Start small, with government sites, and see if we can merely catch up to the accessibility practices of leading internet companies.
You mean it wasn't the Government who mandated Google develop Google Voice with voicemail transcription and voting to develop a massive bayesian classifier for voice recognition algorithms so that they could recognize the content of YouTube videos and sell ads alongside them?
Really, you're suggesting profit motive drives innovation and the march of progress lifts all boats? It's a non-zero-sum game?
Why, you sound just like a communist. Oh, wait, no, that's not it. Um, oh, hell, I'm bad at this part.
I've been working on a device which is capable of communicating with legislators, which it does via whacks to the head with a cardboard tube. 1 whack for yes, 64 for no, etc.
You've got the polarity reversed there, buddy. A 'no' vote on everything is the preferable base case.
Unless there is some requirement for accessibility, blind people will be denied the ability to read, shut off from all education and employment. Are you OK with that, seriously?
Hold on a sec. Deep breath. You're not on Slashdot because you hate technology.
Now, then, we're talking about an all-digital world. Where we have good text-to-speech software, better than Ray Kurzweil's reader from the 1970's. His device, and similar devices today, are mostly limited by the quality of OCR.
By contrast, an all-digital world is a dream for blind people who want to consume books. How much of a pain in the ass is it to have a home reader where you have to align pages of a physical book, turn them, etc. vs. having an iPod-form-factor device that can download most any book from Amazon?
There are 2-3 million blind (enough) people in the United States alone to make this a hugely attractive market. The only thing that can get in the way of a product like this is the government itself. Its copyright laws (DMCA and standard) with threats of 'rapecage or death' for violators may dissuade profit-seekers from doing a DRM-break on whatever formats are common. This a potential multi-billion-dollar industry, they just need to get out of the way if they care about blind people.
That logic didn't come out of nowhere. It is it the end state of egalitarianism: if we ALL can't do it, then no one can.
I'm working on an essay looking at egalitarianism as a societal form of OCD. I'd be interested in comments from the peanut gallery^W^W insightful Slashdot crowd.
If it was consumer focused, this feature would be advertised as a selling point on cell phones
Well, some people think it's a good idea, but notice that unless they wanted to mandate radio quality, it's not likely to have even a minor benefit. I just send the kids off on a road trip with a couple new video players. These are great little no-name devices - they play most formats, come with enough storage for a long car trip (900Kb mpeg4 via ffmpeg), do audio, video, ebooks - and FM radio.
Now, that last one seems odd, doesn't it? I thought so and decided to check it out, just for grins. Now, I don't live in an area with much on the dial, and I have good radios at the house for picking up more distant stations, but there are 3-4 strong local stations that can be heard anywhere. Except on these little things. The FM radio is effectively useless, the strongest stations cut in and out.
My suspicion is some marketdroid insisted on that extra feature, but whoever designed the unit for sale (or at the Chinese reference design) knew that almost nobody would use it and keeping the price low was the biggest goal. So they put in a very very cheap, worthless radio. All that really results in is a slightly higher price, more UI clutter, and probably slightly reduced battery life.
Any mandate like this would likely result in the same course of action, mostly causing harm. Of course, mandating radios in telephones isn't one of the enumerated Powers of Congress last I looked, so I can't blame the *AA or corrupt politicians quite so much as the People who let them get away with this nonsense. And, perhaps ultimately, they'll be the ones who wind up shouldering the outcome with crappier phones.
No, seriously, I've thought this since I started hearing about DNSSEC. 'Hey, wait, if we have a way to verify that a DNS response is from the proper owners, then why not simply use that to transmit a fingerprint of a cert, to 'sign' it that way?'
Right, and many of the arguments for the CA hierarchy and that shakedown go away. Not all, I'll admit, but most.
So, great resistance ought to be expected. Kudos to the guys at Google.
Since you can get a pretty good ZFS on FreeBSD for creating filers
We really need FreeBSD 9 and v23 pools. That's the win. It's not quite there yet, probably a year away. Block-level de-dup is so important for big NAS.
