FWIW, I'm typing this on a Karmic Koala desktop right now. I general, I prefer Linux. That didn't stop me from wanting to spend a little time and money to have an awesome, little unsupported OS X netbook.
I'm not particularly upset with Apple at not supporting my setup. Why would they? I think it's pretty uncool that they're going out of their way to break it, though, and I certainly disagree with the idea that I did anything wrong by installing a legitimately purchased OS on my own legitimately purchased hardware.
Sigh. You can access them prior to purchase, [apple.com] and are encouraged to do so
Did you check for a EULA at the website for the box of cereal you opened this morning? The book you'll read before going to bed? The CD you listened to in your car? The chair you're sitting on right now?
Of course not. You handed someone cash, and they handed you a product. You own it, just like I own my copy of OS X. Don't get started on the "so you think you have the right to give away copies?" crap because no one's saying that. What I am saying is that I have the right to do whatever I want with my copy, short of violating the law, because it became my property when I bought it.
Oh, and nothing that I know of prevents me from hacking the installer so that it never presents a EULA to me. Why couldn't I? Until/unless I agree to a EULA, I haven't consented to be bound by any terms beyond the ones on that box of breakfast cereal.
And finally, even that BS EULA only requires Apple-branded hardware. Any lawyers care to offer evidence that my Apple-brand (by me) HP Mini 10 doesn't count? Is "Foo-branded" a term of legal art meaning "branded by Foo" as opposed to "branded as Foo"? I'm clearly not trying to sell it as an authentic Apple product, and I'm not aware of any restrictions that would keep you from labeling your Chevy as a Ford so long as you don't try to misleadingly sell it as such.
You didn't pay for it. You paid for an upgrade of OSX... for the copy that came with the Mac you never bought. You stole it.
You're a damn liar. I'm holding the Leopard box that I walked into an Apple Store and paid full retail price for. Looking at the label, it says "MAC OS X V10.5 RETAIL". The DVD inside says "Mac OS X Leopard Install DVD". WTF part of that sounds like "upgrade" to you?
What do you know - you and I actually agree on something. Yeah, FreeBSD + ZFS is a complete win for pretty much everything involving file transfer. I honestly can't think of a single thing I don't like about it. The instant FreeBSD imports this, I'm swapping in a quad-core CPU to give it as much crunching power as it wants to do its thing.
Surely with high amounts of data (that zfs is supposed to be able to handle), a hash collision may occur?
The birthday paradox says you'd have to look at 2^(n/2) candidates, on average, to find a collision for a given n-bit hash. In this case, that means you'd have to look at about 2^128 objects to find a collision with a particular one.
On my home server, the default block size is 128KB. With a terabyte drive, that gives about 8.4 million blocks.
GmPy says the likelihood of an event with probably of 1/(2^128) not happening 8.4 million times (well, 1024^4/(128*1024) times) in a row is 0.99999999999999999999999999999997534809671184338108088348233. In other words, that's how likely you are to fill a 1TB drive with 128KB blocks without a single hash collision.
We're actually finding it easier to migrate the data first. Last week we just finished moving another major system to native PostgreSQL, and have FoxPro, VB.NET, and Python clients accessing the data at any given time. The driving force was that I was hired as a web dev to make a web application that could access and manipulate the data, and that proved basically impossible when using native FoxPro tables. We started by copying data from FP to PostgreSQL with a cron job, and when that worked perfectly for months, we started migrating other code to use PSQL directly.
This is not made easier by the fact that the main FP app is our major internal application, and without it up and running, about $500,000 per business hour stops moving through our system. That's not something the boss smiles gladly upon.
I don't agree with the guy who said its only for enterprises, but I think you would have been better off just not using foxpro.
The codebase started back in the DOS days.
Its not that difficult to transition from. just do it. You'll be happier.
I wouldn't say that! We've moved a lot of data into PostgreSQL with the help of a tool I wrote that my boss let me release under the GPL. There's still a lot of code in FP, though, and we're in the planning stages of a multi-year conversion process.
Trust me: we've seen the light! Now it's just a matter of moving on with zero allowed downtime.
because virtualization only works for large companies with many, many servers
You're full of crap. At my company, a coworker and I are the only one handling the virtualization for a single rackful of servers. He virtualizes Windows stuff because of stupid limitations in so much of the software. For example, we still use a lot of legacy FoxPro databases. Did you know that MS's own FoxPro client libraries are single-threaded and may only be loaded once per instance, so that a Windows box is only capable of executing one single query at a time? We got around that by deploying several virtualized instances and querying them round-robin. It's not perfect, but works as well as anything could given that FoxPro is involved in the formula. None of those instances need to have more than about 256MB of RAM or any CPU to speak of, but we need several of them. While that's an extreme example, it serves the point: sometimes with Windows you really want a specific application to be the only thing running on the machine, and virtualization gives that to us.
