But Ubuntu is specifically being called out as one of the "fatware" distros that needs to "slim down" (or at least as one that isn't "vm tuned"). And I'm saying that if you start with the minimal installation and then apt-get what you need, pulling in dependencies as you go, you'll get a pretty trim system.
But ubuntu-minimal doesn't come with lm-sensors, hdparm, or smartctl... And while you could use something other than a stock kernel (a good Xen-based VM provider will let you either use their kernel or your own via pv-grub), is there really all that much of a point?
What exactly need be "tuned" for virtualization in a VM? I start my VMs with ubuntu-minimal, which is pretty darned minimal indeed. I think "eject" is about the only package in there that a VM wouldn't want.
I don't know, I can easily envision some pretentious designer getting his way saying "This way is better, so it HAS to be this way" if you know what I mean.
I don't think DRM is necessarily their goal, but that doesn't mean their goal is much less deplorable than DRM, and ultimately it doesn't really matter why they made the decision. The why doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day it's an always-on game that doesn't need to be always-on.
I don't discount the possibility that it wasn't really about DRM, but that it was less work for them to do it this way rather than maintaining the separate offline behaviour for the information that is reliant on the network connection, and they just don't care about the criticism. That is to say that it wouldn't have been that much effort to maintain an offline mode, but they don't care enough to even bother.
That change has nothing to do with ads, and in no way does it help or hinder ad blocking.
Google could have handled that quite simply by banning ad blockers from the chrome store, or by not extending the API with things specifically designed to support ad blockers...
The fork doesn't have anything to do with ad blockers because nothing was stopping them from banning those before.
They didn't block them before, I don't see why this fork would cause them to block them after. They may decide to do so at some point, but that decision doesn't have anything to do with the forking...
Linux on the desktop, specifically, yes. In an embedded fashion it's already ubiquitous. I would bet that almost everybody has at least one Linux device in their home/possession whether they know it or not. For example, the ADSL/VDSL/FTTH modems that Bell Canada hands out to all their customers runs Linux.
by 'real' I mean people who actually know what a kernel is vs those that don't...
This elitist attitude is damaging to Linux. Users who don't know what a kernel is would normally be called a typical user. If anything, people who know what a kernel is aren't "real" users in that they don't represent the vast overwhelming majority of computer users.
Consider that all three major ZFS platforms (Linux/FreeBSD/Illumos) are working on a common core that they all share, and that the lions share of ZFS development is coming from the Linux community. Perhaps the Linux ZFS community should not be dismissed so readily.
FreeBSD is a fantastic platform for ZFS, but considering that both FreeBSD and ZoL are pulling down new work all the time, it's not automatically more stable.
Better data integrity? Checksums on all blocks means the OS can tell if data is corrupt, and the data can be seamlessly recovered from redundancy (typically parity from raidz or raidz2, which also doesn't have the raid5 write hole because ZFS is copy-on-write).
Easier to use? zfs management happens through the "zfs" and "zpool" commands which are generally much easier to work with than obscure necromancy commands required for traditional types of systems that make me care about cylinders and partitions.
More flexible? The storage pool method, where you build a pool of capacity and allocate filesystems out of it, gives you a great deal of flexibility and simplicity. I just keep adding more storage to my pool as required, either by adding more RAID arrays or increasing the size of disks in those arrays, and then I've got my primary filesystem for storage, I've got a deduplicated one I use for backups, and I've got a compressed one I use for long-term archives. And creating a new one like that takes about five seconds without having to repartition or reformat anything. Creating/deleting filesystems is about as much effort as creating/deleting files.
Easier snapshots? Snapshots are instant on copy-on-write filesystems. Any modification of data causes the block to be copied anyhow, so all a snapshot has to do is not delete older blocks.
ZFS is one of a handful of next-gen filesystems (along with BTRFS and HAMMER) that are so far beyond traditional filesystems that it's a really eye-opening experience using them. That's not to say ZFS is perfect, or that the ZFSonLinux implementation is perfect, but it's in a reasonable state of stability at this point, and the advantages that these new filesystems offer is substantial.
I do wish that ZFS had asynchronous deduplication like HAMMER, though. ZFS deduplication requires atrocious amounts of RAM (estimates go from 5 to 20 gigabytes of RAM per terabyte of deduplicated data), while HAMMER has effectively no extra memory required at runtime for dedupe, because it just scans the disk afterwards and does the deduplication after the fact, so it doesn't need to hold the full block table in memory at all times.
