Yeah, but paying attention to case only works if the people providing numbers do so as well, and so many people screw up MB vs. Mb that you can't count on it. It's one of those things where it's better just to leave no room whatsoever for error by spelling it out.
Because its not just about storage but about routing.
More accurately, it's not about storage at all but about routing. Most of the Freenetistas I've discussed this with have eventually admitted as much; Ian himself has said on more than one occasion that he never claimed otherwise.
The caching and expiring of data is a fundemental part of this process. It is this that gives the scalability thats I feel is lacking in other P2P networks.
The caching and expiring is not necessary for scalability. I know this as well as anyone because I worked for a year and a half on a global-scale data distribution project that provided permanence and full consistency with all the scalability anyone could ask for. What really forces the non-permanence of data in Freenet is its focus on anonymity. To assure permanence one needs at the very least to maintain an accurate count of how many copies exist elsewhere (so you don't delete the last one to make room for the new N'Street Aguilera "song"). That turns out to be terrifically difficult - and perhaps impossible - to reconcile with all of the "hiding" that necessarily goes on in Freenet. If someone could ever figure out how to reconcile permanence and anonymity that would be awesome, but so far nobody has and Freenet has chosen anonymity.
I who thought that FreeNet was meant as a tool to disclose information about those governaments
Um, yes, well. Check out Saving the Whales Using Freenet from last March. Despite the fact that Ian and many other Freenetistas regularly read my site, I have yet to receive any pointers to info about actual instances of Freenet being used in such ways. For that, you might try Peekabooty instead.
Of course, no discussion of Serial ATA would be complete without mentioning the answer from the SCSI camp - Serial Attached SCSI. SAS will use the same connector as SATA, but will support longer cable lengths, multiple initiators (if you don't know what an initiator is you don't even belong in this discussion), full SCSI semantics instead of lame-o ATA semantics, etc. Even so, the SAS folks are still ceding the high end to Fibre Channel and talking about three coexisting technologies for the low-end/midrange/enterprise market segments. Sorry, kiddies, but SATA is still low-end.
If there's one mistake you should try not to make more than once in this business, it's that competitors have been standing still since their previous generation. Announcing something brand new and having it be less than half a generation ahead of the competitor's last version is a failure.
I really love how the Maxtor paper compares SATA to parallel ATA, USB (?!) and Firewire...but not to SCSI or FC. I wonder why that is. Actually, no I don't.;-)
A couple of years ago I bought a 17" 1280x1024 analog-interface LCD from Planar Systems - either the CT1744Z or a direct predecessor, I don't quite remember. It came with built-in speakers (I don't care that much about sound so that was a plus; YMMV) and a built-in four-port USB hub that hadn't even been mentioned in the literature. It was under $1000 then, and is now down to $650 (at Insight.
I just have to say, this is a great monitor, and I wish more people knew about the brand. It never seems to be included in these types of roundups, which is a shame because I think it would do very well. Compared to other LCD monitors I've looked at the Planar is bright, it has good contrast (400:1) and pixel response time (15ms rise, 10ms fall), etc. The interpolation actually works rather well, though I still prefer to get dot-for-dot accuracy on a smaller display area in most cases; unlike some LCD monitors, this one gives you the choice. IMO Planar's combination of performance, features and price spanks any of the monitors that were in this review.
And no, I don't have any relationship with Planar other than that of a very satisfied customer. I just like to acknowledge when people work hard to create good products.
The real issue here is standards-committee wankery and the tendency of some people to accuse anyone who doesn't agree with them 100% of being proprietary, monopolistic, etc. This is exactly the sort of non-issue that doesn't deserve such rhetoric, and those who insist on crying wolf should be ejected from the process until they learn that "collaboration" doesn't mean "we rubber-stamp your ideas just because they're yours".
In a democracy, you are responsible for the actions of those you elect.
Yes, but am I responsible for the actions of a president I most emphatically did not elect, whom many would say was not legitimately elected at all but sits in the Oval Office nonetheless? Am I responsible for the actions of some senator from North Carolina or Texas (I'm in Massachusetts) who is the chair of some committee that exercises extra-Constitutional power to affect what bills even get seen by the full legislature? Am I responsible for the actions of some unelected official even though their rules and regulations only have the force of law because Congress improperly abdicated their legislative authority when they created some bureau fifty years ago?
