Re:You mean real 'worthless' admins, right?
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Hack IIS6 Contest
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You've completely missed the gp posters point, and you are not an admin at a busy small company.
"Pristine image"? of what? The server without all the apps loaded would be worthless. Our servers worth securing probably get 2-3 updates a week. Then you'll need any live data that's on the box. What meaning of "pristine" are we going for here?
A pristine server is worthless, I need an up to date one. Our admin has incredibly little time, so I hope he spends it making sure backups are up to snuff; not perfecting the speed with which he can set up a box that isn't either up to date with all outr code and data, or something new that obviously has to be set up from scatch anyway.
Yeah, it does kind of bug me that slashdot is giving the hated Lucas free publicity. Just because he sucks, now he might get business from slashdot readers who were otherwise unaware of Revenge of the Sith.
Good thing it wasn't a positive story, or he might have gotten business from both of them.
"You can yank the power cord out of the wall anytime you like, and the database won't get corrupted." - That's how I've generally heard the main advantage of a good DB described to non-technical people. Power failure won't cause corruption is the cannonical example.
I only vaugely recall the incident you mention; I thought at the time it was a case of "Why MySQL isn't a real DB", but before MySQL fans jump down my throat, I'll admit that I didn't (and don't) really know. It may well have been, as you describe, hardware outright lying to software, in which case, to return to the original discussion, using only a filesystem and not a db would not have helped. Certainly there might be bugs in hardware that a DB can't cover for. But there are many many sorts of bugs and other failures that a DB will prevent from corrupting your data, because that is one of the main design goals of a good DB.
I'll stick with my original point: If using a DB makes your data storage more fragile, you are doing something very wrong.
If your database is more "fragile" than your file system, you are doing something very wrong. Half the point of a DB is to build on the unstable, corruptable base that is the file system, and achieve something stable and, in particular, incorruptable. The other half of what databases are for is querying power. If the queries you do with a database can be handled by a filesystem, you don't know what databases are for.
Reiser, as far as I can tell, wants to make filesystems more like databases. Because even for doing things handleable by a filesystem, some more DB-like query power and corruption resistance would be nice. But that doesn't mean file systems will now handle all the things DBs do.
In answer to your original question, I can't recall a huge site going down because a DB became corrupt, got an example? As for the resource consumption, the DB is not throwing the memory and CPU time away, it is doing stuff with them. You seem to be proposing "Just don't do that stuff." Um, yeah.
When did God grant these rights? I'm sure you bought your land from someone, and they bought it from someone, etc. But if you follow the chain back, in practically all of the US, at some point someone got forced off the land at gunpoint. I guess their rights weren't so inalienable. So I still say your "ownership" of the land derives from the society in which you live having decided you own it. Without that society, someone else can shoot you and take it.
"Just compensation" applies when we take your land away. When we insist you keep playing by the same rules (zoning, etc) that were in force when you bought it, you have not been deprived of anything you had a reasonable expectation of having. If the rules get changed on you, without any compensation, you have a legitimate beef.
On a tangent, the use of "Creator" in that phrase was a compromise between those who wanted to say "God", and those who wanted to argue the rights were inherent in men independent of any particular conception of divinity.
Yes, it's true, the rest of us think we have some right to tell you what you can and can't do with your property. We'll be happy to change our minds, and concede that your land is yours to do absolutely whatever you like with if you will please show us the deed that was issued to you by God. What? It was issued by the State? You mean your ownership of the land is derivative of the society you live in in the first place? Interesting.
I can sue companies for poluting my land right now. So the absence of this ability is clearly not why we need the EPA. Why we do shall be left as an exercise for the student.
I don't intend to substitute Googles validation for my common sense. But when I go to Google for news, and click on one of the top few stories on a particular topic, I want to have some expectation that I'm probably getting a reasonably trustworthy news source.
Currently I do this by scanning for one I've heard of. Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC News, hell, even Al Jazeera and CNN: All of these may have biases, but I have some idea what they are, and they can all be expected to try for accuracy about the basic facts.
