksys didn't build the source using their compiler (which they haven't given you a binary to, and so don't owe you source) and the original source code which the author of the article admitted was available for download, using configure flags to specify an alternate configuration file location.
Guess what? It's totally possible that Linksys is in full compliance with the GPL. This guy didn't bother to make sure that the code was in violation before crying foul and putting up a "Linksys sucks -- email them and ask for the modified source!" page.
I took two minutes to "apt-get source zebra", and look at this:
chet@bunny:~/tmp/zebra-0.93b$./configure --help | grep dir
--srcdir=DIR find the sources in DIR [configure dir or `..'] Installation directories: Fine tuning of the installation directories:
--bindir=DIR user executables [EPREFIX/bin]
--sbindir=DIR system admin executables [EPREFIX/sbin]
--libexecdir=DIR program executables [EPREFIX/libexec]
--datadir=DIR read-only architecture-independent data [PREFIX/share]
--sysconfdir=DIR read-only single-machine data [PREFIX/etc]
--sharedstatedir=DIR modifiable architecture-independent data [PREFIX/com]
--localstatedir=DIR modifiable single-machine data [PREFIX/var]
--libdir=DIR object code libraries [EPREFIX/lib]
--includedir=DIR C header files [PREFIX/include]
--oldincludedir=DIR C header files for non-gcc [/usr/include]
--infodir=DIR info documentation [PREFIX/info]
--mandir=DIR man documentation [PREFIX/man]
LDFLAGS linker flags, e.g. -L<lib dir> if you have libraries in a
nonstandard directory <lib dir>
CPPFLAGS C/C++ preprocessor flags, e.g. -I<include dir> if you have
headers in a nonstandard directory <include dir> chet@bunny:~/tmp/zebra-0.93b$
There's nothing to see here, folks. There's no story here, because just like with the SCO stories, there is absolutely no substantiated evidence.
Congratulations, Michael. You have been trolled. Maybe if you'd read the article before posting it to the front page you'd have spared Linksys some bad publicity.
Unless they provided you with a license to run the compiler which they have, they aren't required to furnish source code.
If they were provided with a modified version of GCC, they themselves do have a right to the modified source. The GPL provides you with the freedom to make and distribute modifications to a program which is licensed to you.
However, it doesn't say that you have to provide the program itself to anyone.
I use GPM for mouse handling. The software was made available by the author(s). I can make modifications to it all I want, but unless I provide someone else with a binary based upon my modified source, I don't have to provide source code to anything.
Know your rights well. Know where they stop even better -- you don't want to come off as a maniac claiming rights to that which isn't yours, but be sure that you know what rights are provided to you.
I'd like to know RMS' take on GPL'd apps being distributed as part of an "embedded" device. Google, here I come...
No, I didn't, and neither did anyone else I'd asked.
Let's delve into fuzzy math. What's twice as big as a large audience?
That's right, a larger audience.
So it's entirely possible for them to lose a large audience, and still have enough to headline a tour.
That doesn't mean that they couldn't have made more had they not cut off some people who might otherwise buy a t-shirt or attend a show.
There are always bigger venues. Until they're selling out stadiums like the Rolling Stones and others have done, there's always room for more profit. Even if they did sell out stadiums, they would realize that alienating fans probably won't gain them much love.
Seriously, I think that by pissing off so many with the high-and-mighty act in regards to Napster and music sharing in general they've managed to cut themselves off from a large audience.
Had they not been jackasses about the whole situation I'd be inclined to fire up WinMX and give their new stuff a listen, just to see what the bad-boys-gone-pop have been up to lately. There are a lot of people I know that have not heard the new Metallica stuff, but might give it a listen if somebody mentioned having heard it and liked it.
Peer-to-peer file sharing is a great marketing tool, although one that's hard to control. Metallica cut themselves off from a lot of word-of-mouth, and since I don't hear their music on any of the radio stations I listen to while in the car, they're in practically the same position as other bands who can't get played on the radio: their work is unheard of, and a little word of mouth would go a long way.
Metallica took a moral stand against the free advertising P2P provided. I'm letting them have their moral stand, and I'm sure they'd be interested to know that it's that very moral stand which is preventing them from getting the advertising they might have gotten when people shared mix tapes in the '80s*, or when they swapped files in the late '90s forward.
* Ahh, mix tapes. The seek time sucked, but how nice is it to fit media in your pocket? I wonder about the utility of a mini-disc drive for the PC...
I find it more likely that a Linux kernel module could be written to do on-the-fly crypto with a loopback-style device....although the point is that you'd use this in order to make it difficult for others to do exactly what you're saying should be easy.
This is meant for applications where losing the data is less costly than having it intercepted by a third party. In other words, it doesn't hurt you much if your system were to fail -- you'd lose those MP3s that you downloaded, and some other random stuff. Perhaps some sensitive company documents, especially if a version of the motherboard were available for mobile devices.
However, if somebody were to manage to get ahold of your system, you'd probably rather not make it easy for them to access the hard drive contents.
If your motherboard fails, you can buy another one, and use your key to recover the contents. Thus, there's no real need to be able to access the contents on a motherboard other than the original (or a replacement of the original).
Sometimes I can't believe what makes the front page. Apparently it comes as a shock to Michael that groups of people who trust each other will provide software and other collections of bits to others on the group.
I remember people using war-ftpd to share so-called "warez" to each other, long before the average person had ever heard of Winamp.
How is it newsworthy that people do the same thing with music?
Ugh ugh ugh.
If this story is worth the front page, then this comment is worth reading.
No, they don't. The major parties' candidates have good coverage. If you're not in the Big Two, you're probably not going to be appearing in any major debates on broadcast television anytime soon.
The media industry is the largest lobbying force in the U.S. Government.
