I wonder if our ever-declining real wage is connected to our pessimism?
If I thought that my life was going to be Better In The Future For Sure then I'd be much more likely to take risks, try stuff that might not work, and generally be more optimistic. When I'm confident that my life will be as-good-or-better than now then I could always say "well, that was a nice experiment, too bad it didn't work, thank goodness it will not substantially impact the remainder of my life"
Can anyone shed some light on whether these technologies are niche/minor technologies, or whether they're actually popular / useful / used technologies?
"I've never heard of AMPLab" means just about nothing, given that I don't really spend a lot of time on Big Data. I recognize Hadoop (and MapReduce, Scala, etc,etc), but most of the technologies used in this class seems to be specific to Berkeley.
(I'm almost afraid to ask, given that there's a grand total of 13 comments and it's already 1/2 down the/. main page:( )
Huh - so the main difference is that it can figure out what's changed after the local machine has been running for a while, and save those changes?
Many many moons ago I was at a Usenix conference & it seemed like the trendy topic was moving a process from one machine to another. After some quick Googling, it looks like the terms to look for are process migration and application checkpointing
This patent sound similar to that stuff.
(It's probably one of these things where I"m going to have to dig deeply into all these concepts in order to actually be able to clearly differentiate amongst them.)
Re: trolling: LOL, yeah - I replied to geekoid, *then* clicked on his name & noticed that all his posts are very short and very negative. Luckily for me my response also got a reply from you, and so the discussion quality just upticked quite a bit:)
It was tough reconciling the sacrosanct rule of not RTFA with a desire to actually know what the patent actually does. So I compromised, followed the link, and then only read the summary:
A system for providing an operating system over a network to a local device is provided. The system includes a base image server, a preferences image server and an image loader. The system may also include a boot loader. A method for providing an operating system over a network to a local device is also provided. The method includes receiving a request for an operating system. The method further includes transmitting to a local device remotely stored base and preferences images that are configured for combination into a combined image. The method may also include the synchronizing the combined image with a cached version of an operating system on the local device.
Going back and reading the patent in a little bit more detail, and then skimming RFC 906, I still don't see how the patent isn't obvious. Things like encrypting the image (or compressing the image), updating the image, etc, etc all seem like they 'fall out of' the diskless booting idea.
Could you provide list of the specific things that this does that RFC 906 doesn't do?
Didn't Unix (specifically, NFS) have a diskless boot option decades ago? Between that and whatever VMWare's been doing (they must have a way of choosing which image you want to load onto your server, right?) how is this in any way an original, patent-able idea?
the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake
It was really nice when the college's mission used to be refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake, but in today's shrinking economy that is (more and more) no longer the case. Now-a-days not only does the college as a whole feel immense budget pressure, but if individual departments don't ante up each year then they'll be on the chopping block
While staff in many industries might object to a plan that expects them to sleep in their office, data center firms have a primary calling of keeping their facilities operational at all times
I love how the summary neatly dismisses the objections of the employees by citing the goal of the corporation. I can see this working well for a variety of other problems that the data center firms face, but let's just jump to the one the MBAs are salivating over:
While staff in many industries might object to working without pay or benefits, data center firms have a primary calling of keeping their costs low and profits high
I know that you're looking for a nerdy techno-solution, but have you looked into a neighborhood watch? If your house has been broken into then the thieves / backyard guests are probably stealing / visiting your neighbors, too. If there is someone who works from home (even occasionally) they can keep an eye out and call stuff in. I don't have the source handy, but I seem to remember the Seattle PD saying that something like 90% of their residential burglary- & trespassing- type arrests come from neighbors calling stuff in.
In Seattle we've actually got a Crimewatch coordinator position on the police force - an officer like that can answer your questions about how to secure your property & neighborhood, and will even drop by your neighborhood watch meeting once you've got 10+ people or so. They don't stop the guy directly but they know a ton about how to deter thieves & make it easier to catch them.
As an added bonus it'll get you talking to your neighbors. There's really no reason to talk to your neighbors in modern America (except for stuff like this), and a shared threat really makes people come together. Our neighborhood watch started out banding together against the 'troublesome houses', and expanded to neighborhood cleanup days.
academics themselves get practically nothing for writing textbooks. Almost all of the money goes to the publishers.
I've never written a book myself, but people who have have told me that your statement is absolutely right.