For more obscure stories, this doesn't necessarily work. So I'm perfectly glad to hear Google will be making some attempt to weed out those "news" sources which, to put it kindly, do not try for accuracy about the basic facts.
I don't know why you think I'd start flaming you. I don't do any of those things (or really much at all) by IM. My IMing is mostly limited to coworkers, who are often just down the hall, and/or on the same LAN. So we've no need for file transfer, though we often IM paths to files to each other. Which I then want to cut & paste into a file system browser, and then I swear at gaim. But really, my IM needs are minimal, if gaim supported standard kb shortcuts, it would be perfect. Which is why it bugs me so much.
C as in copy, X as in crossing something out I guess. But really, I think any metaphor is made up after the fact. There is nothing apropriate about most of them, like there was with the olden-days windows shortcuts (cntrl-insert is paste I think?), but once you learn them, they are nicer. Metaphor is important for GUI elements, but for keyboard shortcuts, if I have to think about what the key means, forget it.
Someone (Apple I think) picked these keys, and lots of people liked them (so MS copied them) because they are easy to hit with the left hand while your right is on the mouse. Pretty much the only keyboard shortcuts I use are those that are fairly universal (on Windows) and can be hit with my left hand alone. Control Z,X,C,V,A & F I use without thought, and to some extent G & Y. (who the hell picked Y?)
Silly as it may seem, this is one of the big reasons I like and/or am locked into windows. Those 6-8 keys do the same thing in every single app. I suppose I could switch to Apple, they're big on interface standards. But any system on which at least cut/copy/paste aren't the same in 99.9% of apps will probably never be my primary desktop.
"Open Source has an impressive track record for quality software"
I'd say Open Source has an impressive track record for powerful software, and an abysmal one for polished software. I use and like a lot of OSS, including the stuff you mention, but seldom recommend it to non-geeks. I like power, they demand polish.
For example, I really like Gaim (on Windows), and as one of the most polished Open Source programs I've used, it's an exception, I do reccomend it to non-geeks. Yet even it is not as polished as it should be. To wit, my pet peeve: How bloody hard would it be to support Control-C for Copy? Drives me up the wall. hit copy, go to other app, hit paste, what the hell is that?, oh right, Gaim. go back, right-click... It wouldn't bug me so much, except that control-C is so universally supported in Windows. I can't remember the last program other than gaim that didn't do it. It's a reflex action; I just think "copy" and my hand does it. OK, calming down now.
The first ammendment is a great idea. I said I don't care what the founders would think about the issues of today. I do care what they wrote down and made the legal basis of our society.
We shall continually and eternally debate how best to form a functioning society while protecting the rights of individuals, and the founders set up one of the better frameworks for that debate. They deserve much credit for that. But as we engage in this debate, we sometimes discuss issues not covered in that framework. And sometimes, some of us are crazy enough to suggest that while the founders did an absolutely bang-up job in general, they did not forsee everything, and their framework may need tweaking. Note that they wisely made it possible, but difficult, to tweak that framework.
In these cases, some people are quite fond of saying "But the Founders would agree with ME". To which I am saying "You have know way of knowing that, and so what anyway? They were great men, but they weren't gods. Even if they would disagree with me, that doesn't make me wrong." Of course these are often the same people who already think God agrees with them in any case, so I'm not entirely sure why I bother attempting rational discussion.
It can get a little dirty, but this is just for changes after code is "done" the first time, so mostly bugfixes. If the number of these is going to get terribly dense in any particular section, it's more likely I'll have ripped the whole thing out and rewritten it (while swearing).
Actually though, we've recently switched to using Subversion. The Tortise SVN "Blame" report shows the who and when for every line in the source (or charachter for that matter). So the importance of these comments is somewhat diminished. I still use them when apropriate, to provide the "why", and because sometimes it's nice to be told that some code is an after the original writing modification even if you don't think to wonder. So I still use them anytime I think to myself "Nobody could have really wanted the original behavior, so it won't break anything to change this"
How about, some of the least religious people of their time? Certainly very concerned about the need to keep religion out of government.
Anyway, glad to hear you don't like demonizing people. Well, except those damn liberals, but hey, they're practically actual demons anyway.
