You can either filter on a sophisticated ruleset te detect what you describe, or you can block one host in one domain (the same domain of 'bing.com', just a different host record within it....)
It's good that google accommodated the need, but just because Google did it one way and MS did it another that Google's way must be better (by better, this would mean easier).
It would help to have the flaws in MS's approach actually described and how Google's overcomes it.
On the one hand, the lack of a technologically compelling competitor to Google concerns me. As a consequence, google susceptibility to SEO gaming is significant, but Google doesn't have a sound business justification to change what is working unless a competitor outdoes them. Unfortunately, in business the only 'justifiable' time to fund improvements is when there is *something* to gain and Google simply has nothing to gain in this context without competition.
On the other hand, I don't think Microsoft should be the one to come in. They are another goliath that retains some good technical people, but strategically knows little more than brute force nowadays to get into markets. They bought their way into second place in game consoles, they are trying to buy their way into some niche markets where Linux currently leads (both in the server room and embedded spaces). They tend to offer generally 'mostly sufficient' technology that doesn't really stack up to their competition or blow them away on a technical level, but earns what ground it can by sheer force of money earned through the markets they did corner at the right time with the right technology (invented or purchased). Through dumping (and even further, sometimes essentially bribing customers to use their products) they pursue an obsessive need to take over new markets.
In other words, I want to see Google challenged by a competitor on the strength of the technology they offer, not on the strength of a massive marketing budget and the ability to blatantly lose money for future market share. I have tons of respect for Google for actually innovating and revolutionizing search while every major player languished. I want another google, not microsoft, to get Google back on its toes.
If google has been sitting on their laurels, relatively speaking, and allowing SEO types to game the algorithm outside of Google's advertising model, then something is wrong. If Bing truly has a roughly comparable quality results without being vulnerable to current google SEO strategies, then maybe one way or another it could make SEO less effective.
On the other hand, more and more cell-phone devices are gaining userbase to worry about.. The picture is more interesting there...
Most mobile browsers still lack flash support, though their general capability of rendering and interacting with websites is nearing parity with desktop browsers otherwise.
So if your website can only expend effort to develop to one of Flash, Silverlight, or standard Javascript/HTML5, which do you pick? Desktop users in theory would be able to download a free browser to support the standards, but mobile phone users are quite limited. It may be wise to accommodate the market without much recourse and hedge your bets on free desktop apps filling the gap.
Even putting aside HTML5 for a moment, many people continue to use flash for things that can be readily handled in HTML4/Javascript/CSS broadly. Multimedia content isn't well accomodated, however some use flash just for 'dynamic' looking interfaces/content, which can largely be implemented in more universally available javascript.
1. Their marketing strategy seems to be to push the name 'Microsoft' as far away as possible. Interesting they view their own name as a liability in this space.
2. 'Bing is not google' abbreviation seems particularly weird. Suggesting that currently google has an oppressive, monopolistic grip on the search industry, leaving little choice but to have to go with them as they are the defacto standard. The company that wants to save a market from an oppressive, de-facto standard monopoly is.... Microsoft?
You say "most" accurately. There exist games more along the lines you described, particularly where NPCs are easily killed. Horror games have it (though most try to 'monsterify' what the PC kills, there are plenty of depictions of allies dying. Horror movies similarly do this all the time. I usually get a kick out of playing them particularly around Halloween to be in the spirit (though mindless gore is boring, it can emphasize the danger of an environment when done sparingly, leaving the rest of the game more suspenseful as a result). In both media, the popular instances tend to want the audience to sympathize with the victims (the whole point is to make the audience experience some fear), but people may choose to empathize in other ways and also these often end with a vengeful scene where the protagonist(s) does equally horrific things to the antagonist(s) at the end.
Yes, most of us would find a person obsessed with any media focused on these themes disturbing/worrying. If you want to claim a free society, then sure so long as everything is purely simulated/artificial and no one is actually subjected to any harm, we should allow them. It is possibly a bad idea for children to indulge in such games, as their personality isn't quite baked yet. If an adult indulges, I don't foresee it pushing them to commit atrocities. Some may claim a very realistic simulation allows some to sate their urges and allow them to relieve some temptation if they have those tendencies yet recognize them as wrong. I lack personal experience and am unaware of any definitive science supporting or debunking such claims.
No flash. I'm actually mixed on this one. On the one hand, it's inconvenient with the web as it is.
On the other hand, I hate how the web is, and if all these smart phones don't do flash, maybe the flash ads go away more.
More to the point, I don't see flash being supported without causing flash-based advertisements to go nuts and suck down battery life. 'FlashBlock' I use on my desktop to avoid annoyance. Flash on a phone could likely require it to not be totally screwed.
