Site owners (the ones paying the bills) have no incentive to demand that the CA be competent.
I completely disagree. SSL is all about trust, and the CA you trust for your site's cert does matter. There's only so much a CA can practically do to establish your (corporate) identity, but that's what you trust them to do every time they are asked to issue a certificate in your name. It's not rocket science, this is a basic level of trust that everyone needs. We expect, and trust ANYONE who handles our personal information to properly, consistently verify our identity.
A better system would have the end-user pay someone they trust to identify the site; they are directly paying for the identification service and can take their business elsewhere if they get crap service.
What?? Let me get this straight... you want to pay for a whitelist(s) of the Internet? OK, while you're shopping, I have a nice bridge you might be interested in.
Mapping to real-world identities is a separate issue (only provided by "extended validation" or whatever certs due to browser UI issues), and is (1) rather expensive because you need people involved to look at paperwork and such and (2) mostly isn't needed, because you'll generally find IRL groups' sites by communication from those groups (eg, my electric bill has the electric company's URL printed on it, I don't need to look them up in google and then verify that I got pointed to the right place).
1. The whole point of a CA is for them to verify who you (site owner) are. People are already involved to look at paperwork. To change a POC in our existing system even requires you to fax paperwork to them on company letterhead. If they didn't do that already, then what is the point of requiring end users to trust them? If they fail to do this, then fire the CA, delist them, stop trusting them. Are CA's perfect, no. Could we use some better standards, or maybe regulation to ensure they enforce certain security best practices, possibly. We got EV certificates without regulation.. a small UI improvement (somewhat standardized at least), better checks, legal ID, physical presence (they have a better method than the phone book reverse lookup check I guess?), URL ownership, etc, BUT only for a new, more expensive, OPTIONAL class of certificates. Are Internet users clamoring for more regulation, hell to the fsck no. It will eventually be required to properly tie up loose ends in a trust based system I think though. 2. I will repeat again what you said, so it has more time to sink in. "you'll generally find IRL groups' sites by communication from those groups (eg, my electric bill has the electric company's URL printed on it, I don't need to look them up in google and then verify that I got pointed to the right place)." Everyone will use a search engine for the dumbest things you can possibly imagine at some point in their life. Getting to the right URL is already assumed when dealing with MITM attacks. Going to the wrong URL is NOT something a CA is in a position to prevent. - EV helps, but if normal certs are still trusted then bad URLs with normal certs still are too, so WTF is the point? Well.. besides CAs wanting more money.
If browser vendors adopted an EV type UI for all certificate "tiers", then our current system could help against fraudulent URLs with valid SSL certs. The problem then is we'd then have no way of distinguishing the extra checks CAs are doing for EV without over complicating the UI. WHY do we need to distinguish those extra checks you ask? Because CAs want mo' money, and part of that is driving end user demand for expensive certificates.
The MITM is just a UI issue with our current certificate system. The problems we have with the UI are because CAs use inconsistent identity verification and we stupidly tied the UI to that. We SHOULD be able to use self signed c
Floppies of the time, at worst, including a few manual codeword prompts or a keywheel scheme, none of which qualify as DRM.
Are we really splitting hairs over DRM vs. copy protection vs. exact level of access control required to be considered 'DRM'? Copy protection is not new at all, and there were much trickier schemes used for floppies and other media.
Copy Protection DOS floppy protection often relied on intentional bad sectors at known locations.
Asking you for the fifth word of the second to last paragraph in the instruction manual is what now? It's not copy protection, it's not really digital access control. It's more of a pain in the ass than some of today's DRM. With "good" DRM, you don't run into it during normal usage, only when you deviate from the terms of your license. This is a step up from more brutal methods, like dongles, instruction manual references, prevention of backup copies, etc.
The point of this thread, I believe, was the DRM we have today is not new. It is a new form of something we've lived with for a while now. There have been intentional restrictions built into digital media almost from the start.
If with normal language, you spend some time learning syntax, with Perl you first learn to do some work by picking scripts on the Net. Then you try to combine the scripts - and find that it is possible indeed and the abracadabra beneath is a neat programming language.
My biggest gripe with Perl is that after 'knowing' it for years, and using it here and there by picking small scripts off the net and writing my own 1-2 page scripts, I STILL find bits in these scripts that make me go WTF.
I might not understand every single syntactical element of C, C++, or Java, but I can usually figure it out from the context when I come across new ones. That is with very minimal exposure too. I suppose I might be taking for granted how similar the syntax of those three are, and my cumulative experience with all three probably surpasses Perl. Still, with Perl... there are so many implied behaviors, obscure operators, so many different ways of accomplishing the same thing, that I don't think these WTF moments will ever go away:\
I love to write me own Perl, but God damn, reading someone else's is f'ing nuts.
Why do you think even apple is flocking over to 'pc'-hardware
Is all PC hardware the same? NO. Compare an eMachine with a IBM or HP workstation. Compare a PC desktop with a PC server. Heck, pick any two models of PC servers, and go to town. Thanks, please come again.