I do the same thing on the Unix side. Suppose we're rolling out a new Internet-facing service. I don't really want to install it on the same system as other critical services, but I don't want to ask my boss for a new 1U rackmount that will sit with a load average of 0.01 for the next 5 years. Since we use FreeBSD, I find a lightly-loaded server and fire up a new jail instance. Since each jail only requires the disk space to hold software that's not part of the base system, I can do things like deploying a Jabber server in its own virtualized environment in only 100MB.
I don't think our $2,000 Dell rackmounts count as "super-servers" by any definition. If we have a machine sitting their mostly idle, and can virtualize a new OS instance with damn near zero resource waste that solves a very real business or security need, then why on earth not other than because it doesn't appeal to the warped tastes of certain purists?
Agreed. I can't get too worked up about non-custodial parent kidnappings. OK, so Dad (or Mom) didn't have the legal right of custody. That's a far cry from them being sold to a Satanic cult, or whatever the moral panic is this week.
Hell, I grew up with no cell phones, [...] while never wearing a helment.
Same here to all the above.
I contend that the world today is no less safe for kids, but that every single bad thing that may happen is broadcast nationally in lurid detail. My father-in-law is convinced that there's a pedo behind every tree and that I'm stupid for not being more worried about it (yes: those were his words). Does anyone know where I could find stats on things like abductions by strangers that would show wish view is more accurate?
I checked two SA stores in my home town, and neither had laptops in stock.
Other potential sources for a better laptop than he has for practically free: any electronics shop ("got anything someone left here 6 years ago?"), Craigslist ("free to good home: 2 cats and a Celeron"), or the soup kitchen ("where do hobos throw out their old stuff?").
That's fine. Their town; their decision. But rather than have government do the job
The people of the town - who are the government! - voted to get together and do what the telco had refused to do. When you get to a certain percentage level of popular support, the distinction between "the government" and "the people" disappears altogether.
So what draws this clear line for you between Scientology and "actual religion"?
It's seems we have to go through this every time, so:
Pick a church. Any church. Catholic, Hindu, Baptist, Muslim, Jehovah's Witness, Buddhist, whatever. Go in some day when people are around and ask them what they believe. Someone will sit down with you and answer questions until you can't think of any more, and will almost certainly offer you a free copy of the appropriate religious texts.
Now repeat the experiment at a Scientology office. See how far you get without whipping out a checkbook or Visa.
That is the difference. "True" religions are interested in your spiritual health and will help you develop it according to their beliefs, even if it costs them. The CoS is interested in your wallet.
Back in those days, people were suspicious of user accounts.
A few people were suspicious of user accounts. The rest of us had accounts on all sorts of websites.
The foolish and careless ones signed up first (really low UIDs are a clear sign of herd mentality)
I guess I discovered Slashdot the week after the Great Paranoiq Debates because I don't recall ever reading a word about it. It comes down to a few holdouts who eschewed accounts for some weird reason of their own, and now care enough about their high UIDs to patiently explain why those really means they were here first. Or something like that.
I could not believe how much slower a Pentum 4M 3.2 GHz with 4 times as much memory was at basic file manipulation. I'm not talking about running any programs, but just open folder move/copy/delete files.
Oh, they're so cute when they're young and idealistic! Back in reality, I have a database server with 8 cores, 16GB of RAM, and 500+GB of RAID-10 storage. For all but an hour a month, that's abundantly sufficient for everything we ask of it. For that one hour, though, a bit of that RAID turns into swap while we run some gigantic monthly financial queries.
Your ideal solution would be to spend a few thousand dollars in programmer time to make those queries run faster, or drop at least a thousand on a set of 4GB ECC DIMMs. My practical solution involves allocating 16GB out of 500 to swap for the one hour out of 720 that our normal resources aren't sufficient. Frankly, I like my idea better, and I know that my boss does too.
The FreeBSD people still haven't been able to run and integrate it reliably.
It's now marked as production quality in FreeBSD, and it's now entirely possible to have ZFS-only systems. My home server boots directly into a ZFS root filesystem without any UFS filesystems to help it. Given those two facts, I'd say they've been able to run and integrate it quite nicely.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, I'm typing this on a Karmic Koala desktop right now. I general, I prefer Linux. That didn't stop me from wanting to spend a little time and money to have an awesome, little unsupported OS X netbook.
I'm not particularly upset with Apple at not supporting my setup. Why would they? I think it's pretty uncool that they're going out of their way to break it, though, and I certainly disagree with the idea that I did anything wrong by installing a legitimately purchased OS on my own legitimately purchased hardware.
Uh, except the poison update in question is for 10.6 Snow Leopard, not 10.5 Leopard.
Apology accepted.
