Perhaps you could tell them about this thing called the "internet" which seems to appreciate more data, faster. You know, rather than "exclusive" or "let's post a video a week arbitrarily out of our archive".
Don't get me wrong, I've seen a quite a few of the videos hosted by TED (because new ideas are only worth spreading if they've got a sponsor such as BMW), but seriously, for the rest of us, that might not be able to afford the cost of entry, how about you share the idea of "ideas worth sharing" to an audience ready to hear just a bit more?
I'm seeing a lot of these responses get hung up on their personal idealism. I'll give 'em the benefit of the doubt that there is no significant astro-turfing going on here.
But after seeing a multitude of responses suggesting the complexity of graphics cards above all other device drivers, I sort of wonder: Are we believing a myth?
I see countless articles about how GPUs are such advanced pieces of tech. I see tons of anecdotal evidence about how more optimized they are.
But after years of hearing how good Card A is against Card B at API X vs API Y, I sort of wonder...wow, what a coincidence that both happen to be really good at their next possible market.
Device drivers are tricky business, no question. All I ever seem to see is the same arguments from interested passers-by explaining how they couldn't open up their drivers because they'd give away some secret, or there's no incentive to give away their secret sauce because they've spent so much more time and money than some other specialized sector.
I think at this point, I'd be as happy to see these companies open up their specs to the point of third-party ground-up implementations as I would hearing one of them go on the record as to their reasons why they feel they can't.
"At any rate, it's already proven that talking on the phone impairs driving more than being a little inebriated. So I'd like to see that enforced just like DUI. Forget points and fines, I want to see a few people go to PMITA state jail if they get seen doing that too often."
I'm a bit lazy when it comes to doing the research, so I've not seen these studies. I'm curious if they found a discriminator that proved the cell phone was any worse than having a conversation with a passenger in the same vehicle.
Perhaps the next step from some of the "must use hands-free whatsits" (18 days until that becomes mandatory around these parts), should we also find ways to protect the driver from the living/breathing distractions that are in the same vehicle, demanding the same level of conversation?
Pull that off, and the average road-trip family vacation homicide rate would likely get knocked down a little.
Thank you, exactly one point from the apple marketing page involved anything regarding UNIX, and that was compliance to a POSIX standard (which isn't really any sort of direct "Yeah, that means it's UNIX", so much as "Yeah, we agreed to maintain this basic minimum within the C standard libs.")
So, I challenge you to prove that Windows NT + Cygwin couldn't meet the same standard.
You're treating UNIX not as a trademark defended by the Open Group, nor a history relating to things directly derived from the Bell Labs or the UC Berkeley sources (yes, I did try to give credit to the userland that was based on a BSD.), but rather a philosophy. Fair enough. But if the kernel lineage doesn't matter, then my assertion of NT Kernel + Cygwin (derived from GNU sources, surely close to UNIX in philosophy, yes?) rings true.
But you get marked "Informative" while I get marked "Troll".
If you have doubts that Apple's got need for extra support for HFS+ metadata, go ask the RsyncX folks why they keep on releasing. If you doubt my claim that metadata got glommed on to the standard unix utils, go use 10.1 and watch all your resource forks fail. Academic bonus points if you were to diff the bsd source (you know, unix?) and the darwin source. ls is easy, right? Should work on most standard *nix systems, right? So go grab the source from freebsd or gnu and compile 'em on mac and tell me they've not done anything. Please. Prove me wrong.
You're informative, I'm the troll, right? Here's your chance to shine.
It has been my experience that people that exclaim how Mac OS X is a "true UNIX" are often the type that never touch the command-line and haven't experienced the level of crap that is apple glomming-on all their filesystem meta-data to the things that resemble unix the most.
Keep in mind that the Mach microkernel is not unix, it came from CMU. Some userland stuff came from the *BSD lineage, but calling OS X a "true UNIX" rings about as true as calling windows + cygwin the same.
I'm sorry, but could someone explain what a carbon credit is, or what these "emerging carbon markets" are all about?
