The article starts off talking about an external firewire/USB drive.
On that basis the *worst* possible choices for filesystems would be Reiserfs and XFS.
Both of these filesystems (particularly XFS) make assumptions about the reliability of power supply and of connectivity of devices. They perform *extremely* badly if a drive is disconnected unexpectedly, something which (arguably) happens very often with external drives.
XFS was originally for mainframes and today is for high-reliability servers so it makes the assumption that its running on 'enterprise-level' hardware with a UPS and RAID array.
Reiserfs, on the other hand, has been accused of simple *sloppyness*. And my own experience would back that up, I'm afraid. I know that I'll get flamed by the Reiser fan-boys out there but Reiserfs has done my data in (on unexpected power failures) more times than I care to think.
And when I say *extremely* badly, in both cases (XFS, Reiserfs) I really mean it. Data can be lost in very nasty ways such as files consisting entirely of nulls or files 'swapping' data (your avi file has some text file in it and your 'text' file is an executable binary). Often without even an error message to tell you that something has gone terribly wrong.
Just as people drive SUVs in order to feel safer sharing the road with other drivers in SUVs people gain weight in order to feel safer alongside other people who are big and fat and might otherwise crush them.
Norton's utilities used to be THE answer to almost anything
Ah the days of manually editing the FAT. The days of writing down a chain of blocks for a file before marking those blocks as bad in order to hide data... Now *that* was cool.
Any consideration of middle east issues has to take into account periods of history beyond a few centuries because all of the players in the region do so. The only 'players' who don't are those who are not actually *located* in the region (ie the USA and Europeans).
The whole "Palestinians don't exist" thing goes back to the Romans and before that to the Phoenicians/Philistines.
The Phoenicians/Philistines were, arguably, the same people. They were, arguably, exterminated by the 'invading' Hebrews. (Of course the Israelis would not see that as an invasion as such).
Todays Israeli might argue that the Palestinians were invented by the Romans who wanted to 'pretend' that they were the same people as the Philistines and who therefore had prior claim to the land. And that, therefore, the Palestinians claim to the land is false, that they don't really exist as a people (the 'they are really just Arabs' line of reasoning).
I used to listen to the BBC world service online regularly. It was the best online radio news service available at the time.
Then came the Olympics.
During the Olympics the BBC world service news on the hour was replaced with "Due to rights restrictions we are unable to bring you this program". The hourly *news*. The BBC world service news. Rights restrictions!?!?!?!?!
And if you get the Vmotion software from VMware, you can move a running virtual machince from one server to another, while it is running, without skipping a beat.
Presumably with some sort of shared storage?
I'd be interested to know whats used. Is it a generic shared/cluster storage system or some special VMWare-provided system?
It is simply amazing that Windows 98 for instance, can deliver the same (and often better) end-user experience and functionality that Vista does, but with only 5% CPU MHz, RAM and Disk resources.
Absolutely.
Thats why I play World of Warcraft on my Windows 98 box with DirectX 9 and my Nvidia 8800 GTX video card.
Linux has not failed on the desktop. Any article with a title such as this is just FUD. Linux is growing on the desktop like wildfire.
Linux has not failed for *you* on the desktop.
After a significant time of Linux desktops (I started using Linux in '92/'93 (its so long ago I can't remember exactly when but it was with the 0.x kernels and I started with olvwm for my window manager)) I've gone to OSX on my desktop. It performs better and is better integrated. It requires less of my time and less effort to work with.
For me Linux has failed on the desktop. (Not on servers though, I wouldn't dream of OSX as a server.)
The article is not FUD; it should be a warning and a wakeup call to those who want to develop a useable, competetive Linux desktop. But it is not FUD.
It is bad "hygiene" to have data pushed onto the same stacks as addresses.
Its like living in India; you have to eat with a different hand than that with which you wipe your arse.
In other cultures you have toilet paper to wipe your arse, soap to wash with afterward and you can eat with knives and forks. Very high tech stuff.
Its an interesting contrast; the C programming culture is one of the oldest in the world. India is (arguably) among the oldest civilisations in the world.
Yet in both cases they have to resort to pretty primitive means to hygienically separate some basic functions such as eating, shitting and buffer overruns.
Very methodical and commendable programming practice you have there.
Now, not trying to be snarky or anything, honestly, but how often do you find that you run out of time on projects? Do you ever find that being so careful in your coding means that you get hounded for being late or behind schedule?
