Every filesystem is a database at heart. They already contain other attributes like permissions, create and modify date etc. The place to store this stuff is in the FS because the database is already there. All you need to do is add some more stuff like extended description, a few topic reference fields, and and slap of a query engine on it. The query engine does not need to be real complex either. You can get away with little or no formating/sorting/grouping support as the user space app which performs the query should take care of that. All you need is basic bool logic and string comparision. Most of this code already exists out there under a free license, I am not saying it would be a copy past job but there are examples of required algorithms which developers can look at safely, without running afowl of and IP.
The one tough thing WINFS aims to do that would be simple in user space is it hopes to be able to look in files and gleen some atributes form them. This is great if you can hook into some of the libraries form office or adobe et al, it saves you from having to implement parseing for all that stuff. I am not quite sure how you solve that one at the FS level. I just fear a user space system will get real crufty real fast and break when major changes occur to the files and their real attribes on disk that the DB can't know about. Like if a mount point gets moved or everything is resotored form a tarball and the dates get changed/permissions change a little because someone was careless. I think overall getting the neccecary info form the user when new files are created would be a fair compromise, the only issues is rule one of DATA "crap in crap out".
Then there are all the problems that you mostly have to deal with wether you do it in the FS or as some user space hack/bloatware thing:
Note that file creation would constitute just that you would want/need for efficency archives to contain all that info for the file in them, so the user does not have to enter it. Makefiles and the like would have to be update to do magic and fill in that data for the output files. Then you naturally have to fix all the gui tool kits so their fileIO dialogs support that info, any apps with custom dialogs will need to be patched as will console apps. Some sort of default values would be need for apps that just can't resonably support collecting that info as well. I don't want to have to fill in values everytime I "cat" somethig, I mean to unlink moments later.
I think its clear there are lots of differcult usability problems to solve. Some could probably extend and of the major OSS filesystems to include some extra attributes and add a crude query system, its all a question of what do you really do with it once you have it. I am sure R&D at Microsoft is just as perplexed on that point as I am. I feel sory for them since the marketing dept has been pushing this as the next big thing for almost a decade now, the pressure must be intense.
Thank god I am not the only one who read everything on that list a recalled it from the news this year. If people have not heared whats there already they need to start getting their news some place other then MSN
Stop letting good ideas be victimized by the M$ marketing FUD machine. Someone said "database filesystem" That was a good idea. M$ can along and said gee lets steal that idea. Hey there is no existing implementation to copy how do we do it. The answer is they did not do it. They put a database to keep rather mundane information on top of NTFS(a real filesystem) and called it WINFS(NTFS and a almost completely unrealated database, not a file system). Keeping data on the relations ships between files is a nice idea. Putting it in user space is dumb. Its overhead. Look at most of the example he gave "find a word document I worked on last month". All that info is already in the filesystem. A filesystem really is already a database in the strictest since. It stores whats on which inode assoicated with how many blocks which you could think of as attributes. It also sores attibutes like permissions and dates. Why not just put some more attributes into it like subject and relatedtopicID . If you did that and then added the ability to maintain some other tables where you could put extended descriptions and stuff, and built up the query engine to be able to efficently solve queries users will likely ask then you'd have what your really looking for. Addionally you would lose the overhead to a degree because you'd be storing informaiton once instead of in the FS and in the database.
You could not DOS does right out of the box. You could only DOS DOS if someone had installed add on software. Where there is no network support there is no DOS attack.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
Yes, but you tend to ignor the fact that the gasses used in florescent bulbs are much more damaging to the atmosphere then anything envolved with incandesent. There is also mercury in some types of florescent bulbs. Ever wonder why you can't toss tubes out in your trash in most municipalities? I am not sure what are issues with manufacturing LCDs but Si anything is bad, have you any idea how much toxic chemistry must be desposed of per micro-chip and given how LCDs work I'll bet some of the process is just as destructive. There are always trade offs, don't fall prey to the latest "green fad" of the week. Remember when all our power was supposed to come form photo-cells until people wised up and figured out that given the enviornmental expense of producing them, the hazards of disposing of them and their limited life span would be an ecological disaster? If your a green freak you need to be worried about the stupid stuff like attempting to grow rice in the desert that we do here in America , cars, computers, and even methods of power generation are trivial compared to some of the stuff the Ag industry does.