I did some cursory research, and as best as I can tell, carbon certificates have value only in public perception. Like gold stars for exceptional pupils.
Is there really a market for "warm & fuzzy feelings" now?
your, punctuation! makes? it "hard" to understand: your point.
Are you picking on Web 2.0 companies? Are you complaining about Google (who owns the service formerly known as Blogger)? Are you nay-saying the companies such as Gawker that have blog networks of paid stooges that'll write entries about whatever the flavor of the month is?
An understanding of some of the chemical or molecular interactions in your food can be handy knowledge. It'll keep you away from the old Swedish Lemon Angel debacle at least.
My limited experience with food scientists suggests that they rarely think about measuring things to infinite precision, but rather think about the underlying systems. More of a hacker mentality.
Ok, so the popular meme is to say "The average slashdot reader this" or "The average slashdot reader that", but seriously, waxing nostalgic to a f#$@ing Disney film soundtrack?
we weren't doing full images. Only the files that had changed got copied around.
But if you want to do full on partition images, you can do what another poster suggested and use DD to both create and write the images (dd if=/dev/hda2 of=disk.image to make it, dd if=disk.image of=/dev/hda2 to write it, adjusting for partitions and disk type, naturally. You could probably also futz around with the blocksize parameter to optimize it a little as well)
Just make sure you have enough space to deal with the resulting file.
the problem with that is that you're eating a lot of bandwidth and writing everything whether it's changed or not. If there's nothing worth changing, rsync will just pass over it.
I helped a guy out with this sort of thing once before, and this is what we came up with:
Two boxes.
The first machine was set up with Debian and Shorewall All the other machines lived behind it.
The second machine was also set up with Debian, and with some rsync silliness, we got all of the lab machines re-imaging themselves every night.
It was a bit of a hassle to get running at first (we had to wipe every machine and install linux on it) and there is the drawback that the windows partition was living on FAT32 (unless NTFS write support has become significantly better, this might still be an issue). We also had to use Smart Boot Manager as it had the nice feature of being able to schedule boots. At midnight, every machine in the building would reboot into linux, rsync their windows partition against the master server, and then reboot to windows in the morning.
There was some good things to this, though:
1) Everything was done out of band, so even when windows would normally complain or make things difficult (some system files, as I recall), it was totally out of our way.
2) You could push a new image to the rsync server and within 24 hours all of your machines would be patched.
3) No matter what crap they installed or littered on the machines, it was gone the next morning.
4) Rsync is smart enough to do deltas and only push across the files that have changed, so it was reasonably bandwidth friendly.
5) When a machine crapped out (due to software, anyhow), you could walk up to it, reboot it, perform the magic keyboard voodoo, boot into linux and reimage it.
I'm sure there's fancier ways of doing this, but it's the sort of thing you can potentially scrap together the basics in a few days and with the exception of the two machines, it's only the cost of labor.
Perhaps I'm missing your inherent irony, but depending on who you talk to slashdot jumped the shark a half decade ago.
As I see it, there are a few camps left. Feel free to suggest others if I've missed them:
The new: Hey, they're new. Can't blame them for that that. The old: Well, some people believe that there was a golden age of slashdot, and can't quite bring themselves to believe it's over, so they keep coming back, just in case. The curmudgeons: Ok, so others might believe that slashdot never had any redeeming value, but show up just to reenforce that viewpoint. The trolls: The static. Find me anywhere that doesn't suffer the noise from the signal over a signficant timeline. Try not to be elitist about it. The undecided: I heard it was good, once, maybe, so I'm still checking it out. The true believer: Golden age of slashdot over? Never! The meta-philosphers: Hey, let's just attach whichever of the previous assertions make sense for today's comment. It's all relative anyway.
I won't identify myself with any specific camp, but let's just say that it's hardly optimistic.
My first thought was "When will the U.S. Olympic training center get one?"
Not that I give a rat's ass about the olympics, but if you could convince athletes to spend prolonged periods in such a device and train them at that, there's at least a few events that would surely see an improvement that didn't involve performance-enhancing drugs or blood-doping.