A long time ago Mac was the best, but these days it surely isn't, and certainly not the best in regard to financially as apple computers are way overpriced (these days they're nothing more than a regular pc running OSX).
You don't know a God damned thing about computer hardware, from Apple or anyone else. As far as I can tell, you think all PC's are identical.
The windows platform is an equally if not much better (it's cheaper) platform as the Mac is.
This is getting old buddy, what is the Windows platform? Again, you display a complete ignorance of computer hardware, how it is priced, or why any two computers might be priced differently.
If you like your Mac just keep using it, but don't scream it's the best platform as it surely isn't (anymore).. Maybe in a couple of years Linux has become more userfriendly (and with MUCH less different distro's that are slightly incompatible with eachother) it will be one of the best platforms around.. But in the end you just use what you like and works best for you, if it's Mac, use Mac, if it's Linux, use Linux, if it's Windows, use windows, but don't try to enforce your choice on somebody else....
This is rich, a Linux user telling a Mac user not to enforce an OS choice on somebody else. I'm going to shit my pants, that is so hilarious! Hey, if all Linux users just ignore everyone and pretend other OS's don't exist, Linux becomes the best OS in the world by default! Why bother draw comparisons to Solaris or OS X, or Windows when you can just wish them out of existence right? I mean, comparing OS's is soooo hard, there are all these boring technical details, all these industry specific needs, the whole debate over how overrated GUIs and ease of use are, what the exact definition of beta really is (it's a myth right, because all software is the same, just open (good) or closed (bad), duuuuh) Yes, everyone please just use whatever OS you want, and stop talking about it unless it's the One True OS. Nobody is interested in learning about different OS platforms, or computer architectures, sheesh, drop it guys, we only need one right?
They claimed that you could use others' PS3's extra power when they weren't using it to render frames in games.
It's still possible. I think you misunderstood though because that doesn't make sense for games. Maybe in a HPC environment, which Cell is also intended for, work could be sent to non-local SPUs. Obviously the latency between two game consoles on the internet is too high for offloading any game logic unless you're into some really funky math games.
He was referring to the number of consoles sold Sept 2007 to Sept 2008, not the grand totals
Why is Wii ever compared to the other consoles? It's in a league of it's own, with no HD, no DVD, no next gen media format, entirely different price point, different audience, etc. You might as well be comparing iPhones to GameBoys. Maybe Microsoft is trying to go there with low end XBox models, but for damn sure, a discussion of PS3 vs. 360 has no room for the Wii.
That's why any modern car with a decent onboard computer display will show you that figure.
Right, so why do WE need a MPG rating?
Doing math with numbers guessed from needle gauges while driving just doesn't make sense. It's very simple: needle at 1/8 tank = X miles left, you just get familiar with your car if it doesn't outright tell you.
planning a drive through an area where gas stations are very spread out
OK, got me there, but that's not very common on the road. In a plane or boat, I could see MPG making a lot more sense though.
A much more common case where exact numbers and math would be involved (for cars) is this: would be "I [will] drive X miles to work every day, how much does that cost?"
Sun might have something you'd be interested in, Hybrid Storage Pools.
RAM will always be faster than any permanent storage (maybe someday AS fast), so I wouldn't expect critical parts of VM to go anywhere. With HSPs, the disk cache is pushed out to SSD, AFAIK. Back a few years ago, when disk swapping was a perfectly normal every day event, I always thought it would make sense to have something faster than a hard drive, but cheaper than main memory to act as a swap space. I was picturing cheaper DRAM I guess, but SSDs make a lot of sense today. This is a similar idea, a middle tier of fast/bulk storage anyway.
Of course you could just hold your breath for btrfs with some form of SSD optimization. I think that's ridiculous though, given that ZFS is here today, and Sun is already moving past SSD optimization and onto what are you going to use them for.. Sure, the article implied "desktop OS", but that's a fairly simple subset of what SSD will do in the enterprise.
How does Apple make it's consumers special? By selling premium goods that only some choose to buy?
Do you think I'm special because I own Apple products? ANYONE can buy them, so I don't see how anyone could think it would make them special.
Maybe Lamborghini owners think they're special because they're somewhere near the top. single digit, X% of the world's wealthiest people. Maybe that IS special to some degree.
But, Apple products? By providing slightly more value and charging slightly more than competitors, you think that makes people special, really? These aren't super powers friend.
Re:Flash and Silverlight the target?
on
Sun Releases JavaFX
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I'm sorry, what the fuck do Flash, Silverlight and Java FX have to do with Android?
Mods, mods, mods.. please guys, wake up.
This is a blatant attempt to stop Android taking over the mobile phone space.
Unwrap some of that tinfoil so you can talk, and tell us WHY.
Thanks for the info, I've only dealt with the little window Networker provided to it. You might be right about OS X, there's got to be something going on under the hood to make them as smooth as they are.