This means that the media has a lot of influence over the actions of government. This also means that the media outlets want to keep their leverage, because they've grown too fond of their influence to risk it by pissing off members of either of the Big Two.
Their lobbying provides them with significant influence. In order to keep the gov't lackies from growing tired of their you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours relationship, there's an unspoken rule in the media: do not give third-party candidates as much coverage.
I read an article in the paper recently which voiced the opinion that potential Democratic nominees should back off on their criticism of Bush, since it might cast the nominees themselves in a negative light come election time. A few Democrats were quoted.
Who won from this? Readers saw the names of several Democrats in print, which legitimizes their positions in the running for the next Presidential candidacy in the eyes of the public -- of course the Democrates should watch what they say, because they have a shot at the Presidency. Bush also got some sympathy from the media, as the story basically said, "Democrats should back off of Bush unless they honestly think they could do better next term", implying that Bush is doing okay, and would serve acceptably as President come next election.
Mention of third-party points of view weren't mentioned, implying that their positions are less important.
Elections do not have good media coverage. All participants do not have equal access to good data. Most people just have the names of GOP and Democrat leaders thrown in their faces, and choose one or the other.
Normally I agree with your comments, but I have to wonder --
What's the point in not buying an XBox if you honestly want the benefits of buying them?
Consumers have gotten up and shown that they don't want more media consolidation, and it looks like Congress is listening. They only listen to prevent hordes of angry voters putting them out of office, but that's how it works in these United States.
What would be more effective would be buying an XBox, and writing your congress(wo)?man to express your opinions regarding systems which are artificially closed.
Explain how important "fair use" is to you, and encourage others to do the same. Tell your congresspuppet that you feel that products which contain anti-circumvention technology does more to remove your fair use rights than it does to protect the businessperson. Mention the XBox, perhaps even cite the 1992 Sega ruling, and throw in current examples of artificial product lock-in with respect to the printer cartridge industry for good measure.
Write your congresspuppet, and write them often. Encourage others to write them. Tell them you are sick of seeing your fair use rights taken away in the name of "digital rights". Tell them that you feel that the existing copyright law adequately covers businesses, and that you feel that "digital" copyright laws are an infringement upon your consumer rights.
Remember, puppets don't understand issues -- they just move in the direction of the hardest tugs. Tug their strings, and encourage others to do the same.
If the XBox provides a service that you want, buy it! You're not hurting MS in any way that they'll ever notice by not purchasing one.
Chances are, even if you're correct on paper, Microsoft is still selling X-Boxes above their variable costs, and is recovering fixed costs with each sale.
Are there features other than attributes provided by ext[23] which ReiserFS can't provide?
Regarding the attributes, ReiserFS can't do the following "useful" things:
- Excluding a single file from access-time logging.
- Append-only would be useful in certain cases.
- 'c' (compress file contents) -- Ext[23] doesn't do this yet, and ReiserFS doesn't either, but they both will support it later.
- 'D' (dirsync) attribute -- Other than ensuring that filesystem metadata operations are completed successfully before proceeding, I can't imagine a beneficial use of this attribute. ReiserFS already journals all metadata, and V4 journals everything (and does it faster).
- 'd' (do not back up using dump) -- AFAIK you can't use dump to back up a ReiserFS partition anyways, but tar still exists, and I'm sure there are wrapper scripts for the die-hard dump users.
- 'E' (error in compression) doesn't seem to apply to general (current) use of ext[23], and doesn't have an analogue in ReiserFS.
- 'I' (hash-indexed directory) -- ReiserFS' directory algorithms are much (much!) faster than ext[23]. ReiserFS will eventually support directory plugins, which allow one to set a per-directory hashing scheme. I note that ext[23] doesn't allow modification of this attribute, so I'm not sure if/how it allows you to choose a hashing scheme.
- Immutable ('i') bit -- This might be useful in some circumstances, such as a setuid binary. Not supported by ReiserFS.
- The 'j' option is meant to get around the fact that ext[23] only journals metadata unless mounted with "data=journal". As mentioned elsewhere, ReiserFS' long-term goal is to provide fully atomic file operations, which provides the benefits of data journalling with none of the burdens. Thus, ReiserFS V3 doesn't support this attribute, as the time spent in adding this feature would have been better spent working on V4. Note that with V4 all operations are atomic, which has the effect of turning this flag on for every file.
- 's' (zero file contents upon delete) -- ReiserFS doesn't support this.
- 'S' (write file synchronously) is likely used in cases where preserving file integrity is important. ReiserFS' journalling (especially in V4) provides this "for free".
- 'T' (top of directory heirarchy) is used to get around an ext[23] weakness. I don't recall details, but I believe it's something related to preventing fragmentation and grouping similar files together for enhanced performance. ReiserFS (especially V4) is already quite fast, and with code-level optimizations will likely get faster.
- 't' (don't merge tails) does not apply to current ext3 code, as tails aren't yet merged anyways. This will be used as a flag to write the file to disk in such a way as to be compatible with LILO and other boot loaders. At present I'm not aware of any special issues with ReiserFS' tail packing (which does exist, by the way) with respect to LILO. Note that a ReiserFS partition can be mounted with the "notail" option if you want, which is feature-wise equal to ext[23], which don't seem to provide tail packing at all right now (and if they do, someone needs to update the chattr man page).
- 'u' (back up upon deletion) -- ReiserFS doesn't support this.
- 'X' and 'Z' relate to compression, and do not apply to ext[23] or ReiserFS at the moment. ReiserFS will eventually support compression plugins, as well as encryption plugins.
So of the attributes, the only ones which might actually be of some use in the context of ReiserFS would be exclusion from atime logging, append-only, the immutable bit, zero-contents-upon-delete (although future crypto plugins will destroy the need for this feature), and back up upon deletion.