The real engineering feat would be to make a centrifuge pod large enough to not only simulate a high-jump track, but also large enough to provide living quarters and whatnot. Just imagine the size of the counterweight, and then imagine the insane energy requirements to keep that thing spinning continuously for years.
I say we try it, even if the portion of the population that actually thinks about olympic events (short of the every-four-years television retrospective) is exceedingly small. It'd make for a great physical and psychological case study.
See, I've got mod points right now, and I'm wasting the opportunity to use them against perceived ne'er-do-wells by this comment, but I justify my inaction for two reasons.
1) I am a close relative to the article submitter of record. So for ethical reasons, I won't/shouldn't mod anything related to this article anyway. Conflict of interest.
2) Seeing a Bruce Perens imposter (http://slashdot.org/~.Bruce+Perens) almost made me violate the first point, but pragmatism ruled the day. No matter what I moderated it as (and the qualifier choices are still far too limited, in my view), I figured it'd get beaten down in metamoderation because the imposter is subtle enough for those that wouldn't study context.)
Majesco produced it as in "published/distributed" it.
So I wouldn't worry too much about the loss of creative content to the industry, worry more about smaller studios having one less outlet to get their games out to a wider audience.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you could tell them about this thing called the "internet" which seems to appreciate more data, faster. You know, rather than "exclusive" or "let's post a video a week arbitrarily out of our archive".
Don't get me wrong, I've seen a quite a few of the videos hosted by TED (because new ideas are only worth spreading if they've got a sponsor such as BMW), but seriously, for the rest of us, that might not be able to afford the cost of entry, how about you share the idea of "ideas worth sharing" to an audience ready to hear just a bit more?
I'm seeing a lot of these responses get hung up on their personal idealism. I'll give 'em the benefit of the doubt that there is no significant astro-turfing going on here.
But after seeing a multitude of responses suggesting the complexity of graphics cards above all other device drivers, I sort of wonder: Are we believing a myth?
I see countless articles about how GPUs are such advanced pieces of tech. I see tons of anecdotal evidence about how more optimized they are.
But after years of hearing how good Card A is against Card B at API X vs API Y, I sort of wonder...wow, what a coincidence that both happen to be really good at their next possible market.
Device drivers are tricky business, no question. All I ever seem to see is the same arguments from interested passers-by explaining how they couldn't open up their drivers because they'd give away some secret, or there's no incentive to give away their secret sauce because they've spent so much more time and money than some other specialized sector.
I think at this point, I'd be as happy to see these companies open up their specs to the point of third-party ground-up implementations as I would hearing one of them go on the record as to their reasons why they feel they can't.
This is mostly just a curiosity for me...
"At any rate, it's already proven that talking on the phone impairs driving more than being a little inebriated. So I'd like to see that enforced just like DUI. Forget points and fines, I want to see a few people go to PMITA state jail if they get seen doing that too often."
I'm a bit lazy when it comes to doing the research, so I've not seen these studies. I'm curious if they found a discriminator that proved the cell phone was any worse than having a conversation with a passenger in the same vehicle.
Perhaps the next step from some of the "must use hands-free whatsits" (18 days until that becomes mandatory around these parts), should we also find ways to protect the driver from the living/breathing distractions that are in the same vehicle, demanding the same level of conversation?
Pull that off, and the average road-trip family vacation homicide rate would likely get knocked down a little.
Thank you, exactly one point from the apple marketing page involved anything regarding UNIX, and that was compliance to a POSIX standard (which isn't really any sort of direct "Yeah, that means it's UNIX", so much as "Yeah, we agreed to maintain this basic minimum within the C standard libs.")
So, I challenge you to prove that Windows NT + Cygwin couldn't meet the same standard.
You're treating UNIX not as a trademark defended by the Open Group, nor a history relating to things directly derived from the Bell Labs or the UC Berkeley sources (yes, I did try to give credit to the userland that was based on a BSD.), but rather a philosophy. Fair enough. But if the kernel lineage doesn't matter, then my assertion of NT Kernel + Cygwin (derived from GNU sources, surely close to UNIX in philosophy, yes?) rings true.