That still doesn't change the underlying question - if there are textbooks out there for free, will publishers leave the market because there's no money (no incentive) for them to stay? And if they do, will there be enough other incentive to keep people working on the maintenance of the free textbooks?
Another interesting question just occurred to me: O'Reilly seems to be doing ok (at least, that's my impression). If there's all these Awesome Free Resources on the web, how does O'Reilly stay afloat?
a professor is going to put together the equivalent of a textbook in handouts and lecture notes anyway, over the years
From what I've seen this is not true. Instead the professor puts together the handouts and lecture notes for their specific course(s) over the years.
The difference between that and a textbook is actually huge - the textbook fills in everything that's needed for someone to pick the book up & understand it without going to the professor's classes. Why would anyone do that when the target audience is people who (by definition) will be going to class? And it's this last 10% of the work that will take 90% of the effort.
All of which brings me back to my original point - will these free / OSS books actually be maintained over the years? Looking at http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/, under "Computer Science", there's several books about OpenOffice and MS Office that appear to have been updated as new versions came out, but I can't quite tell if these are normal, or exceptions.
On the one hand I really like the idea of keeping incidental costs of education down by doing things like making textbooks available for free. On the other hand I'm mature enough to realize that nobody is going to create a (quality) textbook for free*.
So my concern for the long-term sustainability of this model is this: 1) One-time grant money is made available to create a free textbook 2) The free textbook reduces the profitability of the proprietary books, which then leave the market 3) Since the money in step #1 is one-time, and since grantors looooooooooove to fund New Awesome Advances but hate to fund Ongoing Operating Expenses, Maintenance and Upkeep the free textbook languishes 3.1) Making non-trivial changes to the textbook is a huge undertaking, so the already-overworked teachers using the book won't be making wholesale revisions to it regularly 3.1.1) Maybe I"m wrong on 3.1, and I've love to see links to projects that contradict 3.1
4) The textbook market is now gone but the free textbooks aren't being maintained either.
I'd love to hear discussion on this, but I'd particularly like to see established, free textbooks that are genuinely self-supporting.
* Yes, yes please do feel free to reply to this post with whatever online, free books you know about. I look forwards to seeing your list
(This is not intended as a troll - my apologies in advance if it's read that way)
The beautiful thing about OSS is that anyone, anywhere can contribute. Just throw together a project, put it on the web, give it the right license, and BAM! You've contributed an open source project. Producing a high-quality, production-ready OSS project, on the other hand, takes some doing.
I ask just because I looked at a couple of these frameworks and got the impression that they have potential, but they're 'not there yet'
Maybe the real news here is that big, established company has decided to devote resources to really doing this right?
...and why do his posts jump to the front page? Man, how many more people is Slashdot going to auto-post (I mean, how many more people beyond Ian McAllister and this "CmdrTaco" )?
Is it just me, or has almost every article by Neil McAllister made it to the Slashdot front page?
I propose 1) a "slashcallister" because it rolls off the tongue, and can be used to tag these articles (as part of the greater "slashonomy"), so that 2) McAllister's articles be picked up by Slashdot's server-side RSS reader and auto-posted & auto-tagged, thus creating the Official Slashdot Neil McAllister Channel
I have to admit that I enjoyed watching the video, and the very idea is pretty cool. I was disappointed that the cardboard support never goes away (isn't he ever going to eat the thing?) but seeing all the 'ginger snap, not gingerbread' postings above helped remind me why I keep coming back to/.
That said - the video seemed less like a video, and more like a collection of chronologically-arranged stills. I guess if you're providing the video as help, given the people making it, then you can assume that they'll all have VLC media player installed & know (or look up) the 'advance 1 frame' feature, but still.
Anyways, awesome article, regardless of my picayune carping:)
I keep wondering why do BitCoin articles keep showing up here. Any given article doesn't really seem quite nerdy enough to be real 'News For Nerds' (and yes, I agree that most of the articles here haven't been News For Nerds for a quite some time), and it's kind of a weird topic.
I kinda feel like "BitCoin articles is to Slashdot as gold advertisements is to the Fox News Network".
So I'm going to coin a term that we can add to the Slashdot Taxonomy (or the 'slashonomy', as I like to call it::) ): Slashgold!
As in: Random dude: "So, was the article good?" You: "Naw, it was just another fluff piece promoting slashgold"
because employers are more frequently treated like humans.