Then it sounds like you've already made the decision, or the distribution makers have made it for you.
I don't know what distro you use, but I do know that a friend was recently unable to get Debian to install onto a Reiser root (I'd have offered to help, except for the 240-mile trip it would have involved), and from what the comments say here, Redhat doesn't visibly include the option in the default install.
I have converted machines from ext2 to reiser, using tar and going partition by partition.
Is it worth it for you? Only you can make that decision. It has been worth it for me.
That's a great point, and definitely a valid concern.
To address that, I seem to recall Hans having said that the current implementation will eventually be streamlined in terms of CPU usage. The important thing is that the algorithms scale well, and don't take exponentially longer (in fact, it's probably quite sublinear time) as you store more files.
The development team is aware of the CPU load, and will be working to lighten the load. Judging by how good these guys seem to be, I'd expect dramatic improvements by the time the rest of the 2.6 series matures.
Re:Filesystems for the laptop user?
on
Reiser4 Benchmarks
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Operations are journalled in such a way that instead of updating the directory entries (or the file allocation table, or whatever applies to that specific FS) and then writing the new file contents, ReiserFS writes the new contents, and _then_ updates the directory information.
From the impression I have after having read the V4 design docs, in most cases it's a matter of just writing the new data without touching the old, then updating the bookkeeping entries and marking the old information as unneeded. In theory, this method gives journalling and crash safety "for free".
In practice, there's the matter of increased code complexity, which means that you'll take a hit on CPU usage, at least until the developers can stop their mad rush to get V4 into Linux 2.6 and work on code-level optimization (as opposed to optimizing the algorithms), but with Reiser's tree algorithms you're probably spinning the disk less while waiting for the filesystem code to find the data you need.
At any rate, full data journalling comes without the burden of "log what I'm going to do, complete with data, then perform the operations, then mark the pending operation as completed in the journal." Basically you get around having to write twice in nearly all cases.
(If ReiserFS decides that it's a really really good idea to leave the data where it's at, it will write new contents to free space on the disk, update the tree to reflect the changes, write the new contents to the original file's location on the disk, and again update the tree. However, this only occurs in rare circumstances, and is the exception rather than the norm.)
ReiserFS does have speed as a goal; however, with ReiserFS 4, all filesystem operations are now atomic, which is functionally equivalent to having full data (not just metadata) journalling.
In addition, having the fastest CPU in the world won't make ext[23] better at things for which ReiserFS is fast.
CPU speeds are increasing. Storage space is increasing. RAM is cheap.
However, none of that equates to "disks are fast". Having a fast CPU with a slow filesystem is like having a gigabit LAN connected to the Internet via dialup. Sure, internally you're quite good, but throughput will still suck eggs.
The fact of the matter is, it is easier to have no clue what you're talking about than to read a little bit before posting.
I guess my point, which seems to be less interesting to others than I'd thought, is that the music industry tries REALLY hard to make sure that we hear their stuff EVERYWHERE. If a trademark owner was shown to be trying to turn their trademarked name into a commonly used general term (notice that Band-Aid commercials now say "Band-Aid brand"?), they'd be pretty well down the road to losing their trademark.
What the problem is, as far as I'm concerned, is that this music that's shoved down our collective throats on radio, car commercials, September 11 tributes, in restaurants, and such is something that for which music industry has tried hard to get us to feel a need.
Marketing is fine, but when you can't walk into a fast-food restaurant without hearing this music, there's a problem. That's not something I often do, but back in high school I worked at McDonald's and it was definitely an issue for me then. Later at night we used to pull out a CD player and let fly with the music we wanted to hear; however, as there was really no way to place the stereo such that all of the employees could hear it but the customers could not, this is now the stuff of lawsuits.
The RIAA and friends have tried hard to make it so that you must get music through the channels they control, and if this means $18 CDs and Musak, so be it.
You cannot use Ebay or Yahoo to distribute music which you own and produced entirely by yourself with your CD burner. Truly independent performers and producers of music find it next to impossible to get airplay.
My (apparently not-so-compelling) argument is that if the RIAA wants to make sure that the average American cannot live without being exposed to their media while making it hard for media from other sources to be played in the same places (radio, burger joints, etc.), then I believe that the intent is to force the music into our culture.
I wouldn't argue that a given piece of work is universal across a generation, or the nation. The thing we most of us do have in common is that the RIAA is the source of the overwhelming majority of the music which we know best and love.
Go watch Forrest Gump. For every song you hear, find a song not controlled by the RIAA which would as effectively give each scene the specific time-period "feel" that is has.
Until you can do that, it is my belief that you can't have the '70s without the raspy voice of John Fogerty, or the '80s without hair bands and bad pop.
It's that part of our culture which is owned by the RIAA, and if your parents can't find a copy of the first song they ever danced or made out to while listening to the radio, that's part of their lives that they can't as easily revisit.
However, it's still often illegal for them to obtain a non-original copy, even if that song is no longer available on the mass market.
We don't want to be criminalized, and many wouldn't mind paying a small fee for music. I think that music should be easily available, and that the more a song has been played publicly, the less it should cost. Every late '60s or '70s movie that's used "I Put A Spell On You" in its soundtrack is effectively associating that song with the culture of that time period, and you know full well it's done with the RIAA's permission.
The RIAA's licensing scheme says that the more a song is played, the more they will receive. Let's stop rewarding them for trying to license our culture back to us.
This is also available at http://www.tr0n.com/~chet/culture_ownership.html. I'd like to retain all copyright, at least until somebody actually expresses enough interest in doing something with it to let me know;-)
Something that didn't make the cut for story submission...
