My primary reasons for strong preference for git over hg are the following:
Lightweight Branches
History is malleable.
git-svn
git "heads" are explicit
Hg is oriented in such a way that the "easiest" workflow is to have multiple branches in multiple different branches. In git, I have exactly one working copy that has all of my history. If I'm making a minor nit change, or a huge sweeping change it all happens in a single directory. Hg generally wants a separate directory/working copy for each branch or line of development.
Hg has a really nice and malleable history via the MQ extension that has quilt like qualities. Which is really, really nice. The problem with it is that once I publish it for someone else to review it, it's not malleable any more (or not as malleable). Maybe that's gotten better, but since I last looked at it, it sucked in comparison to using git-rebase, or one of the Stgit or whatever it was that added quilt like commands to git. Using git, I can publish a branch, get review and commentary, quickly fix the malleable history and re-publish it. Once it passes all review and testing, once integrated into the "mainline", all of the history will be extremely high quality. There will be far fewer commits that are fixed 2 commits later when somebody reviews the code.
git-svn is absolutely wonderful for interacting with SVN repository. My company can use SVN, and I can use git on my machine and work, and re-work a series of small quality commits and then push them to SVN in a automated way. I'm not sure I'd reorganize an SVN repository via it. (Not sure this yet works on Windows).
In Mercurial, heads are deduced by a commit which has no children. So any commit lying around is something that has to be dealt with. In git, I can have a commit that has no children and delete that branch, and it disappears. I can reset a branch to be at any point I like, and it'll be there no matter what else I do.
In the end, Mercurial makes it harder for you to do something "bad" like re-write history too far back in time. At points that is very limiting. Git on the other hand hands you all the chainsaws, if you cut off your legs, they figure that's your problem. In the end, git lets me do what I need to.
I'm a bit of a VCS junkie, so complex interfaces didn't bother me. Once I understand the model of a VC system, I can quickly adapt to it.
Fair enough, I think it's an accurate post, I think you have a different experience with your unions the the folks I've known that unionized. I think that in many industries that might be true of a professional union. I explicitly stated that I thought it was would be different for a plumbers Union or really any non-factory Union.
In the area I live, there are meat packing plants where the union guys would go to the non-union one and blew up transformers and do other criminal things to try and intimidate the place into unionization. I see unions as corrupting. The irony being that the non-union shop had better wages, better benefits, and in general were far more profitable then the union plants.
Now, my question still stands: "What did your Union do for you, most especially that you couldn't have done for yourself?" I feel far more confident to negotiate for myself to handle my personal case then I would ever feel pitching in with a bunch of other folks. I think I'm extremely skilled at what I do, and feel that I can and have gotten top dollar for my efforts. I've never had any aspect of my employment that I couldn't address for myself. I've negotiated in good faith at several places, and ended up leaving for a better opportunity when changes were not made to accommodate changes in my life.
It's an honest and earnest question to you specifically, and your industry in particular? I would have no problem joining a professional organization, agreeing to a code of ethics, and even being tested or certified to ensure quality skills. If it were organized like say laywers or CPA's professional organizations, I'd be very comfortable with joining such a thing. I'd absolutely never join an organization that felt compelled to negotiate my compensation or health benefits. I'd never join an organization that insisted folks not be fired. I'd even contemplate purchasing unemployment insurance for myself (personally I'm more likely to just save a rainy day fund, but only because I realize insurance is not cost effective once you make it past a certain point without making a claim).
I told my boss the other day, I'd much rather work a place that I know fires people. We had three guys fired the other day. They didn't do their jobs. They had mad bad decisions that cost the company a significant opportunity. Too many places accumulate crufty people that everyone agrees should go as they provide minimal productivity and are a huge drain on moral. I want to go where those people are asked to leave. It'd be great if they got a nice severance package. It'd be great if they got warnings, and if other things were done to soften the blow.
My take on Unions is that I want no part of one. I've known several folks who were a part of a Union. Everyone of them had roughly the following to say:
Unions were for working slow to keep up the number of required employees.
Unions were against automation, and technology upgrades for efficiency.
Unions treat everyone the same, and that your value is as a number, not an individual.
Unproductive people were enabled to keep their job.
In a Union, talent, effort, drive, desire all took a back seat to seniority in determining virtually anything (pay, stature, authority, responsibility).
People who weren't around for what Unions were actually needed, can't recognize a grievance. You're boss telling you to stop slacking, isn't a grievance. You being injured while fooling around near a machine, isn't a grievance.
Now most of those were straight factory worker Unions, not say a local plumbers union, which I'm guessing is a bit different.
My take on Unions is that they've become the monster they fought. They have become large bureaucratic institutions that are mostly consumed with money and power. Sorry, but showing up to work and working 8 hours a day, doesn't entitle you to an excessive hourly wage and lifetime benefits.
I understand and completely respect what unions have accomplished for standards of livings, worker safety, and the like.
I also understand that generationally, we've lost sight of the lessons that Unionization taught us. Just as I think we've lost sight of the lessons the Depression taught us. We've held on to certain principles, long after they made no sense. We over compensated in order to right the ship, and then let the pendulum swing too far past. It'll swing back around, hopefully to a point closer to equilibrium.
I'm sure the Kings and Queens of England accomplished a huge number of things we greatly appreciate, hell they colonized my country (US). I greatly appreciated it, but I'm not going to hope we switch back to a Monarchy form of Gov't, or that the US become a Colony of the UK again merely because it accomplished this great task.
A convincing argument about why Unions should exist today is about what good they have accomplished today. Not telling me that 50-100 years ago they accomplished all these wonderful things, and I should keep paying my dues. What does a Union accomplish for me today? Do we legitimately believe that if every Union disappeared off the face of the planet, we'd go back to 16 hours days 6 and a half days a week? I don't, but that's the sort of thing that would convince me a Union is a good idea.
Yes, Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffet. My hunch is the fact that so many people have held onto the stocks for so long, and they are such stable investors would be one of the very few counter balances to the stock freefalling. They are making public plans the contingency plans for when Buffet retires or dies.
I live in Omaha, and trust me, Berkshire Hathaway's meetings every year noticed by folks far and wide who have nothing to do with Warren Buffet. He's at least as strongly connected personally to his company as Jobs is to Apple. The problem is Warren has a strong "Reatily Clarity Field", and thus is far less of a rockstar then Jobs.
For the sake of argument, I'll agree with absolutely everything you say, but that doesn't mean all of the data and media currently in existence will not be completely incomprehensible in 100 years.
I'm arguing that a specific and convoluted form of encoding will in fact be incomprehensible. We can't read all of the old artifacts from 1000 years ago, precisely because the notation and structure of the tools are foreign. 100 years from now my conjecture is that: "Things which are structured in a way to make a computer run fast will fall by the way side, and in the future be interpreted in low fidelity, especially given that they are not self contained", and "Things which are structured as human consumable instructions, will be capable of being interpreted with high fidelity, especially as well constructed ones are self contained."
I don't believe in this proprietary format FUD either - if the proprietary format is no longer supported, you migrate
No, what is needed is for all data to end up in a "long term stable form". PostScript and Portable Digital Format (PDF) will probably be readable 100 years from now using systems that exist then. Why? It's an open format, with lots of content, and everybody and their dog has a reader for it. Will Word documents exist then? Maybe. Will they be rendered with high fidelity? Nope! They lack open fonts, or internal font storage (lots of things open correctly, but on any number of them render completely wrong due to different font metrics).
Will Office documents render correctly 100 years from now? Probably a lot of them. Maybe even most of the important ones. However, if you use clever OLE things, do I think the embedded Visio diagram will "work" 100 years from now. Not a chance. Will the embedded Excel? Maybe. Will the cross reference, and cross linked documents? No.
PS and PDF will be readable and renderable 100 years from now with very high fidelity if for no other reason then both of them are mostly human readable *PROGRAMS*. PS literally is a programming language, PDF isn't but fairly close. Reverse Engineering and comprehending the Word format that are optimized to fitting into old computers.