As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event...", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers."
So in other words there really is *no* hope that web 2.0 will actually produce anything truly outstanding?
That game gives (gave) all kinds of ways of winning.
My favorite was the lawyers/corporate branch/advertising campaigns method followed up by ecoterrorism. Lawyers can stop production in enemy cities, corporate branches can sap productivity into your own economy and advertising can make their populations very unhappy. Theres no real need to resort to anything so primitive as open hostilities. Unless you *want* to:)
Theres a unit in the game which can convert surrounding developed squares back into pristine wilderness (the marvels of nanotechnology). So what you do is you make friends with the biggest power in the game and start mass producing these units.
You then send them to your 'friends' nation and park one next to every single one of their cities.
Then, when the time is right, in one turn you activate *all* of them.
In one turn your 'friend' becomes your (temporary) 'enemy' right before they get zapped back into the stoneage.
It's an inherently difficult problem to scale things so near-tech-level rivals have approximately correct interactions while zeroing the chance against far-tech-level opponents.
World of Warcraft has an extremely effective way of dealing with a similar problem.
If you are significantly lower level than an opponent there is no way at all that any number of you will do any damage at all to an opponent. When the level difference is in the tens its pretty well impossible to harm them.
In the case of the spearmen though, there may be a reasonable argument;
Those 'phalanx' units that survived until the 20th century do not represent spear-wielding bronze-age warriors somehow mystically frozen in time or some kind of 'ceremonial unit' whose methods and equipment have been preserved in the name of tradition.
It may be presumed that their personnel and gear have been upgraded in the intervening centuries. It might be more of a SWAT team (for want of a better analogy right this minute) by the time it goes up against the missile cruiser. And, yes, I'd give a SWAT team *some* chance of taking out a missile cruiser.
Its either not entirely true or slightly disengenuous. I'm not sure which.
On the one hand, a Xen VM is basically a root filesystem and a kernel. Its not like VMWare where you have a proprietary disk image format and a proprietary VM config format etc.
So from that perspective it should be trivial to pull a Xen VM out of the freezer in 10 years time and have it 'just work'.
But this isn't the whole picture.
There are two ways that the VM could work today:
It could use HVM (hardware virtualisation) in which case the kernel in the VM shouldn't need to know that its running under Xen. In this case you could even run a proprietary OS such as Microsoft offerings.
It could be using paravirtualisation in which case the kernel in the VM needs to be ported to the Xen architecture. In this case you are pretty well restricted to an OS for which you can port the kernel.
In the latter case it *does* matter which version of Xen and which version of the kernel is in use; you can't use a Xen 2.x kernel under Xen 3.x
So, the statement from the Xen guy may be slightly disingenuous as it is not true that you could take a VM for Xen 2.x and 'unfreeze' it and run it, unmodified, in Xen 3.x or later. There would have to be modifications; its not going to work out of the box.
There is no reason to believe that a Xen 3.x kernel will work under Xen 4.x
Unless you use HVM, at which time no, the VM does not care one bit which version of Xen it runs under and his statement is true.
But its not true at this point in time for all values of VM and all values of Xen.
Slashdot Mirror
The article starts off talking about an external firewire/USB drive.
On that basis the *worst* possible choices for filesystems would be Reiserfs and XFS.
Both of these filesystems (particularly XFS) make assumptions about the reliability of power supply and of connectivity of devices. They perform *extremely* badly if a drive is disconnected unexpectedly, something which (arguably) happens very often with external drives.
XFS was originally for mainframes and today is for high-reliability servers so it makes the assumption that its running on 'enterprise-level' hardware with a UPS and RAID array.
Reiserfs, on the other hand, has been accused of simple *sloppyness*. And my own experience would back that up, I'm afraid. I know that I'll get flamed by the Reiser fan-boys out there but Reiserfs has done my data in (on unexpected power failures) more times than I care to think.
And when I say *extremely* badly, in both cases (XFS, Reiserfs) I really mean it. Data can be lost in very nasty ways such as files consisting entirely of nulls or files 'swapping' data (your avi file has some text file in it and your 'text' file is an executable binary). Often without even an error message to tell you that something has gone terribly wrong.
Just as people drive SUVs in order to feel safer sharing the road with other drivers in SUVs people gain weight in order to feel safer alongside other people who are big and fat and might otherwise crush them.
hey died because they knew what the customer needed. NOT what the customer actually wanted, but what they thought the customer should have
Sorry, but Microsoft and Apple are still here because they have viable businesses.