I have been watching morbidly as the RIAA tries to make felons out of normal people. I am disgusted by these tactics, and it saddens me that the United States government would even momentarily entertain the thought of fining or jailing people for wanting ownership of that which gives America a cultural identity.
We don't all have common backgrounds, or live in similar situations. What ties Americans together as a nation is a longing for freedom, and the music that provides our identity as a generation, or as a nation. It is along this line of thinking that I wrote the following, and I would appreciate constructive comment on it.
We are not criminals!
We are not criminals. We are the proud citizens of these United States of America, and we want our culture back. For too long the music industry has branded us criminals -- thieves who would fight to take what is not ours, unwilling to support those who influence our lives and shape our culture, our national self-image. Yet there is no sign of the media calling off its plan to define and control our culture.
The music industry claims to have the interests of artists in mind while persecuting those who would attempt to make free certain parts of our culture. With the belief that work should be compensated fairly it is self-evident that artists deserve fair compensation for their work. However, the music industry routinely uses the "work make for hire" clause of the Copyright Act of 1976 to rob artists of their right to profit from their own creations by working with whichever publisher they choose.
If the music industry holds fair compensation in high regard, perhaps they could consider a business model in which an author retains ownership of her own works. If they are unable to fairly compensate artists, it is not the fault of the consumer. Business does not exist in a vacuum, and it is unfair to produce legislation which aims to preserve a monopolistic industry's position without significant consumer benefit. We want the right to experience the music of our lives at will without being forced to use our dollars to vote for the music industry's dominance.
While the popular media industries demonize citizens whose lives are most strongly tied to their products, they are fighting hard to retain their status as the group solely responsible for driving American culture. These self-proclaimed owners of our national identity strive to ensure that our lives are pervaded with their music, their movies, their values. They force their media into our lives; billing movies and albums as not just mere entertainment, but "events" which will affect our lives. One can hardly watch television or a film or listen to the radio without being subjected to mainstream music. Yet rather than rejoice and celebrate their successes they cry out at the realization that culture is a hard thing to bottle.
We do not consider it fair that the media surround us with the same sounds and images, over and over, yet we are criminalized for trying to integrate them into our culture. We have a right to our culture, and to not be regarded as criminals for demanding ownership.
A company cannot own a common term; trademark laws are such that trademark owners must take action to prevent their trademarks from falling into common usage, lest they become public-domain terms. The curious lack of a similar concept in the media domain means that our lives can be immersed in elements which become part of our cultural vocabulary, yet current law dictates that most of us will die before gaining ownership of our cultural identities.
We want ownership of the media that pervades our lives.
Well, that's it, folks. If I had bandwidth I'd turn it into a petition of sorts, but as it is all I can do is put it up here for comment, in hopes that somebody else will be inspired to take some action.
Please do comment -- I'd like to hear what people have to say.
I do know how much it can suck to reconstruct Debian's bookkeeping files -- I somehow removed much of/var (or all of it, I don't quite recall) on a router to which I don't have physical access.
I'm happy to say that the router is still up and running, and/var is completely fine.
Many (many!) 2.4 kernels up to and including 2.4.16 had nasty bugs which could affect any filesystem code, including ReiserFS. I recall having problems with 2.4.9 which led to me tarring up the home partition and remaking the filesystem, which I agree isn't the best solution.
Unfortunately, the only real judge of stability out there for a kernel is to have many, many people use it for things and see if it breaks. Until a serious group of people decide to start auditing the kernel OpenBSD-style, that's the only real metric out there.
I do agree that having good tools which can help to repair a filesystem can lead to peace of mind, even if you never end up needing them.
As a sidenote, I don't recall specifically what was needed to restore the dpkg stuff, but I do remember that dpkg --[gs]et-selections was a big help, in combination with the fact that most (hopefully, all) packages create a corresponding directory in/usr/share/doc.
What I probably did was tell dpkg that every directory in/usr/share/doc named a package that was installed, then get a complete list of every file included in the dpkg -L output of every installed package, sort it, then diff against "find / | sort" output to find files which were owned by packages but not yet claimed by a package.
What "acceptance of Darwin"? Are people actively making the choice to use Darwin because it's a microkernel, or are they using it because they want to use MacOS X?
You suggest that people use Darwin because they are interested in microkernels.
Can you provide any evidence that this is the case -- That people use Darwin not because they prefer the OSX interface, but because it's a microkernel?
Do people use Darwin on a large scale outside of its normal role in OSX? I may have missed something significant here......or maybe people who use Darwin would use any kernel that made MacOS work, whether a microkernel, or based on a forked resurrection of Desqview, and you're just trying to blow smoke up the collective asses of anyone reading your claims.
I agree totally. It's sad to see how much the popularity of PCs has driven quality lower, lower, lower.
I recently worked tech support for a small ISP (about 30k customers) in Western PA, and people do not realize that you really do get what you pay for.
The rush to undercut costs has led to a decline in prices, but also to a decline in quality and respect for the consumer. People want to buy an $80 printer, and a $400 PC, then are surprised when ink refills are expensive relative to the initial cost of the printer, and the HSP MicroModem or PC-TEL* in their Compaq can't maintain a connection for longer than it takes to drink a cup of coffee, even though it says 56K.
The sad part about the market for printers is that finding a quality alternative is difficult, as all of the manufacturers seem to be playing the same games with respect to forcing consumers to purchase ink at inflated costs. With modems, at least you have the option of going and dropping some cash on something implemented in hardware...
What would be _really_ useful is a hardware review site that tracked things like this, instead of "let's review the newest AMD crap and video cards" like most hardware sites seem to do. A consumer's site devoted to accurate reviews of printers, cartridges, modems, mice, and such (and which PC manufacturers are using shitty stuff) would be more useful to the general population.