ROFL, killed it, and how many _other_ random processes beforehand? I don't think modern Linux kernels do this any more. Or do you mean your process died on it's own from lack of error checking when a memory allocation finally failed?
Linux certainly makes no assumptions about the _intent_ of a process using lots of memory. I can't think of an OS that would for that matter.
Had Win 3.11 been open source and a consultant was able to change it, the machine would probably still be operating.
Isn't requesting the manufacturer of the visual inspection machine to provide updated software the proper thing to do? How do you just swap out the operating software on something like that without involving the vendor? Was it not under support or something?
This is exactly why I don't understand the open source support business model. The two biggest bullet points the open source advocates use is self support and low cost. What the heck do these businesses think their market is?
It's like advocating open cars because someday everything might run on ethanol, and you want to personally be able to switch your car to whatever you want, or put a hemi in your Ford, or whatever. Then open car maintenance vendors pop up. Huh? Nothing would really change, people would bring their cars in to the open car vendor they bought it from because every open car would be a little different. Support for the custom open car you hand built would more expensive than any closed car. Most people would continue right on not even changing their own oil or tire pressure.
I know, theoretically, you have the choice of multiple support vendors, and still retain the option of self support. Then, reality bites, and RedHat doesn't want to support your Debian installation. Few businesses really want the overhead of maintaining custom kernel modifications, or custom webservers. They might try... and use some custom patched code base, unmaintained for years, and eventually switch to the default vendor shipped code. Open source in the business world (and sometimes in general, I'm sorry) seems to try solving problems that don't exist.
I remembered another little known built in NTFS feature few people know about. Maybe those of you genuinely interested in filesystem features & backups, not OS religion will appreciate it.
Change journaling.
I don't think there is a native GUI for this, instead the backup vendor provides one, or handles it for you. It is specifically meant for backups. Instead of scrubbing the entire disk and comparing to previous records to find changed files, with the change journal enabled, incremental backups consisting of millions of files are pretty quick. Well, discovering the list is MUCH faster anyway, backing up a million 1k files sucks regardless. The beginning of a backup can actually be very resource intensive, and time consuming without this feature. It has a small overhead, but each time you perform a backup operation the journal resets, releasing that overhead.
Anyone know where this feature might have originated from? AFAIK Solaris and Linux don't have this ability, and being backup specific, I can't imaging the FOSS world even dream of it. Well, now you know, copy away:)
Volume Shadow Copy: sounds like LVM2 snapshots under Linux
VSC isn't perfect for sure, but how exactly do you take a _consistent_ snapshot with LVM? Snap and pray?
VSC has hooks for applications to detect a snapshot and quiesce themselves, in a cooperative manner. Not perfect, but at least Microsoft's big apps mostly support it to enable consistent backups.
I don't know how popular it is though. The most common way of doing consistent backups on both UNIX and Windows is for the backup software to either tell the app to quiesce itself then back it up, or a combo quiesce & snapshot, exit quiesced mode soon as snap is done, then take your time backing up the snapshot. The problem is that you need app specific modules to quiesce them, and the need to deal with a multitude of snapshot techniques. Snapshot might be software like LVM, or SVM, third party software like VxVM, hardware like Symmetrix BCV, or Clariion snap, God only knows. You can imagine that this gets VERY complex and expensive.
VSC allows applications to plug into it so that backup software doesn't need to be app specific, just VSC aware to start/stop a snap. The app detects a snap and quiesces automatically. VSC also allows storage vendors to integrate their platforms with it. Like I said, the most common was is still the app/vendor specific route, I'm not sure just how many storage vendors have integrated with VSC, but it could be more than I think.
Backup software calls for a snap, the app quiesces by itself, the backend storage system does a hardware snap or mirror split, backup software gets the OK to backup. Cool, huh?
I dig on Microsoft a lot too guys, but you should really get your heads out of the sand and pay attention to the many good things they (and other vendors) do. Reading linux.com all day doesn't give a realistic representation of where Linux stands technologically.
Hierarchical Storage Management: HSM as implemented by IBM and then ported to Linux
News to me, where does Linux have HSM built in? Is it free? Do you have any examples of it being used in production?
Junction Points: sounds like hard links under Linux
Don't nitpick, there is obviously a lot you don't understand about NTFS and it's associated frameworks. The GP is right, NTFS has changed a lot over the years but kept the same name.
Ext has... well, it got journaling at some point. And then.. well, here we are. If Ext3 was more than just your run of the mill textbook filesystem, there wouldn't be so many damned new ones in the works.
"Open-source code is typically not complex enough to make money selling support."
Go look at the kind of software that is SUCCESSFULLY sold as solution bundles, or with professional services. Cost aside, does it look anything at all like free software? Make free software look like it came from the bargain bin? Well, it did.
If you want to sell support or solutions, free software developers are going to have to start coding a lot harder, and learn some very specific business needs (while still turning it into code for free). Basically, you need FOSES, free open source _enterprise_ software. This market is not nearly as big as many of you think. I think it might have 1.5 players in all.