Only people creating filers with complex disk pools really need ZFS, because for a workstation system it offers no advantages regarding the security of your data and indeed may make your storage less reliable in that context
My workstations are Linux, but I keep good backups of them, because every once in a while I suffer a crash that eats ext3/4 and I lose up to a day's work. I'm fairly sick of that, and like bringing up a machine that's always got a consistent filesystem. bcache will likely be good enough at some point to replace the L2ARC, but we're really close to the point of having small SSD's be cheap enough to throw in a desktop machine to make the disk access blazing. Seagate's XT disks help a bit, but they're just limited to not knowing enough about the data.
I did a quick google for the old 1977 crowds and they all look 30 or younger. The films appealed mainly to the young people, just like today's movie do.
30 year-olds have children and thus run out of time and money. By time they can go out again they've realized that most movies are just as enjoyable, if not more, on DVD or streaming.
Get with the program, man, that was released on Friday.
I kid - the only way I found it was to search on the gp's suggestion, find an article on wikipedia about a different record type, linked to a wikipedia page on dns record types, found an SSH type (SSHFP) that was sort of like what you suggested, and then from there reasoned that the right type should be called 'TLSFP', and voila, Google RFC out on Friday. Freakin' intarwebs.
They thought of a few features I missed in the few minutes between clicks above, it looks pretty sold.
Compared to what? For instance, there are probably more OpenSolaris/Nexenta ZFS users than NetApp users. If hardware support were narrowed to a few decent options there, the work isn't enormous.
The only real advantage is ZFS and you can get that on Linux in more and more ways all the time. Someday the performance might even be adequate.
Right, there's really no option now on Linux that anybody would seriously use. That's changing, slowly but steadily. We have hardware that works today.
Also, Solaris can eek 20% or so more disk performance out of a machine than Linux can. I'm not sure why, I just see the raw disk rates.
I remember what being a Solaris admin was like, and if you fix everything wrong with it, you'll have Linux.
Again, ZFS is the killer app. ZFS makes setting up iscsi, NFS, and smb shares much easier than linux. I do both.
If not for the CDDL/GPL problem, this would go away almost overnight, but here we are, having to worry about governmental attacks for mixing code.
Optical readers in the visible and invisible spectrum and software that can allow for edges that aren't razor straight? It's a reasonable guess.
Yeah, I guess the rollers could just be wide enough to handle the largest note on the diagonal. I've got a laser printer that if you don't feed in the paper with the straighteners will make a spitball out of the paper. I'd love to have one that could deal with paper on an arbitrary skew.
What problems have you had? I don't push it very hard.
I'm not arguing for CIFS in-kernel on FreeBSD, but for tighter integration for ZFS and (presumably) Samba. It's the sysadmin aspect of the ZFS tools that makes it really nice to work with.
Legalize it all damn ready. Seriously, executive order, make it happen.
Presidents have learned not to mess with black ops budgets.
Besides, once Mexico fails, we can have a good old-fashioned land war, 'save' the Mexican people, and add more payers into our entitlement programs. What could possibly go wrong?
ZFS-FUSE is a pretty amazing effort, but it tends to be buggy and big on memory consumption, from what I've read. It's also at the wrong layer.
I have high hopes for ZFS in FreeBSD 9. Due to their compatibility requirements, they can't get zpools > v16 in FreeBSD 8 (and it sounds like it'll only be 15 at this point). If 9 has zpool v23, there will be much rockage.
Tightly integrated CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI would also be welcome.
For a straight NAS box, OpenSolaris is just where it's at... for now.
Their efforts would be _vastly_ better spent helping to port and/or maintain the handful of genuinely interesting features (ZFS, DTrace, etc) in OpenSolaris, to FreeBSD.
Well, I can't argue with you there. I suspect being able to build OpenSolaris would be helpful in that transition, so perhaps it's not for naught.
Traits occurring through random mutation that are useful for a species to reproduce tend to be picked up, and traits that expend resources that offer no benefit tend to be lost.
The idea that thousands of plant species could have convergently picked up a complex set of traits (poison pollen, communications systems) that were never useful before but required resources to maintain - asymptotically approaches zero.