I've done work for ES&S at a couple of different points, and can point out several things. First, the reports are mostly accurate (there are a few points which I'd disagree with, but there are a number of legitimate concerns in there). Second, no system is secure without physical security, and a number of the attacks ultimately come down to the state needing to ensure that these machines are treated as such. States are very lax about this, and that is a serious problem (personally I think precinct counters should be there to validate the ballot for the voter and give feedback/warnings or errors, and all tabulation should be done via high speed central scanners. The tabulation of the precinct counters might be kept as checks against voter fraud during ballot transport). Physical security is the single most important aspect of any voting system, with enough physical access any security system can be beaten (see every DRM or anti-cheat system for gaming). Unless it's fairly far into the videos, the video stuff is actually about the Sequoia not about ES&S systems. The PDF report linked to does include several chapters about the ES&S systems (all of part II).
Most of those that are dealing with the M100 and the M650 should be dealt with with the next generation of hardware/software for the newer paper scanner products (don't want to comment on the others as I didn't work on or with any of those). Not sure what ES&S's view is, but my personal view is that all DRE machines should be shipped to the nearest blackhole for permanent storage.
There is also some help in addressing some of the concerns about the review of proprietary software. Other then the Java compiler and the cryptography pieces (which are required to have FIPS complaince that most OSS products lack due to expense), all of the software is Open Source and is compiled during the system builds. I believe only one or two libraries aren't compiled from scratch on the machine (the commercial crypto tools, and the Sun JDK). I wouldn't be shocked to find out that OpenJDK is compiled on some future release. Every tool and/or line of source used to build the system has an MD5SUM, and a SHA1SUM along with the external site the software was retrieved from. Other then the crypto and the Java tools, all of the tools are built from source (a LiveCD distro with a minimal dev environment to build GCC, glibc, make, perl and a couple of other tools are bootstrapped into a chroot). It is fairly straight forward to use walk into a secure room and a blank PC with no software on it and end up with 99% of the software that ends up on the M100 replacement product. Two embedded compilers require windows that are built separately.
Another issue is that resolving issues quickly on election day is internally an important quality to the company. There are some security aspects that would be a disaster if the slightest thing goes wrong. With a deployment that large, by a mostly volunteer group, there are always significant mistakes and "proper" security would get in the way. The inability to do field firmware upgrades, because somebody in the state failed to upgrade the hardware before it shipped would be a disaster. It happens in every election despite all the procedures and guidelines. So part of the "only one key" thing falls into this category.
Finally, the most serious problem with all of the software is that no programmer in their right mind can deal with the various rules and obligations for VVSG compliance. I'd spend a day writing, unit testing, and writing "normal" documentation. Followed by at least a day or two of writing all of the required documentation, none of this included the stuff we had tools to auto-generate. I had to write the code first and document afterwards because it was hard to be concise and see all of the related code at a time when it was fully documented.
They require the generation of inane and superfluous documentation, and are bureaucratic and dogmatic about enforcing the rule co
I mostly agree with you. The XPS line from Dell is fairly nice, and once you turn off all of the neon lighting it looks mostly professional. The backpack is just too large, and I never saw the other options for it.
My only real beef with Mac laptops are that I can't get really high end machine with just low end everything else. The screen resolution and the size of the keyboard are all I really care about. If the CPU was 1/3th as fast, and had a smaller drive, I wouldn't care. I just can't justify paying that much for what is essentially an LCD to me. With other companies while you move up in quality of the other hardware, you don't have to move to absolute most expensive configurations just to get to a decent sized LCD.
I'm also annoyed that Apple moves computers through a price point. They have roughly 3 price points, and they just vary what you get over time, rather then letting the price sink (which would cost them in margin, and probably affect their bottom line in the short run). If you don't want to pay roughly $1200, $1800, or $2400, there isn't an Apple option for you. Guess I'll just have to go refirb, or the used market to get what I want at a price I can deal with.
Unless they all operate on the same meta-data the foreign tool is out. My boss thinks the same way you do, every one is allowed to use any damn tool they feel like, with absolutely no bounds.
I work with a guy who insists on using Visual Studio, as nearly as I can tell, because he's unaware that there is a multi-tab text editor outside of VS. So, everytime I have to take over a project from him, I have to go figure extract what files are being build, and then port it into the production system, every other developer on the project uses. Because this is such a hassle, the guy will do updates and commits on an interval measured in months, where as every other developer does them on intervals measured in hours. So along with everything else we have to deal with, when he commits his code, he generally will blow away months of someone elses work because he can't be bothered with learning how resolve conflicts, and it'll never integrate cleanly. We'll spend a week just trying to undo all the damage he'd done. All because he can't be bothered to use the same toolchain everyone else on the team does. It also means I have no commit history, no commit comments, and nothing I cause use to do research on to figure out how the software evolved.
Because he uses Windows, Visual C++ compiler, on an AMD 2.8GHz machine and does all his profiling, it's trivial to go make improve his codes performance on Linux, g++, on an 1Ghz Via C3 (which is the deployment environment for the embedded system). As he works on the single most performance critical aspect, it's more then a bit frustrating. Especially as the code has extreme and unnatural things done to it to the parts that are slow under his one off development environment, but those aren't the parts that are slow under production.
For things like Java, I've learned the hard way, that we'll only have one setup of meta-data. It's terrible frustrating to have all of the corporate standards setup correctly in say Eclipse, (checkstyle, code generation, auto-formatter, unit testing, test coverage, find bugs, PMD, warning levels, etc, etc), and then have some jackass continually commits code that upon contact with a properly configured environment will be flagged as a violation of the coding guidelines, or generates huge numbers of warnings if only he'd turn on the already agreed upon warnings.
I've learned, that there is one set of production meta-data used to do a production build. While we can argue over how we maintain that set of meta-data, once that decision is made all tools must use that meta-data directly (they can translate it from one format to another, as long as it does that automatically, like Maven can for some IDE's). So if we use Eclipse, you can use any tool you want, as long as it reads Eclipse meta-data. If we choose Ant, then you can use any tool you want, as long as it does Ant meta-data. If we choose GNU Build system, you can use any platform and compiler you want, as long as it uses the GNU build system. The one hard and fast rule I have for the meta-data is that it must be possible to build from a command-line in an automated way. It can be obscenely difficult to do (like say Eclipse), but it must be possible.
I've generally learned that anybody who won't agree to use a consistent set of tools with the rest of the team, is a prima dona and is in dire need of a lesson. Yes, I know my toolchain stone cold (gcc/g++, and Eclipse). However, if there is a consensus to use a different toolchain, I'll learn a second one stone cold. I've learned tons about bash, gcc, g++, the Borland compilers, Visual Studio, a number of embedded compilers, Watcom, XCode, the NeXT Objective C IDE, NetBeans, Eclipse, CVS, SVN, Git, Monotone, Arch, Mercurial, Ant, Maven, GNU Make, GNU Auto{conf,make}/libtool, SCons, and probably a couple of others I've forgotten (I've known bits and pieces of several scripting languages, but none well enough write home about). I've learned the best practices of them all when I used them. Given m
All of which were very much proprietary. The key to the low cost PC as the competition among hardware makers. Go look at Sun, Macs, and PS/2 machines (Commodore, Amiga, and Atari should probably be added to that list of yours). From that era Suns and Macs were proprietary. The moment, Macs tried to license the hardware, the company very nearly went out of business. Sun sold great, solid equipment, and could never get it even close to the price point to compete (I also am not sure they wanted to). PS/2's? That whole line died a horrible death due to the proprietary bus (Micro Channel). The PC world thrived and took when the ISA bus was king, and IBM published all of the hardware specs for 3rd party cards (and thus the hardware that specs for the bus). The PC world thrived and took off when Compaq won the landmark case allowing them to reverse engineer the IBM Bios. The PC world thrived and took off when the Microsoft negotiated the deal with IBM to sell MS-DOS that was licensed to IBM as PC-DOS. The PC world thrived and took off when Intel got competitors in Cyrix, AMD, and other hardware makers creating x86 clone chips.