FOSS business model.. hah. "Switch to free software, saving money in licensing and staffing"... but continue to buy software support agreements and professional services for software a college intern can babysit. Shit, he wrote part of it.
This also means nearly all enlisted IT positions are deployable now. I'm not sure what the long term effects of that will be though. I could see it going a couple different ways. Better retention, fewer geeks...
In the Marine Corps, many of our brightest are sent to IT related MOS's (jobs). Of those, the smarter ones (going off ASVAB scores anyway) tend to wind up at headquarters. That's DC for the most part, or at least Quantico, VA. Headquarters for us is like a black hole, we either don't deploy, or we voluntarily deploy in very small numbers. So small the quotas are usually filled with volunteers! We rarely meet annual training requirements (one rifle, one swim, one gas mask qual in four years, outside bootcamp). It's not nearly the same as being on a real Marine Corps base, or shit, deploying. I'm not saying this is a bad thing.. keeping the brightest bulbs close to home probably pays off, but there's the lure of making 4x, 5x your salary for some government IT services company with a hard on for former military. I don't think there are many enlisted IT guys left in HQ now:\ Mostly replaced with contractors over the past few years. Hard decision for these guys to make after four years. Get out and make real money, or stay in and transition abruptly to the real Corps.
So... I can't say having all enlisted IT personnel deployable will HURT retention any because they sure aren't keeping any around DC. I, like everyone else had no idea where I could end up when I joined, so that's not changed any. Maybe they'll have a chance to keep bright IT guys for 8+ years now, who knows.
Anyway, just thought I'd share some personal experience with Marine IT. Most of our good, garrisoned IT folks came from an ENTIRELY different world than what you find onboard that carrier for example.
Well, there is the idea that with no AV at all, a virus could theoretically linger longer on a Mac. But, a widespread one would probably get weeded out with a system update, the same way Microsoft started pushing monthly malicious software removal updates.
I think it's safe to say from a botnet perspective anyway, one hacked Mac is worth more than one hacked Windows PC for that reason alone.
If there was as much money as you think to be made from cracking Macs someone would have done it by now, or do you honestly think that there's no one in the world talented enough to find a hole in OSX with $28 billion on the line?
How long can you continue to devalue what is now 8% of the computer market? It is growing, and the malware representation from it is... what? Which is it, REALLY secure, PITA to hack/compromise, or just not as valuable as other platforms? Are you expecting a rubber band effect when it reaches some larger market percentage? If you really want to think market size is the only factor, then what about Vista vs. XP/older? As Vista adoption continues, do you seriously expect malware incidents to continue at the same rate as XP? Why is it so hard to consider that maybe Mac OS X is/has already been in the same category of PITA to compromise.
It could just be that Mac OS X & Vista are secure enough, and make malware easy enough to detect & remove that the malware penetration rates we have today cannot be sustained in the future.
Let me see. 1. If an entity you had little or no representation in (presuming you should have representation at all, as in a government that considers you its citizen, NOT a corporation you have no investment in) levied a DRM tax on imported games.
2. Games are generally not available domestically. Quality Japanese game exports/imports are a large facet of the economy, operated by a giant monopolistic company, and some wealthy locals (pirates?) are smuggling cheap games from the Netherlands into the country FOR PROFIT, and dirt cheap because they dodge import DRM taxes, hurting legit game importers.
3. Smuggler has his ship confiscated by authorities, and charged with various infractions.
4. The government took action to prevent one of its biggest corporations from going under by relieving it of paying DRM import taxes, you have even less DRM now than games sold back home.
5. Smuggler and his lawyer arrange a boycott of the legit game importer's games.
6. A group of people lead by the smugglers destroyed a whole shipment of DRM free games in protest of having no representation in the government.
I might have gotten some of this wrong, and others will surely correct me, but my point has been made. This was MUCH more complex than "We wanted A, They wanted B, rabble, rabble, fighting ensued". The Boston Tea Party does not compare in any way at all to angry teenagers bitching about having to pay for video games.
That would be due to bugs though, there isn't a good reason higher frame rates should impact a game's physics.
The real reason to have an _average_ frame rate much higher than your monitor's refresh rate, is so that hopefully the _minium_ frame rate doesn't dip below it, for long anyway. OK, outputting at higher frame rates is kind of silly, but there are plenty of reasons for being capable of it, and it shouldn't hurt your experience as long as you have vsync on. A pan from a 120 fps empty room to 20 fps crystal cavern is very distracting without vsync.
OpenSolaris is no more "mainly geared" towards desktops than your typical Linux distro.
From what you just said though... stick with what you've got, because I'm afraid you'd be switching OS's for reasons you really don't understand. Nothing you've read here on Slashdot today is worth basing an OS/platform decision on, there are many, many other things to consider.
Slashdot Mirror
Site owners (the ones paying the bills) have no incentive to demand that the CA be competent.