On the whole happy, but not without qualification:
-The browser was good. Relatively fast load and rendering, good touchscreen interaction. The one site so far that I have some problems using is google reader. The scrollable viewport for the articles isn't accommodated well. There are enough alternative navigation options in reader that I can get by, but I have to get used to them. Other sites depending on users to scroll within subelements like this may have issues. -The multitasking worked well. I did manage to hit a few websites with huge images that ended up exhausting the memory and requiring me to close 'cards' and only have 4 or so open, but these were very rare websites. -The device showed up as a usable mass-storage device, could access my pictures and stuff trivially. Can not access their 'OS' files. -The physical keypad works ok. The only other keyboard I've tried much in this class has been blackberry. The blackberry I could use 'reasonably' without any experience. My proficiency with the Pre is growing, but it wasn't as trivial as Blackberry keypads. -I didn't think I'd care much about one-handed operation, but it was more comfortable than having my hands so close together for a longer time. This might not have been the case for a landscape keyboard, but certainly the ability to operate one-handed is there if one cares, has comfort issues, or use it in relation to 3.1" porn. -The battery was relatively short lived in my first day usage. I was hammering the thing a lot more (constant music playing and browsing) than I would normally. An extended battery option is very possible (battery is quite accessible) and I wager likely. If I settle down in usage, it might be reasonable. Only time will tell. -The microUSB cover was a royal pain. After a few opens and closes, it freed up some. Still, it's a lot more inconvenient than what I had done previously. It's almost as if they are exacerbating a problem to make the overpriced Touchstone more appealing. -As well known, there is no storage expansion supported. I am disappointed with this in principal, though I don't have that much content myself. -No tethering yet. The device does not preset a CDC ACM device via USB, I don't think it does DUN profile (never used it before). Sprint's CSO said tethering will be possible, but no evidence to date. -It refuses to download files from the web it does not explicitly have a handler for. For example, if you have Classic and want to try a prc you see on the internet, you can't download it and move it on the phone to the right location. You must use another system to retrieve it and manipulate the Pre via USB mass storage mode. -The SDK is not out and their selection of applications is rather slim at the moment. I've played with 'WebShell'/'AjaxTerm', but it's impossible to use with Pre's inabliity to see that I'm trying to type in the page instead of a search. Even when it does work somewhat, it's clear I need a real SSH client and other applications.
When they say 'USB mass storage support', they mean the phone presents some aspect of its filesystem as a USB mass storage device at your request. So you have a 7GB 'thumb drive'.
AFAICT, your only options are via another computer to change the 7GB of content.
I think this was a pretty glaring mistake to make that they probably made based on 'hey, iphone doesn't have it!'.
I tracked the likely rumors and they seem consistent that things I'm not happy with on iPhone aren't fundamentally going to change. -High barrier to entry for SDK (I don't want to buy a new system to run the OS required and the cost on top of all that seems steep) -No physical keyboard (they have a philosophical beef with physical keys that I don't share) -AT&T (in my usage scenario, there is a significantly important gap in their coverage where *no* GSM carrier hits for some reason, on top of AT&T being more expensive before some discounts I qualify for and *much* more expensive after service discounts are considered) -Fixed battery (they sacrificed a key serviceability issue to achieve high capacity for form factor, which is a trade I'm not prepared to make) -The ability to multitask (Apple seems to have a philosophical view that users must be protected from themselves using a feature that might possibly run down the battery faster. The WebOS platform at least lets me decide whether using it is appropriate.
I admittedly took some risk with the pre in buying before their SDK was actually in my hands, but I'll take the leap that they are at the very least desperate enough to catch up to apple that they will follow up on their promise of a free SDK to do that. I would have personally loved to do Android earlier because of the open-ness of the platform, but the only hardware I like is currently on a GSM carrier and the upcoming ones I like are only announced for GSM carriers (for most, GSM is a good thing, but as above, my coverage area has a unique aspect to it)
Windows *is* required for many ESX/ESXi environments. Specifically, if you want many of the features, you must run VirtualCenter, which requires a Windows server. Live migration is a feature they currently tie to that product and *don't* expose via a public API straight to an ESX(i) hypervisor.
In terms of the 'perils' of a full blown OS 'over' another OS, that may not be as big of a deal. Xen and VMWare ESX have similar strategies of a management OS that runs as a privileged guest, true. They feel they best serve by being in full control. However, if configured right, Linux hosted virtualization guests, for example, can acheive very good IO with 'normal' looking guest devices. They can achieve great IO performance with paravirtualized adapters. A 'full-blown' os can be just as optimized to fulfill the role as hypervisor fine, there is no theoretical reason why not.