It was the fact that there was stiff competition for virtually every part in a machine. It was the nasty world evil consumer that bought, cheap crappy hardware, that got the economies of scale going. If you look at the PC world, the PC used to cost $3,000 (probably $10,000, but $3K is what I paid for my first machine in '95). The competition in an open market place (read, not Mac's, not Sun, not IBM's PS/2), are what created and won virtually all of the market place. The competition eventually drove the price of a PC to under $500, all the while getting, better and better hardware. Eventually the price got low enough, that it started to add more and more features that used to be the sole purview of high end "Workstation", or "Server" class machines. There's a reason that Sun sells what is effectively, nothing more then a jumped up version of the modern day desktop machine as their entry level server. I'm here to tell you that, Bill and Co. have a place at that table of folks who were there and part of what made it happen.
Does that make Bill a good person? No (but just because that doesn't make him good, doesn't imply that he's bad). Does that mean, Bill intended this move to accomplish that? Probably not. I think Bill Gates figured out fairly early on that hardware was rapidly becoming a commodity market, and that software was the thing that people had a true affinity for. If they could run the same software on different hardware, what did they care? In the end, he was correct. Just ask Apple. There's a reason Apple nearly went out of business when somebody else undercut their hardware (both because the model was setup all wrong, and that people didn't really care about Mac the hardware, they cared about Mac the interface). Most folks couldn't care less about the iMac, the Mac Mini, the iPod, or the iPhone in the hardware. What most of them really care about is how useful and easy the software is for them to use. I have a Mac and I hate the interface. I find it counter-intuitive, but only because I don't think "if I want this and that to work together, I should drag one to the other".
Windows in all its incarnations, and all of it's vile issues. It filled in the gap that allowed the PC computers to be usable by folks who couldn't have otherwise. For that alone, Bill and Co. deserve a place in history and helping to drive the PC revolution. Would something else have filled that need? Sure, but Bill was there. Would somebody else have discovered gravity? Sure, but we give Newton credit, because he was there and did what he did. If the PC market had been left to Sun, Apple, and IBM, they'd be carving huge chunks of a smaller pie, at much higher profit margins. None of them got that if they sold crappy stuff that was just above the crappy line.
It's not for the feint of heart, but you might look at using LFS to build such a minimal system. I don't really see the harm in using a "full" Linux machine for the development environment, and then using LFS to build the embedded image that you deploy to "real" devices. We do this where I work.
Why on Earth are you generating releases that often? I've worked in a lot of shops that used SVN, and at we used the SVN revision number for our "internal" releases. Given a path and a revision number, you have a unique identifier for *EVERY* sub-directory inside of an SVN repository. Until we actually made a long term supported branch we didn't bother with human consumable names.
If you really generate multiple branches a week inside of the same repository that you intend to provide long term support for, I'm thinking you deserve the punishment you're discussing.
Branches are meant for human consumable names for long term heads to commit to. We used to drop "1.2.3.4.r56789", which meant it was on "/path/to/project/branches/project-1.2.3.4" and that it was based upon the revision 56789. Every build would contain this information. So unless I was making an *EXTERNAL* that needed long term support, this worked just fine. Plus, you can delete the "needless hair", or shut it on into it's own area. Create:
It's not like you have to keep everything in/branches,/tags, and/trunk. The tool is a big version controlled directory structure, so think about how you would design the workflow for a directory structure that makes you happy, and do it that way.
I don't use subversion anymore, but just because you're thinking trapping yourself into thinking there's "only one way" is your problem, not that the tool won't let you construct a sane workflow.
The irony here is folks who think BlackBox voting think this is a condemnation of all machines. If you look closely, you'll find that it's really saying that you should move from touch screens to optical scans. Which most black box folks object to despite the fact that it works just like a regular ballot that is hand counted. It generates all of the same artifacts, and can easily be validated by a hand count.
I've argued with Bev Harris previously on Slashdot as a matter of fact. She's relatively over the top. Which I suppose is good, but it also makes some of the things she does and say look just plain crazy.
I think he means this in the same way that Marc Andreessen meant it back in ~1996 or so when he talked about making the Browser as the new platform. In same ways, the way Java is a platform, and makes the OS "irrelavent". Essentially, all of them see Web Applications as the destroyer of coupling and vendor lock-in (well at least to Vendor desktop software, you'll be just as locked in to the Web 2.0 applications if they have your data, and won't let you share or mix and match). The thought being that, as long as the OS/platform has a decent Web Browser, it doesn't matter if it's Linux, FreeBSD, QNX, Windows XP/Vista, or MacOS. The experience you have with Google Mail is mostly derived from the quality of the browser implementation of specific technologies, and Google's ability to deal with the sub-standard aspects of that implementation across browers. It's pretty much identical to me on my Windows machine, on my Linux machine, or my MacOS machine. Thus the OS is irrelevant.
I'm not sure I believe in the mindset of these folks. They are moving off into a land of even less reliable, less robust, and less secure. However, having control of the central server, and only being dependent upon the browser and less dependent upon DLL's upon a remote machine is interesting. However, I'm not convinced that in the long run it'll be a viable solution. I really like owning my data. I really like having it all work off line. I know work is being done in those areas, it'll definitely be interesting.
Again, the point of this isn't the the Operating system will be less useful, or necessary. It is just that any good user agent will get you access to enough "applications" that are good enough, it won't matter what Operating System you run. Any "native" OS applications that aren't browsers could just as easily be replaced with Web 2.0 applications, and move along with life.
Not that I agree with any of it, it's merely my explaination of the perspective I think those folks are bringing to the problem.
Really? Care to cite a time when nationwide outage happened to each of the major carriers? I've had Sprint Cell service for 10 years now (I miss a cell phone you could reliable use as a weapon in self defense and then make a call to 911, but that's another story), and I've never had occasion for them to have citywide outage, let alone a "system" outage. I've had them sell me crappy phones that I needed 6 warranty replacements in a year. I've got spots where there are regular outages (mostly those have been going away).
Your definition of 5 9's is really bad. If you do something like the sum of each phones up time divided by the total amount of phone deployment time. I can't use the proper math symbols here, but basically, add up the uptime percentage all phones, and divide by the number of phones. My hunch, is that barring Acts of God, is that Sprint easily cracks 90%, 99%, and might squeak by 99.9% on that basis. Other then being out of range, or having a crappy phone, I'm counting towards 99.9, or 99.99% uptime. I have a couple of dropped calls that are unexepcted where an immediate redial didn't work. I've had a couple of weird, you can't hear me, or I can't hear you issues. Say maybe 10 instances of those a year, that total maybe 10 minutes each where I should have been able to communicate and I couldn't. I think that's far exaggerated, I'd be shocked if it's over 30 minutes a year on average. So depending on what you mean by "close", I think you need a citation of some facts.
I wish Sprint had better coverage, I wish that they got rid of the last of the deadspots in the city I live in, I wish they'd send lap dancers out with my bill (it's one of the few ways I'd look forward to getting my bill). I'm just happy that the amount I pay has gone down by a factor of 2-3 (in plain dollars, inflation adjusted I'm sure it's better, and I get vastly more minutes now then I did 10 years ago). I'm much happier about that and having them waste ~30 minutes a year, if it saves me ~$800/year.
yet you won't see the government razing those neighborhoods and starting anew, would you? Besides, who gets called a criminal?
Yeah, but that's a totally difference case. In that case, you know where to send the agents to physically pick up the criminals. So your comparison is fundamentally flawed. You also know that you have jursidition where the criminals are if they are in that neighborhood.
I agree with what you are getting at, but this sentence is flawed. It'd be nice if the Internet still had anonymity, but still be vastly more secure then it is. That's possible, but it would still get in the way of law enforcement from catching the criminals. However, that's their problem, not mine. I mean, it'd be handy if they could just stop every one at checkpoints, but I'm certainly not going to back that.
Essentially transporting TCP over TCP has serious timeout problems... a small glitch in the outer TCP can cause major hiccups on the inner TCP.