No, no, and no. I can and do vote for a mere handful of representatives, whose roles have become so diluted by the above factors that voting is purely an act of principle untinged by practical effect. To say that people in general are responsible for outcomes that people in general can affect so little is ridiculous.
Hardware speed isn't everything. Why else would programs running on the exact same hardware show such great variation in ability? Fritz might not be able to evaluate as many positions per second as Deep Blue, but it evaluates them better. Kramnik and Kasparov are fairly evenly matched. Fritz seems fairly well matched with Kramnik, and Deep Blue with Kasparov. It doesn't exactly take an advanced degree in math or logic to figure out the transitive relationships and conclude that Fritz and Deep Blue are a lot closer in strength than the raw hardware numbers would indicate.
Hsu says he could write a program today that would kick the stuffing out of Deep Fritz
So why doesn't he? Talk is cheap. Despite all of its raw hardware speed, Deep Blue would not have beaten Kasparov had it not been for Joel Benjamin spoon-feeding it tips on how to beat one specific player. Kramnik, Anand, or any of a half-dozen other top grandmasters would have kicked its ass because it was not tuned to their styles. Fritz, by contrast, is not so reliant on tuning and would probably do better in a tournament setting against multiple top-level opponents. When Hsu can write a program that's even IM level, without having a GM hold his hand, his claim will have some credibility.
My big bet is that storage is going to be the interesting area in high-tech next year...and I don't just say that because I happen to work in that area. CPUs, video cards, and memory will all get faster in not-very-interesting ways. Wireless networks will grow in not-very-interesting ways (mostly; see below). But there will be heaps of storage-related news:
Portable removable storage devices will be a growth market. Wireless versions, probably based on some flavor of wireless 1394 will be particularly handy.
Someone will start shipping some form of removable storage (probably optical) that offers 50GB or more on something the size of a CD or smaller. Initial versions will be write-once and expensive; lower costs and rewritable versions won't hit until 2004.
Products and services to synchronize and distribute data will grow steadily as people want to share that data between more and more devices.
People will continue to ignore distributed filesystems and their cousins as alternatives to the above-mentioned synchronization nightmare.
iSCSI will continue to be hyped until (about mid-year) people realize that it doesn't give them anything they didn't already have. That plus a continuing soft IT economy will create a wave of rolled-back claims and changed strategies from all the router-company refugees behind the hype.
The BFDA (Big Fine Disk Array) vendors will continue to pay more attention to lawsuits among themselves than to designing and implementing actual products that meet customers' needs.
More and more storage-related functionality will be packaged as separate appliances (for reasons see above). People will eventually realize that all this "virtualization" hype is just a bunch of garbage anyway, but will continue to support the appliance approach for other kinds of functionality.
those qualified people are not having any problem finding jobs.
Depends a lot on where you are, or perhaps even who you hang around with. Here in the Boston area, I know a few people - kernel guys, not web weenies - who are not only qualified but absolutely top-notch with 10+ years to prove it, who've been seriously looking for over a year. Ouch. I hate to think what's happening for people who are lower than these guys on the totem pole. Yes, the bottom 10-20% from the dot-com boom never deserved to have tech jobs in the first place, but the people at the middle of the skill scale and above are also getting hammered and that's just a waste of hard-won training and capability.
What on Earth makes you think that an author's involvement with the subject of a study is likely to make them more objective?
Re:I want to grow up a Blogger just like you!
on
The Weblog Handbook
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· Score: 2
Slashdot posts are different, they're interactive. Blogging is one-way: you read what I have to say.
That's not really true, and misses much of what many people get out of weblogging. An increasing number of weblogs have inline commenting, and there are an increasing number of separate comment services out there to serve the remainder. Even without commenting as such, feedback via email or via other people's weblogs has always been an essential feature of the "blog experience". Show me a blogger who gets lots of traffic but no feedback and I'll show you a blogger who probably won't be one for much longer.
Conversations have to start somewhere. Posting an article to a weblog is a good place to start, sort of like having your very own Slashdot where you're the editor and you get to decide what goes on the front page. For the majority of bloggers interaction is still an integral part of the experience just as much as it is here but with fewer first posts and trolls and goatse.cx and generally antisocial dorks.