I completely disagree. SSL is all about trust, and the CA you trust for your site's cert does matter. There's only so much a CA can practically do to establish your (corporate) identity, but that's what you trust them to do every time they are asked to issue a certificate in your name. It's not rocket science, this is a basic level of trust that everyone needs. We expect, and trust ANYONE who handles our personal information to properly, consistently verify our identity.
A better system would have the end-user pay someone they trust to identify the site; they are directly paying for the identification service and can take their business elsewhere if they get crap service.
What?? Let me get this straight... you want to pay for a whitelist(s) of the Internet? OK, while you're shopping, I have a nice bridge you might be interested in.
Mapping to real-world identities is a separate issue (only provided by "extended validation" or whatever certs due to browser UI issues), and is (1) rather expensive because you need people involved to look at paperwork and such and (2) mostly isn't needed, because you'll generally find IRL groups' sites by communication from those groups (eg, my electric bill has the electric company's URL printed on it, I don't need to look them up in google and then verify that I got pointed to the right place).
1. The whole point of a CA is for them to verify who you (site owner) are. People are already involved to look at paperwork. To change a POC in our existing system even requires you to fax paperwork to them on company letterhead. If they didn't do that already, then what is the point of requiring end users to trust them? If they fail to do this, then fire the CA, delist them, stop trusting them. Are CA's perfect, no. Could we use some better standards, or maybe regulation to ensure they enforce certain security best practices, possibly. We got EV certificates without regulation.. a small UI improvement (somewhat standardized at least), better checks, legal ID, physical presence (they have a better method than the phone book reverse lookup check I guess?), URL ownership, etc, BUT only for a new, more expensive, OPTIONAL class of certificates. Are Internet users clamoring for more regulation, hell to the fsck no. It will eventually be required to properly tie up loose ends in a trust based system I think though.
2. I will repeat again what you said, so it has more time to sink in.
"you'll generally find IRL groups' sites by communication from those groups (eg, my electric bill has the electric company's URL printed on it, I don't need to look them up in google and then verify that I got pointed to the right place)."
Everyone will use a search engine for the dumbest things you can possibly imagine at some point in their life.
Getting to the right URL is already assumed when dealing with MITM attacks.
Going to the wrong URL is NOT something a CA is in a position to prevent. - EV helps, but if normal certs are still trusted then bad URLs with normal certs still are too, so WTF is the point? Well.. besides CAs wanting more money.
If browser vendors adopted an EV type UI for all certificate "tiers", then our current system could help against fraudulent URLs with valid SSL certs.
The problem then is we'd then have no way of distinguishing the extra checks CAs are doing for EV without over complicating the UI. WHY do we need to distinguish those extra checks you ask? Because CAs want mo' money, and part of that is driving end user demand for expensive certificates.
The MITM is just a UI issue with our current certificate system.
The problems we have with the UI are because CAs use inconsistent identity verification and we stupidly tied the UI to that. We SHOULD be able to use self signed c
Floppies of the time, at worst, including a few manual codeword prompts or a keywheel scheme, none of which qualify as DRM.
Are we really splitting hairs over DRM vs. copy protection vs. exact level of access control required to be considered 'DRM'?
Copy protection is not new at all, and there were much trickier schemes used for floppies and other media.
Copy Protection
DOS floppy protection often relied on intentional bad sectors at known locations.
Asking you for the fifth word of the second to last paragraph in the instruction manual is what now? It's not copy protection, it's not really digital access control. It's more of a pain in the ass than some of today's DRM. With "good" DRM, you don't run into it during normal usage, only when you deviate from the terms of your license. This is a step up from more brutal methods, like dongles, instruction manual references, prevention of backup copies, etc.
The point of this thread, I believe, was the DRM we have today is not new. It is a new form of something we've lived with for a while now. There have been intentional restrictions built into digital media almost from the start.
LOUD NOISES
If with normal language, you spend some time learning syntax, with Perl you first learn to do some work by picking scripts on the Net. Then you try to combine the scripts - and find that it is possible indeed and the abracadabra beneath is a neat programming language.
My biggest gripe with Perl is that after 'knowing' it for years, and using it here and there by picking small scripts off the net and writing my own 1-2 page scripts, I STILL find bits in these scripts that make me go WTF.
I might not understand every single syntactical element of C, C++, or Java, but I can usually figure it out from the context when I come across new ones. That is with very minimal exposure too. I suppose I might be taking for granted how similar the syntax of those three are, and my cumulative experience with all three probably surpasses Perl. Still, with Perl... there are so many implied behaviors, obscure operators, so many different ways of accomplishing the same thing, that I don't think these WTF moments will ever go away :\
I love to write me own Perl, but God damn, reading someone else's is f'ing nuts.
Why do you think even apple is flocking over to 'pc'-hardware
Is all PC hardware the same? NO. Compare an eMachine with a IBM or HP workstation. Compare a PC desktop with a PC server. Heck, pick any two models of PC servers, and go to town.
Thanks, please come again.
A long time ago Mac was the best, but these days it surely isn't, and certainly not the best in regard to financially as apple computers are way overpriced (these days they're nothing more than a regular pc running OSX).