Kirby
Re:Must be why rsync over ssh is much faster
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Multi-Threaded SSH/SCP
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· Score: 2, Informative
tar cfpz - . | ssh user@host '( cd/destination ; tar xfpvz - )'
I'd use a "." instead of *, it avoids shell line length problems, and will also copy hidden files... as someone who as learned this the hard way. Also in my experience, on anything faster then 10MB, don't bother with compression (it's really a CPU to network speed ratio, on transfers I did regularly that was the rule of thumb with P4 2.2Ghz Xeons). Also, I removed the "v" from the source tar, as it duplicates every file name twice and can be hard to read. I can't remember if ssh or tar had better compression, I know I tested both. It really just changed the tipping point of the CPU speed. I also used to use blowfish for the cipher as it was easier on the CPU if you were running out of CPU instead of network. On a Gigabit network, I always ran out of CPU first.
I normally use -C instead of a subshell, but that's merely a matter of taste. I also use the technique in reverse quite often so I can untar on the destination machine as root.
Uh.. from the article, the software is called "Prevent Software Quality System"... Wow, I can't think of a bigger misnomer for something that should help improve software quality. I sure don't want to prevent software quality in my own products.
I'm perfectly fine with it being only on future copyrighted works. So everything that is *currently* copyrighted is under the insane rules, while everything on a go-forward basis is under sane rules. There's no need to make it retroactive, that one could argue would greatly affect the laid out plans (no more so then the Fed's changing Tax laws in the 80s, that made interest not be tax deductible, and thus screwing up the well laid plans of folks who racked up huge debt to avoid paying taxes). We can even give a period (1 year) so folks can go finish up their copyrighted works and get them in under current law.
I think that makes perfect sense, but then I'd think that all the money they'd spent in making the thing perform faster then say 1MB/sec read rate is totally wasted. I'd assume folks are trying to push these are replacements for enterprise server machines, which I'd be extremely relucant to do.
Folks talk about these things in the theoretical (the original poster linked to a story that crunched numbers to show it should be safe). My question is does anyone have solid experience they can point to show that it has actually been safe for say 6-18 months under some well known duty cycle (A database, a file server, an e-mail server).
I have actual experience, with crappy flash made by a low end manufacturer that shows me, it's not terrible reliable. It is my understanding that we've had better luck with other makers, but their parts were too expensive (but software development is free *sigh*).
There are other threads in here that make me want to cram a CF-IDE converter into my machines and try putting my journal onto a Flash drive. Sounds like the performance boost and power consumption is a big win, but the fact that every byte of data pushed to the journal might be an issue. On a home machine, it might be worth playing with for giggles for performance testing.
Other folks I know who have tried to do things with flash have also been disappointed over the past 12-24 months, despite assurances from various experts that "it should work"... I'm looking for, "I'd done it, here it is, go play with it.". Now obviously MP3 players have been doing it for a while. I'm more interested in general purpose usage of a Flash drive. Those are the types of things I'm currently working on, cramming a flash into a machine that runs an ext2/ext3/xfs/reiserfs/jfs or some other read/write heavy usage ready FS on it.
When I was young and stupid about drives and media, I lost a 1.2GB WD drive and lost everything on it. I couldn't spell "mkfs" or "fsck" and had no idea how to recover the drive at the time (I also didn't have the money to have a second drive to recover too, and no credit card so I could hold onto the first while having the second during the RMA). I was just young and ignorant. I lost a 1-2GB laptop drive that I literally just rode into the ground, I could have copied everything off and moved along. I knew the drive was going bad, but it was just a knock around system that I didn't care about. In the end, had I been thinking, I'd have saved the e-mail on it. I lost the first ~5-6 years of e-mail I had, but who wants e-mail from when they were 18-24? That was probably a couple of hundred MB that I might regret, but of nothing more then sentimental value. I'd never read it, and only be amused that I could prove I'm getting the same chain letters 15 years later.
I believe I had 4-5 drives I lost due to a virus or pilot error, but not a mechanical/media problem.
I've RMA'ed probably 100-200 drives due to some type of failure. I've had lots of of drives fail that were in a RAID array, that the mirror saved me. I've had lots of drives fail that were stand alone that had a section of bad sectors. All of that I recovered every byte of data from. Normally a drive that is going bad, you can still recover from for a very limited amount of time. Normally you have plenty of lead time, especially with SMART drive monitoring that your drive is going south. As long as you pay attention, spinning media isn't that hard to keep in good shape.
As a professional IT person, 42KB is it. On machines where production work is done for money at a company. 42KB is it, and in that case I was bound and determined to recover absolutely everything, and I invested a week into that project. I gave up on the 42KB once I proved that it was in a backup for the database that was at that point 15 days old (and thus of no use). Had it been necessary or cost effective, I'd have spent the $1-3K to get that drive images recovered by a professional data recovery shop. I think I've lost a drive or two on my personal machines at work, but the drive was fine, the laptop SATA controller was overheating. Using FSCK, I recovered the entire FS once the RAID controller was replaced. I think I had to re-rip some music from CD, because I failed to back it up prior to sending the laptop in for repair. I re-imaged the drive just to be safe in case the RAID controller had corrupted something important on the OS drive, which was the only reason I actually lost the music.
Again, it's the fact that the flash drives we have decided the drives are smaller at the interface level. Using fsck just scragged the system pretty much start to finish. I don't have a clue where the missing blocks are from. I have no idea what happened, upon reboot it decided that the block devices was smaller. Filesystem recover tools haven't had a chance to mature to understand those types of failures. Flash makers haven't yet decided that access to diagnostics and re-mapping logs might be of value to data recovery tools (at least none that I'm aware of). Access to the raw data (in case they are holding blocks in reserve). All of these things are reasons to be concerned about write leveling.
Yes I have. However, I've never had one magically get smaller on me in such a way that fsck decides that your done fixing the filesystem. With SSD, YES, I've had exactly that happen to me.
In my life, I've lost a total of about 42Kb be completely unrecoverable with spinning media (yes, I mean that number literally). I use RAID extensively, I was the DBA/SA/Developer at a place that had ~10TB of disk online for 5 years. In all that time, 42KB is all I lost. Oh, that was in the off-line, tertiary backup of the production database (it was one of 5 copies that could be used as a starting point for recovery, we also had the redo logs for 5 days, each DB was a snapshot from one of the previous 5 days). It was stored on bleeding edge IDE drives put in a RAID 5 array. We used it as a cheap staging area before pushing the data over Firewire/USB to a removable drive that an officer of the company took home as part of the disaster recovery system (it had only the most recent DB and redo logs). The guy didn't RMA the hot spare, and we had two drives fail in about 3 days while the hot spare was waiting for the RMA paper work to fill out. In that one particular case, using ddrescue, I recovered all of the data off of the RAID5 array but 42KB (even though it was an ext3 filesystem on LVM, on a RAID5 array, which made the recovery even more complex). Every other bit and byte of data in my life from spinning media that I cared about, I've recovered (I've had a number of drives die with data I didn't care about, but I could have recovered from if need be). Trust me, I know about reliability, backups, and how to manage media to ensure that failure doesn't happen. I know about failure modes of drives. I've hot swapped my fair share of drives, and done the RMA paperwork. I've been in charge of drives that losing any one of the ~200 drives would have cost 10 times as much as I made in a year if I couldn't reproduce the data on it within hours.
If it had been worth $10K, I'd have sent off the drive to get that 42KB of data recovered. But it wasn't. It's well understood how the failure mode of spinning media. People know exactly how to do things like erase drives securely. People know who to call that has a clean room that can remove the magentic media to and put it under a microscope to get the data recovered. SSD isn't nearly as mature in that sense.
All of that is really to say: Yes, I know something about disks and drives. My point is to say that SSD's aren't magic pixie dust in terms of reliablabilty. I've had exactly what he's saying I shouldn't worry about happen to me on a regular basis. Enough, that our engineering department has developed specific procedures to deal with them in the field. We've changed our release procedures to accout for them. If your going to use an SSD or flash drive, go kick the crap out of it. Don't believe on faith anything you read on Slashdot (including this post, which is anecdotal). We order lots of 5,000 flash disk, and you can bet that at least 100 of them has serious flaws within being fielded. The ones the developers and testing uses regularly develop problems in terms of months, not years. The manufacturer tells us essentially, it's not worth it to find those, so deal with it.