But anyway, yeah, I'm sure the founders would agree with you on everything. Wait, no I'm not, they lived more than 200 frickin years ago and the issues facing the country have changed a little since then. Nobody knows what they would think about issues today, and no one should care.
I'm not actually a lots-of-comments fan in general. I like comments when code is not easily understandable without them, but that should be rare. But anyway, I was replying to mention something relevant to your old/new comments issue: I learned a truly awesome habit from my boss a my first programming job. Anytime I'm starting out in a new programming environment, one of the first things I do is set up a macro so that with one keystroke I can generate the start of a one-line comment, my initials, and the date. I may not go in for a lot of comments when writing new code, but when I modify old code, for each change I hit that macro and type in a quick explanation. So at least you'll know it was me that broke your code, when I did it, and what the hell I was thinking.
I can't stand Doxygen. Every single time I've dealt with someones Doxygen documented code, the resulting docs have been quite extensive, to be sure. But they don't contain any more information than a header file, and it's in a less useful format. I realize it is probably possible to use it right and have it be wonderful, and maybe that's what you do, but I've yet to see it happen.
"If you think the whole of the U.S. army would slaughter American citizens without question"
I don't. I'm saying we'd better pay attention and make sure it stays that way, because if that changes, we're screwed.
"If you're willing to entrust your liberty to the kind-heartedness of the people already in power"
I'm not. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, even more than ever before. Because you're also a dammed fool if you're willing to entrust your liberty to your ability to stage an armed revolt sometime in the future. If we let things get to the point that armed revolt is needed, it will be way too late. So I think we need to pay attention now to the rights that matter. In my opinion, that does not include the unrestricted right to carry around a 38 Special.
It's been shown a weaker force can make sufficient nuisance of itself that a foreign occupier will decide it's not worth it. No example comes to mind of a stronger force deciding to give up in the face of a weaker force when giving up means the stronger force is completely eradicated.
The American Revolution was a somewhat ragged bunch of men making a nuisance of themselves, and forming good aliances. They made it very costly for the strongest navy and second-stongest army in the western hemisphere to fight on one not terribly important front of its war against the second-strongest navy and strongest army. And when the British offered to make peace with us independently of our French allies, so they could focus their efforts, we dropped our pals like a hot rock.
Exactly. Man is not capable of swimming across the Atlantic. Coming as close as one can to swimming across it, and closer than anyone else has, doesn't mean he did it. I'm just saying, he didn't swim across the Atlantic in the same sense that channel swimmers swim across the channel. I don't bitch about someone rowing across the atlantic, because they claim to have rowed in a boat. I wouldn't bitch about this guy getting a boost while swimming, just about getting a boost while riding in the boat. He covered the significant majority of the distance sitting in a boat.
Well, big projects tend to have lots of developers, so selling someone the code under a different license is probably infeasible.
But I myself have paid someone for a non-GPL license to otherwise GPL code. Because they were the only copyright holder, it was easy for them to do this.
The whole point of it being open source is you don't need the original developer. If someone else cares about it enough, they'll become the new lead developer on the open version. The alternative becomes a pretty silly question: If no one cares, who cares?
If someone develops something cool, and makes it open source, I say good for them. If someone else thinks it's cool enough to buy the copyright and hire them, I'm not going to criticise them for taking the money.
Normally I hate the open source argument that says, don't complain about something you don't like, shut up and code it yourself. But, if you don't like that some developer no longer wants to work on an open version of something he wrote, feel free to work on it yourself. That's why open is cool after all.
Citizens can certainly cause enough trouble to make a foreign invader decide it's not worth it. When the force being opposed is the government of the country itself, and giving up means not existing anymore, that government isn't going to decide it's not worth it as easily. In that case, I don't think a force with nothing but small arms is going to defeat one as well equipped as the US armed forces. Besides, the afghanis had many weapons one does not have an uninfringed right to in the US today. Notably Stinger missiles.
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You've completely missed the gp posters point, and you are not an admin at a busy small company.
"Pristine image"? of what? The server without all the apps loaded would be worthless. Our servers worth securing probably get 2-3 updates a week. Then you'll need any live data that's on the box. What meaning of "pristine" are we going for here?