You don't know a God damned thing about computer hardware, from Apple or anyone else. As far as I can tell, you think all PC's are identical.
The windows platform is an equally if not much better (it's cheaper) platform as the Mac is.
This is getting old buddy, what is the Windows platform? Again, you display a complete ignorance of computer hardware, how it is priced, or why any two computers might be priced differently.
If you like your Mac just keep using it, but don't scream it's the best platform as it surely isn't (anymore).. Maybe in a couple of years Linux has become more userfriendly (and with MUCH less different distro's that are slightly incompatible with eachother) it will be one of the best platforms around.. But in the end you just use what you like and works best for you, if it's Mac, use Mac, if it's Linux, use Linux, if it's Windows, use windows, but don't try to enforce your choice on somebody else....
This is rich, a Linux user telling a Mac user not to enforce an OS choice on somebody else. I'm going to shit my pants, that is so hilarious!
Hey, if all Linux users just ignore everyone and pretend other OS's don't exist, Linux becomes the best OS in the world by default! Why bother draw comparisons to Solaris or OS X, or Windows when you can just wish them out of existence right? I mean, comparing OS's is soooo hard, there are all these boring technical details, all these industry specific needs, the whole debate over how overrated GUIs and ease of use are, what the exact definition of beta really is (it's a myth right, because all software is the same, just open (good) or closed (bad), duuuuh) Yes, everyone please just use whatever OS you want, and stop talking about it unless it's the One True OS. Nobody is interested in learning about different OS platforms, or computer architectures, sheesh, drop it guys, we only need one right?
SAN vendor (Xiotech) has the first system to support the standard (Emprise 5000/7000
Which standard?
Has Xiotech added Emulex HBAs to the compatibility matrix for those systems yet? ROFL.
They claimed that you could use others' PS3's extra power when they weren't using it to render frames in games.
It's still possible. I think you misunderstood though because that doesn't make sense for games. Maybe in a HPC environment, which Cell is also intended for, work could be sent to non-local SPUs. Obviously the latency between two game consoles on the internet is too high for offloading any game logic unless you're into some really funky math games.
He was referring to the number of consoles sold Sept 2007 to Sept 2008, not the grand totals
Why is Wii ever compared to the other consoles? It's in a league of it's own, with no HD, no DVD, no next gen media format, entirely different price point, different audience, etc.
You might as well be comparing iPhones to GameBoys. Maybe Microsoft is trying to go there with low end XBox models, but for damn sure, a discussion of PS3 vs. 360 has no room for the Wii.
That's why any modern car with a decent onboard computer display will show you that figure.
Right, so why do WE need a MPG rating?
Doing math with numbers guessed from needle gauges while driving just doesn't make sense. It's very simple: needle at 1/8 tank = X miles left, you just get familiar with your car if it doesn't outright tell you.
planning a drive through an area where gas stations are very spread out
OK, got me there, but that's not very common on the road. In a plane or boat, I could see MPG making a lot more sense though.
A much more common case where exact numbers and math would be involved (for cars) is this: would be "I [will] drive X miles to work every day, how much does that cost?"
OK, but how many colors did DOS have? *ducks*
Sun might have something you'd be interested in, Hybrid Storage Pools.
RAM will always be faster than any permanent storage (maybe someday AS fast), so I wouldn't expect critical parts of VM to go anywhere. With HSPs, the disk cache is pushed out to SSD, AFAIK. Back a few years ago, when disk swapping was a perfectly normal every day event, I always thought it would make sense to have something faster than a hard drive, but cheaper than main memory to act as a swap space. I was picturing cheaper DRAM I guess, but SSDs make a lot of sense today. This is a similar idea, a middle tier of fast/bulk storage anyway.
ZFS & SSD
Johnathan Schwartz's blog
Of course you could just hold your breath for btrfs with some form of SSD optimization. I think that's ridiculous though, given that ZFS is here today, and Sun is already moving past SSD optimization and onto what are you going to use them for..
Sure, the article implied "desktop OS", but that's a fairly simple subset of what SSD will do in the enterprise.
How does Apple make it's consumers special? By selling premium goods that only some choose to buy?
Do you think I'm special because I own Apple products? ANYONE can buy them, so I don't see how anyone could think it would make them special.
Maybe Lamborghini owners think they're special because they're somewhere near the top. single digit, X% of the world's wealthiest people.
Maybe that IS special to some degree.
But, Apple products? By providing slightly more value and charging slightly more than competitors, you think that makes people special, really? These aren't super powers friend.
I'm sorry, what the fuck do Flash, Silverlight and Java FX have to do with Android?
Mods, mods, mods.. please guys, wake up.
This is a blatant attempt to stop Android taking over the mobile phone space.
Unwrap some of that tinfoil so you can talk, and tell us WHY.
I'm the GP too, had to reply to myself :)
Thanks for the info, I've only dealt with the little window Networker provided to it.
You might be right about OS X, there's got to be something going on under the hood to make them as smooth as they are.