Re:I want to grow up a Blogger just like you!
on
The Weblog Handbook
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· Score: 2
Who's making you read blogs that you don't want to? Nobody? Then why are you bitching? Just don't read blogs you don't like, and if you don't like any blogs don't read any blogs. Bitching about something other people seem to enjoy and derive fulfillment from just makes you...ummm...what was your charming phrase...oh yeah. An anti-social reject.
Sturgeon's Law: 99% of science fiction is crap...but then 99% of everything is crap. There's as much crap right here on Slashdot as on some huge number of blogs, and yet you read it and even respond to it. Nobody's holding a gun to your head forcing you to read any blog. Why deny other people their fun, no matter how lame or self-indulgent it might seem to you?
Re:Blogging == mental masturbation
on
The Weblog Handbook
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Why would I care to read your stupid rantings?
Why would you care to talk with your friends? Because they might have insight or perspective that you find interesting. A weblog is nothing more (or less) than a way to express those same thoughts to many of your friends at once, without repeating yourself, and putting those thoughts where other people can also find them if they want to (or not, if they don't). Why do you have a problem with that?
USB OTG is still not really symmetric. It's just a way for devices to negotiate over who gets to be master; that master then takes over all the polling that the computer would be doing in traditional USB. It's still a fundamentally crappy way to do things, it wastes resources (which the consumer does pay for), and it only works for two devices instead of N. Firewire is still way better technically, and here today.
Why not do it for real?
on
Undelete In Linux
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· Score: 4, Informative
It shouldn't be all that hard to do this in-kernel, so it doesn't have library-preload dependencies or side effects and catches even stuff that comes into the kernel from unexpected directions. All you need is a dirt-simple filter driver that you push on top of the filesystem to change delete/unlink calls so they move stuff into the trashcan, plus some ioctls to view/empty it.
Oh, wait, Linux doesn't have filter drivers. For a moment there I forgot we were talking about a "technically superior" OS.
If your data is distributed, and someone updates it, then the update is faithfully replicated - even if it is wrong.
Depends on your definition of "wrong"; if your system supports true deletion and a properly authorized entity deleted something, it should be gone from all replicas. Largely for that reason, many of the systems being developed in this area tend toward an archival model where previous updates are supposed to remain available almost forever and deletion just means "mark it as not being part of the current data set".
The you have the non-trivial problem of finding the latest version.
Yep, it's non-trivial all right, but these are just the kinds of people who might be able to beat the problem into submission.
Should the british goverment, a university, and whoever else, trust a small buisness in san diego to house its part data.
If the data is encrypted and signed, why not? They can't inspect it, they can't modify it, the worst they can do is drop it on the floor and that's exactly equivalent to the sort of failure that other parts of the system are designed to deal with. It gets more difficult when there might be a very large number of "rogue servers" that promise to store copies and then don't, but even that scenario need not be fatal and the basic idea is still sound.
would yahoo hold files for google? If it is this way, it sounds like my credit card data would be insecure
A large part of how a system like this is supposed to work is the observation that having someone hold an encrypted and signed piece of data might help you survive a failure or improve performance, but doesn't do the holder any good whatsoever in terms of inspecting or modifying your data. If you consider the encryption to be secure, then this type of system can be just as secure.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but paying attention to case only works if the people providing numbers do so as well, and so many people screw up MB vs. Mb that you can't count on it. It's one of those things where it's better just to leave no room whatsoever for error by spelling it out.
More accurately, it's not about storage at all but about routing. Most of the Freenetistas I've discussed this with have eventually admitted as much; Ian himself has said on more than one occasion that he never claimed otherwise.
The caching and expiring is not necessary for scalability. I know this as well as anyone because I worked for a year and a half on a global-scale data distribution project that provided permanence and full consistency with all the scalability anyone could ask for. What really forces the non-permanence of data in Freenet is its focus on anonymity. To assure permanence one needs at the very least to maintain an accurate count of how many copies exist elsewhere (so you don't delete the last one to make room for the new N'Street Aguilera "song"). That turns out to be terrifically difficult - and perhaps impossible - to reconcile with all of the "hiding" that necessarily goes on in Freenet. If someone could ever figure out how to reconcile permanence and anonymity that would be awesome, but so far nobody has and Freenet has chosen anonymity.
Unfortunately, that doesn't really work. See my Freenet FIQ (Frequently Ignored Questions) for an explanation.