* You can have a PC-TEL modem delivered to your door for $8 (including shipping), according to Pricewatch.
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In both cases, I say, prove it. Prove that Linksys didn't build the source using their compiler (which they haven't given you a binary to, and so don't owe you source) and the original source code which the author of the article admitted was available for download, using configure flags to specify an alternate configuration file location.
Guess what? It's totally possible that Linksys is in full compliance with the GPL. This guy didn't bother to make sure that the code was in violation before crying foul and putting up a "Linksys sucks -- email them and ask for the modified source!" page.
I took two minutes to "apt-get source zebra", and look at this:There's nothing to see here, folks. There's no story here, because just like with the SCO stories, there is absolutely no substantiated evidence.
Congratulations, Michael. You have been trolled. Maybe if you'd read the article before posting it to the front page you'd have spared Linksys some bad publicity.
Unless they provided you with a license to run the compiler which they have, they aren't required to furnish source code.
If they were provided with a modified version of GCC, they themselves do have a right to the modified source. The GPL provides you with the freedom to make and distribute modifications to a program which is licensed to you.
However, it doesn't say that you have to provide the program itself to anyone.
I use GPM for mouse handling. The software was made available by the author(s). I can make modifications to it all I want, but unless I provide someone else with a binary based upon my modified source, I don't have to provide source code to anything.
Know your rights well. Know where they stop even better -- you don't want to come off as a maniac claiming rights to that which isn't yours, but be sure that you know what rights are provided to you.
I'd like to know RMS' take on GPL'd apps being distributed as part of an "embedded" device. Google, here I come...
No, I didn't, and neither did anyone else I'd asked.
Let's delve into fuzzy math. What's twice as big as a large audience?
That's right, a larger audience.
So it's entirely possible for them to lose a large audience, and still have enough to headline a tour.
That doesn't mean that they couldn't have made more had they not cut off some people who might otherwise buy a t-shirt or attend a show.
There are always bigger venues. Until they're selling out stadiums like the Rolling Stones and others have done, there's always room for more profit. Even if they did sell out stadiums, they would realize that alienating fans probably won't gain them much love.
Why do I reply to AC posters?
Ugh.
Metalliwho? They still make music?
Seriously, I think that by pissing off so many with the high-and-mighty act in regards to Napster and music sharing in general they've managed to cut themselves off from a large audience.
Had they not been jackasses about the whole situation I'd be inclined to fire up WinMX and give their new stuff a listen, just to see what the bad-boys-gone-pop have been up to lately. There are a lot of people I know that have not heard the new Metallica stuff, but might give it a listen if somebody mentioned having heard it and liked it.
Peer-to-peer file sharing is a great marketing tool, although one that's hard to control. Metallica cut themselves off from a lot of word-of-mouth, and since I don't hear their music on any of the radio stations I listen to while in the car, they're in practically the same position as other bands who can't get played on the radio: their work is unheard of, and a little word of mouth would go a long way.
Metallica took a moral stand against the free advertising P2P provided. I'm letting them have their moral stand, and I'm sure they'd be interested to know that it's that very moral stand which is preventing them from getting the advertising they might have gotten when people shared mix tapes in the '80s*, or when they swapped files in the late '90s forward.
* Ahh, mix tapes. The seek time sucked, but how nice is it to fit media in your pocket? I wonder about the utility of a mini-disc drive for the PC...
I find it more likely that a Linux kernel module could be written to do on-the-fly crypto with a loopback-style device. ...although the point is that you'd use this in order to make it difficult for others to do exactly what you're saying should be easy.
This is meant for applications where losing the data is less costly than having it intercepted by a third party. In other words, it doesn't hurt you much if your system were to fail -- you'd lose those MP3s that you downloaded, and some other random stuff. Perhaps some sensitive company documents, especially if a version of the motherboard were available for mobile devices.
However, if somebody were to manage to get ahold of your system, you'd probably rather not make it easy for them to access the hard drive contents.
If your motherboard fails, you can buy another one, and use your key to recover the contents. Thus, there's no real need to be able to access the contents on a motherboard other than the original (or a replacement of the original).
Sometimes I can't believe what makes the front page. Apparently it comes as a shock to Michael that groups of people who trust each other will provide software and other collections of bits to others on the group.
I remember people using war-ftpd to share so-called "warez" to each other, long before the average person had ever heard of Winamp.
How is it newsworthy that people do the same thing with music?
Ugh ugh ugh.
If this story is worth the front page, then this comment is worth reading.
Hint: neither is true.
No, they don't. The major parties' candidates have good coverage. If you're not in the Big Two, you're probably not going to be appearing in any major debates on broadcast television anytime soon.
The media industry is the largest lobbying force in the U.S. Government.
This means that the media has a lot of influence over the actions of government. This also means that the media outlets want to keep their leverage, because they've grown too fond of their influence to risk it by pissing off members of either of the Big Two.
Their lobbying provides them with significant influence. In order to keep the gov't lackies from growing tired of their you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours relationship, there's an unspoken rule in the media: do not give third-party candidates as much coverage.
I read an article in the paper recently which voiced the opinion that potential Democratic nominees should back off on their criticism of Bush, since it might cast the nominees themselves in a negative light come election time. A few Democrats were quoted.
Who won from this? Readers saw the names of several Democrats in print, which legitimizes their positions in the running for the next Presidential candidacy in the eyes of the public -- of course the Democrates should watch what they say, because they have a shot at the Presidency. Bush also got some sympathy from the media, as the story basically said, "Democrats should back off of Bush unless they honestly think they could do better next term", implying that Bush is doing okay, and would serve acceptably as President come next election.
Mention of third-party points of view weren't mentioned, implying that their positions are less important.