A pristine server is worthless, I need an up to date one. Our admin has incredibly little time, so I hope he spends it making sure backups are up to snuff; not perfecting the speed with which he can set up a box that isn't either up to date with all outr code and data, or something new that obviously has to be set up from scatch anyway.
Yeah, it does kind of bug me that slashdot is giving the hated Lucas free publicity. Just because he sucks, now he might get business from slashdot readers who were otherwise unaware of Revenge of the Sith.
Good thing it wasn't a positive story, or he might have gotten business from both of them.
"You can yank the power cord out of the wall anytime you like, and the database won't get corrupted." - That's how I've generally heard the main advantage of a good DB described to non-technical people. Power failure won't cause corruption is the cannonical example.
I only vaugely recall the incident you mention; I thought at the time it was a case of "Why MySQL isn't a real DB", but before MySQL fans jump down my throat, I'll admit that I didn't (and don't) really know. It may well have been, as you describe, hardware outright lying to software, in which case, to return to the original discussion, using only a filesystem and not a db would not have helped. Certainly there might be bugs in hardware that a DB can't cover for. But there are many many sorts of bugs and other failures that a DB will prevent from corrupting your data, because that is one of the main design goals of a good DB.
I'll stick with my original point: If using a DB makes your data storage more fragile, you are doing something very wrong.
If your database is more "fragile" than your file system, you are doing something very wrong. Half the point of a DB is to build on the unstable, corruptable base that is the file system, and achieve something stable and, in particular, incorruptable. The other half of what databases are for is querying power. If the queries you do with a database can be handled by a filesystem, you don't know what databases are for.
Reiser, as far as I can tell, wants to make filesystems more like databases. Because even for doing things handleable by a filesystem, some more DB-like query power and corruption resistance would be nice. But that doesn't mean file systems will now handle all the things DBs do.
In answer to your original question, I can't recall a huge site going down because a DB became corrupt, got an example? As for the resource consumption, the DB is not throwing the memory and CPU time away, it is doing stuff with them. You seem to be proposing "Just don't do that stuff." Um, yeah.
When did God grant these rights? I'm sure you bought your land from someone, and they bought it from someone, etc. But if you follow the chain back, in practically all of the US, at some point someone got forced off the land at gunpoint. I guess their rights weren't so inalienable. So I still say your "ownership" of the land derives from the society in which you live having decided you own it. Without that society, someone else can shoot you and take it.
"Just compensation" applies when we take your land away. When we insist you keep playing by the same rules (zoning, etc) that were in force when you bought it, you have not been deprived of anything you had a reasonable expectation of having. If the rules get changed on you, without any compensation, you have a legitimate beef.
On a tangent, the use of "Creator" in that phrase was a compromise between those who wanted to say "God", and those who wanted to argue the rights were inherent in men independent of any particular conception of divinity.
Yes, it's true, the rest of us think we have some right to tell you what you can and can't do with your property. We'll be happy to change our minds, and concede that your land is yours to do absolutely whatever you like with if you will please show us the deed that was issued to you by God. What? It was issued by the State? You mean your ownership of the land is derivative of the society you live in in the first place? Interesting.
I can sue companies for poluting my land right now. So the absence of this ability is clearly not why we need the EPA. Why we do shall be left as an exercise for the student.
I don't intend to substitute Googles validation for my common sense. But when I go to Google for news, and click on one of the top few stories on a particular topic, I want to have some expectation that I'm probably getting a reasonably trustworthy news source.
Currently I do this by scanning for one I've heard of. Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC News, hell, even Al Jazeera and CNN: All of these may have biases, but I have some idea what they are, and they can all be expected to try for accuracy about the basic facts.
For more obscure stories, this doesn't necessarily work. So I'm perfectly glad to hear Google will be making some attempt to weed out those "news" sources which, to put it kindly, do not try for accuracy about the basic facts.
Sure it does. Stocks may never trade at 0, but companies can certainly go bankrupt in such a way that the shareholders get nothing.
Hmmm...
