The last news i had was here on slashdot less than a week ago, Microsoft was appealing the decision and Eolas was trying to prevent Microsoft from even being able to attempt an appeal.
"With the GPL, the authors still retain full copyrights to the material. The license defines how you are permitted to use it. If you do not follow the license, you have no permission to use it."
bzzz wrong. The GPL is a license which defines terms to DISTRIBUTE and COPY the material. Copyright law doesn't give the holder of a copyright any authority over how you USE software.
EULA's state terms of use (the GPL is not a EULA), there is no backing for them under copyright law. If they have teeth at all it's in contract law, not copyright law. Whether they do have said teeth is something which hasn't been settled in court yet.
The same organism has to survive both the highest of temperatures and the lowest of temps (you don't get alot colder than space, or mars for that matter).
While there are organisms that can thrive in extreme temperatures, usually the same organism can't survive at both extremes.
We really need to get off this expert kick, most of what we are talking about are options that power users want, and power users aren't neccesarily experts.
Half the power users I know couldn't even begin to handle the CLI but would still want flexibility on alot of basic preferences.
There is a very simple change that greatly improve the whole experience though. If I double click on a file, and it says there is no associated application. I then choose to associate one and click ok... at this point it drops me back to the desktop.
This is very odd behavior, I'd expect it to open the file in that application! Otherwise it gives the impression that "it didn't take" and I need to associate again.
The same if I rick click and choose to open it with an application that isn't in the list yet, it should open immediately, after all I choose to open it with that application!
" "too easy to use, too simple". I thought that was a funny thing to say for a put down, but I heard it."
That's because there are disadvantages to being easy to use. It means giving up power and it means dumbing down the interface.
For instance, one click installs, an ideal dream... I guess. They are a horrid idea in practice. Because you didn't set any options about the install, you now have to find and set the configuration after the fact.
Whereas with a basic wizard you can pick the essential options in the wizard and it will configure those options for you. So 99% of applications don't need further configuration after install. You can go straight from install, to use.
Out of his entire list there are perhaps two things which are even half good ideas.
For the most part this guy doesn't want to improve anything, he wants to jet us back into the stoneage.
He wants to get rid of views in nautilus.
He also would like to see an end to the HIG (and no he doesn't want something to replace it), in fact he also wants a stop put to cooperation with KDE and other WMs. Freedesktop.org, is evil as far as he's concerned.
If you read this guys rant on the first page you'd see that Gnome and KDE cooporating and working together on standards and so forth is one of the percieved errors.
You do understand your NOT supposed to "build" software on a binary distribution, at all, ever. Right?
If you absolutely have to have something you should have built binary packages and then installed those. Preferably by downloading the source packages and patching them to the new version and rebuilding.
You do a LFS system then? Because pretty much every distribution out there comes with x.org now, not xfree86.
x.org IS xfree86, there was a licensing change, they just grabed the version with the old license to get around it. Unlike xfree these guys are actually doing development, and lots of it. There is even serious talk about an opengl x, which of course offloads all the x processing onto the video card (all of which are highly optimized for opengl thanks to quake benchmarks being industry standard).
That means a snappier gui, and faster system since it won't be bogged down doing the calculation everytime you move a window.
That's just one of a number of things, and it's still aways off yet, but alot of other changes aren't. Take a good look at x.org, because xfree is dead.
Odd I've never found a correlation between spelling/grammar and intelligence.
Unless you consider the stupidity of spelling/grammar trolls, who live in such shame they have to convince their pathetic little minds of superiority. They do this of course by pointing out the mistakes of others in the most anal fashion, usually where those mistakes matter least.
"True, but if Hyundai made hard drives, chances are they would all fail at the same time (about the computer equivalent of 24,000 miles),"
Maybe, fortunately with harddrives it generally doesn't work that way:) Some will be DOA, some will drop off in two months, some in a year, some in two, some in ten. Depends on the conditions, the drives of course, the luck of the draw, whether the groundhog saw it's shadow, that sort of thing.
"Besides, replacing drives costs money too, warranty or not, because it takes up your time, especially when UPS loses the replacements, crushes them, and then delivers them to the wrong address (at least, that's what they do with my replacement DSL modems)."
It can, but most of the guys doing this are on salary, and would be reading slashdot getting paid if they weren't replacing a drive and getting paid.
"I am pretty sure fiber channel is faster than that. That's what fast arrays are hooked up with, anyway. These are generally independent boxes, with their own highly sophisticated and intelligent controller and a really fat pipe."