I thought that the hubris of assuming that you know what the customer needs was what Steve Jobs was all about... and he seems to be doing ok.
Maybe DEC just couldn't generate enough hype...
Norton's utilities used to be THE answer to almost anything
Ah the days of manually editing the FAT. The days of writing down a chain of blocks for a file before marking those blocks as bad in order to hide data... Now *that* was cool.
This goes back way beyond the Jordanian period.
Any consideration of middle east issues has to take into account periods of history beyond a few centuries because all of the players in the region do so. The only 'players' who don't are those who are not actually *located* in the region (ie the USA and Europeans).
The whole "Palestinians don't exist" thing goes back to the Romans and before that to the Phoenicians/Philistines.
The Phoenicians/Philistines were, arguably, the same people. They were, arguably, exterminated by the 'invading' Hebrews. (Of course the Israelis would not see that as an invasion as such).
Todays Israeli might argue that the Palestinians were invented by the Romans who wanted to 'pretend' that they were the same people as the Philistines and who therefore had prior claim to the land. And that, therefore, the Palestinians claim to the land is false, that they don't really exist as a people (the 'they are really just Arabs' line of reasoning).
And the closest thing we have to a Praetorian Guard, the Secret Service is not large enough to pull off a coop.
I thought that the US Marine Corps was more the Praetorian Guard? Aren't they the only US military unit which the president can command directly?
I used to listen to the BBC world service online regularly. It was the best online radio news service available at the time.
Then came the Olympics.
During the Olympics the BBC world service news on the hour was replaced with "Due to rights restrictions we are unable to bring you this program". The hourly *news*. The BBC world service news. Rights restrictions!?!?!?!?!
I left and never went back again.
Which country would that be? Palestine? Never was such a country. Transjordan, perhaps? Invented by the British between the World Wars.
Hey, according to the Israelis the 'Palestinian' people were 'invented' (by the Romans in the first instance) and really they are just Arabs.
Nice, subtle form of genocide there; pretend that an entire people never really existed...
My own site also got a 'D', so that seems to be the standard grade.
*Your* site got a 'D' and *therefore* that seems to be the standard grade?
I think I see a flaw in your logic there, batman.
And if you get the Vmotion software from VMware, you can move a running virtual machince from one server to another, while it is running, without skipping a beat.
Presumably with some sort of shared storage?
I'd be interested to know whats used. Is it a generic shared/cluster storage system or some special VMWare-provided system?
It is simply amazing that Windows 98 for instance, can deliver the same (and often better) end-user experience and functionality that Vista does, but with only 5% CPU MHz, RAM and Disk resources.
Absolutely.
Thats why I play World of Warcraft on my Windows 98 box with DirectX 9 and my Nvidia 8800 GTX video card.
w00t!
use generic names for options/applications, not the quirky and witty names starting with "g", "k" or ending ".org"!
:(
Gah, tell me about it... I absolutely *hate* the way that *all* KDE applications start with a 'k' and *all* Gnome applications start with a 'g'.
Its not even consistent!
If I want to uninstall all traces of KDE from my Debian system then this:
dpkg --get-selections|grep ^k|sed -e 's/install/purge/'|dpkg --set-selections && apt-get -y dselect-upgrade
will strip out the kernel too...
Linux has not failed on the desktop. Any article with a title such as this is just FUD. Linux is growing on the desktop like wildfire.
Linux has not failed for *you* on the desktop.
After a significant time of Linux desktops (I started using Linux in '92/'93 (its so long ago I can't remember exactly when but it was with the 0.x kernels and I started with olvwm for my window manager)) I've gone to OSX on my desktop. It performs better and is better integrated. It requires less of my time and less effort to work with.
For me Linux has failed on the desktop. (Not on servers though, I wouldn't dream of OSX as a server.)
The article is not FUD; it should be a warning and a wakeup call to those who want to develop a useable, competetive Linux desktop. But it is not FUD.
It is bad "hygiene" to have data pushed onto the same stacks as addresses.
Its like living in India; you have to eat with a different hand than that with which you wipe your arse.
In other cultures you have toilet paper to wipe your arse, soap to wash with afterward and you can eat with knives and forks. Very high tech stuff.
Its an interesting contrast; the C programming culture is one of the oldest in the world. India is (arguably) among the oldest civilisations in the world.