In terms of dismissal of FreeBSD as a desktop platform, I think that unwise. I personally don't do FreeBSD, but I do use Linux and I achieve great personal benefit.
When they went to journalling filesystems, by and large a simple mount operation turned into a mini-recovery operation, a psuedo-fsck if you will. This would even happen on read-only mounts, which to me violates expectations of no disk data being modified.
JFS had one 'quirk' that I think they got right, journal replay was an fsck-level event. A filesystem with a dirty journal could only be mounted read-only and the journal replay code was in fsck and had to be ran to enable remount read-write. There are numerous reasons why I stopped using JFS, but that is one point I kinda agreed with their quirkiness on.
I too had a 2TB RAID volume with ext4. I suffered the same situation. I continue to complain myself even though I have reformatted as ext3 and solved my problems, so that others will hear my issue and learn.
And before you claim my underlying IO must be flawed, a large part of my job is storage subsystem validation and I'm quite used to isolating which layer is inducing problems from storage controller hardware, drivers, or higher-layer os layers, and every thing I did, every test I ran, pointed to ext4 as the culprit in this case.
I have the *exact* same problem as the parent poster had (fsck being required with group descriptor corruption and/or resize inode issues). On clean reboots.
This system I have done lots of stress testing outside and inside of the running ext4 without rebooting, and have had no problems with ext3 or any data miscompare at all to suggest fundamental I/O misbehavior. I have only had problems with ext4. I have not seen data loss after fsck -y, but I have had to fsck -y a lot *despite* never having resized, converted, or suffering a crash on the afflicted system.
That being said, I have ext4 in three places. In two places (my smaller systems), I haven't observed this. I have only observed it on my 2 terabyte volume.
His point was that POSIX doesn't speak to crash behavior. As such, if a system detects a crash and zeroes the MBR and nearby blocks, it would still be POSIX compliant, but no one would plausibly be mollified by that.
The application isn't making a complex assertion based on undocumented behavior not contained in a spec, it's making a very simple assumption that if it writes data to a file, and then calls rename when those calls complete, that those two operations will proceed in order. It proceeds in order on the running system, and the desire expressed is that same ordering guarantee occurs to persistent storage (it is acceptable to be stale/lagged, so long as the second operation didn't jump in front of the other).
He presents three common cases for 'quickie' file modifications: -Modify-in-place. Yes, this logically cannot be expected to leave the content intact in an unexpected interruption. You ask the OS to blow away data, then send it new data, there is a logical indeterminate state in the middle where doing things in the order you specified leaves you exposed. -Write new file, use rename, using fsync to ensure a low exposure of data. This forces data to disk so it's coherent. -Write new file and then use rename without fsync: *This* he claims should easily be expected to corrupt the contents. I take issue with this. The fact that this occurs is because ext4 commits the rename out-of-order ahead of the data commit. I don't understand why the rename operation cannot also be delayed until after the data has been written out. I've seen several people ask 'I don't care that the change happens *now*, but I want the changes to occur in the order I specified', and thus far have seen Ts'o miss that point (intentionally or unintentionally). I have not read any explanation of why changing hardlinks should logically be an operation to jump ahead of pending data writeout. I could be missing something, but I'm not the only one with these questions.
fsync gives a relatively expensive guarantee above and beyond what people require to behave sanely. He says its inexpensive 'now' relative to the past. However, 'now' in this context only applies to ext4 users and thus the operation degrades other filesystem performance and fsync remains an expensive operation relative to not doing at all.
I have installed a system and have been getting resize inode invalid and group descriptors corrupted issues on clean reboots. fsck has yet to fail me, and IO stress tests have demonstrated no general io corruption other than ext4 errors.
On the flipside, for my applications I haven't really gained much.
It requires a great deal of programming discipline, which frankly humanity tends to lack. Absolutely, you can be more resource efficient if you are perfect about manual manipulation, but in practice developer time is sometimes best spent doing other things when the situation isn't one where resource usage efficiency is not a huge factor.
MS seems to have already done it..
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Phoenix BIOSOS?
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Asus has their own quickboot linux feature. However, when brought to market, they require windows to 'install' it. I suspect MS had no small role in that (you can have your rapid-boot device, but you must have MS to enable that)
Yes, a lot of administrators do overextend the view of their role.
That being said, the job is to make sure the systems work without required too large an overhead. If an administrator is tied up supporting 5 users out of 200 95% of the time, their job becomes to reign in those 5 and give the other 195 users the support they need.
To another extent, a role is enforcing the business dictated access controls and auditing. If a janitor can somehow access all the data a corporation has, again an administrator is not doing their job.