The whole point of replacing the laptop drive was to make the silly thing more reliable. But making it uber-reliable for 4 weeks until the write leveling crapped out wasn't the idea.
You ever actually done this? I work on embedded systems that use flash drives... Even with write levelling, we've had failures. It's lots of fun, when your 512MB flash isn't 512MB, and will suddenly lose ~41MB suddenly. As a work around, we've had to start partitioning with extra space left lying around at the end of a disk. This isn't even a heavy workload system.
Some friends of mine at another company that were using them in a I/O laden system that wanted to replace laptop drives to make the machinews lower power and more reliable can blow out a flash drive in about 4 weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
My primary reasons for strong preference for git over hg are the following:
Hg is oriented in such a way that the "easiest" workflow is to have multiple branches in multiple different branches. In git, I have exactly one working copy that has all of my history. If I'm making a minor nit change, or a huge sweeping change it all happens in a single directory. Hg generally wants a separate directory/working copy for each branch or line of development.
Hg has a really nice and malleable history via the MQ extension that has quilt like qualities. Which is really, really nice. The problem with it is that once I publish it for someone else to review it, it's not malleable any more (or not as malleable). Maybe that's gotten better, but since I last looked at it, it sucked in comparison to using git-rebase, or one of the Stgit or whatever it was that added quilt like commands to git. Using git, I can publish a branch, get review and commentary, quickly fix the malleable history and re-publish it. Once it passes all review and testing, once integrated into the "mainline", all of the history will be extremely high quality. There will be far fewer commits that are fixed 2 commits later when somebody reviews the code.
git-svn is absolutely wonderful for interacting with SVN repository. My company can use SVN, and I can use git on my machine and work, and re-work a series of small quality commits and then push them to SVN in a automated way. I'm not sure I'd reorganize an SVN repository via it. (Not sure this yet works on Windows).
In Mercurial, heads are deduced by a commit which has no children. So any commit lying around is something that has to be dealt with. In git, I can have a commit that has no children and delete that branch, and it disappears. I can reset a branch to be at any point I like, and it'll be there no matter what else I do.
In the end, Mercurial makes it harder for you to do something "bad" like re-write history too far back in time. At points that is very limiting. Git on the other hand hands you all the chainsaws, if you cut off your legs, they figure that's your problem. In the end, git lets me do what I need to.
I'm a bit of a VCS junkie, so complex interfaces didn't bother me. Once I understand the model of a VC system, I can quickly adapt to it.
Fair enough, I think it's an accurate post, I think you have a different experience with your unions the the folks I've known that unionized. I think that in many industries that might be true of a professional union. I explicitly stated that I thought it was would be different for a plumbers Union or really any non-factory Union.
In the area I live, there are meat packing plants where the union guys would go to the non-union one and blew up transformers and do other criminal things to try and intimidate the place into unionization. I see unions as corrupting. The irony being that the non-union shop had better wages, better benefits, and in general were far more profitable then the union plants.
Now, my question still stands: "What did your Union do for you, most especially that you couldn't have done for yourself?" I feel far more confident to negotiate for myself to handle my personal case then I would ever feel pitching in with a bunch of other folks. I think I'm extremely skilled at what I do, and feel that I can and have gotten top dollar for my efforts. I've never had any aspect of my employment that I couldn't address for myself. I've negotiated in good faith at several places, and ended up leaving for a better opportunity when changes were not made to accommodate changes in my life.
It's an honest and earnest question to you specifically, and your industry in particular? I would have no problem joining a professional organization, agreeing to a code of ethics, and even being tested or certified to ensure quality skills. If it were organized like say laywers or CPA's professional organizations, I'd be very comfortable with joining such a thing. I'd absolutely never join an organization that felt compelled to negotiate my compensation or health benefits. I'd never join an organization that insisted folks not be fired. I'd even contemplate purchasing unemployment insurance for myself (personally I'm more likely to just save a rainy day fund, but only because I realize insurance is not cost effective once you make it past a certain point without making a claim).
I told my boss the other day, I'd much rather work a place that I know fires people. We had three guys fired the other day. They didn't do their jobs. They had mad bad decisions that cost the company a significant opportunity. Too many places accumulate crufty people that everyone agrees should go as they provide minimal productivity and are a huge drain on moral. I want to go where those people are asked to leave. It'd be great if they got a nice severance package. It'd be great if they got warnings, and if other things were done to soften the blow.
Kirby
My take on Unions is that I want no part of one. I've known several folks who were a part of a Union. Everyone of them had roughly the following to say:
Now most of those were straight factory worker Unions, not say a local plumbers union, which I'm guessing is a bit different.
My take on Unions is that they've become the monster they fought. They have become large bureaucratic institutions that are mostly consumed with money and power. Sorry, but showing up to work and working 8 hours a day, doesn't entitle you to an excessive hourly wage and lifetime benefits.
I understand and completely respect what unions have accomplished for standards of livings, worker safety, and the like.
I also understand that generationally, we've lost sight of the lessons that Unionization taught us. Just as I think we've lost sight of the lessons the Depression taught us. We've held on to certain principles, long after they made no sense. We over compensated in order to right the ship, and then let the pendulum swing too far past. It'll swing back around, hopefully to a point closer to equilibrium.
I'm sure the Kings and Queens of England accomplished a huge number of things we greatly appreciate, hell they colonized my country (US). I greatly appreciated it, but I'm not going to hope we switch back to a Monarchy form of Gov't, or that the US become a Colony of the UK again merely because it accomplished this great task.
A convincing argument about why Unions should exist today is about what good they have accomplished today. Not telling me that 50-100 years ago they accomplished all these wonderful things, and I should keep paying my dues. What does a Union accomplish for me today? Do we legitimately believe that if every Union disappeared off the face of the planet, we'd go back to 16 hours days 6 and a half days a week? I don't, but that's the sort of thing that would convince me a Union is a good idea.
Kirby
I live in Omaha, and trust me, Berkshire Hathaway's meetings every year noticed by folks far and wide who have nothing to do with Warren Buffet. He's at least as strongly connected personally to his company as Jobs is to Apple. The problem is Warren has a strong "Reatily Clarity Field", and thus is far less of a rockstar then Jobs.
Kirby
For the sake of argument, I'll agree with absolutely everything you say, but that doesn't mean all of the data and media currently in existence will not be completely incomprehensible in 100 years.
I'm arguing that a specific and convoluted form of encoding will in fact be incomprehensible. We can't read all of the old artifacts from 1000 years ago, precisely because the notation and structure of the tools are foreign. 100 years from now my conjecture is that: "Things which are structured in a way to make a computer run fast will fall by the way side, and in the future be interpreted in low fidelity, especially given that they are not self contained", and "Things which are structured as human consumable instructions, will be capable of being interpreted with high fidelity, especially as well constructed ones are self contained."
Kirby
No, what is needed is for all data to end up in a "long term stable form". PostScript and Portable Digital Format (PDF) will probably be readable 100 years from now using systems that exist then. Why? It's an open format, with lots of content, and everybody and their dog has a reader for it. Will Word documents exist then? Maybe. Will they be rendered with high fidelity? Nope! They lack open fonts, or internal font storage (lots of things open correctly, but on any number of them render completely wrong due to different font metrics).
Will Office documents render correctly 100 years from now? Probably a lot of them. Maybe even most of the important ones. However, if you use clever OLE things, do I think the embedded Visio diagram will "work" 100 years from now. Not a chance. Will the embedded Excel? Maybe. Will the cross reference, and cross linked documents? No.
PS and PDF will be readable and renderable 100 years from now with very high fidelity if for no other reason then both of them are mostly human readable *PROGRAMS*. PS literally is a programming language, PDF isn't but fairly close. Reverse Engineering and comprehending the Word format that are optimized to fitting into old computers.
Sounds like a like the situation that is going happened at NASA according to this story about tapes about Apollo 11 moon landing data.
Now, I agree that it's less likely because somebody will become motivated to make the money of recovering the data.
