This is probably true, but I'm not sure that most ISPs even bother to do it. They just wait until you run over some predefined traffic limit -- for Comcast, I've heard 90GB tossed around as a figure -- send you an emailed warning, and then cut you off if you continue to push too many packets.
I've heard of people who've gotten bandwidth warnings as a result of very heavy VOIP and video use, not even Bittorrent.
I'm not really sure that the ISPs care that much about what protocol is generating the traffic, they just care that you're using more than your "unadvertised allotment," which is ironic given that they advertise it as unlimited service.
Sure, they could use packet shapers, but it's easier just to look at raw traffic in a given period, and go after anyone who gets more than a few standard deviations away from the mean.
1. They are a pain in the ass to sign up for. They have annoying CAPTCHAs, and their UI makes me want to stab people. The login name you'll probably end up with itself is long (since they have so many accounts, you generally can't get a compact username; you're stuck with JohnDoe48529), and unless you want an equally crappy Flickr username, your Flickr name and your Yahoo ID won't be the same (i.e. Flickr: JohnDoe, Yahoo: JohnDoe48529), which is confusing. It's just one more barrier to entry that keeps non-geeks like my family, who would otherwise be interested in something like Flickr, away.
2. Psychologically, signing up for a "Yahoo ID" seems like a much bigger commitment than "making an account on Flickr." It introduces an extra layer of confusion, when you're trying to get people to sign up for the service. Like I said in my other comment, when people have expressed an interest in getting on Flickr, 90% of them just give up as soon as they figure out that they need to make an account on "another site," i.e. Yahoo, because it's a PITA and seems like a lot of work.
Some of these problems are technical, others are due to Yahoo's implementation; they could have just let you use the same sign-in fields and use a Flickr ID or a Yahoo ID, and then rolled all the Flickr IDs over into Yahoo ID's silently (like eBay did when they bought Half.com -- one day, all the Half.com people got told, 'by the way, your Half.com name is also an eBay account, congratulations'). This would have been fine. But they didn't do that. They make a huge fucking deal about signing in with your Yahoo ID, as if this is something people actually want, and it's not. That's perhaps the most aggravating part of the whole thing.
It's Flickr, which a lot of people like, but without Yahoo, which a lot of people hate.
I wonder if it works with the FlickrExport plugins for iPhoto and Aperture...if it does, I might be interested. I narrowly missed getting onto Flickr before the Yahoo buyout, and everyone seems pretty universally convinced that it's gone downhill since then. (Few features have been added, and those that have are of a blatantly revenue-generating nature, e.g. printing.)
It's pretty obvious that Yahoo bought Flickr for its userbase, and the whole idea is to develop Flickr users into users of Yahoo's other (ad-laden) services, and also use Flickr to bring in more users -- hence, the continual refusal to develop a feature to share photos privately with non-members. If you want to share photos of your family gathering (that you don't want publicly accessible to every nutjob in the world), you have to limit it to "Family" or "Friends," who can only be other Flickr members. It would be trivial to allow users to create a hidden photo album with an obscure URL, and then only distribute that to people they want to see the photos, but this request has been ignored for upwards of a year or more now.
One of my biggest problems with Flickr is that it requires a Yahoo ID.
It's just obnoxious; it makes signing up for it into a much bigger deal, than making a one-shot account (like on Slashdot, or any other discrete service). It just makes it feel like more of a commitment.
I can't tell you how many times I've had people ask me how they can comment on my Flickr photos, and I have to tell them that they need a Flickr name, and they look into it, until they realize it's going to mean getting a Yahoo ID, and that's a big turn off. (My entire family falls into this category; none of them want to get a Yahoo ID. Probably because they're confusing it with Yahoo Mail, but it doesn't matter. The point is people don't want one.)
I always wished that I had got on to Flickr before the instituted the Yahoo ID requirement, because I can never remember what my idiotic Yahoo ID is (it's not the same as my Flickr username), and thus I really only ever use Flickr from computers that have it saved/cookied.
Basically: Yahoo ID's are a drag. I don't want to "build a relationship" with Yahoo. I don't want any of their other crummy services. I just want Flickr, and so do a lot of other people. They've shot themselves in the foot with this requirement -- as I said, I personally know quite a few people who've decided not to touch Flickr because of the mandatory Yahoo ID -- and now they're going to make the hole a little bigger.
In the 1960s, auteurs like Bergman and Antonioni created films with a highly personal stamp, but while their films had some measure of popular success at the time, people today are no longer interested and films mainly function as simple mindless entertainment. I don't think that the average movie-goer cares about screenwriters--and studios often subject a script to rewrites that take it far away from the screenwriter's original intent--they just want a few laughs, the proverbial roller-coaster ride of suspense, or a heartwarming love story, and why pay for that if it's on Bittorrent?
I disagree. I think you're over-romanticizing the past. It's a common mistake, and has been for some time (c.f. the Ancient Greeks constantly bitching about the same stuff). The movies of the 50s and 60s weren't any better than those made today, and I can guarantee you that if you looked, you could probably find sources in the 60s lamenting the apparent decline of films in that era, compared to the "golden years" of the 30s, or even from Vaudeville or silent pictures.
The reason is because, put simply, we don't remember crappy films. It's easy to look back across the past, and think that everything was brilliant and wonderful, but that's only because so many remarkably shitty films have either been forgotten about, or consciously removed from our cultural mythology.
I have no doubt that in 30 years, people will look back on the 80s and 90s with nostalgia, but when they do so, they'll only consider the small number of films that history has seen fit to remember. (And there were some films that were decent, in both decades; Schindler's List in 1987, E.T. in '82, Silence of the Lambs in '92, Pulp Fiction in '94, and Fargo in '96 are all on AFI's list of 100 Best Movies, just for starters.)