Elections do not have good media coverage. All participants do not have equal access to good data. Most people just have the names of GOP and Democrat leaders thrown in their faces, and choose one or the other.
Normally I agree with your comments, but I have to wonder --
What's the point in not buying an XBox if you honestly want the benefits of buying them?
Consumers have gotten up and shown that they don't want more media consolidation, and it looks like Congress is listening. They only listen to prevent hordes of angry voters putting them out of office, but that's how it works in these United States.
What would be more effective would be buying an XBox, and writing your congress(wo)?man to express your opinions regarding systems which are artificially closed.
Explain how important "fair use" is to you, and encourage others to do the same. Tell your congresspuppet that you feel that products which contain anti-circumvention technology does more to remove your fair use rights than it does to protect the businessperson. Mention the XBox, perhaps even cite the 1992 Sega ruling, and throw in current examples of artificial product lock-in with respect to the printer cartridge industry for good measure.
Write your congresspuppet, and write them often. Encourage others to write them. Tell them you are sick of seeing your fair use rights taken away in the name of "digital rights". Tell them that you feel that the existing copyright law adequately covers businesses, and that you feel that "digital" copyright laws are an infringement upon your consumer rights.
Remember, puppets don't understand issues -- they just move in the direction of the hardest tugs. Tug their strings, and encourage others to do the same.
If the XBox provides a service that you want, buy it! You're not hurting MS in any way that they'll ever notice by not purchasing one.
Cite proof.
Chances are, even if you're correct on paper, Microsoft is still selling X-Boxes above their variable costs, and is recovering fixed costs with each sale.
I'm interested.
Are there features other than attributes provided by ext[23] which ReiserFS can't provide?
Regarding the attributes, ReiserFS can't do the following "useful" things:
- Excluding a single file from access-time logging.
- Append-only would be useful in certain cases.
- 'c' (compress file contents) -- Ext[23] doesn't do this yet, and ReiserFS doesn't either, but they both will support it later.
- 'D' (dirsync) attribute -- Other than ensuring that filesystem metadata operations are completed successfully before proceeding, I can't imagine a beneficial use of this attribute. ReiserFS already journals all metadata, and V4 journals everything (and does it faster).
- 'd' (do not back up using dump) -- AFAIK you can't use dump to back up a ReiserFS partition anyways, but tar still exists, and I'm sure there are wrapper scripts for the die-hard dump users.
- 'E' (error in compression) doesn't seem to apply to general (current) use of ext[23], and doesn't have an analogue in ReiserFS.
- 'I' (hash-indexed directory) -- ReiserFS' directory algorithms are much (much!) faster than ext[23]. ReiserFS will eventually support directory plugins, which allow one to set a per-directory hashing scheme. I note that ext[23] doesn't allow modification of this attribute, so I'm not sure if/how it allows you to choose a hashing scheme.
- Immutable ('i') bit -- This might be useful in some circumstances, such as a setuid binary. Not supported by ReiserFS.
- The 'j' option is meant to get around the fact that ext[23] only journals metadata unless mounted with "data=journal". As mentioned elsewhere, ReiserFS' long-term goal is to provide fully atomic file operations, which provides the benefits of data journalling with none of the burdens. Thus, ReiserFS V3 doesn't support this attribute, as the time spent in adding this feature would have been better spent working on V4. Note that with V4 all operations are atomic, which has the effect of turning this flag on for every file.
- 's' (zero file contents upon delete) -- ReiserFS doesn't support this.
- 'S' (write file synchronously) is likely used in cases where preserving file integrity is important. ReiserFS' journalling (especially in V4) provides this "for free".
- 'T' (top of directory heirarchy) is used to get around an ext[23] weakness. I don't recall details, but I believe it's something related to preventing fragmentation and grouping similar files together for enhanced performance. ReiserFS (especially V4) is already quite fast, and with code-level optimizations will likely get faster.
- 't' (don't merge tails) does not apply to current ext3 code, as tails aren't yet merged anyways. This will be used as a flag to write the file to disk in such a way as to be compatible with LILO and other boot loaders. At present I'm not aware of any special issues with ReiserFS' tail packing (which does exist, by the way) with respect to LILO. Note that a ReiserFS partition can be mounted with the "notail" option if you want, which is feature-wise equal to ext[23], which don't seem to provide tail packing at all right now (and if they do, someone needs to update the chattr man page).
- 'u' (back up upon deletion) -- ReiserFS doesn't support this.
- 'X' and 'Z' relate to compression, and do not apply to ext[23] or ReiserFS at the moment. ReiserFS will eventually support compression plugins, as well as encryption plugins.
So of the attributes, the only ones which might actually be of some use in the context of ReiserFS would be exclusion from atime logging, append-only, the immutable bit, zero-contents-upon-delete (although future crypto plugins will destroy the need for this feature), and back up upon deletion.
Anything I've missed?
Then try making a general implementation of the travelling salesman problem fast.
Not all problems can be made fast, at least at present -- that's the point of research into new algorithms.
Then it sounds like you've already made the decision, or the distribution makers have made it for you.
I don't know what distro you use, but I do know that a friend was recently unable to get Debian to install onto a Reiser root (I'd have offered to help, except for the 240-mile trip it would have involved), and from what the comments say here, Redhat doesn't visibly include the option in the default install.
I have converted machines from ext2 to reiser, using tar and going partition by partition.
Is it worth it for you? Only you can make that decision. It has been worth it for me.
Do you ever do, say, "ls /usr/share/doc"?
ReiserFS is quick in many day-to-day operations, not just benchmark test cases.
The only real response I can give to this is, try it and decide for yourself.
Or, is there any reason to use ext3 instead of reiserfs?