I've done work for ES&S at a couple of different points, and can point out several things. First, the reports are mostly accurate (there are a few points which I'd disagree with, but there are a number of legitimate concerns in there). Second, no system is secure without physical security, and a number of the attacks ultimately come down to the state needing to ensure that these machines are treated as such. States are very lax about this, and that is a serious problem (personally I think precinct counters should be there to validate the ballot for the voter and give feedback/warnings or errors, and all tabulation should be done via high speed central scanners. The tabulation of the precinct counters might be kept as checks against voter fraud during ballot transport). Physical security is the single most important aspect of any voting system, with enough physical access any security system can be beaten (see every DRM or anti-cheat system for gaming). Unless it's fairly far into the videos, the video stuff is actually about the Sequoia not about ES&S systems. The PDF report linked to does include several chapters about the ES&S systems (all of part II).
Most of those that are dealing with the M100 and the M650 should be dealt with with the next generation of hardware/software for the newer paper scanner products (don't want to comment on the others as I didn't work on or with any of those). Not sure what ES&S's view is, but my personal view is that all DRE machines should be shipped to the nearest blackhole for permanent storage.
There is also some help in addressing some of the concerns about the review of proprietary software. Other then the Java compiler and the cryptography pieces (which are required to have FIPS complaince that most OSS products lack due to expense), all of the software is Open Source and is compiled during the system builds. I believe only one or two libraries aren't compiled from scratch on the machine (the commercial crypto tools, and the Sun JDK). I wouldn't be shocked to find out that OpenJDK is compiled on some future release. Every tool and/or line of source used to build the system has an MD5SUM, and a SHA1SUM along with the external site the software was retrieved from. Other then the crypto and the Java tools, all of the tools are built from source (a LiveCD distro with a minimal dev environment to build GCC, glibc, make, perl and a couple of other tools are bootstrapped into a chroot). It is fairly straight forward to use walk into a secure room and a blank PC with no software on it and end up with 99% of the software that ends up on the M100 replacement product. Two embedded compilers require windows that are built separately.
Another issue is that resolving issues quickly on election day is internally an important quality to the company. There are some security aspects that would be a disaster if the slightest thing goes wrong. With a deployment that large, by a mostly volunteer group, there are always significant mistakes and "proper" security would get in the way. The inability to do field firmware upgrades, because somebody in the state failed to upgrade the hardware before it shipped would be a disaster. It happens in every election despite all the procedures and guidelines. So part of the "only one key" thing falls into this category.
Finally, the most serious problem with all of the software is that no programmer in their right mind can deal with the various rules and obligations for VVSG compliance. I'd spend a day writing, unit testing, and writing "normal" documentation. Followed by at least a day or two of writing all of the required documentation, none of this included the stuff we had tools to auto-generate. I had to write the code first and document afterwards because it was hard to be concise and see all of the related code at a time when it was fully documented.
They require the generation of inane and superfluous documentation, and are bureaucratic and dogmatic about enforcing the rule co
I mostly agree with you. The XPS line from Dell is fairly nice, and once you turn off all of the neon lighting it looks mostly professional. The backpack is just too large, and I never saw the other options for it.
My only real beef with Mac laptops are that I can't get really high end machine with just low end everything else. The screen resolution and the size of the keyboard are all I really care about. If the CPU was 1/3th as fast, and had a smaller drive, I wouldn't care. I just can't justify paying that much for what is essentially an LCD to me. With other companies while you move up in quality of the other hardware, you don't have to move to absolute most expensive configurations just to get to a decent sized LCD.
I'm also annoyed that Apple moves computers through a price point. They have roughly 3 price points, and they just vary what you get over time, rather then letting the price sink (which would cost them in margin, and probably affect their bottom line in the short run). If you don't want to pay roughly $1200, $1800, or $2400, there isn't an Apple option for you. Guess I'll just have to go refirb, or the used market to get what I want at a price I can deal with.
Kirby
Unless they all operate on the same meta-data the foreign tool is out. My boss thinks the same way you do, every one is allowed to use any damn tool they feel like, with absolutely no bounds.
I work with a guy who insists on using Visual Studio, as nearly as I can tell, because he's unaware that there is a multi-tab text editor outside of VS. So, everytime I have to take over a project from him, I have to go figure extract what files are being build, and then port it into the production system, every other developer on the project uses. Because this is such a hassle, the guy will do updates and commits on an interval measured in months, where as every other developer does them on intervals measured in hours. So along with everything else we have to deal with, when he commits his code, he generally will blow away months of someone elses work because he can't be bothered with learning how resolve conflicts, and it'll never integrate cleanly. We'll spend a week just trying to undo all the damage he'd done. All because he can't be bothered to use the same toolchain everyone else on the team does. It also means I have no commit history, no commit comments, and nothing I cause use to do research on to figure out how the software evolved.
Because he uses Windows, Visual C++ compiler, on an AMD 2.8GHz machine and does all his profiling, it's trivial to go make improve his codes performance on Linux, g++, on an 1Ghz Via C3 (which is the deployment environment for the embedded system). As he works on the single most performance critical aspect, it's more then a bit frustrating. Especially as the code has extreme and unnatural things done to it to the parts that are slow under his one off development environment, but those aren't the parts that are slow under production.
For things like Java, I've learned the hard way, that we'll only have one setup of meta-data. It's terrible frustrating to have all of the corporate standards setup correctly in say Eclipse, (checkstyle, code generation, auto-formatter, unit testing, test coverage, find bugs, PMD, warning levels, etc, etc), and then have some jackass continually commits code that upon contact with a properly configured environment will be flagged as a violation of the coding guidelines, or generates huge numbers of warnings if only he'd turn on the already agreed upon warnings.
I've learned, that there is one set of production meta-data used to do a production build. While we can argue over how we maintain that set of meta-data, once that decision is made all tools must use that meta-data directly (they can translate it from one format to another, as long as it does that automatically, like Maven can for some IDE's). So if we use Eclipse, you can use any tool you want, as long as it reads Eclipse meta-data. If we choose Ant, then you can use any tool you want, as long as it does Ant meta-data. If we choose GNU Build system, you can use any platform and compiler you want, as long as it uses the GNU build system. The one hard and fast rule I have for the meta-data is that it must be possible to build from a command-line in an automated way. It can be obscenely difficult to do (like say Eclipse), but it must be possible.
I've generally learned that anybody who won't agree to use a consistent set of tools with the rest of the team, is a prima dona and is in dire need of a lesson. Yes, I know my toolchain stone cold (gcc/g++, and Eclipse). However, if there is a consensus to use a different toolchain, I'll learn a second one stone cold. I've learned tons about bash, gcc, g++, the Borland compilers, Visual Studio, a number of embedded compilers, Watcom, XCode, the NeXT Objective C IDE, NetBeans, Eclipse, CVS, SVN, Git, Monotone, Arch, Mercurial, Ant, Maven, GNU Make, GNU Auto{conf,make}/libtool, SCons, and probably a couple of others I've forgotten (I've known bits and pieces of several scripting languages, but none well enough write home about). I've learned the best practices of them all when I used them. Given m
All of which were very much proprietary. The key to the low cost PC as the competition among hardware makers. Go look at Sun, Macs, and PS/2 machines (Commodore, Amiga, and Atari should probably be added to that list of yours). From that era Suns and Macs were proprietary. The moment, Macs tried to license the hardware, the company very nearly went out of business. Sun sold great, solid equipment, and could never get it even close to the price point to compete (I also am not sure they wanted to). PS/2's? That whole line died a horrible death due to the proprietary bus (Micro Channel). The PC world thrived and took when the ISA bus was king, and IBM published all of the hardware specs for 3rd party cards (and thus the hardware that specs for the bus). The PC world thrived and took off when Compaq won the landmark case allowing them to reverse engineer the IBM Bios. The PC world thrived and took off when the Microsoft negotiated the deal with IBM to sell MS-DOS that was licensed to IBM as PC-DOS. The PC world thrived and took off when Intel got competitors in Cyrix, AMD, and other hardware makers creating x86 clone chips.