A third aspect is helping to manage liability. Much of the popular 'freeware' people want to put on workstations have explicit license terms about not being used in commercial contexts without compensation. Again, an administrator has the responsibility of protecting the workplace from that exposure as well.
So yes, detection of unknown/uncharacterised software can be an important aspect of an administrators job. Finding a balance between that and allowing the users to do their jobs is a thin line to walk.
Ethernet is cheaply at 1 gigabit now right? 802.11n need not be bridged to 100 mbit anymore, and probably isn't.
Now, to the pure BS mode, where I will completely pull stuff out of my ass without data.
802.11n purports to be ~450 mbit in theory. If a shared media, than you could have two wireless peers near each other, each sucking up 200 mbit of the throughput to acheive equivalence to 100 mbit.
In summary, at extremely small scale I could see 802.11n beating out 100mbit.
I concur though that an 802.11n access point has 450 mbit total in theory, while an equivalent 24-port gigabit switch would likely have 48 gigabit/s throughput to accomodate roughly the same number of users.
First off, extra caution should be kept in mind in dealing with actions from a convicted monopolist.
That said, two aspects worry me: -Government endorsement of the program. This is just so very peculiar and even outside of the monopolist context, kind of disturbing. -I suspect they'll be able to write off expenses incurred in this as a donation. However, MS extracts a non-trivial amount of marketing leverage and as such, expenses should not be considered charitable in nature. As anyone who has undergone MCSE training, MS training programs are comprised of a significant amount of salesmanship.
The fact that Adobe happens to explicitly exert effort to support Linux makes their solution no less proprietary.
It is a more flexible and ubiquitous proprietary technology, but that is not inherently more 'open' by simple virtue of it supporting more permutations.
A non-proprietary technology would be one the open source community could re-create without reverse engineering. Interestingly enough, I think Silverlight as it stands at this moment can be re-implemented by the community more readily than Flash. The 'moonlight' implementation compared to Silverlight is much 'closer' to functional relative to the relationship between Gnash and Flash given the time each has been able to reproduce the respective technologies.
That being said, I still would actually throw in at this point with Adobe rather than MS. Adobe is straightforward about the technology and their approach. MS is talking up their 'openness' and making 'some' good on it, but given their history, it's easy to perceive they play that up out of mere necessity, will somehow prevent moonlight from being 'good enough', and if they ever manage to extinguish flash, drop all pretense of openness in a heartbeat and release a major version of silverlight to ensure obsolescence of the open implementation.
It's not uncommon, there is a prevalent pro-nVidia sentiment in the Linux user world, for example. Yes, AMD and Intel both have much better explicit open-source efforts. Yes, AMD graphics hardware is viable in the high-end relative to nVidia. However, the best 3D and video performance under linux continues to be the nVidia driver, and that is often preferred despite its closed nature to open alternatives. AMD's closed driver has been ok on the 3D front, but more prone to bugs yet and no video decode api supported yet. I say this despite explicitly choosing Intel on my laptop and AMD graphics for my desktop, just recognizing a common view I see.
In Linux, RAID5 is equally available in software as RAID1. The controller requirements are equal, no third party software required. This has been the case for many years. In Windows, I'm not sure what the situation is, as they at least restrict their workstation/desktop platforms to not have that feature built in and my experience in that realm is limited outside that scope.
My most recent build, for example, I did 4 drives of 750 GB drives for an approximate capacity of 2.25 TB (counting the manufacturer way). RAID1 by itself isn't going to do it, and 'RAID0+1' with 4 1 TB drives gets you to 2 TB of storage at increased cost. The cost/GB goes up from 750GB to 1TB currently, and you are paying for 4TB at that increased rate rather than 3.2 TB of storage at the cheaper rate. I really fail to understand the point of 0+1, it reduces the reliability compared to mirroring, isn't much better than RAID5 reliability-wise (if the *right* two drives in a 4 drive 0+1 setup fail, you will make it, but any other combo would fail just the same), and yields smaller capacity. Admittedly, the IO performance can be very good in that situation, but most applications do not extract enough benefit from that to make a difference for most uses.
If the desired capacity is smaller than the generally cheapest drives, 3 drives for RAID 5 is pointless. Anything other than that and you have to start doing the relatively trivial math to figure out the cost for mirror vs. raid5 of lower capacity drives to achieve the same end. For most people if 0+1 starts entering the equation, they would be better off with RAID5/6 with faster drives than 0+1 of cheaper slow drives.
Slashdot Mirror
You can either filter on a sophisticated ruleset te detect what you describe, or you can block one host in one domain (the same domain of 'bing.com', just a different host record within it....)