While we greatly appreciate the whoreing you have done on our behalf at slashdot, we cannont offer you a job at this time. You must fist obtain your MCSE before you can be considerd for one of our code monkey positions. If you would like to work helpdesk please apply to that department. Thanks very much sincerly yours Pointy Haried Boss numner 1234.
The above is about how the letter is going to read. It was a nice try though Devin.
Re:Does it run linux?
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 3, Insightful
wrong again, I think most would say there is a major trend in IT right now to move the applications back to the back room. Noticed all the web based applications lately. I would call that a thin client app. Lets face it a web browser makes a terrible thin client, but its the quickest way to convert all those idle computers on peoples desks back into terminals. I think the future is think but not fat client architecture. It will all for end user systems to have much longer life spans and make handhelds ever more practicle.
Software should be free because of its availibility and no-existant costs of production. I am considering production to be separate from development. Production is nothing more then running the ftp server so poeple can download it. Software is so cheep to manufacture it really should be gratis. Development on the other hand costs time and money. Licensing it is and always will be a stupid scheme because its always going to be pirated and or you will not at some point be able to compete with your previous versions. People simply won't want to pay to upgrade any more.
FOSS has done alot of great things but the gratest projects were born out of need and then generously gifted to the rest of society so that others can enjoy the work.
So what if your business is software and as such you have few specific needs? Then create your own market. Other industries have figured this out. For example: Make an inexpensive cartoon show, that can't likely sell enough advertizing time at first for you to break even. Get people hooked for a little while. Start selling card games and books, and posters related to the cartoon. Profit!
Software firms should be able to do the same. Make a hopefully killer app. Give it away create installed user base. Let companies and individuals pay $$$ you to implement feature X or customization y for them. Wait a release or two an d fold those features into the mainline(you have to get your userbase to upgrade so you not stuck maintaining really old trees). Repete above untill interest in the product dies off, then start on something new. Being open source can't individuals and companies implement stuff on their own and leave you out of the loop. Sure but if your app is of good quality and is substantial enough to be "commercial quality" chances are nobody can do a better job as quickly or cheaply as you can. The other reality is that if some third party does create a valuable patch you can fold it into your mainline imediately, takeing away any third party market for forprofit development on your product insuring you will have a monopoly withing the sphear of your own product.
You have only yourself to blame. You get what you pay for an most things tend to do what their names imply. You bought a WINmodem and tried to use it on LINux, why did you think that would work?
Yes I do know there have been modules for winmodems for a long time but I still don't understand why people want them. I have never understood the missguided notion that an internal modem is ever a good plan. External is always better because you can reset the modem without reseting the PC and every modem I ever met needs to be reset now and again.
Common sense is basicly illegal in this nation. Where have you been. I won't site other examples because I know everyone can site them, but lets look at this situation.
1. If we don't screen the rickedy old man but do screen the 25 year old behind him we'd be sued for age descrimination.
2. The reverse of number one.
3. If we screen any one group with a higher frequency then all others we'd be sued for racial profileing. No matter how much greater the statistical likely hood of the group being envolved in terror happens to be.
4. When there is an acident we will most likely be sued by victims for not haven taken steps like sampleing certain groups at a higher frequency based on the same statistics from number 3.
5. No matter how resonable it would be to blame terror on terrorists rather then air lines or the government, it won't fly because you can't sue a terrorist you can't find so someone else must be responsible for their actions. Becase of this it is impossible to exercise common sense in our saftey measures and we are all doomed to be victims for real because we can't deploy or greatest wepon "common sense" against our enemies.