That's a great point, and definitely a valid concern.
To address that, I seem to recall Hans having said that the current implementation will eventually be streamlined in terms of CPU usage. The important thing is that the algorithms scale well, and don't take exponentially longer (in fact, it's probably quite sublinear time) as you store more files.
The development team is aware of the CPU load, and will be working to lighten the load. Judging by how good these guys seem to be, I'd expect dramatic improvements by the time the rest of the 2.6 series matures.
Operations are journalled in such a way that instead of updating the directory entries (or the file allocation table, or whatever applies to that specific FS) and then writing the new file contents, ReiserFS writes the new contents, and _then_ updates the directory information.
From the impression I have after having read the V4 design docs, in most cases it's a matter of just writing the new data without touching the old, then updating the bookkeeping entries and marking the old information as unneeded. In theory, this method gives journalling and crash safety "for free".
In practice, there's the matter of increased code complexity, which means that you'll take a hit on CPU usage, at least until the developers can stop their mad rush to get V4 into Linux 2.6 and work on code-level optimization (as opposed to optimizing the algorithms), but with Reiser's tree algorithms you're probably spinning the disk less while waiting for the filesystem code to find the data you need.
At any rate, full data journalling comes without the burden of "log what I'm going to do, complete with data, then perform the operations, then mark the pending operation as completed in the journal." Basically you get around having to write twice in nearly all cases.
(If ReiserFS decides that it's a really really good idea to leave the data where it's at, it will write new contents to free space on the disk, update the tree to reflect the changes, write the new contents to the original file's location on the disk, and again update the tree. However, this only occurs in rare circumstances, and is the exception rather than the norm.)
Was it buggy Reiser code, or buggy kernel code?
Many 2.4 kernels before 2.4.17 had bugs which could affect filesystems, Reiser or not.
You obviously know nothing about ReiserFS.
ReiserFS does have speed as a goal; however, with ReiserFS 4, all filesystem operations are now atomic, which is functionally equivalent to having full data (not just metadata) journalling.
In addition, having the fastest CPU in the world won't make ext[23] better at things for which ReiserFS is fast.
CPU speeds are increasing. Storage space is increasing. RAM is cheap.
However, none of that equates to "disks are fast". Having a fast CPU with a slow filesystem is like having a gigabit LAN connected to the Internet via dialup. Sure, internally you're quite good, but throughput will still suck eggs.
The fact of the matter is, it is easier to have no clue what you're talking about than to read a little bit before posting.
I agree to some extent.
I guess my point, which seems to be less interesting to others than I'd thought, is that the music industry tries REALLY hard to make sure that we hear their stuff EVERYWHERE. If a trademark owner was shown to be trying to turn their trademarked name into a commonly used general term (notice that Band-Aid commercials now say "Band-Aid brand"?), they'd be pretty well down the road to losing their trademark.
What the problem is, as far as I'm concerned, is that this music that's shoved down our collective throats on radio, car commercials, September 11 tributes, in restaurants, and such is something that for which music industry has tried hard to get us to feel a need.
Marketing is fine, but when you can't walk into a fast-food restaurant without hearing this music, there's a problem. That's not something I often do, but back in high school I worked at McDonald's and it was definitely an issue for me then. Later at night we used to pull out a CD player and let fly with the music we wanted to hear; however, as there was really no way to place the stereo such that all of the employees could hear it but the customers could not, this is now the stuff of lawsuits.
The RIAA and friends have tried hard to make it so that you must get music through the channels they control, and if this means $18 CDs and Musak, so be it.
You cannot use Ebay or Yahoo to distribute music which you own and produced entirely by yourself with your CD burner. Truly independent performers and producers of music find it next to impossible to get airplay.
My (apparently not-so-compelling) argument is that if the RIAA wants to make sure that the average American cannot live without being exposed to their media while making it hard for media from other sources to be played in the same places (radio, burger joints, etc.), then I believe that the intent is to force the music into our culture.
I wouldn't argue that a given piece of work is universal across a generation, or the nation. The thing we most of us do have in common is that the RIAA is the source of the overwhelming majority of the music which we know best and love.
Go watch Forrest Gump. For every song you hear, find a song not controlled by the RIAA which would as effectively give each scene the specific time-period "feel" that is has.
Until you can do that, it is my belief that you can't have the '70s without the raspy voice of John Fogerty, or the '80s without hair bands and bad pop.
It's that part of our culture which is owned by the RIAA, and if your parents can't find a copy of the first song they ever danced or made out to while listening to the radio, that's part of their lives that they can't as easily revisit.
However, it's still often illegal for them to obtain a non-original copy, even if that song is no longer available on the mass market.
We don't want to be criminalized, and many wouldn't mind paying a small fee for music. I think that music should be easily available, and that the more a song has been played publicly, the less it should cost. Every late '60s or '70s movie that's used "I Put A Spell On You" in its soundtrack is effectively associating that song with the culture of that time period, and you know full well it's done with the RIAA's permission.
The RIAA's licensing scheme says that the more a song is played, the more they will receive. Let's stop rewarding them for trying to license our culture back to us.
This is also available at http://www.tr0n.com/~chet/culture_ownership.html. I'd like to retain all copyright, at least until somebody actually expresses enough interest in doing something with it to let me know ;-)
Something that didn't make the cut for story submission...
I have been watching morbidly as the RIAA tries to make felons out of normal people. I am disgusted by these tactics, and it saddens me that the United States government would even momentarily entertain the thought of fining or jailing people for wanting ownership of that which gives America a cultural identity.
We don't all have common backgrounds, or live in similar situations. What ties Americans together as a nation is a longing for freedom, and the music that provides our identity as a generation, or as a nation. It is along this line of thinking that I wrote the following, and I would appreciate constructive comment on it.