Synergism of neurons can create inordinately complex results, but that does not create a qualitative upheaval in which "intention" is born. Free will cannot exist without cause-and-effect. If we truly had free will, our actions would have no correlation to our environment at all... but they do.
Yes, I'm familiar with the Free Will arguments. That Will is predictable, given perfect knowledge of all the inputs and states (including quantum uncertainty) is true, but that knowledge is unattainable, so 'free will' is used to describe an abstraction of the human experience. The same could be said of any of the other human mental states - anger, love, happiness, sadness, calmness, inspiration, depression. That one can explain the hormones or neurotransmitters involved in creating those states does not make the words less useful for describing the human condition.
This isn't superstition, though, it's pragmatism. Sitting around in a nihilistic funk winds up not being a useful exercise. Using these abstractions lets us talk about humanity. Describing the mechanics lets us talk about a human being. Simply describing the anatomy and physiology is insufficient to describe the emergent behavioral features.
That said, I don't think ZFS was going anywhere anyways. It's incompatible license meant it wasn't ever going to get going in Linux, and Linux has far too much momentum for OpenSolaris to have dethroned it as the open source world's golden boy.
Actually the ZFS storage layer was recently ported to Linux. You can use it with Lustre today, perhaps some databases. The POSIX layer is being worked on.
Due to the licensing conflict, distribution is an open problem. Probably end-users will need to install this themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Start small, with government sites, and see if we can merely catch up to the accessibility practices of leading internet companies.
You mean it wasn't the Government who mandated Google develop Google Voice with voicemail transcription and voting to develop a massive bayesian classifier for voice recognition algorithms so that they could recognize the content of YouTube videos and sell ads alongside them?
Really, you're suggesting profit motive drives innovation and the march of progress lifts all boats? It's a non-zero-sum game?
Why, you sound just like a communist. Oh, wait, no, that's not it. Um, oh, hell, I'm bad at this part.
Happy to oblige.
I'm honestly interested in your thoughts on why that couldn't work.
Just an off-thought: how do you make a web device (or anything else for that matter) accessible to a mute, blind, deaf, quadriplegic?
What, you don't care about the mute, blind, deaf, dyslexic quadriplegics? This is why we need the government to regulate people like you.
I've been working on a device which is capable of communicating with legislators, which it does via whacks to the head with a cardboard tube. 1 whack for yes, 64 for no, etc.
You've got the polarity reversed there, buddy. A 'no' vote on everything is the preferable base case.
Unless there is some requirement for accessibility, blind people will be denied the ability to read, shut off from all education and employment. Are you OK with that, seriously?
Hold on a sec. Deep breath. You're not on Slashdot because you hate technology.
Now, then, we're talking about an all-digital world. Where we have good text-to-speech software, better than Ray Kurzweil's reader from the 1970's. His device, and similar devices today, are mostly limited by the quality of OCR.
By contrast, an all-digital world is a dream for blind people who want to consume books. How much of a pain in the ass is it to have a home reader where you have to align pages of a physical book, turn them, etc. vs. having an iPod-form-factor device that can download most any book from Amazon?
There are 2-3 million blind (enough) people in the United States alone to make this a hugely attractive market. The only thing that can get in the way of a product like this is the government itself. Its copyright laws (DMCA and standard) with threats of 'rapecage or death' for violators may dissuade profit-seekers from doing a DRM-break on whatever formats are common. This a potential multi-billion-dollar industry, they just need to get out of the way if they care about blind people.
That logic didn't come out of nowhere. It is it the end state of egalitarianism: if we ALL can't do it, then no one can.
I'm working on an essay looking at egalitarianism as a societal form of OCD. I'd be interested in comments from the peanut gallery^W^W insightful Slashdot crowd.
If it was consumer focused, this feature would be advertised as a selling point on cell phones
Well, some people think it's a good idea, but notice that unless they wanted to mandate radio quality, it's not likely to have even a minor benefit. I just send the kids off on a road trip with a couple new video players. These are great little no-name devices - they play most formats, come with enough storage for a long car trip (900Kb mpeg4 via ffmpeg), do audio, video, ebooks - and FM radio.