It was the fact that there was stiff competition for virtually every part in a machine. It was the nasty world evil consumer that bought, cheap crappy hardware, that got the economies of scale going. If you look at the PC world, the PC used to cost $3,000 (probably $10,000, but $3K is what I paid for my first machine in '95). The competition in an open market place (read, not Mac's, not Sun, not IBM's PS/2), are what created and won virtually all of the market place. The competition eventually drove the price of a PC to under $500, all the while getting, better and better hardware. Eventually the price got low enough, that it started to add more and more features that used to be the sole purview of high end "Workstation", or "Server" class machines. There's a reason that Sun sells what is effectively, nothing more then a jumped up version of the modern day desktop machine as their entry level server. I'm here to tell you that, Bill and Co. have a place at that table of folks who were there and part of what made it happen.
Does that make Bill a good person? No (but just because that doesn't make him good, doesn't imply that he's bad). Does that mean, Bill intended this move to accomplish that? Probably not. I think Bill Gates figured out fairly early on that hardware was rapidly becoming a commodity market, and that software was the thing that people had a true affinity for. If they could run the same software on different hardware, what did they care? In the end, he was correct. Just ask Apple. There's a reason Apple nearly went out of business when somebody else undercut their hardware (both because the model was setup all wrong, and that people didn't really care about Mac the hardware, they cared about Mac the interface). Most folks couldn't care less about the iMac, the Mac Mini, the iPod, or the iPhone in the hardware. What most of them really care about is how useful and easy the software is for them to use. I have a Mac and I hate the interface. I find it counter-intuitive, but only because I don't think "if I want this and that to work together, I should drag one to the other".
Windows in all its incarnations, and all of it's vile issues. It filled in the gap that allowed the PC computers to be usable by folks who couldn't have otherwise. For that alone, Bill and Co. deserve a place in history and helping to drive the PC revolution. Would something else have filled that need? Sure, but Bill was there. Would somebody else have discovered gravity? Sure, but we give Newton credit, because he was there and did what he did. If the PC market had been left to Sun, Apple, and IBM, they'd be carving huge chunks of a smaller pie, at much higher profit margins. None of them got that if they sold crappy stuff that was just above the crappy line.
Kirby
It's not for the feint of heart, but you might look at using LFS to build such a minimal system. I don't really see the harm in using a "full" Linux machine for the development environment, and then using LFS to build the embedded image that you deploy to "real" devices. We do this where I work.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
It'll get the job done. If your totally new to Linux, it might be a bit much, but the folks on the lists are quite helpful.
Kirby
Why on Earth are you generating releases that often? I've worked in a lot of shops that used SVN, and at we used the SVN revision number for our "internal" releases. Given a path and a revision number, you have a unique identifier for *EVERY* sub-directory inside of an SVN repository. Until we actually made a long term supported branch we didn't bother with human consumable names.
If you really generate multiple branches a week inside of the same repository that you intend to provide long term support for, I'm thinking you deserve the punishment you're discussing.
Branches are meant for human consumable names for long term heads to commit to. We used to drop "1.2.3.4.r56789", which meant it was on "/path/to/project/branches/project-1.2.3.4" and that it was based upon the revision 56789. Every build would contain this information. So unless I was making an *EXTERNAL* that needed long term support, this worked just fine. Plus, you can delete the "needless hair", or shut it on into it's own area. Create:
It's not like you have to keep everything in /branches, /tags, and /trunk. The tool is a big version controlled directory structure, so think about how you would design the workflow for a directory structure that makes you happy, and do it that way.
I don't use subversion anymore, but just because you're thinking trapping yourself into thinking there's "only one way" is your problem, not that the tool won't let you construct a sane workflow.
Kirby
I've argued with Bev Harris previously on Slashdot as a matter of fact. She's relatively over the top. Which I suppose is good, but it also makes some of the things she does and say look just plain crazy.
Kirby
I think he means this in the same way that Marc Andreessen meant it back in ~1996 or so when he talked about making the Browser as the new platform. In same ways, the way Java is a platform, and makes the OS "irrelavent". Essentially, all of them see Web Applications as the destroyer of coupling and vendor lock-in (well at least to Vendor desktop software, you'll be just as locked in to the Web 2.0 applications if they have your data, and won't let you share or mix and match). The thought being that, as long as the OS/platform has a decent Web Browser, it doesn't matter if it's Linux, FreeBSD, QNX, Windows XP/Vista, or MacOS. The experience you have with Google Mail is mostly derived from the quality of the browser implementation of specific technologies, and Google's ability to deal with the sub-standard aspects of that implementation across browers. It's pretty much identical to me on my Windows machine, on my Linux machine, or my MacOS machine. Thus the OS is irrelevant.
I'm not sure I believe in the mindset of these folks. They are moving off into a land of even less reliable, less robust, and less secure. However, having control of the central server, and only being dependent upon the browser and less dependent upon DLL's upon a remote machine is interesting. However, I'm not convinced that in the long run it'll be a viable solution. I really like owning my data. I really like having it all work off line. I know work is being done in those areas, it'll definitely be interesting.
Again, the point of this isn't the the Operating system will be less useful, or necessary. It is just that any good user agent will get you access to enough "applications" that are good enough, it won't matter what Operating System you run. Any "native" OS applications that aren't browsers could just as easily be replaced with Web 2.0 applications, and move along with life.
Not that I agree with any of it, it's merely my explaination of the perspective I think those folks are bringing to the problem.
Kirby
Really? Care to cite a time when nationwide outage happened to each of the major carriers? I've had Sprint Cell service for 10 years now (I miss a cell phone you could reliable use as a weapon in self defense and then make a call to 911, but that's another story), and I've never had occasion for them to have citywide outage, let alone a "system" outage. I've had them sell me crappy phones that I needed 6 warranty replacements in a year. I've got spots where there are regular outages (mostly those have been going away).
Your definition of 5 9's is really bad. If you do something like the sum of each phones up time divided by the total amount of phone deployment time. I can't use the proper math symbols here, but basically, add up the uptime percentage all phones, and divide by the number of phones. My hunch, is that barring Acts of God, is that Sprint easily cracks 90%, 99%, and might squeak by 99.9% on that basis. Other then being out of range, or having a crappy phone, I'm counting towards 99.9, or 99.99% uptime. I have a couple of dropped calls that are unexepcted where an immediate redial didn't work. I've had a couple of weird, you can't hear me, or I can't hear you issues. Say maybe 10 instances of those a year, that total maybe 10 minutes each where I should have been able to communicate and I couldn't. I think that's far exaggerated, I'd be shocked if it's over 30 minutes a year on average. So depending on what you mean by "close", I think you need a citation of some facts.
I wish Sprint had better coverage, I wish that they got rid of the last of the deadspots in the city I live in, I wish they'd send lap dancers out with my bill (it's one of the few ways I'd look forward to getting my bill). I'm just happy that the amount I pay has gone down by a factor of 2-3 (in plain dollars, inflation adjusted I'm sure it's better, and I get vastly more minutes now then I did 10 years ago). I'm much happier about that and having them waste ~30 minutes a year, if it saves me ~$800/year.
Kirby
Yeah, but that's a totally difference case. In that case, you know where to send the agents to physically pick up the criminals. So your comparison is fundamentally flawed. You also know that you have jursidition where the criminals are if they are in that neighborhood.
I agree with what you are getting at, but this sentence is flawed. It'd be nice if the Internet still had anonymity, but still be vastly more secure then it is. That's possible, but it would still get in the way of law enforcement from catching the criminals. However, that's their problem, not mine. I mean, it'd be handy if they could just stop every one at checkpoints, but I'm certainly not going to back that.
Kirby
Sure, except for the tunnel inside a tunnel bit he talked about.
That way lies madness...
I'm curious if you ever have problems like this:
http://sites.inka.de/~W1011/devel/tcp-tcp.html
Essentially transporting TCP over TCP has serious timeout problems... a small glitch in the outer TCP can cause major hiccups on the inner TCP.