We are not criminals!
We are not criminals. We are the proud citizens of these United States of America, and we want our culture back. For too long the music industry has branded us criminals -- thieves who would fight to take what is not ours, unwilling to support those who influence our lives and shape our culture, our national self-image. Yet there is no sign of the media calling off its plan to define and control our culture.
The music industry claims to have the interests of artists in mind while persecuting those who would attempt to make free certain parts of our culture. With the belief that work should be compensated fairly it is self-evident that artists deserve fair compensation for their work. However, the music industry routinely uses the "work make for hire" clause of the Copyright Act of 1976 to rob artists of their right to profit from their own creations by working with whichever publisher they choose.
If the music industry holds fair compensation in high regard, perhaps they could consider a business model in which an author retains ownership of her own works. If they are unable to fairly compensate artists, it is not the fault of the consumer. Business does not exist in a vacuum, and it is unfair to produce legislation which aims to preserve a monopolistic industry's position without significant consumer benefit. We want the right to experience the music of our lives at will without being forced to use our dollars to vote for the music industry's dominance.
While the popular media industries demonize citizens whose lives are most strongly tied to their products, they are fighting hard to retain their status as the group solely responsible for driving American culture. These self-proclaimed owners of our national identity strive to ensure that our lives are pervaded with their music, their movies, their values. They force their media into our lives; billing movies and albums as not just mere entertainment, but "events" which will affect our lives. One can hardly watch television or a film or listen to the radio without being subjected to mainstream music. Yet rather than rejoice and celebrate their successes they cry out at the realization that culture is a hard thing to bottle.
We do not consider it fair that the media surround us with the same sounds and images, over and over, yet we are criminalized for trying to integrate them into our culture. We have a right to our culture, and to not be regarded as criminals for demanding ownership.
A company cannot own a common term; trademark laws are such that trademark owners must take action to prevent their trademarks from falling into common usage, lest they become public-domain terms. The curious lack of a similar concept in the media domain means that our lives can be immersed in elements which become part of our cultural vocabulary, yet current law dictates that most of us will die before gaining ownership of our cultural identities.
We want ownership of the media that pervades our lives.
Well, that's it, folks. If I had bandwidth I'd turn it into a petition of sorts, but as it is all I can do is put it up here for comment, in hopes that somebody else will be inspired to take some action.
Please do comment -- I'd like to hear what people have to say.
Where are the mod points when you need them?
;-)
You're obviously trolling
Thanks for the laugh.
I'm glad someone posted a link to that -- I was about to do the same.
;)
Too bad the MODS didn't MOD THE PARENT UP here.
I do know how much it can suck to reconstruct Debian's bookkeeping files -- I somehow removed much of /var (or all of it, I don't quite recall) on a router to which I don't have physical access.
/var is completely fine.
/usr/share/doc.
/usr/share/doc named a package that was installed, then get a complete list of every file included in the dpkg -L output of every installed package, sort it, then diff against "find / | sort" output to find files which were owned by packages but not yet claimed by a package.
I'm happy to say that the router is still up and running, and
Many (many!) 2.4 kernels up to and including 2.4.16 had nasty bugs which could affect any filesystem code, including ReiserFS. I recall having problems with 2.4.9 which led to me tarring up the home partition and remaking the filesystem, which I agree isn't the best solution.
Unfortunately, the only real judge of stability out there for a kernel is to have many, many people use it for things and see if it breaks. Until a serious group of people decide to start auditing the kernel OpenBSD-style, that's the only real metric out there.
I do agree that having good tools which can help to repair a filesystem can lead to peace of mind, even if you never end up needing them.
As a sidenote, I don't recall specifically what was needed to restore the dpkg stuff, but I do remember that dpkg --[gs]et-selections was a big help, in combination with the fact that most (hopefully, all) packages create a corresponding directory in
What I probably did was tell dpkg that every directory in
Acceptance of wha-?
...or maybe people who use Darwin would use any kernel that made MacOS work, whether a microkernel, or based on a forked resurrection of Desqview, and you're just trying to blow smoke up the collective asses of anyone reading your claims.
What "acceptance of Darwin"? Are people actively making the choice to use Darwin because it's a microkernel, or are they using it because they want to use MacOS X?
You suggest that people use Darwin because they are interested in microkernels.
Can you provide any evidence that this is the case -- That people use Darwin not because they prefer the OSX interface, but because it's a microkernel?
Do people use Darwin on a large scale outside of its normal role in OSX? I may have missed something significant here...
Only time (and your response) will tell.
I agree totally. It's sad to see how much the popularity of PCs has driven quality lower, lower, lower.
I recently worked tech support for a small ISP (about 30k customers) in Western PA, and people do not realize that you really do get what you pay for.
The rush to undercut costs has led to a decline in prices, but also to a decline in quality and respect for the consumer. People want to buy an $80 printer, and a $400 PC, then are surprised when ink refills are expensive relative to the initial cost of the printer, and the HSP MicroModem or PC-TEL* in their Compaq can't maintain a connection for longer than it takes to drink a cup of coffee, even though it says 56K.
The sad part about the market for printers is that finding a quality alternative is difficult, as all of the manufacturers seem to be playing the same games with respect to forcing consumers to purchase ink at inflated costs. With modems, at least you have the option of going and dropping some cash on something implemented in hardware...
What would be _really_ useful is a hardware review site that tracked things like this, instead of "let's review the newest AMD crap and video cards" like most hardware sites seem to do. A consumer's site devoted to accurate reviews of printers, cartridges, modems, mice, and such (and which PC manufacturers are using shitty stuff) would be more useful to the general population.
* You can have a PC-TEL modem delivered to your door for $8 (including shipping), according to Pricewatch.