The world is not the same as it was when these things were tried. When "Free Trade" was developed as a concept it was assumed that the factors of production were imobile. Most businesses were about manufactured goods. To build a car you had to have steel, to make the steel you had to have iron ore. Consequently the car got built where the iron ore was. Today we can ship thousands of tons of raw metal across the globe at a misicule cost. The expensive thing is laybor of construction. The other reality is that with an increasingly service economy things like call centers and people who read X-rays can be overseas as well. Surgery will soon be done by robots controlled by doctors on the other side of the globe. What the hell is left for people to do here in the US or Western Europe then? Simply continue to mortgague our collective futures by running up incredible foriegn owned deficits. Federal debt is no problem when its owed to the citizens of that nation but it will burry us eventally if it continues to flow abroad. Modern tech has made it possible to produce noplace near the resources of production, no you couple that with a degree of political stability the world has never before know and you have the makeings of economic ruin. We need to try some sort of modern forms of protectionism to keep up with new tech or in all seriousness start some more bigger wars, that pit world powers against each other rather then just us agains Afganistan. We need a new Sovient Union or WW3, or we need to put an end to deficit trading with tarifs. Take your pick. Either way in the short term I am sure our quality of life will go down a little bit. Its better then repeating the great depression in 30 years though.
Well, let me tell you that a real computer repair shop will have a service depot with people who do work at the electronics level. I work in my companies IT department but sometimes I help the service guys when they are under the gun with a back log. I know only enough electronics to be helpful with basic stuff like testing caps and de-soldering and replacing identical parts based on a sheet of most common failuers until something works. Some of those guys are really smart though and know their stuff. Its incrdible some of the stuff I would have labeled as lost causes that they can have fixed in no-time flat. There service everything from IBM Iserise equipment doing fine detail work on tape drives all the way down to label printers, which most often you just hit with something.
The point of my comment is this though. The people doing that work for us are EEs, they have credited degrees in Electrical Engineering and many are licensed as EEs. Considering the people who are doing this kinda repair work are already well licensed and covered. It seems insulting to license them again as "repair men"/.
If you read the story it really does sound like they company should own the idea. I mean he was working on this stuff for them while 'on the clock' so to speak.
I mean great so I have this idea for a really clever interface for this asset traking software I am developing for our departments use at the office. Well thats cool but I can't go code up a generic version at home and try and mass market it, The company owns the UI after all I might have had some of the more interesting ideas talking to may coworker while we were out to lunch but all the reall work was done for the corp. Its why they pay me my salary and don't hire some other person instead. I have good ideas(sometimes) and they value them. Its a resource I bring to the table the same way I bring any other skills I may have.
One intersting rub though on all this is certain ideas carry a liability. Like say I have this really clever way to disable some sorta DRM for some corporate and leagal perpose. I then go ask my manager as I sometimes do "Hey I found a way to do cool thing X can I put it out on the net so others might find it useful" Being an OSS fan himself he will say yes. Now the next DCSS or some such is an Idea I had but don't own, hmm who is responsible for the consequenses?
What is wrong with a rollup, so long as the glue is good? Why on earth would you scrap a bunch of good software, when you could use it? What would be so bad about haveing the option to change out a module sometime?
Linux and GNU has its on street cred now. I really don't think the people still need to be sold on Linux and GNU being up to the job anymore. Most people wether they will admit it or not *know* Linux and GNU are now as good as the admin or engineer that runs the system, its the support network behind GNU and Linux they still worry about.
I think whats telling is how often and for how long we have seen Unices shipping with the GNU tools and compiler in the system. GNU is not Unix its something that in most or maybe all cases is inspired by Unix works like Unix but is better then Unix. Getting GNU certified as Unix would in that sense almost be a slap in the face to GNU, although it might still be an endorsement to the Linux kernel. Linux though as stated before does have enough of its own cred that Unix certification will have very little meaning.
Here Here, you are so right sometimes you have to settle for a greater evil in the short term to win some small victories in the end. As a Libertarian I can imagine anything worse then a Liberal in office. I would rather a conservative hold office any day however when Ross did a little damage and handed the election to the Dems the Republican party went more in a neoconservative direction. Still not far enough but it was progress especially because they had to effect some realy change to get their vote back. We are gonna have to be willing to fight this as a gorilla war and sometimes tip the scales toward the worst candidate if we are ever going to create the oppertunity for the men and women we really want in office to get thier chance.