We do the same thing with literature and music; because we only choose to remember and savor what we perceive to be good and worth the effort, our memories (and the physical records) of the past are biased to what's likely to be thought of as good, later on. So the further back you go, the "better" things seem like they were.
I doubt very much that if you walked into a neighborhood movie theater any weekend in 1965, that the overall average quality of movies would have been any higher than in a similar theater in 1995; your chances of walking in on Doctor Zhivago were probably just about as likely as walking in on The Little Nuns or something similarly stupid.
People in 1965, or for that matter, 1955, 1935, or 1655, wanted cheap, forgettable entertainment in the same way we do today. They got it in different forms depending on the available technology, but people haven't fundamentally changed. It's just that the further back you look, the less trash we still have around to remind us of 'everyday' entertainment.
Well, they might rebrand it, but people are going to go nuts if they actually change the email addresses in other countries away from "gmail.com" ones; so regardless of whether it says "Google Mail" or "Gmail" at the top of the page, GMail is what most folks in English speaking countries are going to call it, I suspect.
Really, I think that Google is just going to wait a while, and then once the media coverage has disappeared, buy this guy's domain. Having "gmail.cc" for every other First World CC in the world except DE, just isn't going to fly; they need that domain, and now it's just going to be a lot of negotiation to work out a price.
The BBC Trust, an independent body that replaced the corporation's governors at the beginning of 2007, said the on-demand plans - which also cover cable TV - were "likely to deliver significant public value".
But it agreed with broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, which said earlier this month that the iPlayer could have a "negative effect" on commercial rivals.
As a result, the trust has imposed several conditions on the BBC.
It wants the corporation to scale back plans to let downloaded "catch-up" episodes remain on users' hard drives for 13 weeks, suggesting that 30 days is enough.
Chris Woolard, head of finance, economics and strategy at the Trust, defended the decision to cut the storage time.
When people record a programme at home "if they don't look at it within 48 hours, they don't look at it at all", he said.
So basically, it's the usual -- a bunch of politicians trying hard not to piss off their corporate masters, while tossing a bone to the public here and there, just enough to keep people coming out to the next election and maintaining the facade.
Are there any hard metrics on what the performance advantages are of various schedulers, under typical load conditions?
Reading TFA piqued my interest into I/O scheduling and I've been doing some reading on it, and it seems like there are several competing schools of thought, of which Axboe (and potentially the Linux kernel developers generally) are only one.
An alternative view, such as this from Justin Walker (a Darwin developer) on the darwin-kernel mailing list, holds that it's not worthwhile for the OS kernel to do much disk scheduling, since "the OS does not have a good idea of the actual disk geometry and other performance characteristics, and so we [kernel developers] leave that level of scheduling up to the controllers in the disk drive itself. I think, for example, that recent IBM drives have some variant of OS/2 running in the controller. Since the OS knows nothing about heads, tracks, cylinders for modern commodity disks, it's futile to try to schedule I/O for them." (written Mar 2003)
Axboe seems to acknowledge that this may sometimes be the case, because they do have the 'non-scheduling scheduler,' which he recommends only for use with very intelligent hardware. However, it seems like some people think that commodity drives are already 'smart enough' to do their own scheduling.
It seems like determining which approach was superior would be relatively straightforward, and yet I've never seen it done (although maybe I'm just not looking in the right places). Anecdotally, I'm tempted to agree with Axboe, since it seems like, when doing things where several processes are all thrashing the disk simultaneously, my Linux machine feels faster than my OS X one, but this is by no means scientific (they don't have the same drives in them, not working with the same datasets, etc.).
On what drives, and under what conditions, is it advantageous to have the OS kernel perform scheduling, and on which ones is it best just to pass stuff to the drive and let the controller do all the thinking?
Why don't you just get a heating pad or small electric heater? Most pads can be switched between 40/80/100W, and wouldn't leave you with an insomniac dog.:)
Alternately, and probably a better option, are actual purpose-built dog house heaters, switchable wattages, usable with a timer or rheostat, and designed for use with pets.
When it booted, two big Tux penguins were displayed indicating dual CPUs. Then after a bit of booting six more smaller Tux penguins appeared beneath the first two. So I suspect all eight cores are in use.
Well, hell -- eight penguins? I know that's all the benchmarks I need. Now, where's my credit card?
I think it would be more correct to say: [His] is the the part of the kernel that's responsible for making systems slightly less slow during extended disk writes, while the CPU utilization is minimal.
And even that's not quite true, where the scheduler really comes into play is when you have two or more processes trying to access the disk at the same time. During an extended, sustained read or write, the scheduler probably just needs to stay the hell out of the way and pass data as fast as it can.
You could also say, that as a secondary priority, he's responsible for keeping the CPU utilization minimal, during those disk writes...
At risk of starting a holy war, is there any reason why one approach would be superior? And do they lend themselves to different methods of scheduling? In TFA, Axboe talks about [1] the scheduling mechanism used in later versions of the 2.6 kernel series, which alleviates a problem that I (and most other people, probably) have run into before.
I'm curious, because although I don't use any of the 'real' BSDs very often -- I spend most of my time (at home, anyway) using either Mac OS X, which uses the Mach/XNU kernel (which is derived from 4.3BSD, although I don't know if the I/O scheduler has been rewritten since then), or Linux with the 2.6 kernel, and it seems to me that OS X's disk I/O leaves something to be desired compared to Linux's.