Yet in both cases they have to resort to pretty primitive means to hygienically separate some basic functions such as eating, shitting and buffer overruns.
Here's a tip: Your rant would be easier to follow if you failed to not use less negatives.
Maybe he was trying for some kind of negative buffer overrun?
Very methodical and commendable programming practice you have there.
Now, not trying to be snarky or anything, honestly, but how often do you find that you run out of time on projects? Do you ever find that being so careful in your coding means that you get hounded for being late or behind schedule?
Please bring some editorial standards to the web site please.
I am deeply shocked.
What you are suggesting goes against the very *principles* of Web 2.0
*Shocked*!!!!1111
As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event...", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers."
So in other words there really is *no* hope that web 2.0 will actually produce anything truly outstanding?
They don't believe in democracy anymore.
But... but... they send their children to *die* for democracy!
And they kill the children of other nations for democracy too!
I just can't believe that the freedom loving people of the USA don't believe that democracy isn't worth killing for anymore...
Is that what the Republican and Democratic parties want? VIOLENT BLOODY REVOLUTION?!?
Whenever you are ready to have a proper revolution, let me know. I'll be happy to help in any way I can.
'Call to Power'
:)
That game gives (gave) all kinds of ways of winning.
My favorite was the lawyers/corporate branch/advertising campaigns method followed up by ecoterrorism. Lawyers can stop production in enemy cities, corporate branches can sap productivity into your own economy and advertising can make their populations very unhappy. Theres no real need to resort to anything so primitive as open hostilities. Unless you *want* to
Theres a unit in the game which can convert surrounding developed squares back into pristine wilderness (the marvels of nanotechnology). So what you do is you make friends with the biggest power in the game and start mass producing these units.
You then send them to your 'friends' nation and park one next to every single one of their cities.
Then, when the time is right, in one turn you activate *all* of them.
In one turn your 'friend' becomes your (temporary) 'enemy' right before they get zapped back into the stoneage.
It's an inherently difficult problem to scale things so near-tech-level rivals have approximately correct interactions while zeroing the chance against far-tech-level opponents.
World of Warcraft has an extremely effective way of dealing with a similar problem.
If you are significantly lower level than an opponent there is no way at all that any number of you will do any damage at all to an opponent. When the level difference is in the tens its pretty well impossible to harm them.
In the case of the spearmen though, there may be a reasonable argument;
Those 'phalanx' units that survived until the 20th century do not represent spear-wielding bronze-age warriors somehow mystically frozen in time or some kind of 'ceremonial unit' whose methods and equipment have been preserved in the name of tradition.
It may be presumed that their personnel and gear have been upgraded in the intervening centuries. It might be more of a SWAT team (for want of a better analogy right this minute) by the time it goes up against the missile cruiser. And, yes, I'd give a SWAT team *some* chance of taking out a missile cruiser.
What I'd like to ask Sid is why was the AI behind the Indians so agressively warlike when their 'face' was Mahatma Ghandi?
It always seemed strange to see that kind old man on your screen and to know that you had a huge long protracted war ahead of you.
Its either not entirely true or slightly disengenuous. I'm not sure which.
On the one hand, a Xen VM is basically a root filesystem and a kernel. Its not like VMWare where you have a proprietary disk image format and a proprietary VM config format etc.
So from that perspective it should be trivial to pull a Xen VM out of the freezer in 10 years time and have it 'just work'.
But this isn't the whole picture.
There are two ways that the VM could work today:
It could use HVM (hardware virtualisation) in which case the kernel in the VM shouldn't need to know that its running under Xen. In this case you could even run a proprietary OS such as Microsoft offerings.
It could be using paravirtualisation in which case the kernel in the VM needs to be ported to the Xen architecture. In this case you are pretty well restricted to an OS for which you can port the kernel.
In the latter case it *does* matter which version of Xen and which version of the kernel is in use; you can't use a Xen 2.x kernel under Xen 3.x
So, the statement from the Xen guy may be slightly disingenuous as it is not true that you could take a VM for Xen 2.x and 'unfreeze' it and run it, unmodified, in Xen 3.x or later. There would have to be modifications; its not going to work out of the box.
There is no reason to believe that a Xen 3.x kernel will work under Xen 4.x
Unless you use HVM, at which time no, the VM does not care one bit which version of Xen it runs under and his statement is true.
But its not true at this point in time for all values of VM and all values of Xen.
Yes, this is pretty much exactly the conspiracy that I was thinking of. :)