Take your pick: you can either have the law trying to fuck you or corporations trying to fuck you.
I'll take option 3: none of the above. What makes you so complacent?
Sigh. You can access them prior to purchase, [apple.com] and are encouraged to do so
Did you check for a EULA at the website for the box of cereal you opened this morning? The book you'll read before going to bed? The CD you listened to in your car? The chair you're sitting on right now?
Of course not. You handed someone cash, and they handed you a product. You own it, just like I own my copy of OS X. Don't get started on the "so you think you have the right to give away copies?" crap because no one's saying that. What I am saying is that I have the right to do whatever I want with my copy, short of violating the law, because it became my property when I bought it.
Oh, and nothing that I know of prevents me from hacking the installer so that it never presents a EULA to me. Why couldn't I? Until/unless I agree to a EULA, I haven't consented to be bound by any terms beyond the ones on that box of breakfast cereal.
And finally, even that BS EULA only requires Apple-branded hardware. Any lawyers care to offer evidence that my Apple-brand (by me) HP Mini 10 doesn't count? Is "Foo-branded" a term of legal art meaning "branded by Foo" as opposed to "branded as Foo"? I'm clearly not trying to sell it as an authentic Apple product, and I'm not aware of any restrictions that would keep you from labeling your Chevy as a Ford so long as you don't try to misleadingly sell it as such.
You didn't pay for it. You paid for an upgrade of OSX... for the copy that came with the Mac you never bought. You stole it.
You're a damn liar. I'm holding the Leopard box that I walked into an Apple Store and paid full retail price for. Looking at the label, it says "MAC OS X V10.5 RETAIL". The DVD inside says "Mac OS X Leopard Install DVD". WTF part of that sounds like "upgrade" to you?
What do you know - you and I actually agree on something. Yeah, FreeBSD + ZFS is a complete win for pretty much everything involving file transfer. I honestly can't think of a single thing I don't like about it. The instant FreeBSD imports this, I'm swapping in a quad-core CPU to give it as much crunching power as it wants to do its thing.
Surely with high amounts of data (that zfs is supposed to be able to handle), a hash collision may occur?
The birthday paradox says you'd have to look at 2^(n/2) candidates, on average, to find a collision for a given n-bit hash. In this case, that means you'd have to look at about 2^128 objects to find a collision with a particular one.
On my home server, the default block size is 128KB. With a terabyte drive, that gives about 8.4 million blocks.
GmPy says the likelihood of an event with probably of 1/(2^128) not happening 8.4 million times (well, 1024^4/(128*1024) times) in a row is 0.99999999999999999999999999999997534809671184338108088348233. In other words, that's how likely you are to fill a 1TB drive with 128KB blocks without a single hash collision.
I can live with that.
We're actually finding it easier to migrate the data first. Last week we just finished moving another major system to native PostgreSQL, and have FoxPro, VB.NET, and Python clients accessing the data at any given time. The driving force was that I was hired as a web dev to make a web application that could access and manipulate the data, and that proved basically impossible when using native FoxPro tables. We started by copying data from FP to PostgreSQL with a cron job, and when that worked perfectly for months, we started migrating other code to use PSQL directly.
This is not made easier by the fact that the main FP app is our major internal application, and without it up and running, about $500,000 per business hour stops moving through our system. That's not something the boss smiles gladly upon.
Nope, you're correct. In our case, we'd have to run n virtualized copies in order to be able to run n simultaneous database queries.
I don't agree with the guy who said its only for enterprises, but I think you would have been better off just not using foxpro.
The codebase started back in the DOS days.
Its not that difficult to transition from. just do it. You'll be happier.
I wouldn't say that! We've moved a lot of data into PostgreSQL with the help of a tool I wrote that my boss let me release under the GPL. There's still a lot of code in FP, though, and we're in the planning stages of a multi-year conversion process.
Trust me: we've seen the light! Now it's just a matter of moving on with zero allowed downtime.
because virtualization only works for large companies with many, many servers
You're full of crap. At my company, a coworker and I are the only one handling the virtualization for a single rackful of servers. He virtualizes Windows stuff because of stupid limitations in so much of the software. For example, we still use a lot of legacy FoxPro databases. Did you know that MS's own FoxPro client libraries are single-threaded and may only be loaded once per instance, so that a Windows box is only capable of executing one single query at a time? We got around that by deploying several virtualized instances and querying them round-robin. It's not perfect, but works as well as anything could given that FoxPro is involved in the formula. None of those instances need to have more than about 256MB of RAM or any CPU to speak of, but we need several of them. While that's an extreme example, it serves the point: sometimes with Windows you really want a specific application to be the only thing running on the machine, and virtualization gives that to us.