Does BSD handle I/O differently in some fundamental fashion than Linux? It sounds like, by eliminating block devices, that they basically remove the kernel from doing any re-ordering or caching of data, which makes things "safer" (in the event of a crash) but seems like it would have big performance penalties when using drives that aren't very smart, and don't do a lot of caching and optimization on their own. It seems like getting rid of I/O scheduling altogether is a stiff price to pay for "safety."
[1] (quoting because there doesn't seem to be anchors in TFA)
Classic work conserving IO schedulers tend to perform really poorly for shared workloads. A good example of that is trying to edit a file while some other process(es) are doing write back of dirty data.... Even with a fairly small latency of a few seconds between each read, getting at the file you wish to edit can take tens of seconds. On an unloaded system, the same operation would take perhaps 100 milliseconds at most. By allowing a process priority access to the disk for small slices of time, that same operation will often complete in a few hundred milliseconds instead. A different example is having more two or more processes reading file data. A work conserving scheduler will seek back and forth between the processes continually, reducing a sequential workload to a completely seek bound workload....
companies are bound to obey the laws of the countries they do business in.
Not quite true; the primary obligation of a company is to the laws of the country that it is incorporated in, which is the closest you can get to where a fictitious, legal entity "resides." After that, then they have some responsibility to the laws of the country where they would also like to do business, but only if those laws don't conflict with their home country's.
If you don't want to follow U.S. laws, you just have to not be incorporated there, and not have any offices there, and not have your stock listed in any U.S. exchanges, and you probably don't want to have any employees based there, or have any of your corporate officers fly there, either. But if you do those things, particularly if you base the company out of the U.S., then you're beholden to U.S. laws, which may limit where you can do business.
You can't have it both ways: you can't enjoy the protection of First World laws and derive the benefits of being traded in a First World stock market, while bribing people left and right, collaborating with terrorists or repressive regimes, and generally acting like the corporate equivalent of a tin-pot dictatorship. (Or, at least you shouldn't; clearly some companies get away with things they shouldn't, from time to time.)
I think this proposed law makes a whole lot more sense, even, than the FCPA (which I had mixed feelings about initially, since I'm not sure that bribery is universally immoral, or at least not immoral to the same extent that turning some blogger over to the Chinese, so he can be imprisoned and tortured, is).
Once they put out their spreadsheet program it is quite likely that the Microsoft Business Unit will be broken up and assigned to Windows products.
I guess this explains why they've never done a spreadsheet...if Microsoft stopped making Office for Mac, it would cripple the Macintosh platform and probably depress sales tremendously. Apple knows it -- hence why the advertise that the Mac will run Office -- and so does everyone else (iWork didn't sell very well, heck, it couldn't even outsell Word Perfect).
Not to be conspiratorial, but if you're right, I'd sooner believe that Apple planned a spreadsheet and pulled it out of iWork, essentially scuttling it in order to save the Mac as a platform, rather than believing that they're going to implement one and take on Office directly.
There are thousands, if not millions, of users who can only get away with using Macs, despite their advantages in other areas, because they run a native version of Microsoft Office and thus can be argued to be "100% compatible." Without a native version of Office, the Mac's marketshare would evaporate -- either with users switching back to Windows in order to get "real Office," or to Linux, because it would then be just as good (or bad), and significantly cheaper.
There is Office, and there is everything else. iWork is not Office, therefore it is, to most people, no better or worse than any number of 'alternative office suites,' some of which are free. I think it's a great program, but unless it supports ODF and ODF catches on in a big way (like, the U.S. government mandates it as the One True Format, not bloody likely) it's competing in a niche that's been dead for years.
I'm hardly a MS fanboy: I have a dual-proc G5 (last of the great PPC Space Heaters) at home, sitting next to a Linux workstation that I bought no-OS. I've never purchased a copy of Windows in my life, and don't plan to. But if Office didn't exist for Mac, I'd probably have to bite the bullet and get one, because it's just not practical to not speak the lingua franca of the electronic-document world, with perfect fluency. I despise the fact that DOC, and not an open standard, has become entrenched, but that's the situation users have to deal with.
I've played with PS3 linux. I can tell you, the hypervisor is just that. It virtualizes the PS3 hardware....
I don't know about anybody else, but I find this just conceptually fascinating. Where does the hypervisor run from, anyway? Is it in the machine's ROM, so that there's no way to prevent it from booting? (Without irreversible hardware modifications.)
I was just wondering whether it's possible to get rid of it, and boot Linux on the bare metal, or whether the hypervisor is tied into the hardware so tightly, it's impossible to remove and install a new Domain 0 operating system.
Getting Linux to run on the bare metal, 'below' the hypervisor, will be an interesting exercise in what I suspect may be a large part of the future of "unauthorized" computing. I don't think it'll be long before most consumer systems have something like that in place, so it'll be a good intellectual challenge, if nothing else, to see if it can be gotten around.
But honestly, how do they KNOW you don't want it unless they give it a try? (I'm 100% serious here. I want your response.)
Easy; assume I don't want it unless I request it. If I write a personal email to someone, like to customer service, I expect a response. If I order something, I assume they'll send me a confirmation. I don't want an email a week for the next 50 years.
That's just common sense: if you don't know whether the person on the other end will want to receive something or not, don't send it.
There's a big difference between "push" and "pull" marketing. Or, to use examples, between sending out emails, and putting out a website.
I don't see any problem with manufacturers putting information about their products in places where an interested consumer can find it, if they're looking. But the problem occurs when companies start pushing that information out at consumers, who many or may not be interested in the product or service to begin with.