It's good that google accommodated the need, but just because Google did it one way and MS did it another that Google's way must be better (by better, this would mean easier).
It would help to have the flaws in MS's approach actually described and how Google's overcomes it.
On the one hand, the lack of a technologically compelling competitor to Google concerns me. As a consequence, google susceptibility to SEO gaming is significant, but Google doesn't have a sound business justification to change what is working unless a competitor outdoes them. Unfortunately, in business the only 'justifiable' time to fund improvements is when there is *something* to gain and Google simply has nothing to gain in this context without competition.
On the other hand, I don't think Microsoft should be the one to come in. They are another goliath that retains some good technical people, but strategically knows little more than brute force nowadays to get into markets. They bought their way into second place in game consoles, they are trying to buy their way into some niche markets where Linux currently leads (both in the server room and embedded spaces). They tend to offer generally 'mostly sufficient' technology that doesn't really stack up to their competition or blow them away on a technical level, but earns what ground it can by sheer force of money earned through the markets they did corner at the right time with the right technology (invented or purchased). Through dumping (and even further, sometimes essentially bribing customers to use their products) they pursue an obsessive need to take over new markets.
In other words, I want to see Google challenged by a competitor on the strength of the technology they offer, not on the strength of a massive marketing budget and the ability to blatantly lose money for future market share. I have tons of respect for Google for actually innovating and revolutionizing search while every major player languished. I want another google, not microsoft, to get Google back on its toes.
If google has been sitting on their laurels, relatively speaking, and allowing SEO types to game the algorithm outside of Google's advertising model, then something is wrong. If Bing truly has a roughly comparable quality results without being vulnerable to current google SEO strategies, then maybe one way or another it could make SEO less effective.
On the other hand, more and more cell-phone devices are gaining userbase to worry about.. The picture is more interesting there...
Most mobile browsers still lack flash support, though their general capability of rendering and interacting with websites is nearing parity with desktop browsers otherwise.
So if your website can only expend effort to develop to one of Flash, Silverlight, or standard Javascript/HTML5, which do you pick? Desktop users in theory would be able to download a free browser to support the standards, but mobile phone users are quite limited. It may be wise to accommodate the market without much recourse and hedge your bets on free desktop apps filling the gap.
Even putting aside HTML5 for a moment, many people continue to use flash for things that can be readily handled in HTML4/Javascript/CSS broadly. Multimedia content isn't well accomodated, however some use flash just for 'dynamic' looking interfaces/content, which can largely be implemented in more universally available javascript.
Allegedly it is at least internal to microsoft.
1. Their marketing strategy seems to be to push the name 'Microsoft' as far away as possible. Interesting they view their own name as a liability in this space.
2. 'Bing is not google' abbreviation seems particularly weird. Suggesting that currently google has an oppressive, monopolistic grip on the search industry, leaving little choice but to have to go with them as they are the defacto standard. The company that wants to save a market from an oppressive, de-facto standard monopoly is.... Microsoft?
You say "most" accurately. There exist games more along the lines you described, particularly where NPCs are easily killed. Horror games have it (though most try to 'monsterify' what the PC kills, there are plenty of depictions of allies dying. Horror movies similarly do this all the time. I usually get a kick out of playing them particularly around Halloween to be in the spirit (though mindless gore is boring, it can emphasize the danger of an environment when done sparingly, leaving the rest of the game more suspenseful as a result). In both media, the popular instances tend to want the audience to sympathize with the victims (the whole point is to make the audience experience some fear), but people may choose to empathize in other ways and also these often end with a vengeful scene where the protagonist(s) does equally horrific things to the antagonist(s) at the end.
Yes, most of us would find a person obsessed with any media focused on these themes disturbing/worrying. If you want to claim a free society, then sure so long as everything is purely simulated/artificial and no one is actually subjected to any harm, we should allow them. It is possibly a bad idea for children to indulge in such games, as their personality isn't quite baked yet. If an adult indulges, I don't foresee it pushing them to commit atrocities. Some may claim a very realistic simulation allows some to sate their urges and allow them to relieve some temptation if they have those tendencies yet recognize them as wrong. I lack personal experience and am unaware of any definitive science supporting or debunking such claims.
No flash. I'm actually mixed on this one.
On the one hand, it's inconvenient with the web as it is.
On the other hand, I hate how the web is, and if all these smart phones don't do flash, maybe the flash ads go away more.
More to the point, I don't see flash being supported without causing flash-based advertisements to go nuts and suck down battery life. 'FlashBlock' I use on my desktop to avoid annoyance. Flash on a phone could likely require it to not be totally screwed.