That is a little different, but there your still maxed at 1gb/s tops, because that is the fastest network link your looking at. Since the drives can each put out 320mb/s and in that case would be doing so in parallel, you still can't signficantly improve throughput beyond 4 drives.
"If you have a database that takes up 500GB, you don't need 15 terabytes. You do need reliability and extremely high throughput and low latency. If the 500GB is all on one drive, you will be limited by the speed with which that drive can move its head. If it's spread across 30 smaller disks in a RAID configuration, your latency will be greatly reduced and the throughput will be greatly increased."
*nod* That would be exactly what I said, as I said, that would be the ideal case, a database or webserver. Maybe it would be more useful to give a scenerio where you WOULD want fewer large drives.
What if you don't have a database at all. What if instead you have 15TB of worth of 100mb-1gig video and audio files, what if those files are used by 20 people?
Lets say we're looking at 500gb drives, we'd be talking 30 of them. Lets compare that to 146gb drives, now your looking at 103ish drives, just your network access fibrechannel device that supports at least a gigabit fiber link to the network and full 320mb/s drives at full speed is going to cost you 10x as much if you want it to handle 100 drives and in this scenerio there would be no benefit to it at all. That's not even considering the cost of disks, this isn't ram, a disk of twice the capcity doesn't cost twice as much.
"For the money, more RAM would probably help users out better than a SCSI disk(or 2 since the advent of high end video games, mp3s and movies has really caused the demand for storage to soar)"
I doubt it, since 90+ percent of them are running windows and windows starts to swap before you hit the desktop, no matter how much memory you have. That means the hard drive is your bottleneck, not memory.
On a linux, bsd, or pretty much anything not windows I'd agree, you need to put in enough memory that it's rare for the system to need to swap. If you have less than that, you'll see a bigger performance increase from the added memory (since you've eliminated the disk bottleneck, memory is faster than a scsi drive).
Don't believe me? Boot up your old p1 200, then put a pci ide controller in it and ghost the drive to a fast modern HDD. Don't change anything else and see the performance difference it makes.
Apple used shitty scsi for starters, I won't go into why, you can look it up if you care to. But SCSI was also too expensive then, without the pc guys using it, the price never went down. One of the things I don't like about apple, they dropped the scsi, but didn't drop the price;)
Yes but larger disks don't provide the redundancy of a raid of raids.
However many disks worth of space you've lost in your raid to parity, that's more or less how many drives have to fail before you've lost data and the raid goes down.
Depending on the scheme you use, the same is true in a raid of raids, except with raids. That many raids, have to lose that many drives, before you've lost data.
I agree however, simply because there are benefits to large numbers of small disks, doesn't mean there aren't benefits to large disks as well.
People seem to have this idea that a large disk means just one. Hardly, you can have 15 large drives just as easily as you can have 15 small ones. And the price of every smaller capacity drive drops a notch when the larger capacity disk comes out. If 250gb scsi drives came out today, within 3months they would occupy the price position that 146gb scsi drives hold now and those who do want only 146gb would get it cheaper.
"Hyundai's have great warranties, too, but you still have to walk if it's in the shop, whether it's covered by a warranty or not."
What sort of idiot runs anything that needs multiple TB of storage and doesn't keep extra drives on hand? Also in a raid 5 configuration, you haven't lost data, and the raid isn't down simply because a drive has failed.
"That is all, the rest is absolutely correct, except to mention that if you're running a Windows OS, the maximum volume size is 2.4TB anyway."
True that, although there really aren't many things you'd need 2.4TB that could be done with a windows OS, or if they could be, that anyone would.
Only to a point. Although you can handle more simultaneous small requests faster with more drives, you can only transfer the data from those requests at 320mb/s max, and 3 scsi drives in raid 5 can provide that sustained.
And there are always those who wants lots of larger drives.
Just because you increase drive capacity, doesn't mean you increase drive utilization.
if you have 20gb of data on your 100gb drive, and then ghost that to a 1TB drive, your copying 20gb of data. If you then ghost that 1TB drive to a 10TB drive, your still only copying 20gb.
It's much better to logically reduce to a single point of failure and then introduce redudantcy for that single point... oh wait, that's why you have multiple drives in a raid.
Slashdot Mirror
EOLAS got squashed?
The last news i had was here on slashdot less than a week ago, Microsoft was appealing the decision and Eolas was trying to prevent Microsoft from even being able to attempt an appeal.
That is far from over and hardly squashed?
Although not a published standard to my knowledge, they did this de facto with the FAT filesystem.