If I were running a site like that I would use systems I really did not care much about, which hosted nothing else and keep no logs. You could subpoena my zero-byte/var/log/syslog if you want and I would be more then happy to turn it over, its not like its gonna be differcult to transfer.
I think this is the most fair analogy I have seen yet after reading the article. Its sounds like the chip is just takeing the defective area out of the ciruit and working around the problem. It seems like a degraded mode on a disk array to me, sure your raid 5 array keeps running with the loss of one drive but the performance is not great.
This is not even the start of the war. This is just the first shots to be heared round the Google office building. Microsoft demons some pre-alfa ready tech right before Google's IPO. This is just an attempt to scare investors away from Google by pushing some vaporware in part of their 2006 operating system.
Things to understand:
1. Microsoft never fought a battle with superior technology. In there early days though fought with quick wits, gaslighting IBM with Dos which they bought and Basic something IBM could have done itself pretty quick and easy. Today they fight wars of attrition the have more cash then anyone else so the can just push crap but drownout their competetors with marketing muscule(linux) or undercut them even when their own costs are higher(Playstaion, GameCube).
2. M$ hands are basicly tied anytime they don't have an Office or OS release coming down the pike, these are really their ownly method to deliver new product and technology. Lets be honest most of their other attempts such as CRM and SharePointe are plugins for office. People coming to expect Windows and Office will do everything they need. No need to buy other software, well maybe games.
3. People are getting angry at the upgrade tredmill, they don't want a new OS every 18 months, they want upgrades and free crack, which they should get because M$ screwed it up the first time. Also generally the system requirements on a given OS level trageted at the average box at the time of its release so their old box has to go unless they really went high end or purchased it very recently.
4. M$ likes the upgrade tredmill it generates constant revenue and provides them oppertunity to push new products and capture new markets, see item 2. To address this they tried to do some really ambitous things with Blackcomb to get peoples interest back. Then they discovered they bit off more then they could chew scraped almost all if it for longhorn other then some DRM stuff noone really want. This forced them to give people a break and set the relase date at 05. Then they discovered XP was so back that they had lots of fix work before they could even attempt to sell the next product. Let me tell you Longhorn is nothing but XP with a different UI, at its core its still win2k. I have seen the beta. This has pushed them back to 2006.
5. Since their hands are tied for a year or more , and they like to fight by just having more money then anyone else, they have to do something to take the wind out of Google's sails. M$ anounced along time ago they mean to get the search market, their model demands they make good on their word. They will be fighting an entrened enemy Google is getting a year lead.
6. The last thing Bill can stand is a Google with $$ as it might mean they could lose for a change.
Batteries have a pretty limited dubty cycle. They are good enough now for electric cars as traditionally envisioned but, I would not want to go near this idea without lots of hard numbers showing the kinda impact it would have on my batery life. I supect it would cost consumers much more in maintainance then the value of the electricity they could produce. Now haveing the car more able to function as a personal generator for your own home in the even of blackout sounds like a great idea.
I must agree with you on this. If we could get bike lanes on the outer edges of of US or State Highways as well as city streets it would be great. Obviously there is not need to put them on interstate roads as you probably don't want to on a limited access road because it might be hours between exits on a bike and you be best off ridding down main street where you could stop at a whim for food/rest.
The problem is now you have these highways here in norther OH, where people fly down them at 1.5x the speed limit using the entire road often because the road is narrow, with ditches or other obstructions on both sides, makeing it impossible to pull off, ride on edge or walk out of the steet. Try and take a bike down on of these roads you'd be killed in an instant. I really would ride to work and school if it was not for the saftey factor. Its not like going 20mph on my bike is gonna be way different the 35mph in my car time wise, over the 3-8 mile distances I travel from home on a typical week day.