My car was built in 1970, I don't watch TV, and I only buy video games from the came-out-5-years-ago bargain bin.
I must be ahead of the curve!
Actually, I beleive the amount of time the average person spends watching TV has been declining of late...
Oh, and S of course. I use that with so little thought I apparently can't think of it when I try.
I don't know why you think I'd start flaming you. I don't do any of those things (or really much at all) by IM. My IMing is mostly limited to coworkers, who are often just down the hall, and/or on the same LAN. So we've no need for file transfer, though we often IM paths to files to each other. Which I then want to cut & paste into a file system browser, and then I swear at gaim. But really, my IM needs are minimal, if gaim supported standard kb shortcuts, it would be perfect. Which is why it bugs me so much.
C as in copy, X as in crossing something out I guess. But really, I think any metaphor is made up after the fact. There is nothing apropriate about most of them, like there was with the olden-days windows shortcuts (cntrl-insert is paste I think?), but once you learn them, they are nicer. Metaphor is important for GUI elements, but for keyboard shortcuts, if I have to think about what the key means, forget it.
Someone (Apple I think) picked these keys, and lots of people liked them (so MS copied them) because they are easy to hit with the left hand while your right is on the mouse. Pretty much the only keyboard shortcuts I use are those that are fairly universal (on Windows) and can be hit with my left hand alone. Control Z,X,C,V,A & F I use without thought, and to some extent G & Y. (who the hell picked Y?)
Silly as it may seem, this is one of the big reasons I like and/or am locked into windows. Those 6-8 keys do the same thing in every single app. I suppose I could switch to Apple, they're big on interface standards. But any system on which at least cut/copy/paste aren't the same in 99.9% of apps will probably never be my primary desktop.
"Open Source has an impressive track record for quality software"
I'd say Open Source has an impressive track record for powerful software, and an abysmal one for polished software. I use and like a lot of OSS, including the stuff you mention, but seldom recommend it to non-geeks. I like power, they demand polish.
For example, I really like Gaim (on Windows), and as one of the most polished Open Source programs I've used, it's an exception, I do reccomend it to non-geeks. Yet even it is not as polished as it should be. To wit, my pet peeve: How bloody hard would it be to support Control-C for Copy? Drives me up the wall. hit copy, go to other app, hit paste, what the hell is that?, oh right, Gaim. go back, right-click... It wouldn't bug me so much, except that control-C is so universally supported in Windows. I can't remember the last program other than gaim that didn't do it. It's a reflex action; I just think "copy" and my hand does it. OK, calming down now.
The first ammendment is a great idea. I said I don't care what the founders would think about the issues of today. I do care what they wrote down and made the legal basis of our society.
We shall continually and eternally debate how best to form a functioning society while protecting the rights of individuals, and the founders set up one of the better frameworks for that debate. They deserve much credit for that. But as we engage in this debate, we sometimes discuss issues not covered in that framework. And sometimes, some of us are crazy enough to suggest that while the founders did an absolutely bang-up job in general, they did not forsee everything, and their framework may need tweaking. Note that they wisely made it possible, but difficult, to tweak that framework.
In these cases, some people are quite fond of saying "But the Founders would agree with ME". To which I am saying "You have know way of knowing that, and so what anyway? They were great men, but they weren't gods. Even if they would disagree with me, that doesn't make me wrong." Of course these are often the same people who already think God agrees with them in any case, so I'm not entirely sure why I bother attempting rational discussion.
It can get a little dirty, but this is just for changes after code is "done" the first time, so mostly bugfixes. If the number of these is going to get terribly dense in any particular section, it's more likely I'll have ripped the whole thing out and rewritten it (while swearing).
Actually though, we've recently switched to using Subversion. The Tortise SVN "Blame" report shows the who and when for every line in the source (or charachter for that matter). So the importance of these comments is somewhat diminished. I still use them when apropriate, to provide the "why", and because sometimes it's nice to be told that some code is an after the original writing modification even if you don't think to wonder. So I still use them anytime I think to myself "Nobody could have really wanted the original behavior, so it won't break anything to change this"
"highly religious"?
How about, some of the least religious people of their time? Certainly very concerned about the need to keep religion out of government.