I don't have an issue with corporate web sites, because they require the consumer/viewer to go to them. If I'm looking for widgets, I might type "widgets" into a search engine, and get the website for Widgets, Inc. So I'll go to that page, read about their widgets, and perhaps buy one.
This is entirely different from Widgets, Inc. buying time in the middle of a TV program that I'm watching, and sending me a message trying to convince me to buy their widgets, when I might or might not have been interested beforehand. The key difference is in who initiates the communication; when it's initiated by the seller, it's advertising, when it's initiated by the consumer, it's research.
It would be entirely possible to have a world without advertising, and only research. We can argue about whether that would be a good thing or not, but it's certainly not impossible.
Just like the regular "unsubscribe" links in the body of the messages, such a header could be used by the unscrupulous as a way of telling that certain addresses are 'live.'
The only safe way to have an 'unsubscribe' button, would be if it just caused the sender to get a bounced-email message back, so that they didn't have any way of telling whether the address had a person sitting behind it, or whether it was just a dead address.
So, the closest implementation to your proposal, that I can imagine, would basically come down to mandating that all legitimate emailers respect a bounce-back as an "unsubscribe" request. Which doesn't strike me as a particularly bad idea, but the marketdroids would probably scream bloody murder about it (as they do about anything that keeps them from broadcasting their message into your brain, 24/7/365, by any means necessary).
This would still have some problems; spammers sending email with forged return addresses could basically use the bounces as a way of DOSing the forged address, but this happens already so there's no big change.
Not only that, but unless I can consciously remember signing up for a particular mailing list, I'm not going to use its unsubscribe link -- I'm just going to mark it as Spam.
Why? Because an "unsubscribe" link can just as easily be an "this email address is live, sell it to all the other scumbags" link. Unless I know that the organization it's coming from is legit, clicking on an 'unsubscribe' link in an email is considered harmful, and I won't do it.
If you want to send out bulk emails (and I think this is a pretty terrible idea to begin with), you should carefully cull your lists if you don't want to be marked as a spammer. I don't want to get messages from someone for the rest of my life, just because I bought something from them once. At best, that's going to make me regret ever doing business with them. Just because I bought something from your crummy web store, shouldn't give you the right to send crap to me forever; if I haven't made another purchase in a few months, I'm probably not coming back. Roll the old address off of the list, and move on -- you're probably just going into a junk-mail box somewhere anyway. (Or more likely, being "eaten" by Spam Gourmet after the 10 messages from you I told it to let through have come and gone, because I didn't trust your ass not to spam me in the first place.)
The ultimate definition of "Spam" is pretty simple: it's email that people don't want to receive. If you're sending out email to people who would rather not be getting it, you're a spammer, plain and simple. It may not be illegal (yet), but it doesn't mean that it's not obnoxious.
Does anyone know how much of the PS3's hardware is actually supported? When you run Linux on Cell, is it actually using all of the Cell cores, or is it just using the main (PPC-like) one?
It seems like Cell is probably going to be a lackluster performer, if only the single main processor is used; at that point it's just like using a 3 or 4 year old PowerPC system. But if Linux can support its additional hardware and coprocessors, it seems like you could do some neat stuff with it; I'd think that you could make a nice media-PC frontend on it, for pushing HD video around.
Seems like getting software to take advantage of it, would require changes both to the kernel, and also to GCC, in order to produce optimized binaries for it, not to mention various pieces of software themselves (rewriting for greater parallelizability).
Still, it's a neat hardware platform (that's about all I have nice to say about it, actually), and it's a good bet that at some time in the future, they'll be available inexpensively on the used market. Anything that starts the process of getting better support now, seems like a good thing to me.
So the bottom line here is that they're almost exactly the same?
Yeah, that was a totally worthwhile read, no?
Let me give everyone else the bottom line, and save you two or three minutes of your life, that you'll otherwise never get back:
Sony Playstation 3 support and Kernel-based Virtual Machine support are among the exciting features in this release. From today's testing in our environment used and set of benchmarks, there were no definitive performance gains or losses seen throughout the set of tests.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled Slashvertising....
I dont see why it wouldnt work. Its bluetooth and the platform is open.
But the iPhone isn't, so that's where the problem would occur. It's really about whether Apple would let people use external storage, not whether the external storage will work with standards-compliant devices.
That'd be kinda ironic given in their ads they specifically stress on the fact MS Office is available on Mac and It Is Good.
They're not lying, either; Office for Mac is actually an entirely decent piece of software.
Actually, I'd say without reservations that Office for Mac is significantly nicer to use than Office for Windows, and it's a big step up from Claris/AppleWorks, which Apple has never seen fit to pay any attention to, ever since they brought it back into the corporate fold.
Office for Mac has a more consistent UI and doesn't have some of the annoying nonfeatures that Office XP does (like those ridiculous roll-up menus; can I please find the person who thought they were a good idea, and impale them? Please?), and some features that don't exist on Windows to my knowledge, like the "Notebook Layout" in Word, which automatically records audio and synchronizes it to the typed notes, so later you can click on a line and hear the audio that was spoken at the time you wrote it. It's one of the slickest things I've ever used for automated note-taking and writing minutes, and I don't think it exists anywhere else. (There's still room for improvement; it would be better if it saved the audio and text in separate files inside a container, like Apple's RTFD documents, rather than together in a binary blob.)