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Every filesystem is a database at heart. They already contain other attributes like permissions, create and modify date etc. The place to store this stuff is in the FS because the database is already there. All you need to do is add some more stuff like extended description, a few topic reference fields, and and slap of a query engine on it. The query engine does not need to be real complex either. You can get away with little or no formating/sorting/grouping support as the user space app which performs the query should take care of that. All you need is basic bool logic and string comparision. Most of this code already exists out there under a free license, I am not saying it would be a copy past job but there are examples of required algorithms which developers can look at safely, without running afowl of and IP.
The one tough thing WINFS aims to do that would be simple in user space is it hopes to be able to look in files and gleen some atributes form them. This is great if you can hook into some of the libraries form office or adobe et al, it saves you from having to implement parseing for all that stuff. I am not quite sure how you solve that one at the FS level. I just fear a user space system will get real crufty real fast and break when major changes occur to the files and their real attribes on disk that the DB can't know about. Like if a mount point gets moved or everything is resotored form a tarball and the dates get changed/permissions change a little because someone was careless. I think overall getting the neccecary info form the user when new files are created would be a fair compromise, the only issues is rule one of DATA "crap in crap out".
Then there are all the problems that you mostly have to deal with wether you do it in the FS or as some user space hack/bloatware thing:
Note that file creation would constitute just that you would want/need for efficency archives to contain all that info for the file in them, so the user does not have to enter it. Makefiles and the like would have to be update to do magic and fill in that data for the output files. Then you naturally have to fix all the gui tool kits so their fileIO dialogs support that info, any apps with custom dialogs will need to be patched as will console apps. Some sort of default values would be need for apps that just can't resonably support collecting that info as well. I don't want to have to fill in values everytime I "cat" somethig, I mean to unlink moments later.
I think its clear there are lots of differcult usability problems to solve. Some could probably extend and of the major OSS filesystems to include some extra attributes and add a crude query system, its all a question of what do you really do with it once you have it. I am sure R&D at Microsoft is just as perplexed on that point as I am. I feel sory for them since the marketing dept has been pushing this as the next big thing for almost a decade now, the pressure must be intense.
only if you are crazy enough to run wine with elevated privilages.
Thank god I am not the only one who read everything on that list a recalled it from the news this year. If people have not heared whats there already they need to start getting their news some place other then MSN
Stop letting good ideas be victimized by the M$ marketing FUD machine. Someone said "database filesystem" That was a good idea. M$ can along and said gee lets steal that idea. Hey there is no existing implementation to copy how do we do it. The answer is they did not do it. They put a database to keep rather mundane information on top of NTFS(a real filesystem) and called it WINFS(NTFS and a almost completely unrealated database, not a file system). Keeping data on the relations ships between files is a nice idea. Putting it in user space is dumb. Its overhead. Look at most of the example he gave "find a word document I worked on last month". All that info is already in the filesystem. A filesystem really is already a database in the strictest since. It stores whats on which inode assoicated with how many blocks which you could think of as attributes. It also sores attibutes like permissions and dates. Why not just put some more attributes into it like subject and relatedtopicID . If you did that and then added the ability to maintain some other tables where you could put extended descriptions and stuff, and built up the query engine to be able to efficently solve queries users will likely ask then you'd have what your really looking for. Addionally you would lose the overhead to a degree because you'd be storing informaiton once instead of in the FS and in the database.
You could not DOS does right out of the box. You could only DOS DOS if someone had installed add on software. Where there is no network support there is no DOS attack.
Yes, but you tend to ignor the fact that the gasses used in florescent bulbs are much more damaging to the atmosphere then anything envolved with incandesent. There is also mercury in some types of florescent bulbs. Ever wonder why you can't toss tubes out in your trash in most municipalities? I am not sure what are issues with manufacturing LCDs but Si anything is bad, have you any idea how much toxic chemistry must be desposed of per micro-chip and given how LCDs work I'll bet some of the process is just as destructive. There are always trade offs, don't fall prey to the latest "green fad" of the week. Remember when all our power was supposed to come form photo-cells until people wised up and figured out that given the enviornmental expense of producing them, the hazards of disposing of them and their limited life span would be an ecological disaster? If your a green freak you need to be worried about the stupid stuff like attempting to grow rice in the desert that we do here in America , cars, computers, and even methods of power generation are trivial compared to some of the stuff the Ag industry does.