On the whole happy, but not without qualification:
-The browser was good. Relatively fast load and rendering, good touchscreen interaction. The one site so far that I have some problems using is google reader. The scrollable viewport for the articles isn't accommodated well. There are enough alternative navigation options in reader that I can get by, but I have to get used to them. Other sites depending on users to scroll within subelements like this may have issues.
-The multitasking worked well. I did manage to hit a few websites with huge images that ended up exhausting the memory and requiring me to close 'cards' and only have 4 or so open, but these were very rare websites.
-The device showed up as a usable mass-storage device, could access my pictures and stuff trivially. Can not access their 'OS' files.
-The physical keypad works ok. The only other keyboard I've tried much in this class has been blackberry. The blackberry I could use 'reasonably' without any experience. My proficiency with the Pre is growing, but it wasn't as trivial as Blackberry keypads.
-I didn't think I'd care much about one-handed operation, but it was more comfortable than having my hands so close together for a longer time. This might not have been the case for a landscape keyboard, but certainly the ability to operate one-handed is there if one cares, has comfort issues, or use it in relation to 3.1" porn.
-The battery was relatively short lived in my first day usage. I was hammering the thing a lot more (constant music playing and browsing) than I would normally. An extended battery option is very possible (battery is quite accessible) and I wager likely. If I settle down in usage, it might be reasonable. Only time will tell.
-The microUSB cover was a royal pain. After a few opens and closes, it freed up some. Still, it's a lot more inconvenient than what I had done previously. It's almost as if they are exacerbating a problem to make the overpriced Touchstone more appealing.
-As well known, there is no storage expansion supported. I am disappointed with this in principal, though I don't have that much content myself.
-No tethering yet. The device does not preset a CDC ACM device via USB, I don't think it does DUN profile (never used it before). Sprint's CSO said tethering will be possible, but no evidence to date.
-It refuses to download files from the web it does not explicitly have a handler for. For example, if you have Classic and want to try a prc you see on the internet, you can't download it and move it on the phone to the right location. You must use another system to retrieve it and manipulate the Pre via USB mass storage mode.
-The SDK is not out and their selection of applications is rather slim at the moment. I've played with 'WebShell'/'AjaxTerm', but it's impossible to use with Pre's inabliity to see that I'm trying to type in the page instead of a search. Even when it does work somewhat, it's clear I need a real SSH client and other applications.
When they say 'USB mass storage support', they mean the phone presents some aspect of its filesystem as a USB mass storage device at your request. So you have a 7GB 'thumb drive'.
AFAICT, your only options are via another computer to change the 7GB of content.
I think this was a pretty glaring mistake to make that they probably made based on 'hey, iphone doesn't have it!'.
I tracked the likely rumors and they seem consistent that things I'm not happy with on iPhone aren't fundamentally going to change.
-High barrier to entry for SDK (I don't want to buy a new system to run the OS required and the cost on top of all that seems steep)
-No physical keyboard (they have a philosophical beef with physical keys that I don't share)
-AT&T (in my usage scenario, there is a significantly important gap in their coverage where *no* GSM carrier hits for some reason, on top of AT&T being more expensive before some discounts I qualify for and *much* more expensive after service discounts are considered)
-Fixed battery (they sacrificed a key serviceability issue to achieve high capacity for form factor, which is a trade I'm not prepared to make)
-The ability to multitask (Apple seems to have a philosophical view that users must be protected from themselves using a feature that might possibly run down the battery faster. The WebOS platform at least lets me decide whether using it is appropriate.
I admittedly took some risk with the pre in buying before their SDK was actually in my hands, but I'll take the leap that they are at the very least desperate enough to catch up to apple that they will follow up on their promise of a free SDK to do that. I would have personally loved to do Android earlier because of the open-ness of the platform, but the only hardware I like is currently on a GSM carrier and the upcoming ones I like are only announced for GSM carriers (for most, GSM is a good thing, but as above, my coverage area has a unique aspect to it)
Windows *is* required for many ESX/ESXi environments. Specifically, if you want many of the features, you must run VirtualCenter, which requires a Windows server. Live migration is a feature they currently tie to that product and *don't* expose via a public API straight to an ESX(i) hypervisor.
In terms of the 'perils' of a full blown OS 'over' another OS, that may not be as big of a deal. Xen and VMWare ESX have similar strategies of a management OS that runs as a privileged guest, true. They feel they best serve by being in full control. However, if configured right, Linux hosted virtualization guests, for example, can acheive very good IO with 'normal' looking guest devices. They can achieve great IO performance with paravirtualized adapters. A 'full-blown' os can be just as optimized to fulfill the role as hypervisor fine, there is no theoretical reason why not.