Microsoft, ironically, has a history of producing pretty decent Mac software. I'm not sure if it's because the developers there are aware that the Microsoft marque carries a certain stigma among Mac users, and they overcompensate by trying harder to produce good gear (while the Windows devs seem to know that they could stamp the MS logo on a dog turd and sell ten million copies, and produce software to match), or what, but there's no reason to knock Office for Mac. About the only complaint I have of it, is that it probably won't ever support ODF, which is a terrifically good idea. And back in the "lean years" of the Mac platform, Microsoft produced a version of Close Combat for Mac (or paid someone to produce it, more likely) that was respectable.
Sure, they've produced some half-baked crap (MSN Messenger for Mac, Windows Media Player for Mac), but when they want to, their Mac division seems to have some talent. Pity about the rest of the company, though.
The only way to truly win freedom from the telecoms and cable companies is to build a network which doesn't rely on telecoms and cable companies.
I agree completely! This is why RFC 1149 is only going to become more important in the future. We need to start rolling out alternatives to the telco backbones immediately.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably true, but I'm not sure that most ISPs even bother to do it. They just wait until you run over some predefined traffic limit -- for Comcast, I've heard 90GB tossed around as a figure -- send you an emailed warning, and then cut you off if you continue to push too many packets.
I've heard of people who've gotten bandwidth warnings as a result of very heavy VOIP and video use, not even Bittorrent.
I'm not really sure that the ISPs care that much about what protocol is generating the traffic, they just care that you're using more than your "unadvertised allotment," which is ironic given that they advertise it as unlimited service.
Sure, they could use packet shapers, but it's easier just to look at raw traffic in a given period, and go after anyone who gets more than a few standard deviations away from the mean.
1. They are a pain in the ass to sign up for.
They have annoying CAPTCHAs, and their UI makes me want to stab people. The login name you'll probably end up with itself is long (since they have so many accounts, you generally can't get a compact username; you're stuck with JohnDoe48529), and unless you want an equally crappy Flickr username, your Flickr name and your Yahoo ID won't be the same (i.e. Flickr: JohnDoe, Yahoo: JohnDoe48529), which is confusing. It's just one more barrier to entry that keeps non-geeks like my family, who would otherwise be interested in something like Flickr, away.
2. Psychologically, signing up for a "Yahoo ID" seems like a much bigger commitment than "making an account on Flickr." It introduces an extra layer of confusion, when you're trying to get people to sign up for the service. Like I said in my other comment, when people have expressed an interest in getting on Flickr, 90% of them just give up as soon as they figure out that they need to make an account on "another site," i.e. Yahoo, because it's a PITA and seems like a lot of work.
Some of these problems are technical, others are due to Yahoo's implementation; they could have just let you use the same sign-in fields and use a Flickr ID or a Yahoo ID, and then rolled all the Flickr IDs over into Yahoo ID's silently (like eBay did when they bought Half.com -- one day, all the Half.com people got told, 'by the way, your Half.com name is also an eBay account, congratulations'). This would have been fine. But they didn't do that. They make a huge fucking deal about signing in with your Yahoo ID, as if this is something people actually want, and it's not. That's perhaps the most aggravating part of the whole thing.
I think that's the point.
It's Flickr, which a lot of people like, but without Yahoo, which a lot of people hate.
I wonder if it works with the FlickrExport plugins for iPhoto and Aperture...if it does, I might be interested. I narrowly missed getting onto Flickr before the Yahoo buyout, and everyone seems pretty universally convinced that it's gone downhill since then. (Few features have been added, and those that have are of a blatantly revenue-generating nature, e.g. printing.)
It's pretty obvious that Yahoo bought Flickr for its userbase, and the whole idea is to develop Flickr users into users of Yahoo's other (ad-laden) services, and also use Flickr to bring in more users -- hence, the continual refusal to develop a feature to share photos privately with non-members. If you want to share photos of your family gathering (that you don't want publicly accessible to every nutjob in the world), you have to limit it to "Family" or "Friends," who can only be other Flickr members. It would be trivial to allow users to create a hidden photo album with an obscure URL, and then only distribute that to people they want to see the photos, but this request has been ignored for upwards of a year or more now.
One of my biggest problems with Flickr is that it requires a Yahoo ID.
It's just obnoxious; it makes signing up for it into a much bigger deal, than making a one-shot account (like on Slashdot, or any other discrete service). It just makes it feel like more of a commitment.
I can't tell you how many times I've had people ask me how they can comment on my Flickr photos, and I have to tell them that they need a Flickr name, and they look into it, until they realize it's going to mean getting a Yahoo ID, and that's a big turn off. (My entire family falls into this category; none of them want to get a Yahoo ID. Probably because they're confusing it with Yahoo Mail, but it doesn't matter. The point is people don't want one.)
I always wished that I had got on to Flickr before the instituted the Yahoo ID requirement, because I can never remember what my idiotic Yahoo ID is (it's not the same as my Flickr username), and thus I really only ever use Flickr from computers that have it saved/cookied.
Basically: Yahoo ID's are a drag. I don't want to "build a relationship" with Yahoo. I don't want any of their other crummy services. I just want Flickr, and so do a lot of other people. They've shot themselves in the foot with this requirement -- as I said, I personally know quite a few people who've decided not to touch Flickr because of the mandatory Yahoo ID -- and now they're going to make the hole a little bigger.
In the 1960s, auteurs like Bergman and Antonioni created films with a highly personal stamp, but while their films had some measure of popular success at the time, people today are no longer interested and films mainly function as simple mindless entertainment. I don't think that the average movie-goer cares about screenwriters--and studios often subject a script to rewrites that take it far away from the screenwriter's original intent--they just want a few laughs, the proverbial roller-coaster ride of suspense, or a heartwarming love story, and why pay for that if it's on Bittorrent?