"With the GPL, the authors still retain full copyrights to the material. The license defines how you are permitted to use it. If you do not follow the license, you have no permission to use it."
bzzz wrong. The GPL is a license which defines terms to DISTRIBUTE and COPY the material. Copyright law doesn't give the holder of a copyright any authority over how you USE software.
EULA's state terms of use (the GPL is not a EULA), there is no backing for them under copyright law. If they have teeth at all it's in contract law, not copyright law. Whether they do have said teeth is something which hasn't been settled in court yet.
The same organism has to survive both the highest of temperatures and the lowest of temps (you don't get alot colder than space, or mars for that matter).
While there are organisms that can thrive in extreme temperatures, usually the same organism can't survive at both extremes.
We really need to get off this expert kick, most of what we are talking about are options that power users want, and power users aren't neccesarily experts.
Half the power users I know couldn't even begin to handle the CLI but would still want flexibility on alot of basic preferences.
There are more of them than there are of you, if it has to be one or the other it's the newbies who get there gnome.
There is a very simple change that greatly improve the whole experience though. If I double click on a file, and it says there is no associated application. I then choose to associate one and click ok... at this point it drops me back to the desktop.
This is very odd behavior, I'd expect it to open the file in that application! Otherwise it gives the impression that "it didn't take" and I need to associate again.
The same if I rick click and choose to open it with an application that isn't in the list yet, it should open immediately, after all I choose to open it with that application!
" "too easy to use, too simple". I thought that was a funny thing to say for a put down, but I heard it."
That's because there are disadvantages to being easy to use. It means giving up power and it means dumbing down the interface.
For instance, one click installs, an ideal dream... I guess. They are a horrid idea in practice. Because you didn't set any options about the install, you now have to find and set the configuration after the fact.
Whereas with a basic wizard you can pick the essential options in the wizard and it will configure those options for you. So 99% of applications don't need further configuration after install. You can go straight from install, to use.
maybe doesn't have several thousand to toss at the problem?
Unfortunately freedesktop.org is one of the things GoneME guys would like to see go away.
He doesn't want to replace it mind, say with something better. He simply wants to abolish it and the HIG while we're at it!
Out of his entire list there are perhaps two things which are even half good ideas.
For the most part this guy doesn't want to improve anything, he wants to jet us back into the stoneage.
He wants to get rid of views in nautilus.
He also would like to see an end to the HIG (and no he doesn't want something to replace it), in fact he also wants a stop put to cooperation with KDE and other WMs. Freedesktop.org, is evil as far as he's concerned.
If you read this guys rant on the first page you'd see that Gnome and KDE cooporating and working together on standards and so forth is one of the percieved errors.
You do understand your NOT supposed to "build" software on a binary distribution, at all, ever. Right?
If you absolutely have to have something you should have built binary packages and then installed those. Preferably by downloading the source packages and patching them to the new version and rebuilding.
Although the build process is definately different, not many people build X anyway.
I think it was more that X hasn't had any significant improvement in years and development on it has been slow for a very very long time.
Even without that though, the license change would have been enough, under the new license gnome would be illegal.
You do a LFS system then? Because pretty much every distribution out there comes with x.org now, not xfree86.
x.org IS xfree86, there was a licensing change, they just grabed the version with the old license to get around it. Unlike xfree these guys are actually doing development, and lots of it. There is even serious talk about an opengl x, which of course offloads all the x processing onto the video card (all of which are highly optimized for opengl thanks to quake benchmarks being industry standard).
That means a snappier gui, and faster system since it won't be bogged down doing the calculation everytime you move a window.
That's just one of a number of things, and it's still aways off yet, but alot of other changes aren't. Take a good look at x.org, because xfree is dead.
Odd I've never found a correlation between spelling/grammar and intelligence.
Unless you consider the stupidity of spelling/grammar trolls, who live in such shame they have to convince their pathetic little minds of superiority. They do this of course by pointing out the mistakes of others in the most anal fashion, usually where those mistakes matter least.
"True, but if Hyundai made hard drives, chances are they would all fail at the same time (about the computer equivalent of 24,000 miles),"
:) Some will be DOA, some will drop off in two months, some in a year, some in two, some in ten. Depends on the conditions, the drives of course, the luck of the draw, whether the groundhog saw it's shadow, that sort of thing.
Maybe, fortunately with harddrives it generally doesn't work that way
"Besides, replacing drives costs money too, warranty or not, because it takes up your time, especially when UPS loses the replacements, crushes them, and then delivers them to the wrong address (at least, that's what they do with my replacement DSL modems)."