ROFL, killed it, and how many _other_ random processes beforehand? I don't think modern Linux kernels do this any more.
Or do you mean your process died on it's own from lack of error checking when a memory allocation finally failed?
Linux certainly makes no assumptions about the _intent_ of a process using lots of memory. I can't think of an OS that would for that matter.
Had Win 3.11 been open source and a consultant was able to change it, the machine would probably still be operating.
Isn't requesting the manufacturer of the visual inspection machine to provide updated software the proper thing to do? How do you just swap out the operating software on something like that without involving the vendor? Was it not under support or something?
This is exactly why I don't understand the open source support business model.
The two biggest bullet points the open source advocates use is self support and low cost. What the heck do these businesses think their market is?
It's like advocating open cars because someday everything might run on ethanol, and you want to personally be able to switch your car to whatever you want, or put a hemi in your Ford, or whatever. Then open car maintenance vendors pop up. Huh? Nothing would really change, people would bring their cars in to the open car vendor they bought it from because every open car would be a little different. Support for the custom open car you hand built would more expensive than any closed car. Most people would continue right on not even changing their own oil or tire pressure.
I know, theoretically, you have the choice of multiple support vendors, and still retain the option of self support.
Then, reality bites, and RedHat doesn't want to support your Debian installation. Few businesses really want the overhead of maintaining custom kernel modifications, or custom webservers. They might try... and use some custom patched code base, unmaintained for years, and eventually switch to the default vendor shipped code. Open source in the business world (and sometimes in general, I'm sorry) seems to try solving problems that don't exist.
I remembered another little known built in NTFS feature few people know about. Maybe those of you genuinely interested in filesystem features & backups, not OS religion will appreciate it.
Change journaling.
I don't think there is a native GUI for this, instead the backup vendor provides one, or handles it for you.
It is specifically meant for backups. Instead of scrubbing the entire disk and comparing to previous records to find changed files, with the change journal enabled, incremental backups consisting of millions of files are pretty quick. Well, discovering the list is MUCH faster anyway, backing up a million 1k files sucks regardless. The beginning of a backup can actually be very resource intensive, and time consuming without this feature. It has a small overhead, but each time you perform a backup operation the journal resets, releasing that overhead.
Anyone know where this feature might have originated from? AFAIK Solaris and Linux don't have this ability, and being backup specific, I can't imaging the FOSS world even dream of it. Well, now you know, copy away :)
Volume Shadow Copy: sounds like LVM2 snapshots under Linux
VSC isn't perfect for sure, but how exactly do you take a _consistent_ snapshot with LVM? Snap and pray?
VSC has hooks for applications to detect a snapshot and quiesce themselves, in a cooperative manner.
Not perfect, but at least Microsoft's big apps mostly support it to enable consistent backups.
I don't know how popular it is though. The most common way of doing consistent backups on both UNIX and Windows is for the backup software to either tell the app to quiesce itself then back it up, or a combo quiesce & snapshot, exit quiesced mode soon as snap is done, then take your time backing up the snapshot. The problem is that you need app specific modules to quiesce them, and the need to deal with a multitude of snapshot techniques. Snapshot might be software like LVM, or SVM, third party software like VxVM, hardware like Symmetrix BCV, or Clariion snap, God only knows. You can imagine that this gets VERY complex and expensive.
VSC allows applications to plug into it so that backup software doesn't need to be app specific, just VSC aware to start/stop a snap. The app detects a snap and quiesces automatically. VSC also allows storage vendors to integrate their platforms with it. Like I said, the most common was is still the app/vendor specific route, I'm not sure just how many storage vendors have integrated with VSC, but it could be more than I think.
Backup software calls for a snap, the app quiesces by itself, the backend storage system does a hardware snap or mirror split, backup software gets the OK to backup. Cool, huh?
I dig on Microsoft a lot too guys, but you should really get your heads out of the sand and pay attention to the many good things they (and other vendors) do. Reading linux.com all day doesn't give a realistic representation of where Linux stands technologically.
Hierarchical Storage Management: HSM as implemented by IBM and then ported to Linux
News to me, where does Linux have HSM built in? Is it free? Do you have any examples of it being used in production?
Junction Points: sounds like hard links under Linux
Don't nitpick, there is obviously a lot you don't understand about NTFS and it's associated frameworks. The GP is right, NTFS has changed a lot over the years but kept the same name.
Ext has... well, it got journaling at some point. And then.. well, here we are. If Ext3 was more than just your run of the mill textbook filesystem, there wouldn't be so many damned new ones in the works.
"Open-source code is typically not complex enough to make money selling support."
Go look at the kind of software that is SUCCESSFULLY sold as solution bundles, or with professional services. Cost aside, does it look anything at all like free software? Make free software look like it came from the bargain bin? Well, it did.
If you want to sell support or solutions, free software developers are going to have to start coding a lot harder, and learn some very specific business needs (while still turning it into code for free).