I disagree. I think you're over-romanticizing the past. It's a common mistake, and has been for some time (c.f. the Ancient Greeks constantly bitching about the same stuff). The movies of the 50s and 60s weren't any better than those made today, and I can guarantee you that if you looked, you could probably find sources in the 60s lamenting the apparent decline of films in that era, compared to the "golden years" of the 30s, or even from Vaudeville or silent pictures.
The reason is because, put simply, we don't remember crappy films. It's easy to look back across the past, and think that everything was brilliant and wonderful, but that's only because so many remarkably shitty films have either been forgotten about, or consciously removed from our cultural mythology.
I have no doubt that in 30 years, people will look back on the 80s and 90s with nostalgia, but when they do so, they'll only consider the small number of films that history has seen fit to remember. (And there were some films that were decent, in both decades; Schindler's List in 1987, E.T. in '82, Silence of the Lambs in '92, Pulp Fiction in '94, and Fargo in '96 are all on AFI's list of 100 Best Movies, just for starters.)
We do the same thing with literature and music; because we only choose to remember and savor what we perceive to be good and worth the effort, our memories (and the physical records) of the past are biased to what's likely to be thought of as good, later on. So the further back you go, the "better" things seem like they were.
I doubt very much that if you walked into a neighborhood movie theater any weekend in 1965, that the overall average quality of movies would have been any higher than in a similar theater in 1995; your chances of walking in on Doctor Zhivago were probably just about as likely as walking in on The Little Nuns or something similarly stupid.
People in 1965, or for that matter, 1955, 1935, or 1655, wanted cheap, forgettable entertainment in the same way we do today. They got it in different forms depending on the available technology, but people haven't fundamentally changed. It's just that the further back you look, the less trash we still have around to remind us of 'everyday' entertainment.
Well, they might rebrand it, but people are going to go nuts if they actually change the email addresses in other countries away from "gmail.com" ones; so regardless of whether it says "Google Mail" or "Gmail" at the top of the page, GMail is what most folks in English speaking countries are going to call it, I suspect.
Really, I think that Google is just going to wait a while, and then once the media coverage has disappeared, buy this guy's domain. Having "gmail.cc" for every other First World CC in the world except DE, just isn't going to fly; they need that domain, and now it's just going to be a lot of negotiation to work out a price.
YHBT, I think.
(I'm hoping the GP was a troll...I've always assumed that people like that were too stupid to use anything other than phpBB-based boards.)
Are there any hard metrics on what the performance advantages are of various schedulers, under typical load conditions?
Reading TFA piqued my interest into I/O scheduling and I've been doing some reading on it, and it seems like there are several competing schools of thought, of which Axboe (and potentially the Linux kernel developers generally) are only one.
An alternative view, such as this from Justin Walker (a Darwin developer) on the darwin-kernel mailing list, holds that it's not worthwhile for the OS kernel to do much disk scheduling, since "the OS does not have a good idea of the actual disk geometry and other performance characteristics, and so we [kernel developers] leave that level of scheduling up to the controllers in the disk drive itself. I think, for example, that recent IBM drives have some variant of OS/2 running in the controller. Since the OS knows nothing about heads, tracks, cylinders for modern commodity disks, it's futile to try to schedule I/O for them." (written Mar 2003)
Axboe seems to acknowledge that this may sometimes be the case, because they do have the 'non-scheduling scheduler,' which he recommends only for use with very intelligent hardware. However, it seems like some people think that commodity drives are already 'smart enough' to do their own scheduling.
It seems like determining which approach was superior would be relatively straightforward, and yet I've never seen it done (although maybe I'm just not looking in the right places). Anecdotally, I'm tempted to agree with Axboe, since it seems like, when doing things where several processes are all thrashing the disk simultaneously, my Linux machine feels faster than my OS X one, but this is by no means scientific (they don't have the same drives in them, not working with the same datasets, etc.).
On what drives, and under what conditions, is it advantageous to have the OS kernel perform scheduling, and on which ones is it best just to pass stuff to the drive and let the controller do all the thinking?
Why don't you just get a heating pad or small electric heater? Most pads can be switched between 40/80/100W, and wouldn't leave you with an insomniac dog. :)
Alternately, and probably a better option, are actual purpose-built dog house heaters, switchable wattages, usable with a timer or rheostat, and designed for use with pets.
When it booted, two big Tux penguins were displayed indicating dual CPUs. Then after a bit of booting six more smaller Tux penguins appeared beneath the first two. So I suspect all eight cores are in use.
Well, hell -- eight penguins? I know that's all the benchmarks I need. Now, where's my credit card?
I think it would be more correct to say:
[His] is the the part of the kernel that's responsible for making systems slightly less slow during extended disk writes, while the CPU utilization is minimal.
And even that's not quite true, where the scheduler really comes into play is when you have two or more processes trying to access the disk at the same time. During an extended, sustained read or write, the scheduler probably just needs to stay the hell out of the way and pass data as fast as it can.
You could also say, that as a secondary priority, he's responsible for keeping the CPU utilization minimal, during those disk writes...
At risk of starting a holy war, is there any reason why one approach would be superior? And do they lend themselves to different methods of scheduling? In TFA, Axboe talks about [1] the scheduling mechanism used in later versions of the 2.6 kernel series, which alleviates a problem that I (and most other people, probably) have run into before.
I'm curious, because although I don't use any of the 'real' BSDs very often -- I spend most of my time (at home, anyway) using either Mac OS X, which uses the Mach/XNU kernel (which is derived from 4.3BSD, although I don't know if the I/O scheduler has been rewritten since then), or Linux with the 2.6 kernel, and it seems to me that OS X's disk I/O leaves something to be desired compared to Linux's.