Um, yes, well. Check out Saving the Whales Using Freenet from last March. Despite the fact that Ian and many other Freenetistas regularly read my site, I have yet to receive any pointers to info about actual instances of Freenet being used in such ways. For that, you might try Peekabooty instead.
Of course, no discussion of Serial ATA would be complete without mentioning the answer from the SCSI camp - Serial Attached SCSI. SAS will use the same connector as SATA, but will support longer cable lengths, multiple initiators (if you don't know what an initiator is you don't even belong in this discussion), full SCSI semantics instead of lame-o ATA semantics, etc. Even so, the SAS folks are still ceding the high end to Fibre Channel and talking about three coexisting technologies for the low-end/midrange/enterprise market segments. Sorry, kiddies, but SATA is still low-end.
If there's one mistake you should try not to make more than once in this business, it's that competitors have been standing still since their previous generation. Announcing something brand new and having it be less than half a generation ahead of the competitor's last version is a failure.
Bits that the signalling throws away don't count.
I really love how the Maxtor paper compares SATA to parallel ATA, USB (?!) and Firewire...but not to SCSI or FC. I wonder why that is. Actually, no I don't. ;-)
Actually SATA is 1.2Gb/s, but that doesn't change your point.
A couple of years ago I bought a 17" 1280x1024 analog-interface LCD from Planar Systems - either the CT1744Z or a direct predecessor, I don't quite remember. It came with built-in speakers (I don't care that much about sound so that was a plus; YMMV) and a built-in four-port USB hub that hadn't even been mentioned in the literature. It was under $1000 then, and is now down to $650 (at Insight.
I just have to say, this is a great monitor, and I wish more people knew about the brand. It never seems to be included in these types of roundups, which is a shame because I think it would do very well. Compared to other LCD monitors I've looked at the Planar is bright, it has good contrast (400:1) and pixel response time (15ms rise, 10ms fall), etc. The interpolation actually works rather well, though I still prefer to get dot-for-dot accuracy on a smaller display area in most cases; unlike some LCD monitors, this one gives you the choice. IMO Planar's combination of performance, features and price spanks any of the monitors that were in this review.
And no, I don't have any relationship with Planar other than that of a very satisfied customer. I just like to acknowledge when people work hard to create good products.
The real issue here is standards-committee wankery and the tendency of some people to accuse anyone who doesn't agree with them 100% of being proprietary, monopolistic, etc. This is exactly the sort of non-issue that doesn't deserve such rhetoric, and those who insist on crying wolf should be ejected from the process until they learn that "collaboration" doesn't mean "we rubber-stamp your ideas just because they're yours".
Yes, but am I responsible for the actions of a president I most emphatically did not elect, whom many would say was not legitimately elected at all but sits in the Oval Office nonetheless? Am I responsible for the actions of some senator from North Carolina or Texas (I'm in Massachusetts) who is the chair of some committee that exercises extra-Constitutional power to affect what bills even get seen by the full legislature? Am I responsible for the actions of some unelected official even though their rules and regulations only have the force of law because Congress improperly abdicated their legislative authority when they created some bureau fifty years ago?
No, no, and no. I can and do vote for a mere handful of representatives, whose roles have become so diluted by the above factors that voting is purely an act of principle untinged by practical effect. To say that people in general are responsible for outcomes that people in general can affect so little is ridiculous.
Hardware speed isn't everything. Why else would programs running on the exact same hardware show such great variation in ability? Fritz might not be able to evaluate as many positions per second as Deep Blue, but it evaluates them better. Kramnik and Kasparov are fairly evenly matched. Fritz seems fairly well matched with Kramnik, and Deep Blue with Kasparov. It doesn't exactly take an advanced degree in math or logic to figure out the transitive relationships and conclude that Fritz and Deep Blue are a lot closer in strength than the raw hardware numbers would indicate.
So why doesn't he? Talk is cheap. Despite all of its raw hardware speed, Deep Blue would not have beaten Kasparov had it not been for Joel Benjamin spoon-feeding it tips on how to beat one specific player. Kramnik, Anand, or any of a half-dozen other top grandmasters would have kicked its ass because it was not tuned to their styles. Fritz, by contrast, is not so reliant on tuning and would probably do better in a tournament setting against multiple top-level opponents. When Hsu can write a program that's even IM level, without having a GM hold his hand, his claim will have some credibility.