Kirby
tar cfpz - . | ssh user@host '( cd /destination ; tar xfpvz - )'
I'd use a "." instead of *, it avoids shell line length problems, and will also copy hidden files... as someone who as learned this the hard way. Also in my experience, on anything faster then 10MB, don't bother with compression (it's really a CPU to network speed ratio, on transfers I did regularly that was the rule of thumb with P4 2.2Ghz Xeons). Also, I removed the "v" from the source tar, as it duplicates every file name twice and can be hard to read. I can't remember if ssh or tar had better compression, I know I tested both. It really just changed the tipping point of the CPU speed. I also used to use blowfish for the cipher as it was easier on the CPU if you were running out of CPU instead of network. On a Gigabit network, I always ran out of CPU first.
I normally use -C instead of a subshell, but that's merely a matter of taste. I also use the technique in reverse quite often so I can untar on the destination machine as root.
Kirby
Uh.. from the article, the software is called "Prevent Software Quality System"... Wow, I can't think of a bigger misnomer for something that should help improve software quality. I sure don't want to prevent software quality in my own products.
Kirby
I think that makes perfect sense, but then I'd think that all the money they'd spent in making the thing perform faster then say 1MB/sec read rate is totally wasted. I'd assume folks are trying to push these are replacements for enterprise server machines, which I'd be extremely relucant to do.
Folks talk about these things in the theoretical (the original poster linked to a story that crunched numbers to show it should be safe). My question is does anyone have solid experience they can point to show that it has actually been safe for say 6-18 months under some well known duty cycle (A database, a file server, an e-mail server).
I have actual experience, with crappy flash made by a low end manufacturer that shows me, it's not terrible reliable. It is my understanding that we've had better luck with other makers, but their parts were too expensive (but software development is free *sigh*).
There are other threads in here that make me want to cram a CF-IDE converter into my machines and try putting my journal onto a Flash drive. Sounds like the performance boost and power consumption is a big win, but the fact that every byte of data pushed to the journal might be an issue. On a home machine, it might be worth playing with for giggles for performance testing.
Other folks I know who have tried to do things with flash have also been disappointed over the past 12-24 months, despite assurances from various experts that "it should work"... I'm looking for, "I'd done it, here it is, go play with it.". Now obviously MP3 players have been doing it for a while. I'm more interested in general purpose usage of a Flash drive. Those are the types of things I'm currently working on, cramming a flash into a machine that runs an ext2/ext3/xfs/reiserfs/jfs or some other read/write heavy usage ready FS on it.
Kirby
When I was young and stupid about drives and media, I lost a 1.2GB WD drive and lost everything on it. I couldn't spell "mkfs" or "fsck" and had no idea how to recover the drive at the time (I also didn't have the money to have a second drive to recover too, and no credit card so I could hold onto the first while having the second during the RMA). I was just young and ignorant. I lost a 1-2GB laptop drive that I literally just rode into the ground, I could have copied everything off and moved along. I knew the drive was going bad, but it was just a knock around system that I didn't care about. In the end, had I been thinking, I'd have saved the e-mail on it. I lost the first ~5-6 years of e-mail I had, but who wants e-mail from when they were 18-24? That was probably a couple of hundred MB that I might regret, but of nothing more then sentimental value. I'd never read it, and only be amused that I could prove I'm getting the same chain letters 15 years later.
I believe I had 4-5 drives I lost due to a virus or pilot error, but not a mechanical/media problem.
I've RMA'ed probably 100-200 drives due to some type of failure. I've had lots of of drives fail that were in a RAID array, that the mirror saved me. I've had lots of drives fail that were stand alone that had a section of bad sectors. All of that I recovered every byte of data from. Normally a drive that is going bad, you can still recover from for a very limited amount of time. Normally you have plenty of lead time, especially with SMART drive monitoring that your drive is going south. As long as you pay attention, spinning media isn't that hard to keep in good shape.
As a professional IT person, 42KB is it. On machines where production work is done for money at a company. 42KB is it, and in that case I was bound and determined to recover absolutely everything, and I invested a week into that project. I gave up on the 42KB once I proved that it was in a backup for the database that was at that point 15 days old (and thus of no use). Had it been necessary or cost effective, I'd have spent the $1-3K to get that drive images recovered by a professional data recovery shop. I think I've lost a drive or two on my personal machines at work, but the drive was fine, the laptop SATA controller was overheating. Using FSCK, I recovered the entire FS once the RAID controller was replaced. I think I had to re-rip some music from CD, because I failed to back it up prior to sending the laptop in for repair. I re-imaged the drive just to be safe in case the RAID controller had corrupted something important on the OS drive, which was the only reason I actually lost the music.
Again, it's the fact that the flash drives we have decided the drives are smaller at the interface level. Using fsck just scragged the system pretty much start to finish. I don't have a clue where the missing blocks are from. I have no idea what happened, upon reboot it decided that the block devices was smaller. Filesystem recover tools haven't had a chance to mature to understand those types of failures. Flash makers haven't yet decided that access to diagnostics and re-mapping logs might be of value to data recovery tools (at least none that I'm aware of). Access to the raw data (in case they are holding blocks in reserve). All of these things are reasons to be concerned about write leveling.
Kirby
Yes I have. However, I've never had one magically get smaller on me in such a way that fsck decides that your done fixing the filesystem. With SSD, YES, I've had exactly that happen to me.
In my life, I've lost a total of about 42Kb be completely unrecoverable with spinning media (yes, I mean that number literally). I use RAID extensively, I was the DBA/SA/Developer at a place that had ~10TB of disk online for 5 years. In all that time, 42KB is all I lost. Oh, that was in the off-line, tertiary backup of the production database (it was one of 5 copies that could be used as a starting point for recovery, we also had the redo logs for 5 days, each DB was a snapshot from one of the previous 5 days). It was stored on bleeding edge IDE drives put in a RAID 5 array. We used it as a cheap staging area before pushing the data over Firewire/USB to a removable drive that an officer of the company took home as part of the disaster recovery system (it had only the most recent DB and redo logs). The guy didn't RMA the hot spare, and we had two drives fail in about 3 days while the hot spare was waiting for the RMA paper work to fill out. In that one particular case, using ddrescue, I recovered all of the data off of the RAID5 array but 42KB (even though it was an ext3 filesystem on LVM, on a RAID5 array, which made the recovery even more complex). Every other bit and byte of data in my life from spinning media that I cared about, I've recovered (I've had a number of drives die with data I didn't care about, but I could have recovered from if need be). Trust me, I know about reliability, backups, and how to manage media to ensure that failure doesn't happen. I know about failure modes of drives. I've hot swapped my fair share of drives, and done the RMA paperwork. I've been in charge of drives that losing any one of the ~200 drives would have cost 10 times as much as I made in a year if I couldn't reproduce the data on it within hours.
If it had been worth $10K, I'd have sent off the drive to get that 42KB of data recovered. But it wasn't. It's well understood how the failure mode of spinning media. People know exactly how to do things like erase drives securely. People know who to call that has a clean room that can remove the magentic media to and put it under a microscope to get the data recovered. SSD isn't nearly as mature in that sense.
All of that is really to say: Yes, I know something about disks and drives. My point is to say that SSD's aren't magic pixie dust in terms of reliablabilty. I've had exactly what he's saying I shouldn't worry about happen to me on a regular basis. Enough, that our engineering department has developed specific procedures to deal with them in the field. We've changed our release procedures to accout for them. If your going to use an SSD or flash drive, go kick the crap out of it. Don't believe on faith anything you read on Slashdot (including this post, which is anecdotal). We order lots of 5,000 flash disk, and you can bet that at least 100 of them has serious flaws within being fielded. The ones the developers and testing uses regularly develop problems in terms of months, not years. The manufacturer tells us essentially, it's not worth it to find those, so deal with it.
The whole point of replacing the laptop drive was to make the silly thing more reliable. But making it uber-reliable for 4 weeks until the write leveling crapped out wasn't the idea.
Kirby
Some friends of mine at another company that were using them in a I/O laden system that wanted to replace laptop drives to make the machinews lower power and more reliable can blow out a flash drive in about 4 weeks.
Kirby