Does BSD handle I/O differently in some fundamental fashion than Linux? It sounds like, by eliminating block devices, that they basically remove the kernel from doing any re-ordering or caching of data, which makes things "safer" (in the event of a crash) but seems like it would have big performance penalties when using drives that aren't very smart, and don't do a lot of caching and optimization on their own. It seems like getting rid of I/O scheduling altogether is a stiff price to pay for "safety."
[1] (quoting because there doesn't seem to be anchors in TFA)
companies are bound to obey the laws of the countries they do business in.
Not quite true; the primary obligation of a company is to the laws of the country that it is incorporated in, which is the closest you can get to where a fictitious, legal entity "resides." After that, then they have some responsibility to the laws of the country where they would also like to do business, but only if those laws don't conflict with their home country's.
If you don't want to follow U.S. laws, you just have to not be incorporated there, and not have any offices there, and not have your stock listed in any U.S. exchanges, and you probably don't want to have any employees based there, or have any of your corporate officers fly there, either. But if you do those things, particularly if you base the company out of the U.S., then you're beholden to U.S. laws, which may limit where you can do business.
You can't have it both ways: you can't enjoy the protection of First World laws and derive the benefits of being traded in a First World stock market, while bribing people left and right, collaborating with terrorists or repressive regimes, and generally acting like the corporate equivalent of a tin-pot dictatorship. (Or, at least you shouldn't; clearly some companies get away with things they shouldn't, from time to time.)
I think this proposed law makes a whole lot more sense, even, than the FCPA (which I had mixed feelings about initially, since I'm not sure that bribery is universally immoral, or at least not immoral to the same extent that turning some blogger over to the Chinese, so he can be imprisoned and tortured, is).
Once they put out their spreadsheet program it is quite likely that the Microsoft Business Unit will be broken up and assigned to Windows products.
I guess this explains why they've never done a spreadsheet...if Microsoft stopped making Office for Mac, it would cripple the Macintosh platform and probably depress sales tremendously. Apple knows it -- hence why the advertise that the Mac will run Office -- and so does everyone else (iWork didn't sell very well, heck, it couldn't even outsell Word Perfect).
Not to be conspiratorial, but if you're right, I'd sooner believe that Apple planned a spreadsheet and pulled it out of iWork, essentially scuttling it in order to save the Mac as a platform, rather than believing that they're going to implement one and take on Office directly.
There are thousands, if not millions, of users who can only get away with using Macs, despite their advantages in other areas, because they run a native version of Microsoft Office and thus can be argued to be "100% compatible." Without a native version of Office, the Mac's marketshare would evaporate -- either with users switching back to Windows in order to get "real Office," or to Linux, because it would then be just as good (or bad), and significantly cheaper.
There is Office, and there is everything else. iWork is not Office, therefore it is, to most people, no better or worse than any number of 'alternative office suites,' some of which are free. I think it's a great program, but unless it supports ODF and ODF catches on in a big way (like, the U.S. government mandates it as the One True Format, not bloody likely) it's competing in a niche that's been dead for years.
I'm hardly a MS fanboy: I have a dual-proc G5 (last of the great PPC Space Heaters) at home, sitting next to a Linux workstation that I bought no-OS. I've never purchased a copy of Windows in my life, and don't plan to. But if Office didn't exist for Mac, I'd probably have to bite the bullet and get one, because it's just not practical to not speak the lingua franca of the electronic-document world, with perfect fluency. I despise the fact that DOC, and not an open standard, has become entrenched, but that's the situation users have to deal with.
I've played with PS3 linux. I can tell you, the hypervisor is just that. It virtualizes the PS3 hardware. ...
I don't know about anybody else, but I find this just conceptually fascinating. Where does the hypervisor run from, anyway? Is it in the machine's ROM, so that there's no way to prevent it from booting? (Without irreversible hardware modifications.)
I was just wondering whether it's possible to get rid of it, and boot Linux on the bare metal, or whether the hypervisor is tied into the hardware so tightly, it's impossible to remove and install a new Domain 0 operating system.
Getting Linux to run on the bare metal, 'below' the hypervisor, will be an interesting exercise in what I suspect may be a large part of the future of "unauthorized" computing. I don't think it'll be long before most consumer systems have something like that in place, so it'll be a good intellectual challenge, if nothing else, to see if it can be gotten around.
But honestly, how do they KNOW you don't want it unless they give it a try? (I'm 100% serious here. I want your response.)
Easy; assume I don't want it unless I request it. If I write a personal email to someone, like to customer service, I expect a response. If I order something, I assume they'll send me a confirmation. I don't want an email a week for the next 50 years.
That's just common sense: if you don't know whether the person on the other end will want to receive something or not, don't send it.
There's a big difference between "push" and "pull" marketing. Or, to use examples, between sending out emails, and putting out a website.
I don't see any problem with manufacturers putting information about their products in places where an interested consumer can find it, if they're looking. But the problem occurs when companies start pushing that information out at consumers, who many or may not be interested in the product or service to begin with.
I don't have an issue with corporate web sites, because they require the consumer/viewer to go to them. If I'm looking for widgets, I might type "widgets" into a search engine, and get the website for Widgets, Inc. So I'll go to that page, read about their widgets, and perhaps buy one.
This is entirely different from Widgets, Inc. buying time in the middle of a TV program that I'm watching, and sending me a message trying to convince me to buy their widgets, when I might or might not have been interested beforehand. The key difference is in who initiates the communication; when it's initiated by the seller, it's advertising, when it's initiated by the consumer, it's research.