It's also worth noting that the primary platform for ZFSonLinux is Ubuntu, where DKMS is used to dynamically compile the kernel module. I believe the same is true for most other distros that aren't source-based.
Translation: you add the repository and install the "zfs" package and it does everything for you. So installing ZFS is no more difficult than installing any other package, and the licensing issues are completely irrelevant to users.
But perhaps a more sensible measurement is just to use the actual generating capacity required. 270 terawatt hours per year would be about 31 gigawatts. Consider that HydroQuebec alone produces more power than that from renewable sources, and suddenly it doesn't seem so big anymore.
So, which is more accurate, do you think? A 3+ year old datasheet for a spacecraft that isn't even scheduled to fly for the first time until 2014 (first DragonLab mission), or recent statements by the person IN CHARGE of the flight software?
I saw somebody firing one of them the other day, and it was probably a.22 because the range only allows pistol caliber rifles (there's probably only one range per million people here so not much selection) and the thing was very quiet (my first time seeing one), but I wasn't counting how many rounds he was firing so I've no idea what the magazine capacity was (like if it was over the 10 round limit), and I couldn't tell you for the life of me what kind of rifle it was other than "it was black and looked like an AR-15". I take it they're all supposed to be essentially the same gun?
I don't quite get that about all the different versions of some guns like this. I get that there's a million versions of the M1911 because 1911 would have fallen out of copyright, but for something like the AR-15 how come everybody can have their own version of it? The thing should still be under copyright. Heck, there seem to have been tons of different M1911 versions from all sorts of different companies long before the copyrights should have expired...
If I were DigitalRev I would simply re-post the review again. There needs to be legal and financial ramifications for misuse of a DCMA take down like this.
More amusing is that DigitalRev as a company is outside the jurisdiction of the DMCA; they're a Chinese company based in Hong Kong. The only reason they have to worry about the DMCA is because their servers are in the US (since they're basically an international camera store and Kai Wong factory).
Well, in some industries, there are other effects. It has been pointed out that DRM is more about platform lock-in in the embedded space than it is about piracy. But then you get stuff like SimCity's DRM, which really doesn't have any such effects; the case there is really just EA wants to stop piracy, but the DRM has hurt their sales far more than piracy ever might have.
True, but the possession of a high-capacity magazine would still be illegal.
In fact, Canada's magazine ban is more bizarre than most people realize. Center-fire rifles like the AR-15 are limited to 5-round magazines, while center-fire pistols are limited to 10-round magazines. But there are a lot of cases of overlap. There are pistols that use the same magazines as the AR-15, and those magazines have a 10-round limit because they're made for pistols. But it's perfectly legal to use that magazine in your rifle, giving you a 10-round AR-15 magazine when the legal limit would otherwise be 5 rounds.
But there's a downside to that too. Rim-fire semi-automatic rifles in Canada have no magazine capacity limit, but rim-fire pistols do have the normal 10-round limit.
So, at first, I thought "OK, so that means the.22 LR variant of the AR-15 should have a full-sized magazine in Canada, because it's a rim-fire rifle". But no, that's not the case, because there're pistols that take the same magazines, so they're limited to 10 rounds too...
What you'd need is for somebody to make a.22 variant of the AR-15 with a unique magazine (shared it with nothing else), but barely anybody makes custom firearms driven by the Canadian market since it's so tiny.
Pistol barrels under 106mm are illegal in Canada, regardless of if they are in a gun, with a gun, or by themselves. On the other hand, short shotgun barrels are legal in Canada but illegal in the US (although a shotgun barrel is integral to the firearm rather than a component). The internet knows no borders; the implications of a 3D printed gun applies to all countries regardless of where the file originated (such as in the US).
Come to think of it, 3D printing of firearms doesn't really change anything in Canada, other than the ease of access; Canadian law concerns itself with the possession of things, not just the import/sale/production/acquisition. If it's illegal to possess a firearm or firearm component in Canada, 3D printing it wouldn't change the status.
Slashdot Mirror
This company (from TFA) *is* the maker of The Hurt Locker.
I like to measure things in HydroQuebec's. That is, measuring usage relative to the installed capacity of my province's power company.
Hydro Quebec installed capacity: 36,971 MW
Hydro Quebec max generation per year: 324 TWh/year
TFA's power usage: 43 TWh/year
So TFA says in 2015, GLOBAL wireless transmission energy usage will be about 13% of HydroQuebec's capacity... Suddenly doesn't seem so much.