Yeah, I totally know what you mean. Since corporations are people too it's important for employees to pick an employer that gets the respect, treatment, and legal benefits that the employer deserves!
Clearly, Provost Catherine Riordan is trying to extort the CompSci department to bring in some dough, or else she's going to cut the department.
Seriously - go back & read the "completely out of touch" article (http://www.geekwire.com/2011/western-washington-provost-were-respect-computer-science-department), and it's all there.
The ONLY concrete criticism she's offering of the computer science department is that they're not "engaging the business community and other people to a sufficient degree". She repeatedly mouths some bland chastisements about not really preparing for / "thinking about the future" (whatever that means), she dismisses the department's effort to "updat[e] their curriculum in a major way to better meet the needs of students" (claiming that she's "not an expert" - if that's true then she should be fired & her 6-figure salary given to someone who is willing to take the time to understand the college she's running), and then keeps coming back to whole thing about reaching out to the region's tech community.
What she wants is for the CompSci department to cough up enough money to help her solve her budget problems. What this is is extortion!
I'm curious about this spate of Slashvertising for Packt books. Is the problem that no-one is writing any other book reviews, or is the problem that Packt is gaming the slashdot system to get these posted?
"Microsoft is reportedly in talks with major TV networks about having its Xbox Live service stream TV channels in the United States. This would be an interesting move on the company's part as it would allow an Xbox 360 user to stream TV channels though their Xbox."
Really? I had no idea that streaming TV channels to XBox Live would allow my XBox 360 to stream TV channels! Thank you, sir, for the excellent & informative summary!:) </ ducks >
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if our ever-declining real wage is connected to our pessimism?
If I thought that my life was going to be Better In The Future For Sure then I'd be much more likely to take risks, try stuff that might not work, and generally be more optimistic. When I'm confident that my life will be as-good-or-better than now then I could always say "well, that was a nice experiment, too bad it didn't work, thank goodness it will not substantially impact the remainder of my life"
And, just because I feel like I ought to provide a citation:
http://www.workinglife.org/wiki/Wages+and+Benefits%3A+Real+Wages+(1964-2004)
Can anyone shed some light on whether these technologies are niche/minor technologies, or whether they're actually popular / useful / used technologies?
"I've never heard of AMPLab" means just about nothing, given that I don't really spend a lot of time on Big Data. I recognize Hadoop (and MapReduce, Scala, etc,etc), but most of the technologies used in this class seems to be specific to Berkeley.
(I'm almost afraid to ask, given that there's a grand total of 13 comments and it's already 1/2 down the /. main page :( )
Huh - so the main difference is that it can figure out what's changed after the local machine has been running for a while, and save those changes?
Many many moons ago I was at a Usenix conference & it seemed like the trendy topic was moving a process from one machine to another. After some quick Googling, it looks like the terms to look for are
process migration
and
application checkpointing
This patent sound similar to that stuff.
(It's probably one of these things where I"m going to have to dig deeply into all these concepts in order to actually be able to clearly differentiate amongst them.)
Re: trolling: LOL, yeah - I replied to geekoid, *then* clicked on his name & noticed that all his posts are very short and very negative. Luckily for me my response also got a reply from you, and so the discussion quality just upticked quite a bit :)
It was tough reconciling the sacrosanct rule of not RTFA with a desire to actually know what the patent actually does. So I compromised, followed the link, and then only read the summary:
A system for providing an operating system over a network to a local device is provided. The system includes a base image server, a preferences image server and an image loader. The system may also include a boot loader. A method for providing an operating system over a network to a local device is also provided. The method includes receiving a request for an operating system. The method further includes transmitting to a local device remotely stored base and preferences images that are configured for combination into a combined image. The method may also include the synchronizing the combined image with a cached version of an operating system on the local device.
Going back and reading the patent in a little bit more detail, and then skimming RFC 906, I still don't see how the patent isn't obvious. Things like encrypting the image (or compressing the image), updating the image, etc, etc all seem like they 'fall out of' the diskless booting idea.
Could you provide list of the specific things that this does that RFC 906 doesn't do?
Didn't Unix (specifically, NFS) have a diskless boot option decades ago? Between that and whatever VMWare's been doing (they must have a way of choosing which image you want to load onto your server, right?) how is this in any way an original, patent-able idea?
Actually he's fine.