But you get marked "Informative" while I get marked "Troll".
If you have doubts that Apple's got need for extra support for HFS+ metadata, go ask the RsyncX folks why they keep on releasing. If you doubt my claim that metadata got glommed on to the standard unix utils, go use 10.1 and watch all your resource forks fail. Academic bonus points if you were to diff the bsd source (you know, unix?) and the darwin source. ls is easy, right? Should work on most standard *nix systems, right? So go grab the source from freebsd or gnu and compile 'em on mac and tell me they've not done anything. Please. Prove me wrong.
You're informative, I'm the troll, right? Here's your chance to shine.
It has been my experience that people that exclaim how Mac OS X is a "true UNIX" are often the type that never touch the command-line and haven't experienced the level of crap that is apple glomming-on all their filesystem meta-data to the things that resemble unix the most.
Keep in mind that the Mach microkernel is not unix, it came from CMU. Some userland stuff came from the *BSD lineage, but calling OS X a "true UNIX" rings about as true as calling windows + cygwin the same.
This year's April 1st jokes are just a bit too esoteric, I think. Celestial peanut? What?
Note that the article reads like a press release, with the exception of playing into everyone's dislike of the TSA.
Note that the "linux to mac" section of the blog has one article, not once mentioning linux.
Read through it, and ask yourself, who the f*#@ is Michael Nygard, and why should I care?
So how is the RIAA and the protection of First Amendment rights doing in the UK courts, anyhow?
More to the point, is the DMCA enforceable in Canada, as the comment leading into this point said was the context?
I'm sorry, but could someone explain what a carbon credit is, or what these "emerging carbon markets" are all about?
I did some cursory research, and as best as I can tell, carbon certificates have value only in public perception. Like gold stars for exceptional pupils.
Is there really a market for "warm & fuzzy feelings" now?
Parent post currently posted as "Interesting"
Really.
Ok, so the cowboyneal option was always posted as a gag option, and it was well known enough that people kept including it.
If the best you have to offer this thread is to question the slashdot polling system, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone to take you seriously.
You probably knew that, but you were hoping for +5 Funny, anyhow, weren't you?
Same reason why a "funny" moderation gets a maximum negative filter for me. One can only handle the same tired jokes so often.
your, punctuation! makes? it "hard" to understand: your point.
Are you picking on Web 2.0 companies? Are you complaining about Google (who owns the service formerly known as Blogger)? Are you nay-saying the companies such as Gawker that have blog networks of paid stooges that'll write entries about whatever the flavor of the month is?
No, really, I don't get it.
The way I recall it, slashdot didn't require user accounts at first for posting as something other than anonymous coward.
So after spending several months getting us all riled up about privacy, the user account system went from voluntary to mandatory.
I probably could've had a lower UID, just as there are many more things worth caring about than the cardinal value of one's UID. =)
-transiit
you're getting bogged down in the sensationalism.
An understanding of some of the chemical or molecular interactions in your food can be handy knowledge. It'll keep you away from the old Swedish Lemon Angel debacle at least.
My limited experience with food scientists suggests that they rarely think about measuring things to infinite precision, but rather think about the underlying systems. More of a hacker mentality.
Back that truck up a second.
Ok, so the popular meme is to say "The average slashdot reader this" or "The average slashdot reader that", but seriously, waxing nostalgic to a f#$@ing Disney film soundtrack?
Really?
we weren't doing full images. Only the files that had changed got copied around.
But if you want to do full on partition images, you can do what another poster suggested and use DD to both create and write the images (dd if=/dev/hda2 of=disk.image to make it, dd if=disk.image of=/dev/hda2 to write it, adjusting for partitions and disk type, naturally. You could probably also futz around with the blocksize parameter to optimize it a little as well)
Just make sure you have enough space to deal with the resulting file.
the problem with that is that you're eating a lot of bandwidth and writing everything whether it's changed or not. If there's nothing worth changing, rsync will just pass over it.
I helped a guy out with this sort of thing once before, and this is what we came up with:
Two boxes.