But Ubuntu is specifically being called out as one of the "fatware" distros that needs to "slim down" (or at least as one that isn't "vm tuned"). And I'm saying that if you start with the minimal installation and then apt-get what you need, pulling in dependencies as you go, you'll get a pretty trim system.
But ubuntu-minimal doesn't come with lm-sensors, hdparm, or smartctl... And while you could use something other than a stock kernel (a good Xen-based VM provider will let you either use their kernel or your own via pv-grub), is there really all that much of a point?
Did you actually look at the package list?
What exactly need be "tuned" for virtualization in a VM? I start my VMs with ubuntu-minimal, which is pretty darned minimal indeed. I think "eject" is about the only package in there that a VM wouldn't want.
I don't know, I can easily envision some pretentious designer getting his way saying "This way is better, so it HAS to be this way" if you know what I mean.
I don't think DRM is necessarily their goal, but that doesn't mean their goal is much less deplorable than DRM, and ultimately it doesn't really matter why they made the decision. The why doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day it's an always-on game that doesn't need to be always-on.
I don't discount the possibility that it wasn't really about DRM, but that it was less work for them to do it this way rather than maintaining the separate offline behaviour for the information that is reliant on the network connection, and they just don't care about the criticism. That is to say that it wouldn't have been that much effort to maintain an offline mode, but they don't care enough to even bother.
That change has nothing to do with ads, and in no way does it help or hinder ad blocking.
Google could have handled that quite simply by banning ad blockers from the chrome store, or by not extending the API with things specifically designed to support ad blockers...
The fork doesn't have anything to do with ad blockers because nothing was stopping them from banning those before.
They didn't block them before, I don't see why this fork would cause them to block them after. They may decide to do so at some point, but that decision doesn't have anything to do with the forking...
Linux on the desktop, specifically, yes. In an embedded fashion it's already ubiquitous. I would bet that almost everybody has at least one Linux device in their home/possession whether they know it or not. For example, the ADSL/VDSL/FTTH modems that Bell Canada hands out to all their customers runs Linux.
by 'real' I mean people who actually know what a kernel is vs those that don't...
This elitist attitude is damaging to Linux. Users who don't know what a kernel is would normally be called a typical user. If anything, people who know what a kernel is aren't "real" users in that they don't represent the vast overwhelming majority of computer users.
Consider that all three major ZFS platforms (Linux/FreeBSD/Illumos) are working on a common core that they all share, and that the lions share of ZFS development is coming from the Linux community. Perhaps the Linux ZFS community should not be dismissed so readily.
FreeBSD is a fantastic platform for ZFS, but considering that both FreeBSD and ZoL are pulling down new work all the time, it's not automatically more stable.
Better data integrity? Checksums on all blocks means the OS can tell if data is corrupt, and the data can be seamlessly recovered from redundancy (typically parity from raidz or raidz2, which also doesn't have the raid5 write hole because ZFS is copy-on-write).
Easier to use? zfs management happens through the "zfs" and "zpool" commands which are generally much easier to work with than obscure necromancy commands required for traditional types of systems that make me care about cylinders and partitions.
More flexible? The storage pool method, where you build a pool of capacity and allocate filesystems out of it, gives you a great deal of flexibility and simplicity. I just keep adding more storage to my pool as required, either by adding more RAID arrays or increasing the size of disks in those arrays, and then I've got my primary filesystem for storage, I've got a deduplicated one I use for backups, and I've got a compressed one I use for long-term archives. And creating a new one like that takes about five seconds without having to repartition or reformat anything. Creating/deleting filesystems is about as much effort as creating/deleting files.
Easier snapshots? Snapshots are instant on copy-on-write filesystems. Any modification of data causes the block to be copied anyhow, so all a snapshot has to do is not delete older blocks.
ZFS is one of a handful of next-gen filesystems (along with BTRFS and HAMMER) that are so far beyond traditional filesystems that it's a really eye-opening experience using them. That's not to say ZFS is perfect, or that the ZFSonLinux implementation is perfect, but it's in a reasonable state of stability at this point, and the advantages that these new filesystems offer is substantial.
I do wish that ZFS had asynchronous deduplication like HAMMER, though. ZFS deduplication requires atrocious amounts of RAM (estimates go from 5 to 20 gigabytes of RAM per terabyte of deduplicated data), while HAMMER has effectively no extra memory required at runtime for dedupe, because it just scans the disk afterwards and does the deduplication after the fact, so it doesn't need to hold the full block table in memory at all times.