In terms of dismissal of FreeBSD as a desktop platform, I think that unwise. I personally don't do FreeBSD, but I do use Linux and I achieve great personal benefit.
When they went to journalling filesystems, by and large a simple mount operation turned into a mini-recovery operation, a psuedo-fsck if you will. This would even happen on read-only mounts, which to me violates expectations of no disk data being modified.
JFS had one 'quirk' that I think they got right, journal replay was an fsck-level event. A filesystem with a dirty journal could only be mounted read-only and the journal replay code was in fsck and had to be ran to enable remount read-write. There are numerous reasons why I stopped using JFS, but that is one point I kinda agreed with their quirkiness on.
I too had a 2TB RAID volume with ext4. I suffered the same situation. I continue to complain myself even though I have reformatted as ext3 and solved my problems, so that others will hear my issue and learn.
And before you claim my underlying IO must be flawed, a large part of my job is storage subsystem validation and I'm quite used to isolating which layer is inducing problems from storage controller hardware, drivers, or higher-layer os layers, and every thing I did, every test I ran, pointed to ext4 as the culprit in this case.
I have the *exact* same problem as the parent poster had (fsck being required with group descriptor corruption and/or resize inode issues). On clean reboots.
This system I have done lots of stress testing outside and inside of the running ext4 without rebooting, and have had no problems with ext3 or any data miscompare at all to suggest fundamental I/O misbehavior. I have only had problems with ext4. I have not seen data loss after fsck -y, but I have had to fsck -y a lot *despite* never having resized, converted, or suffering a crash on the afflicted system.
That being said, I have ext4 in three places. In two places (my smaller systems), I haven't observed this. I have only observed it on my 2 terabyte volume.
His point was that POSIX doesn't speak to crash behavior. As such, if a system detects a crash and zeroes the MBR and nearby blocks, it would still be POSIX compliant, but no one would plausibly be mollified by that.
The application isn't making a complex assertion based on undocumented behavior not contained in a spec, it's making a very simple assumption that if it writes data to a file, and then calls rename when those calls complete, that those two operations will proceed in order. It proceeds in order on the running system, and the desire expressed is that same ordering guarantee occurs to persistent storage (it is acceptable to be stale/lagged, so long as the second operation didn't jump in front of the other).
He presents three common cases for 'quickie' file modifications:
-Modify-in-place. Yes, this logically cannot be expected to leave the content intact in an unexpected interruption. You ask the OS to blow away data, then send it new data, there is a logical indeterminate state in the middle where doing things in the order you specified leaves you exposed.
-Write new file, use rename, using fsync to ensure a low exposure of data. This forces data to disk so it's coherent.
-Write new file and then use rename without fsync:
*This* he claims should easily be expected to corrupt the contents. I take issue with this. The fact that this occurs is because ext4 commits the rename out-of-order ahead of the data commit. I don't understand why the rename operation cannot also be delayed until after the data has been written out. I've seen several people ask 'I don't care that the change happens *now*, but I want the changes to occur in the order I specified', and thus far have seen Ts'o miss that point (intentionally or unintentionally). I have not read any explanation of why changing hardlinks should logically be an operation to jump ahead of pending data writeout. I could be missing something, but I'm not the only one with these questions.
fsync gives a relatively expensive guarantee above and beyond what people require to behave sanely. He says its inexpensive 'now' relative to the past. However, 'now' in this context only applies to ext4 users and thus the operation degrades other filesystem performance and fsync remains an expensive operation relative to not doing at all.
In terms of the general attitude of filesystems shrugging off data consistency so long as their indexes are intact, I find myself agreeing with Torvalds' comments on the debacle:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/811167/focus=811700
I have installed a system and have been getting resize inode invalid and group descriptors corrupted issues on clean reboots. fsck has yet to fail me, and IO stress tests have demonstrated no general io corruption other than ext4 errors.
On the flipside, for my applications I haven't really gained much.
It requires a great deal of programming discipline, which frankly humanity tends to lack. Absolutely, you can be more resource efficient if you are perfect about manual manipulation, but in practice developer time is sometimes best spent doing other things when the situation isn't one where resource usage efficiency is not a huge factor.
Asus has their own quickboot linux feature. However, when brought to market, they require windows to 'install' it. I suspect MS had no small role in that (you can have your rapid-boot device, but you must have MS to enable that)
Yes, a lot of administrators do overextend the view of their role.
That being said, the job is to make sure the systems work without required too large an overhead. If an administrator is tied up supporting 5 users out of 200 95% of the time, their job becomes to reign in those 5 and give the other 195 users the support they need.