Basically, you need FOSES, free open source _enterprise_ software. This market is not nearly as big as many of you think. I think it might have 1.5 players in all.
FOSS business model.. hah. ... but continue to buy software support agreements and professional services for software a college intern can babysit. Shit, he wrote part of it.
"Switch to free software, saving money in licensing and staffing"
I want some of what they're smoking.
This also means nearly all enlisted IT positions are deployable now. I'm not sure what the long term effects of that will be though. I could see it going a couple different ways. Better retention, fewer geeks...
In the Marine Corps, many of our brightest are sent to IT related MOS's (jobs). Of those, the smarter ones (going off ASVAB scores anyway) tend to wind up at headquarters. That's DC for the most part, or at least Quantico, VA. Headquarters for us is like a black hole, we either don't deploy, or we voluntarily deploy in very small numbers. So small the quotas are usually filled with volunteers! We rarely meet annual training requirements (one rifle, one swim, one gas mask qual in four years, outside bootcamp). It's not nearly the same as being on a real Marine Corps base, or shit, deploying. I'm not saying this is a bad thing.. keeping the brightest bulbs close to home probably pays off, but there's the lure of making 4x, 5x your salary for some government IT services company with a hard on for former military. I don't think there are many enlisted IT guys left in HQ now :\ Mostly replaced with contractors over the past few years. Hard decision for these guys to make after four years. Get out and make real money, or stay in and transition abruptly to the real Corps.
So... I can't say having all enlisted IT personnel deployable will HURT retention any because they sure aren't keeping any around DC.
I, like everyone else had no idea where I could end up when I joined, so that's not changed any. Maybe they'll have a chance to keep bright IT guys for 8+ years now, who knows.
Anyway, just thought I'd share some personal experience with Marine IT. Most of our good, garrisoned IT folks came from an ENTIRELY different world than what you find onboard that carrier for example.
Well, there is the idea that with no AV at all, a virus could theoretically linger longer on a Mac. But, a widespread one would probably get weeded out with a system update, the same way Microsoft started pushing monthly malicious software removal updates.
I think it's safe to say from a botnet perspective anyway, one hacked Mac is worth more than one hacked Windows PC for that reason alone.
If there was as much money as you think to be made from cracking Macs someone would have done it by now, or do you honestly think that there's no one in the world talented enough to find a hole in OSX with $28 billion on the line?
How long can you continue to devalue what is now 8% of the computer market? It is growing, and the malware representation from it is... what? Which is it, REALLY secure, PITA to hack/compromise, or just not as valuable as other platforms? Are you expecting a rubber band effect when it reaches some larger market percentage? If you really want to think market size is the only factor, then what about Vista vs. XP/older? As Vista adoption continues, do you seriously expect malware incidents to continue at the same rate as XP? Why is it so hard to consider that maybe Mac OS X is/has already been in the same category of PITA to compromise.
It could just be that Mac OS X & Vista are secure enough, and make malware easy enough to detect & remove that the malware penetration rates we have today cannot be sustained in the future.
That STILL does not compare at all.
Let me see.
1. If an entity you had little or no representation in (presuming you should have representation at all, as in a government that considers you its citizen, NOT a corporation you have no investment in) levied a DRM tax on imported games.
2. Games are generally not available domestically. Quality Japanese game exports/imports are a large facet of the economy, operated by a giant monopolistic company, and some wealthy locals (pirates?) are smuggling cheap games from the Netherlands into the country FOR PROFIT, and dirt cheap because they dodge import DRM taxes, hurting legit game importers.
3. Smuggler has his ship confiscated by authorities, and charged with various infractions.
4. The government took action to prevent one of its biggest corporations from going under by relieving it of paying DRM import taxes, you have even less DRM now than games sold back home.
5. Smuggler and his lawyer arrange a boycott of the legit game importer's games.
6. A group of people lead by the smugglers destroyed a whole shipment of DRM free games in protest of having no representation in the government.
I might have gotten some of this wrong, and others will surely correct me, but my point has been made. This was MUCH more complex than "We wanted A, They wanted B, rabble, rabble, fighting ensued". The Boston Tea Party does not compare in any way at all to angry teenagers bitching about having to pay for video games.
That would be due to bugs though, there isn't a good reason higher frame rates should impact a game's physics.
The real reason to have an _average_ frame rate much higher than your monitor's refresh rate, is so that hopefully the _minium_ frame rate doesn't dip below it, for long anyway. OK, outputting at higher frame rates is kind of silly, but there are plenty of reasons for being capable of it, and it shouldn't hurt your experience as long as you have vsync on. A pan from a 120 fps empty room to 20 fps crystal cavern is very distracting without vsync.
OpenSolaris is no more "mainly geared" towards desktops than your typical Linux distro.
From what you just said though... stick with what you've got, because I'm afraid you'd be switching OS's for reasons you really don't understand. Nothing you've read here on Slashdot today is worth basing an OS/platform decision on, there are many, many other things to consider.
You think all implementations of GCC are built from the same source? Seriously?