It can, but most of the guys doing this are on salary, and would be reading slashdot getting paid if they weren't replacing a drive and getting paid.
"I am pretty sure fiber channel is faster than that. That's what fast arrays are hooked up with, anyway. These are generally independent boxes, with their own highly sophisticated and intelligent controller and a really fat pipe."
That is a little different, but there your still maxed at 1gb/s tops, because that is the fastest network link your looking at. Since the drives can each put out 320mb/s and in that case would be doing so in parallel, you still can't signficantly improve throughput beyond 4 drives.
"If you have a database that takes up 500GB, you don't need 15 terabytes. You do need reliability and extremely high throughput and low latency. If the 500GB is all on one drive, you will be limited by the speed with which that drive can move its head. If it's spread across 30 smaller disks in a RAID configuration, your latency will be greatly reduced and the throughput will be greatly increased."
*nod* That would be exactly what I said, as I said, that would be the ideal case, a database or webserver. Maybe it would be more useful to give a scenerio where you WOULD want fewer large drives.
What if you don't have a database at all. What if instead you have 15TB of worth of 100mb-1gig video and audio files, what if those files are used by 20 people?
Lets say we're looking at 500gb drives, we'd be talking 30 of them. Lets compare that to 146gb drives, now your looking at 103ish drives, just your network access fibrechannel device that supports at least a gigabit fiber link to the network and full 320mb/s drives at full speed is going to cost you 10x as much if you want it to handle 100 drives and in this scenerio there would be no benefit to it at all. That's not even considering the cost of disks, this isn't ram, a disk of twice the capcity doesn't cost twice as much.
"For the money, more RAM would probably help users out better than a SCSI disk(or 2 since the advent of high end video games, mp3s and movies has really caused the demand for storage to soar)"
;)
I doubt it, since 90+ percent of them are running windows and windows starts to swap before you hit the desktop, no matter how much memory you have. That means the hard drive is your bottleneck, not memory.
On a linux, bsd, or pretty much anything not windows I'd agree, you need to put in enough memory that it's rare for the system to need to swap. If you have less than that, you'll see a bigger performance increase from the added memory (since you've eliminated the disk bottleneck, memory is faster than a scsi drive).
Don't believe me? Boot up your old p1 200, then put a pci ide controller in it and ghost the drive to a fast modern HDD. Don't change anything else and see the performance difference it makes.
Apple used shitty scsi for starters, I won't go into why, you can look it up if you care to. But SCSI was also too expensive then, without the pc guys using it, the price never went down. One of the things I don't like about apple, they dropped the scsi, but didn't drop the price
Yes but larger disks don't provide the redundancy of a raid of raids.
However many disks worth of space you've lost in your raid to parity, that's more or less how many drives have to fail before you've lost data and the raid goes down.
Depending on the scheme you use, the same is true in a raid of raids, except with raids. That many raids, have to lose that many drives, before you've lost data.
I agree however, simply because there are benefits to large numbers of small disks, doesn't mean there aren't benefits to large disks as well.
People seem to have this idea that a large disk means just one. Hardly, you can have 15 large drives just as easily as you can have 15 small ones. And the price of every smaller capacity drive drops a notch when the larger capacity disk comes out. If 250gb scsi drives came out today, within 3months they would occupy the price position that 146gb scsi drives hold now and those who do want only 146gb would get it cheaper.
"Hyundai's have great warranties, too, but you still have to walk if it's in the shop, whether it's covered by a warranty or not."
What sort of idiot runs anything that needs multiple TB of storage and doesn't keep extra drives on hand? Also in a raid 5 configuration, you haven't lost data, and the raid isn't down simply because a drive has failed.
"That is all, the rest is absolutely correct, except to mention that if you're running a Windows OS, the maximum volume size is 2.4TB anyway."
True that, although there really aren't many things you'd need 2.4TB that could be done with a windows OS, or if they could be, that anyone would.
Only to a point. Although you can handle more simultaneous small requests faster with more drives, you can only transfer the data from those requests at 320mb/s max, and 3 scsi drives in raid 5 can provide that sustained.
And there are always those who wants lots of larger drives.
Just because you increase drive capacity, doesn't mean you increase drive utilization.
if you have 20gb of data on your 100gb drive, and then ghost that to a 1TB drive, your copying 20gb of data. If you then ghost that 1TB drive to a 10TB drive, your still only copying 20gb.
It's much better to logically reduce to a single point of failure and then introduce redudantcy for that single point... oh wait, that's why you have multiple drives in a raid.
Some companies want a number of LARGER disk in an array.