It would be entirely possible to have a world without advertising, and only research. We can argue about whether that would be a good thing or not, but it's certainly not impossible.
Just like the regular "unsubscribe" links in the body of the messages, such a header could be used by the unscrupulous as a way of telling that certain addresses are 'live.'
The only safe way to have an 'unsubscribe' button, would be if it just caused the sender to get a bounced-email message back, so that they didn't have any way of telling whether the address had a person sitting behind it, or whether it was just a dead address.
So, the closest implementation to your proposal, that I can imagine, would basically come down to mandating that all legitimate emailers respect a bounce-back as an "unsubscribe" request. Which doesn't strike me as a particularly bad idea, but the marketdroids would probably scream bloody murder about it (as they do about anything that keeps them from broadcasting their message into your brain, 24/7/365, by any means necessary).
This would still have some problems; spammers sending email with forged return addresses could basically use the bounces as a way of DOSing the forged address, but this happens already so there's no big change.
Not only that, but unless I can consciously remember signing up for a particular mailing list, I'm not going to use its unsubscribe link -- I'm just going to mark it as Spam.
Why? Because an "unsubscribe" link can just as easily be an "this email address is live, sell it to all the other scumbags" link. Unless I know that the organization it's coming from is legit, clicking on an 'unsubscribe' link in an email is considered harmful, and I won't do it.
If you want to send out bulk emails (and I think this is a pretty terrible idea to begin with), you should carefully cull your lists if you don't want to be marked as a spammer. I don't want to get messages from someone for the rest of my life, just because I bought something from them once. At best, that's going to make me regret ever doing business with them. Just because I bought something from your crummy web store, shouldn't give you the right to send crap to me forever; if I haven't made another purchase in a few months, I'm probably not coming back. Roll the old address off of the list, and move on -- you're probably just going into a junk-mail box somewhere anyway. (Or more likely, being "eaten" by Spam Gourmet after the 10 messages from you I told it to let through have come and gone, because I didn't trust your ass not to spam me in the first place.)
The ultimate definition of "Spam" is pretty simple: it's email that people don't want to receive. If you're sending out email to people who would rather not be getting it, you're a spammer, plain and simple. It may not be illegal (yet), but it doesn't mean that it's not obnoxious.
Does anyone know how much of the PS3's hardware is actually supported? When you run Linux on Cell, is it actually using all of the Cell cores, or is it just using the main (PPC-like) one?
It seems like Cell is probably going to be a lackluster performer, if only the single main processor is used; at that point it's just like using a 3 or 4 year old PowerPC system. But if Linux can support its additional hardware and coprocessors, it seems like you could do some neat stuff with it; I'd think that you could make a nice media-PC frontend on it, for pushing HD video around.
Seems like getting software to take advantage of it, would require changes both to the kernel, and also to GCC, in order to produce optimized binaries for it, not to mention various pieces of software themselves (rewriting for greater parallelizability).
Still, it's a neat hardware platform (that's about all I have nice to say about it, actually), and it's a good bet that at some time in the future, they'll be available inexpensively on the used market. Anything that starts the process of getting better support now, seems like a good thing to me.
Yeah, that was a totally worthwhile read, no?
Let me give everyone else the bottom line, and save you two or three minutes of your life, that you'll otherwise never get back: Now, back to our regularly scheduled Slashvertising....
I dont see why it wouldnt work. Its bluetooth and the platform is open.
But the iPhone isn't, so that's where the problem would occur. It's really about whether Apple would let people use external storage, not whether the external storage will work with standards-compliant devices.
That'd be kinda ironic given in their ads they specifically stress on the fact MS Office is available on Mac and It Is Good.
They're not lying, either; Office for Mac is actually an entirely decent piece of software.
Actually, I'd say without reservations that Office for Mac is significantly nicer to use than Office for Windows, and it's a big step up from Claris/AppleWorks, which Apple has never seen fit to pay any attention to, ever since they brought it back into the corporate fold.
Office for Mac has a more consistent UI and doesn't have some of the annoying nonfeatures that Office XP does (like those ridiculous roll-up menus; can I please find the person who thought they were a good idea, and impale them? Please?), and some features that don't exist on Windows to my knowledge, like the "Notebook Layout" in Word, which automatically records audio and synchronizes it to the typed notes, so later you can click on a line and hear the audio that was spoken at the time you wrote it. It's one of the slickest things I've ever used for automated note-taking and writing minutes, and I don't think it exists anywhere else. (There's still room for improvement; it would be better if it saved the audio and text in separate files inside a container, like Apple's RTFD documents, rather than together in a binary blob.)
Microsoft, ironically, has a history of producing pretty decent Mac software. I'm not sure if it's because the developers there are aware that the Microsoft marque carries a certain stigma among Mac users, and they overcompensate by trying harder to produce good gear (while the Windows devs seem to know that they could stamp the MS logo on a dog turd and sell ten million copies, and produce software to match), or what, but there's no reason to knock Office for Mac. About the only complaint I have of it, is that it probably won't ever support ODF, which is a terrifically good idea. And back in the "lean years" of the Mac platform, Microsoft produced a version of Close Combat for Mac (or paid someone to produce it, more likely) that was respectable.
Sure, they've produced some half-baked crap (MSN Messenger for Mac, Windows Media Player for Mac), but when they want to, their Mac division seems to have some talent. Pity about the rest of the company, though.
The only way to truly win freedom from the telecoms and cable companies is to build a network which doesn't rely on telecoms and cable companies.
I agree completely! This is why RFC 1149 is only going to become more important in the future. We need to start rolling out alternatives to the telco backbones immediately.