Now, that last one seems odd, doesn't it? I thought so and decided to check it out, just for grins. Now, I don't live in an area with much on the dial, and I have good radios at the house for picking up more distant stations, but there are 3-4 strong local stations that can be heard anywhere. Except on these little things. The FM radio is effectively useless, the strongest stations cut in and out.
My suspicion is some marketdroid insisted on that extra feature, but whoever designed the unit for sale (or at the Chinese reference design) knew that almost nobody would use it and keeping the price low was the biggest goal. So they put in a very very cheap, worthless radio. All that really results in is a slightly higher price, more UI clutter, and probably slightly reduced battery life.
Any mandate like this would likely result in the same course of action, mostly causing harm. Of course, mandating radios in telephones isn't one of the enumerated Powers of Congress last I looked, so I can't blame the *AA or corrupt politicians quite so much as the People who let them get away with this nonsense. And, perhaps ultimately, they'll be the ones who wind up shouldering the outcome with crappier phones.
No, seriously, I've thought this since I started hearing about DNSSEC. 'Hey, wait, if we have a way to verify that a DNS response is from the proper owners, then why not simply use that to transmit a fingerprint of a cert, to 'sign' it that way?'
Right, and many of the arguments for the CA hierarchy and that shakedown go away. Not all, I'll admit, but most.
So, great resistance ought to be expected. Kudos to the guys at Google.
Since you can get a pretty good ZFS on FreeBSD for creating filers
We really need FreeBSD 9 and v23 pools. That's the win. It's not quite there yet, probably a year away. Block-level de-dup is so important for big NAS.
Only people creating filers with complex disk pools really need ZFS, because for a workstation system it offers no advantages regarding the security of your data and indeed may make your storage less reliable in that context
My workstations are Linux, but I keep good backups of them, because every once in a while I suffer a crash that eats ext3/4 and I lose up to a day's work. I'm fairly sick of that, and like bringing up a machine that's always got a consistent filesystem. bcache will likely be good enough at some point to replace the L2ARC, but we're really close to the point of having small SSD's be cheap enough to throw in a desktop machine to make the disk access blazing. Seagate's XT disks help a bit, but they're just limited to not knowing enough about the data.
6. Indiana Jones in a refrigerator. Goddamn aliens.
I did a quick google for the old 1977 crowds and they all look 30 or younger. The films appealed mainly to the young people, just like today's movie do.
30 year-olds have children and thus run out of time and money. By time they can go out again they've realized that most movies are just as enjoyable, if not more, on DVD or streaming.
Get with the program, man, that was released on Friday.
I kid - the only way I found it was to search on the gp's suggestion, find an article on wikipedia about a different record type, linked to a wikipedia page on dns record types, found an SSH type (SSHFP) that was sort of like what you suggested, and then from there reasoned that the right type should be called 'TLSFP', and voila, Google RFC out on Friday. Freakin' intarwebs.
They thought of a few features I missed in the few minutes between clicks above, it looks pretty sold.
It's good they're fixing the TLS MITM problem.
its NOT a philosphy. its a money-making endeavor with a storybook theme
Read up on the history of human religions. Millions of people have been slaughtered on these grounds.
The userbase is too small.
Compared to what? For instance, there are probably more OpenSolaris/Nexenta ZFS users than NetApp users. If hardware support were narrowed to a few decent options there, the work isn't enormous.
The only real advantage is ZFS and you can get that on Linux in more and more ways all the time. Someday the performance might even be adequate.
Right, there's really no option now on Linux that anybody would seriously use. That's changing, slowly but steadily. We have hardware that works today.
Also, Solaris can eek 20% or so more disk performance out of a machine than Linux can. I'm not sure why, I just see the raw disk rates.
I remember what being a Solaris admin was like, and if you fix everything wrong with it, you'll have Linux.
Again, ZFS is the killer app. ZFS makes setting up iscsi, NFS, and smb shares much easier than linux. I do both.
If not for the CDDL/GPL problem, this would go away almost overnight, but here we are, having to worry about governmental attacks for mixing code.