To another extent, a role is enforcing the business dictated access controls and auditing. If a janitor can somehow access all the data a corporation has, again an administrator is not doing their job.
A third aspect is helping to manage liability. Much of the popular 'freeware' people want to put on workstations have explicit license terms about not being used in commercial contexts without compensation. Again, an administrator has the responsibility of protecting the workplace from that exposure as well.
So yes, detection of unknown/uncharacterised software can be an important aspect of an administrators job. Finding a balance between that and allowing the users to do their jobs is a thin line to walk.
Ethernet is cheaply at 1 gigabit now right? 802.11n need not be bridged to 100 mbit anymore, and probably isn't.
Now, to the pure BS mode, where I will completely pull stuff out of my ass without data.
802.11n purports to be ~450 mbit in theory. If a shared media, than you could have two wireless peers near each other, each sucking up 200 mbit of the throughput to acheive equivalence to 100 mbit.
In summary, at extremely small scale I could see 802.11n beating out 100mbit.
I concur though that an 802.11n access point has 450 mbit total in theory, while an equivalent 24-port gigabit switch would likely have 48 gigabit/s throughput to accomodate roughly the same number of users.
First off, extra caution should be kept in mind in dealing with actions from a convicted monopolist.
That said, two aspects worry me:
-Government endorsement of the program. This is just so very peculiar and even outside of the monopolist context, kind of disturbing.
-I suspect they'll be able to write off expenses incurred in this as a donation. However, MS extracts a non-trivial amount of marketing leverage and as such, expenses should not be considered charitable in nature. As anyone who has undergone MCSE training, MS training programs are comprised of a significant amount of salesmanship.
The fact that Adobe happens to explicitly exert effort to support Linux makes their solution no less proprietary.
It is a more flexible and ubiquitous proprietary technology, but that is not inherently more 'open' by simple virtue of it supporting more permutations.
A non-proprietary technology would be one the open source community could re-create without reverse engineering. Interestingly enough, I think Silverlight as it stands at this moment can be re-implemented by the community more readily than Flash. The 'moonlight' implementation compared to Silverlight is much 'closer' to functional relative to the relationship between Gnash and Flash given the time each has been able to reproduce the respective technologies.
That being said, I still would actually throw in at this point with Adobe rather than MS. Adobe is straightforward about the technology and their approach. MS is talking up their 'openness' and making 'some' good on it, but given their history, it's easy to perceive they play that up out of mere necessity, will somehow prevent moonlight from being 'good enough', and if they ever manage to extinguish flash, drop all pretense of openness in a heartbeat and release a major version of silverlight to ensure obsolescence of the open implementation.
It's not uncommon, there is a prevalent pro-nVidia sentiment in the Linux user world, for example. Yes, AMD and Intel both have much better explicit open-source efforts. Yes, AMD graphics hardware is viable in the high-end relative to nVidia. However, the best 3D and video performance under linux continues to be the nVidia driver, and that is often preferred despite its closed nature to open alternatives. AMD's closed driver has been ok on the 3D front, but more prone to bugs yet and no video decode api supported yet. I say this despite explicitly choosing Intel on my laptop and AMD graphics for my desktop, just recognizing a common view I see.
In Linux, RAID5 is equally available in software as RAID1. The controller requirements are equal, no third party software required. This has been the case for many years. In Windows, I'm not sure what the situation is, as they at least restrict their workstation/desktop platforms to not have that feature built in and my experience in that realm is limited outside that scope.
My most recent build, for example, I did 4 drives of 750 GB drives for an approximate capacity of 2.25 TB (counting the manufacturer way). RAID1 by itself isn't going to do it, and 'RAID0+1' with 4 1 TB drives gets you to 2 TB of storage at increased cost. The cost/GB goes up from 750GB to 1TB currently, and you are paying for 4TB at that increased rate rather than 3.2 TB of storage at the cheaper rate. I really fail to understand the point of 0+1, it reduces the reliability compared to mirroring, isn't much better than RAID5 reliability-wise (if the *right* two drives in a 4 drive 0+1 setup fail, you will make it, but any other combo would fail just the same), and yields smaller capacity. Admittedly, the IO performance can be very good in that situation, but most applications do not extract enough benefit from that to make a difference for most uses.
If the desired capacity is smaller than the generally cheapest drives, 3 drives for RAID 5 is pointless. Anything other than that and you have to start doing the relatively trivial math to figure out the cost for mirror vs. raid5 of lower capacity drives to achieve the same end. For most people if 0+1 starts entering the equation, they would be better off with RAID5/6 with faster drives than 0+1 of cheaper slow drives.