Devin,
While we greatly appreciate the whoreing you have done on our behalf at slashdot, we cannont offer you a job at this time. You must fist obtain your MCSE before you can be considerd for one of our code monkey positions. If you would like to work helpdesk please apply to that department. Thanks very much sincerly yours Pointy Haried Boss numner 1234.
The above is about how the letter is going to read. It was a nice try though Devin.
wrong again, I think most would say there is a major trend in IT right now to move the applications back to the back room. Noticed all the web based applications lately. I would call that a thin client app. Lets face it a web browser makes a terrible thin client, but its the quickest way to convert all those idle computers on peoples desks back into terminals. I think the future is think but not fat client architecture. It will all for end user systems to have much longer life spans and make handhelds ever more practicle.
Software should be free because of its availibility and no-existant costs of production. I am considering production to be separate from development. Production is nothing more then running the ftp server so poeple can download it. Software is so cheep to manufacture it really should be gratis. Development on the other hand costs time and money. Licensing it is and always will be a stupid scheme because its always going to be pirated and or you will not at some point be able to compete with your previous versions. People simply won't want to pay to upgrade any more.
FOSS has done alot of great things but the gratest projects were born out of need and then generously gifted to the rest of society so that others can enjoy the work.
So what if your business is software and as such you have few specific needs? Then create your own market. Other industries have figured this out. For example: Make an inexpensive cartoon show, that can't likely sell enough advertizing time at first for you to break even. Get people hooked for a little while. Start selling card games and books, and posters related to the cartoon. Profit!
Software firms should be able to do the same. Make a hopefully killer app. Give it away create installed user base. Let companies and individuals pay $$$ you to implement feature X or customization y for them. Wait a release or two an d fold those features into the mainline(you have to get your userbase to upgrade so you not stuck maintaining really old trees). Repete above untill interest in the product dies off, then start on something new. Being open source can't individuals and companies implement stuff on their own and leave you out of the loop. Sure but if your app is of good quality and is substantial enough to be "commercial quality" chances are nobody can do a better job as quickly or cheaply as you can. The other reality is that if some third party does create a valuable patch you can fold it into your mainline imediately, takeing away any third party market for forprofit development on your product insuring you will have a monopoly withing the sphear of your own product.
You have only yourself to blame. You get what you pay for an most things tend to do what their names imply. You bought a WINmodem and tried to use it on LINux, why did you think that would work?
Yes I do know there have been modules for winmodems for a long time but I still don't understand why people want them. I have never understood the missguided notion that an internal modem is ever a good plan. External is always better because you can reset the modem without reseting the PC and every modem I ever met needs to be reset now and again.
Common sense is basicly illegal in this nation. Where have you been. I won't site other examples because I know everyone can site them, but lets look at this situation.
1. If we don't screen the rickedy old man but do screen the 25 year old behind him we'd be sued for age descrimination.
2. The reverse of number one.
3. If we screen any one group with a higher frequency then all others we'd be sued for racial profileing. No matter how much greater the statistical likely hood of the group being envolved in terror happens to be.
4. When there is an acident we will most likely be sued by victims for not haven taken steps like sampleing certain groups at a higher frequency based on the same statistics from number 3.
5. No matter how resonable it would be to blame terror on terrorists rather then air lines or the government, it won't fly because you can't sue a terrorist you can't find so someone else must be responsible for their actions. Becase of this it is impossible to exercise common sense in our saftey measures and we are all doomed to be victims for real because we can't deploy or greatest wepon "common sense" against our enemies.
You just got on my friends list.