It's also worth noting that the primary platform for ZFSonLinux is Ubuntu, where DKMS is used to dynamically compile the kernel module. I believe the same is true for most other distros that aren't source-based.
Translation: you add the repository and install the "zfs" package and it does everything for you. So installing ZFS is no more difficult than installing any other package, and the licensing issues are completely irrelevant to users.
But perhaps a more sensible measurement is just to use the actual generating capacity required. 270 terawatt hours per year would be about 31 gigawatts. Consider that HydroQuebec alone produces more power than that from renewable sources, and suddenly it doesn't seem so big anymore.
Nope, try again.
So, which is more accurate, do you think? A 3+ year old datasheet for a spacecraft that isn't even scheduled to fly for the first time until 2014 (first DragonLab mission), or recent statements by the person IN CHARGE of the flight software?
Your research is flawed.
VxWorks is an operating system, not a company. Wind River, who make VxWorks, sell Wind River Linux.
I thought that for the Falcon rocket and Dragon capsule, SpaceX use the VxWorks realtime OS made by Wind River.
No, they don't use it at all. RFTA.
I saw somebody firing one of them the other day, and it was probably a .22 because the range only allows pistol caliber rifles (there's probably only one range per million people here so not much selection) and the thing was very quiet (my first time seeing one), but I wasn't counting how many rounds he was firing so I've no idea what the magazine capacity was (like if it was over the 10 round limit), and I couldn't tell you for the life of me what kind of rifle it was other than "it was black and looked like an AR-15". I take it they're all supposed to be essentially the same gun?
I don't quite get that about all the different versions of some guns like this. I get that there's a million versions of the M1911 because 1911 would have fallen out of copyright, but for something like the AR-15 how come everybody can have their own version of it? The thing should still be under copyright. Heck, there seem to have been tons of different M1911 versions from all sorts of different companies long before the copyrights should have expired...
If I were DigitalRev I would simply re-post the review again. There needs to be legal and financial ramifications for misuse of a DCMA take down like this.
More amusing is that DigitalRev as a company is outside the jurisdiction of the DMCA; they're a Chinese company based in Hong Kong. The only reason they have to worry about the DMCA is because their servers are in the US (since they're basically an international camera store and Kai Wong factory).
Really? Mine would have been "GOPRO FUCK YOURSELVES!"
Well, in some industries, there are other effects. It has been pointed out that DRM is more about platform lock-in in the embedded space than it is about piracy. But then you get stuff like SimCity's DRM, which really doesn't have any such effects; the case there is really just EA wants to stop piracy, but the DRM has hurt their sales far more than piracy ever might have.
True, but the possession of a high-capacity magazine would still be illegal.
In fact, Canada's magazine ban is more bizarre than most people realize. Center-fire rifles like the AR-15 are limited to 5-round magazines, while center-fire pistols are limited to 10-round magazines. But there are a lot of cases of overlap. There are pistols that use the same magazines as the AR-15, and those magazines have a 10-round limit because they're made for pistols. But it's perfectly legal to use that magazine in your rifle, giving you a 10-round AR-15 magazine when the legal limit would otherwise be 5 rounds.
But there's a downside to that too. Rim-fire semi-automatic rifles in Canada have no magazine capacity limit, but rim-fire pistols do have the normal 10-round limit.
So, at first, I thought "OK, so that means the .22 LR variant of the AR-15 should have a full-sized magazine in Canada, because it's a rim-fire rifle". But no, that's not the case, because there're pistols that take the same magazines, so they're limited to 10 rounds too...
What you'd need is for somebody to make a .22 variant of the AR-15 with a unique magazine (shared it with nothing else), but barely anybody makes custom firearms driven by the Canadian market since it's so tiny.
Pistol barrels under 106mm are illegal in Canada, regardless of if they are in a gun, with a gun, or by themselves. On the other hand, short shotgun barrels are legal in Canada but illegal in the US (although a shotgun barrel is integral to the firearm rather than a component). The internet knows no borders; the implications of a 3D printed gun applies to all countries regardless of where the file originated (such as in the US).
Come to think of it, 3D printing of firearms doesn't really change anything in Canada, other than the ease of access; Canadian law concerns itself with the possession of things, not just the import/sale/production/acquisition. If it's illegal to possess a firearm or firearm component in Canada, 3D printing it wouldn't change the status.