He'll hit the base case long before he runs out of stack space:
if (worker.isDead)
{
return;
}
the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake
It was really nice when the college's mission used to be refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake, but in today's shrinking economy that is (more and more) no longer the case. Now-a-days not only does the college as a whole feel immense budget pressure, but if individual departments don't ante up each year then they'll be on the chopping block
While staff in many industries might object to a plan that expects them to sleep in their office, data center firms have a primary calling of keeping their facilities operational at all times
I love how the summary neatly dismisses the objections of the employees by citing the goal of the corporation. I can see this working well for a variety of other problems that the data center firms face, but let's just jump to the one the MBAs are salivating over:
While staff in many industries might object to working without pay or benefits, data center firms have a primary calling of keeping their costs low and profits high
I know that you're looking for a nerdy techno-solution, but have you looked into a neighborhood watch? If your house has been broken into then the thieves / backyard guests are probably stealing / visiting your neighbors, too. If there is someone who works from home (even occasionally) they can keep an eye out and call stuff in. I don't have the source handy, but I seem to remember the Seattle PD saying that something like 90% of their residential burglary- & trespassing- type arrests come from neighbors calling stuff in.
In Seattle we've actually got a Crimewatch coordinator position on the police force - an officer like that can answer your questions about how to secure your property & neighborhood, and will even drop by your neighborhood watch meeting once you've got 10+ people or so. They don't stop the guy directly but they know a ton about how to deter thieves & make it easier to catch them.
As an added bonus it'll get you talking to your neighbors. There's really no reason to talk to your neighbors in modern America (except for stuff like this), and a shared threat really makes people come together. Our neighborhood watch started out banding together against the 'troublesome houses', and expanded to neighborhood cleanup days.
I love Yoda's book reviews!
For those that are looking for a follow-up to Applied Cryptography, this it is not
(On a more serious note - this is an great review of a really interesting book - thanks for posting it! :) )
academics themselves get practically nothing for writing textbooks. Almost all of the money goes to the publishers.
I've never written a book myself, but people who have have told me that your statement is absolutely right.
That still doesn't change the underlying question - if there are textbooks out there for free, will publishers leave the market because there's no money (no incentive) for them to stay?
And if they do, will there be enough other incentive to keep people working on the maintenance of the free textbooks?
Another interesting question just occurred to me: O'Reilly seems to be doing ok (at least, that's my impression). If there's all these Awesome Free Resources on the web, how does O'Reilly stay afloat?
Thanks for the links - these are definitely interesting!
Some of these look good (I had forgotten about 'Eloquent JavaScript'), but many don't ("Introduction To Computer Science", at http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Computer_Science (linked to from http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/) contains hardly any material at all).
a professor is going to put together the equivalent of a textbook in handouts and lecture notes anyway, over the years
From what I've seen this is not true. Instead the professor puts together the handouts and lecture notes for their specific course(s) over the years.
The difference between that and a textbook is actually huge - the textbook fills in everything that's needed for someone to pick the book up & understand it without going to the professor's classes. Why would anyone do that when the target audience is people who (by definition) will be going to class? And it's this last 10% of the work that will take 90% of the effort.
All of which brings me back to my original point - will these free / OSS books actually be maintained over the years? Looking at http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/, under "Computer Science", there's several books about OpenOffice and MS Office that appear to have been updated as new versions came out, but I can't quite tell if these are normal, or exceptions.
On the one hand I really like the idea of keeping incidental costs of education down by doing things like making textbooks available for free. On the other hand I'm mature enough to realize that nobody is going to create a (quality) textbook for free*.
So my concern for the long-term sustainability of this model is this:
1) One-time grant money is made available to create a free textbook
2) The free textbook reduces the profitability of the proprietary books, which then leave the market
3) Since the money in step #1 is one-time, and since grantors looooooooooove to fund New Awesome Advances but hate to fund Ongoing Operating Expenses, Maintenance and Upkeep the free textbook languishes
3.1) Making non-trivial changes to the textbook is a huge undertaking, so the already-overworked teachers using the book won't be making wholesale revisions to it regularly
3.1.1) Maybe I"m wrong on 3.1, and I've love to see links to projects that contradict 3.1
4) The textbook market is now gone but the free textbooks aren't being maintained either.
I'd love to hear discussion on this, but I'd particularly like to see established, free textbooks that are genuinely self-supporting.