Anyway, glad to hear you don't like demonizing people. Well, except those damn liberals, but hey, they're practically actual demons anyway.
But anyway, yeah, I'm sure the founders would agree with you on everything. Wait, no I'm not, they lived more than 200 frickin years ago and the issues facing the country have changed a little since then. Nobody knows what they would think about issues today, and no one should care.
I'm not actually a lots-of-comments fan in general. I like comments when code is not easily understandable without them, but that should be rare. But anyway, I was replying to mention something relevant to your old/new comments issue:
I learned a truly awesome habit from my boss a my first programming job. Anytime I'm starting out in a new programming environment, one of the first things I do is set up a macro so that with one keystroke I can generate the start of a one-line comment, my initials, and the date. I may not go in for a lot of comments when writing new code, but when I modify old code, for each change I hit that macro and type in a quick explanation. So at least you'll know it was me that broke your code, when I did it, and what the hell I was thinking.
I can't stand Doxygen. Every single time I've dealt with someones Doxygen documented code, the resulting docs have been quite extensive, to be sure. But they don't contain any more information than a header file, and it's in a less useful format. I realize it is probably possible to use it right and have it be wonderful, and maybe that's what you do, but I've yet to see it happen.
"If you think the whole of the U.S. army would slaughter American citizens without question"
I don't. I'm saying we'd better pay attention and make sure it stays that way, because if that changes, we're screwed.
"If you're willing to entrust your liberty to the kind-heartedness of the people already in power"
I'm not. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, even more than ever before. Because you're also a dammed fool if you're willing to entrust your liberty to your ability to stage an armed revolt sometime in the future. If we let things get to the point that armed revolt is needed, it will be way too late. So I think we need to pay attention now to the rights that matter. In my opinion, that does not include the unrestricted right to carry around a 38 Special.
It's been shown a weaker force can make sufficient nuisance of itself that a foreign occupier will decide it's not worth it. No example comes to mind of a stronger force deciding to give up in the face of a weaker force when giving up means the stronger force is completely eradicated.
The American Revolution was a somewhat ragged bunch of men making a nuisance of themselves, and forming good aliances. They made it very costly for the strongest navy and second-stongest army in the western hemisphere to fight on one not terribly important front of its war against the second-strongest navy and strongest army.
And when the British offered to make peace with us independently of our French allies, so they could focus their efforts, we dropped our pals like a hot rock.
"Man cannot swim that long"
Exactly. Man is not capable of swimming across the Atlantic. Coming as close as one can to swimming across it, and closer than anyone else has, doesn't mean he did it. I'm just saying, he didn't swim across the Atlantic in the same sense that channel swimmers swim across the channel. I don't bitch about someone rowing across the atlantic, because they claim to have rowed in a boat. I wouldn't bitch about this guy getting a boost while swimming, just about getting a boost while riding in the boat. He covered the significant majority of the distance sitting in a boat.
Well, big projects tend to have lots of developers, so selling someone the code under a different license is probably infeasible.
But I myself have paid someone for a non-GPL license to otherwise GPL code. Because they were the only copyright holder, it was easy for them to do this.
The whole point of it being open source is you don't need the original developer. If someone else cares about it enough, they'll become the new lead developer on the open version. The alternative becomes a pretty silly question: If no one cares, who cares?
If someone develops something cool, and makes it open source, I say good for them. If someone else thinks it's cool enough to buy the copyright and hire them, I'm not going to criticise them for taking the money.
Normally I hate the open source argument that says, don't complain about something you don't like, shut up and code it yourself. But, if you don't like that some developer no longer wants to work on an open version of something he wrote, feel free to work on it yourself. That's why open is cool after all.
Citizens can certainly cause enough trouble to make a foreign invader decide it's not worth it. When the force being opposed is the government of the country itself, and giving up means not existing anymore, that government isn't going to decide it's not worth it as easily. In that case, I don't think a force with nothing but small arms is going to defeat one as well equipped as the US armed forces.
Besides, the afghanis had many weapons one does not have an uninfringed right to in the US today. Notably Stinger missiles.