I do the same thing on the Unix side. Suppose we're rolling out a new Internet-facing service. I don't really want to install it on the same system as other critical services, but I don't want to ask my boss for a new 1U rackmount that will sit with a load average of 0.01 for the next 5 years. Since we use FreeBSD, I find a lightly-loaded server and fire up a new jail instance. Since each jail only requires the disk space to hold software that's not part of the base system, I can do things like deploying a Jabber server in its own virtualized environment in only 100MB.
I don't think our $2,000 Dell rackmounts count as "super-servers" by any definition. If we have a machine sitting their mostly idle, and can virtualize a new OS instance with damn near zero resource waste that solves a very real business or security need, then why on earth not other than because it doesn't appeal to the warped tastes of certain purists?
Agreed. I can't get too worked up about non-custodial parent kidnappings. OK, so Dad (or Mom) didn't have the legal right of custody. That's a far cry from them being sold to a Satanic cult, or whatever the moral panic is this week.
Except for that whole "bear arms" part once they had them.
Hell, I grew up with no cell phones, [...] while never wearing a helment.
Same here to all the above.
I contend that the world today is no less safe for kids, but that every single bad thing that may happen is broadcast nationally in lurid detail. My father-in-law is convinced that there's a pedo behind every tree and that I'm stupid for not being more worried about it (yes: those were his words). Does anyone know where I could find stats on things like abductions by strangers that would show wish view is more accurate?
Really? the 2nd? Has there been a single successful armed rebellion since the revolution.
Yes, and probably within your parents' lifetime.
I checked two SA stores in my home town, and neither had laptops in stock.
Other potential sources for a better laptop than he has for practically free: any electronics shop ("got anything someone left here 6 years ago?"), Craigslist ("free to good home: 2 cats and a Celeron"), or the soup kitchen ("where do hobos throw out their old stuff?").
My Compaq laptop with XP only has 112 MB of memory.
Here's $5 and a map to the Salvation Army. Upgrade that slab.
That's fine. Their town; their decision. But rather than have government do the job
The people of the town - who are the government! - voted to get together and do what the telco had refused to do. When you get to a certain percentage level of popular support, the distinction between "the government" and "the people" disappears altogether.
So what draws this clear line for you between Scientology and "actual religion"?
It's seems we have to go through this every time, so:
Pick a church. Any church. Catholic, Hindu, Baptist, Muslim, Jehovah's Witness, Buddhist, whatever. Go in some day when people are around and ask them what they believe. Someone will sit down with you and answer questions until you can't think of any more, and will almost certainly offer you a free copy of the appropriate religious texts.
Now repeat the experiment at a Scientology office. See how far you get without whipping out a checkbook or Visa.
That is the difference. "True" religions are interested in your spiritual health and will help you develop it according to their beliefs, even if it costs them. The CoS is interested in your wallet.
I can only imagine the holiday festivities in your childhood home. "Joyous day, Father! May I insert the update pages in the World Book?"
Back in those days, people were suspicious of user accounts.
A few people were suspicious of user accounts. The rest of us had accounts on all sorts of websites.
The foolish and careless ones signed up first (really low UIDs are a clear sign of herd mentality)
I guess I discovered Slashdot the week after the Great Paranoiq Debates because I don't recall ever reading a word about it. It comes down to a few holdouts who eschewed accounts for some weird reason of their own, and now care enough about their high UIDs to patiently explain why those really means they were here first. Or something like that.
I could not believe how much slower a Pentum 4M 3.2 GHz with 4 times as much memory was at basic file manipulation. I'm not talking about running any programs, but just open folder move/copy/delete files.
Say, about 17 minutes to copy a file?
Change an Ubuntu screen to 640x480, and then try to change it back, without using secret hidden commands. Can't be done.
I've never seen a window that you couldn't ALT+click to drag around so that you can see every part of the window, even if it's bigger than the screen.
FAIL. You should not swap, period.
Oh, they're so cute when they're young and idealistic! Back in reality, I have a database server with 8 cores, 16GB of RAM, and 500+GB of RAID-10 storage. For all but an hour a month, that's abundantly sufficient for everything we ask of it. For that one hour, though, a bit of that RAID turns into swap while we run some gigantic monthly financial queries.
Your ideal solution would be to spend a few thousand dollars in programmer time to make those queries run faster, or drop at least a thousand on a set of 4GB ECC DIMMs. My practical solution involves allocating 16GB out of 500 to swap for the one hour out of 720 that our normal resources aren't sufficient. Frankly, I like my idea better, and I know that my boss does too.
The FreeBSD people still haven't been able to run and integrate it reliably.
It's now marked as production quality in FreeBSD, and it's now entirely possible to have ZFS-only systems. My home server boots directly into a ZFS root filesystem without any UFS filesystems to help it. Given those two facts, I'd say they've been able to run and integrate it quite nicely.
Contracts can be written "in perpetuity".