The world is not the same as it was when these things were tried. When "Free Trade" was developed as a concept it was assumed that the factors of production were imobile. Most businesses were about manufactured goods. To build a car you had to have steel, to make the steel you had to have iron ore. Consequently the car got built where the iron ore was. Today we can ship thousands of tons of raw metal across the globe at a misicule cost. The expensive thing is laybor of construction. The other reality is that with an increasingly service economy things like call centers and people who read X-rays can be overseas as well. Surgery will soon be done by robots controlled by doctors on the other side of the globe. What the hell is left for people to do here in the US or Western Europe then? Simply continue to mortgague our collective futures by running up incredible foriegn owned deficits. Federal debt is no problem when its owed to the citizens of that nation but it will burry us eventally if it continues to flow abroad. Modern tech has made it possible to produce noplace near the resources of production, no you couple that with a degree of political stability the world has never before know and you have the makeings of economic ruin. We need to try some sort of modern forms of protectionism to keep up with new tech or in all seriousness start some more bigger wars, that pit world powers against each other rather then just us agains Afganistan. We need a new Sovient Union or WW3, or we need to put an end to deficit trading with tarifs. Take your pick. Either way in the short term I am sure our quality of life will go down a little bit. Its better then repeating the great depression in 30 years though.
Well, let me tell you that a real computer repair shop will have a service depot with people who do work at the electronics level. I work in my companies IT department but sometimes I help the service guys when they are under the gun with a back log. I know only enough electronics to be helpful with basic stuff like testing caps and de-soldering and replacing identical parts based on a sheet of most common failuers until something works. Some of those guys are really smart though and know their stuff. Its incrdible some of the stuff I would have labeled as lost causes that they can have fixed in no-time flat. There service everything from IBM Iserise equipment doing fine detail work on tape drives all the way down to label printers, which most often you just hit with something.
The point of my comment is this though. The people doing that work for us are EEs, they have credited degrees in Electrical Engineering and many are licensed as EEs. Considering the people who are doing this kinda repair work are already well licensed and covered. It seems insulting to license them again as "repair men"/.
If you read the story it really does sound like they company should own the idea. I mean he was working on this stuff for them while 'on the clock' so to speak.
I mean great so I have this idea for a really clever interface for this asset traking software I am developing for our departments use at the office. Well thats cool but I can't go code up a generic version at home and try and mass market it, The company owns the UI after all I might have had some of the more interesting ideas talking to may coworker while we were out to lunch but all the reall work was done for the corp. Its why they pay me my salary and don't hire some other person instead. I have good ideas(sometimes) and they value them. Its a resource I bring to the table the same way I bring any other skills I may have.
One intersting rub though on all this is certain ideas carry a liability. Like say I have this really clever way to disable some sorta DRM for some corporate and leagal perpose. I then go ask my manager as I sometimes do "Hey I found a way to do cool thing X can I put it out on the net so others might find it useful" Being an OSS fan himself he will say yes. Now the next DCSS or some such is an Idea I had but don't own, hmm who is responsible for the consequenses?
What is wrong with a rollup, so long as the glue is good? Why on earth would you scrap a bunch of good software, when you could use it? What would be so bad about haveing the option to change out a module sometime?
Linux and GNU has its on street cred now. I really don't think the people still need to be sold on Linux and GNU being up to the job anymore. Most people wether they will admit it or not *know* Linux and GNU are now as good as the admin or engineer that runs the system, its the support network behind GNU and Linux they still worry about.
I think whats telling is how often and for how long we have seen Unices shipping with the GNU tools and compiler in the system. GNU is not Unix its something that in most or maybe all cases is inspired by Unix works like Unix but is better then Unix. Getting GNU certified as Unix would in that sense almost be a slap in the face to GNU, although it might still be an endorsement to the Linux kernel. Linux though as stated before does have enough of its own cred that Unix certification will have very little meaning.
Here Here, you are so right sometimes you have to settle for a greater evil in the short term to win some small victories in the end. As a Libertarian I can imagine anything worse then a Liberal in office. I would rather a conservative hold office any day however when Ross did a little damage and handed the election to the Dems the Republican party went more in a neoconservative direction. Still not far enough but it was progress especially because they had to effect some realy change to get their vote back. We are gonna have to be willing to fight this as a gorilla war and sometimes tip the scales toward the worst candidate if we are ever going to create the oppertunity for the men and women we really want in office to get thier chance.