* Yes, yes please do feel free to reply to this post with whatever online, free books you know about. I look forwards to seeing your list
...since it's 8/10, rather than the Packt-standard 9/10 :)
(This is not intended as a troll - my apologies in advance if it's read that way)
The beautiful thing about OSS is that anyone, anywhere can contribute. Just throw together a project, put it on the web, give it the right license, and BAM! You've contributed an open source project. Producing a high-quality, production-ready OSS project, on the other hand, takes some doing.
I ask just because I looked at a couple of these frameworks and got the impression that they have potential, but they're 'not there yet'
Maybe the real news here is that big, established company has decided to devote resources to really doing this right?
...and why do his posts jump to the front page?
Man, how many more people is Slashdot going to auto-post (I mean, how many more people beyond Ian McAllister and this "CmdrTaco" )?
This is totally unfair
*ducks*runs* :)
Is it just me, or has almost every article by Neil McAllister made it to the Slashdot front page?
I propose
1) a "slashcallister" because it rolls off the tongue, and can be used to tag these articles (as part of the greater "slashonomy"), so that
2) McAllister's articles be picked up by Slashdot's server-side RSS reader and auto-posted & auto-tagged, thus creating the Official Slashdot Neil McAllister Channel
I have to admit that I enjoyed watching the video, and the very idea is pretty cool. I was disappointed that the cardboard support never goes away (isn't he ever going to eat the thing?) but seeing all the 'ginger snap, not gingerbread' postings above helped remind me why I keep coming back to /.
That said - the video seemed less like a video, and more like a collection of chronologically-arranged stills. I guess if you're providing the video as help, given the people making it, then you can assume that they'll all have VLC media player installed & know (or look up) the 'advance 1 frame' feature, but still.
Anyways, awesome article, regardless of my picayune carping :)
Hehe - I mis-read this as "GNome researchers" have too much data.
Probably along the lines of several thousand comments to the effect of "I can't stand GNOME 3", "I liked GNOME 2 better", etc, etc :)
I'll be honest - I didn't really RTFA that closely, in part because it just fawns over the SSDs.
Can someone tell me why this is significant? (Because it's EBay, because it's the first large-scale deployment of SSDs like this, etc, etc)?
Thanks in advance (and sorry about the clueless SSD noob posting :) )
I keep wondering why do BitCoin articles keep showing up here. Any given article doesn't really seem quite nerdy enough to be real 'News For Nerds' (and yes, I agree that most of the articles here haven't been News For Nerds for a quite some time), and it's kind of a weird topic.
I kinda feel like "BitCoin articles is to Slashdot as gold advertisements is to the Fox News Network".
So I'm going to coin a term that we can add to the Slashdot Taxonomy (or the 'slashonomy', as I like to call it: :) ): Slashgold!
As in:
Random dude: "So, was the article good?"
You: "Naw, it was just another fluff piece promoting slashgold"
because employers are more frequently treated like humans.
Yeah, I totally know what you mean. Since corporations are people too it's important for employees to pick an employer that gets the respect, treatment, and legal benefits that the employer deserves!
(I know it's a typo, but it's a funny typo :) )
Clearly, Provost Catherine Riordan is trying to extort the CompSci department to bring in some dough, or else she's going to cut the department.
Seriously - go back & read the "completely out of touch" article (http://www.geekwire.com/2011/western-washington-provost-were-respect-computer-science-department), and it's all there.
The ONLY concrete criticism she's offering of the computer science department is that they're not "engaging the business community and other people to a sufficient degree". She repeatedly mouths some bland chastisements about not really preparing for / "thinking about the future" (whatever that means), she dismisses the department's effort to "updat[e] their curriculum in a major way to better meet the needs of students" (claiming that she's "not an expert" - if that's true then she should be fired & her 6-figure salary given to someone who is willing to take the time to understand the college she's running), and then keeps coming back to whole thing about reaching out to the region's tech community.
What she wants is for the CompSci department to cough up enough money to help her solve her budget problems. What this is is extortion!
I'm curious about this spate of Slashvertising for Packt books. Is the problem that no-one is writing any other book reviews, or is the problem that Packt is gaming the slashdot system to get these posted?
"Microsoft is reportedly in talks with major TV networks about having its Xbox Live service stream TV channels in the United States. This would be an interesting move on the company's part as it would allow an Xbox 360 user to stream TV channels though their Xbox."
Really? I had no idea that streaming TV channels to XBox Live would allow my XBox 360 to stream TV channels! Thank you, sir, for the excellent & informative summary! :)
</ ducks >