My big bet is that storage is going to be the interesting area in high-tech next year...and I don't just say that because I happen to work in that area. CPUs, video cards, and memory will all get faster in not-very-interesting ways. Wireless networks will grow in not-very-interesting ways (mostly; see below). But there will be heaps of storage-related news:
Depends a lot on where you are, or perhaps even who you hang around with. Here in the Boston area, I know a few people - kernel guys, not web weenies - who are not only qualified but absolutely top-notch with 10+ years to prove it, who've been seriously looking for over a year. Ouch. I hate to think what's happening for people who are lower than these guys on the totem pole. Yes, the bottom 10-20% from the dot-com boom never deserved to have tech jobs in the first place, but the people at the middle of the skill scale and above are also getting hammered and that's just a waste of hard-won training and capability.
It's a cabbage. I don't know about you, but I don't think I'll be walking by a cabbage patch and feel a sudden urge to chow down any time soon. ;-)
What on Earth makes you think that an author's involvement with the subject of a study is likely to make them more objective?
That's not really true, and misses much of what many people get out of weblogging. An increasing number of weblogs have inline commenting, and there are an increasing number of separate comment services out there to serve the remainder. Even without commenting as such, feedback via email or via other people's weblogs has always been an essential feature of the "blog experience". Show me a blogger who gets lots of traffic but no feedback and I'll show you a blogger who probably won't be one for much longer.
Conversations have to start somewhere. Posting an article to a weblog is a good place to start, sort of like having your very own Slashdot where you're the editor and you get to decide what goes on the front page. For the majority of bloggers interaction is still an integral part of the experience just as much as it is here but with fewer first posts and trolls and goatse.cx and generally antisocial dorks.
Who's making you read blogs that you don't want to? Nobody? Then why are you bitching? Just don't read blogs you don't like, and if you don't like any blogs don't read any blogs. Bitching about something other people seem to enjoy and derive fulfillment from just makes you...ummm...what was your charming phrase...oh yeah. An anti-social reject.
Sturgeon's Law: 99% of science fiction is crap...but then 99% of everything is crap. There's as much crap right here on Slashdot as on some huge number of blogs, and yet you read it and even respond to it. Nobody's holding a gun to your head forcing you to read any blog. Why deny other people their fun, no matter how lame or self-indulgent it might seem to you?
Why would you care to talk with your friends? Because they might have insight or perspective that you find interesting. A weblog is nothing more (or less) than a way to express those same thoughts to many of your friends at once, without repeating yourself, and putting those thoughts where other people can also find them if they want to (or not, if they don't). Why do you have a problem with that?
USB OTG is still not really symmetric. It's just a way for devices to negotiate over who gets to be master; that master then takes over all the polling that the computer would be doing in traditional USB. It's still a fundamentally crappy way to do things, it wastes resources (which the consumer does pay for), and it only works for two devices instead of N. Firewire is still way better technically, and here today.
It shouldn't be all that hard to do this in-kernel, so it doesn't have library-preload dependencies or side effects and catches even stuff that comes into the kernel from unexpected directions. All you need is a dirt-simple filter driver that you push on top of the filesystem to change delete/unlink calls so they move stuff into the trashcan, plus some ioctls to view/empty it.
Oh, wait, Linux doesn't have filter drivers. For a moment there I forgot we were talking about a "technically superior" OS.
Depends on your definition of "wrong"; if your system supports true deletion and a properly authorized entity deleted something, it should be gone from all replicas. Largely for that reason, many of the systems being developed in this area tend toward an archival model where previous updates are supposed to remain available almost forever and deletion just means "mark it as not being part of the current data set".
Yep, it's non-trivial all right, but these are just the kinds of people who might be able to beat the problem into submission.
If the data is encrypted and signed, why not? They can't inspect it, they can't modify it, the worst they can do is drop it on the floor and that's exactly equivalent to the sort of failure that other parts of the system are designed to deal with. It gets more difficult when there might be a very large number of "rogue servers" that promise to store copies and then don't, but even that scenario need not be fatal and the basic idea is still sound.
A large part of how a system like this is supposed to work is the observation that having someone hold an encrypted and signed piece of data might help you survive a failure or improve performance, but doesn't do the holder any good whatsoever in terms of inspecting or modifying your data. If you consider the encryption to be secure, then this type of system can be just as secure.