Why do you need the domain?
If I were running a site like that I would use systems I really did not care much about, which hosted nothing else and keep no logs. You could subpoena my zero-byte /var/log/syslog if you want and I would be more then happy to turn it over, its not like its gonna be differcult to transfer.
I think this is the most fair analogy I have seen yet after reading the article. Its sounds like the chip is just takeing the defective area out of the ciruit and working around the problem. It seems like a degraded mode on a disk array to me, sure your raid 5 array keeps running with the loss of one drive but the performance is not great.
This is not even the start of the war. This is just the first shots to be heared round the Google office building. Microsoft demons some pre-alfa ready tech right before Google's IPO. This is just an attempt to scare investors away from Google by pushing some vaporware in part of their 2006 operating system.
Things to understand:
1. Microsoft never fought a battle with superior technology. In there early days though fought with quick wits, gaslighting IBM with Dos which they bought and Basic something IBM could have done itself pretty quick and easy. Today they fight wars of attrition the have more cash then anyone else so the can just push crap but drownout their competetors with marketing muscule(linux) or undercut them even when their own costs are higher(Playstaion, GameCube).
2. M$ hands are basicly tied anytime they don't have an Office or OS release coming down the pike, these are really their ownly method to deliver new product and technology. Lets be honest most of their other attempts such as CRM and SharePointe are plugins for office. People coming to expect Windows and Office will do everything they need. No need to buy other software, well maybe games.
3. People are getting angry at the upgrade tredmill, they don't want a new OS every 18 months, they want upgrades and free crack, which they should get because M$ screwed it up the first time. Also generally the system requirements on a given OS level trageted at the average box at the time of its release so their old box has to go unless they really went high end or purchased it very recently.
4. M$ likes the upgrade tredmill it generates constant revenue and provides them oppertunity to push new products and capture new markets, see item 2. To address this they tried to do some really ambitous things with Blackcomb to get peoples interest back. Then they discovered they bit off more then they could chew scraped almost all if it for longhorn other then some DRM stuff noone really want. This forced them to give people a break and set the relase date at 05. Then they discovered XP was so back that they had lots of fix work before they could even attempt to sell the next product. Let me tell you Longhorn is nothing but XP with a different UI, at its core its still win2k. I have seen the beta. This has pushed them back to 2006.
5. Since their hands are tied for a year or more , and they like to fight by just having more money then anyone else, they have to do something to take the wind out of Google's sails. M$ anounced along time ago they mean to get the search market, their model demands they make good on their word. They will be fighting an entrened enemy Google is getting a year lead.
6. The last thing Bill can stand is a Google with $$ as it might mean they could lose for a change.
Batteries have a pretty limited dubty cycle. They are good enough now for electric cars as traditionally envisioned but, I would not want to go near this idea without lots of hard numbers showing the kinda impact it would have on my batery life. I supect it would cost consumers much more in maintainance then the value of the electricity they could produce. Now haveing the car more able to function as a personal generator for your own home in the even of blackout sounds like a great idea.
I must agree with you on this. If we could get bike lanes on the outer edges of of US or State Highways as well as city streets it would be great. Obviously there is not need to put them on interstate roads as you probably don't want to on a limited access road because it might be hours between exits on a bike and you be best off ridding down main street where you could stop at a whim for food/rest.
The problem is now you have these highways here in norther OH, where people fly down them at 1.5x the speed limit using the entire road often because the road is narrow, with ditches or other obstructions on both sides, makeing it impossible to pull off, ride on edge or walk out of the steet. Try and take a bike down on of these roads you'd be killed in an instant. I really would ride to work and school if it was not for the saftey factor. Its not like going 20mph on my bike is gonna be way different the 35mph in my car time wise, over the 3-8 mile distances I travel from home on a typical week day.
are you kidding, I have all of their known class C netblocks blakholed on my router, in both directions.
God thank you for love IPTables.