Optical readers in the visible and invisible spectrum and software that can allow for edges that aren't razor straight? It's a reasonable guess.
Yeah, I guess the rollers could just be wide enough to handle the largest note on the diagonal. I've got a laser printer that if you don't feed in the paper with the straighteners will make a spitball out of the paper. I'd love to have one that could deal with paper on an arbitrary skew.
Yes, stupid GP for suggesting the value should be proportional to the size! Oh hang on, he didn't say that, did he?
Oh, snap, and neither did I! He said it was crazy that they were the same size. I made a tangential joke towards about that. Happy Easter, yo.
What problems have you had? I don't push it very hard.
I'm not arguing for CIFS in-kernel on FreeBSD, but for tighter integration for ZFS and (presumably) Samba. It's the sysadmin aspect of the ZFS tools that makes it really nice to work with.
How would we possibly know whether plants have intentions or not?
There's no indication that plants have any thoughts at all. Intentions are a subset.
Legalize it all damn ready. Seriously, executive order, make it happen.
Presidents have learned not to mess with black ops budgets.
Besides, once Mexico fails, we can have a good old-fashioned land war, 'save' the Mexican people, and add more payers into our entitlement programs. What could possibly go wrong?
ZFS-FUSE is a pretty amazing effort, but it tends to be buggy and big on memory consumption, from what I've read. It's also at the wrong layer.
I have high hopes for ZFS in FreeBSD 9. Due to their compatibility requirements, they can't get zpools > v16 in FreeBSD 8 (and it sounds like it'll only be 15 at this point). If 9 has zpool v23, there will be much rockage.
Tightly integrated CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI would also be welcome.
For a straight NAS box, OpenSolaris is just where it's at ... for now.
but synergism is sufficient to describe the behavioural effects of neural networks.
So, your problem is with putting a name to the various resultant forms of that synergism?
Do emotions exist?
Their efforts would be _vastly_ better spent helping to port and/or maintain the handful of genuinely interesting features (ZFS, DTrace, etc) in OpenSolaris, to FreeBSD.
Well, I can't argue with you there. I suspect being able to build OpenSolaris would be helpful in that transition, so perhaps it's not for naught.
The last I checked Oracle still required non-CDDL code and drivers, and it certainly required a full Solaris for bootstrapping.
That's the part they're fixing that I mentioned in my post.
How does anything evolve? What's your point?
Traits occurring through random mutation that are useful for a species to reproduce tend to be picked up, and traits that expend resources that offer no benefit tend to be lost.
The idea that thousands of plant species could have convergently picked up a complex set of traits (poison pollen, communications systems) that were never useful before but required resources to maintain - asymptotically approaches zero.
Synergism of neurons can create inordinately complex results, but that does not create a qualitative upheaval in which "intention" is born. Free will cannot exist without cause-and-effect. If we truly had free will, our actions would have no correlation to our environment at all ... but they do.
Yes, I'm familiar with the Free Will arguments. That Will is predictable, given perfect knowledge of all the inputs and states (including quantum uncertainty) is true, but that knowledge is unattainable, so 'free will' is used to describe an abstraction of the human experience. The same could be said of any of the other human mental states - anger, love, happiness, sadness, calmness, inspiration, depression. That one can explain the hormones or neurotransmitters involved in creating those states does not make the words less useful for describing the human condition.
This isn't superstition, though, it's pragmatism. Sitting around in a nihilistic funk winds up not being a useful exercise. Using these abstractions lets us talk about humanity. Describing the mechanics lets us talk about a human being. Simply describing the anatomy and physiology is insufficient to describe the emergent behavioral features.
That said, I don't think ZFS was going anywhere anyways. It's incompatible license meant it wasn't ever going to get going in Linux, and Linux has far too much momentum for OpenSolaris to have dethroned it as the open source world's golden boy.
Actually the ZFS storage layer was recently ported to Linux. You can use it with Lustre today, perhaps some databases. The POSIX layer is being worked on.
Due to the licensing conflict, distribution is an open problem. Probably end-users will need to install this themselves.