The first machine was set up with Debian and Shorewall All the other machines lived behind it.
The second machine was also set up with Debian, and with some rsync silliness, we got all of the lab machines re-imaging themselves every night.
It was a bit of a hassle to get running at first (we had to wipe every machine and install linux on it) and there is the drawback that the windows partition was living on FAT32 (unless NTFS write support has become significantly better, this might still be an issue). We also had to use Smart Boot Manager as it had the nice feature of being able to schedule boots. At midnight, every machine in the building would reboot into linux, rsync their windows partition against the master server, and then reboot to windows in the morning.
There was some good things to this, though:
1) Everything was done out of band, so even when windows would normally complain or make things difficult (some system files, as I recall), it was totally out of our way.
2) You could push a new image to the rsync server and within 24 hours all of your machines would be patched.
3) No matter what crap they installed or littered on the machines, it was gone the next morning.
4) Rsync is smart enough to do deltas and only push across the files that have changed, so it was reasonably bandwidth friendly.
5) When a machine crapped out (due to software, anyhow), you could walk up to it, reboot it, perform the magic keyboard voodoo, boot into linux and reimage it.
I'm sure there's fancier ways of doing this, but it's the sort of thing you can potentially scrap together the basics in a few days and with the exception of the two machines, it's only the cost of labor.
-transiit
Perhaps I'm missing your inherent irony, but depending on who you talk to slashdot jumped the shark a half decade ago.
As I see it, there are a few camps left. Feel free to suggest others if I've missed them:
The new: Hey, they're new. Can't blame them for that that.
The old: Well, some people believe that there was a golden age of slashdot, and can't quite bring themselves to believe it's over, so they keep coming back, just in case.
The curmudgeons: Ok, so others might believe that slashdot never had any redeeming value, but show up just to reenforce that viewpoint.
The trolls: The static. Find me anywhere that doesn't suffer the noise from the signal over a signficant timeline. Try not to be elitist about it.
The undecided: I heard it was good, once, maybe, so I'm still checking it out.
The true believer: Golden age of slashdot over? Never!
The meta-philosphers: Hey, let's just attach whichever of the previous assertions make sense for today's comment. It's all relative anyway.
I won't identify myself with any specific camp, but let's just say that it's hardly optimistic.
My first thought was "When will the U.S. Olympic training center get one?"
Not that I give a rat's ass about the olympics, but if you could convince athletes to spend prolonged periods in such a device and train them at that, there's at least a few events that would surely see an improvement that didn't involve performance-enhancing drugs or blood-doping.
The real engineering feat would be to make a centrifuge pod large enough to not only simulate a high-jump track, but also large enough to provide living quarters and whatnot. Just imagine the size of the counterweight, and then imagine the insane energy requirements to keep that thing spinning continuously for years.
I say we try it, even if the portion of the population that actually thinks about olympic events (short of the every-four-years television retrospective) is exceedingly small. It'd make for a great physical and psychological case study.
-transiit
See, I've got mod points right now, and I'm wasting the opportunity to use them against perceived ne'er-do-wells by this comment, but I justify my inaction for two reasons.
1) I am a close relative to the article submitter of record. So for ethical reasons, I won't/shouldn't mod anything related to this article anyway. Conflict of interest.
2) Seeing a Bruce Perens imposter (http://slashdot.org/~.Bruce+Perens) almost made me violate the first point, but pragmatism ruled the day. No matter what I moderated it as (and the qualifier choices are still far too limited, in my view), I figured it'd get beaten down in metamoderation because the imposter is subtle enough for those that wouldn't study context.)
-transiit
Majesco didn't make Psychonauts, Double Fine did.
Majesco produced it as in "published/distributed" it.
So I wouldn't worry too much about the loss of creative content to the industry, worry more about smaller studios having one less outlet to get their games out to a wider audience.
1) Fox is more prone to picking this format up, even if they are willing to bury it before (or during) its success.
2) Other networks? Think about how long ABC held on to the animated version of Clerks? It got what, half a dozen episodes before being cancelled?
The correct answer, is, in fact: "African or European?"
-transiit