If my interpretation is correct, you're still $20 behind (unless you actually value an 80GB drive), since if you win you get to keep the drive, but apparently aren't refunded your $60 deposit. This was exactly why I read the article - and when I found out what's at stake I thought it pretty obvious why even ten-year-old johnny with his hex editor haven't entered - this is the most pathetic competetition I have read of in all my time.
Umm... you do realize that FSM followers are just religious satirists mocking the whole thing, right?
No, to read his post it certainly looks like he's bought into the whole FSM thing, hook, line and pasta-fork. Of course, now you've gone and attacked something he holds so dear, I can feel the flames licking at my heels already.
Sheesh, seriously, how the hell did you get this impression!?
If the disks were in a RAID array, care would have to be taken to make sure they were replaced in the exact sequence as they were in the original system.
Not really necessary - most RAID technologies don't rely on the disks physical address (host, bus, ID, LUN) but rather some persistent "superblock" uniquely identifying the disk and it's specific participation in the group.
I usually have the torx bit close to hand, and it is easier to (un)tighten them than a phillips. I don't mind them at all.
Likewise I see your point, and agree you get more bang for buck out of CPUs. Going forward, it's probably going to be cost effective to have cheaper peripherals and more processes running on the CPU for all but the higher-end servers (whose CPUs spend enough time at 100% to REALLY justify offloading). CPU usage aside, WinModems were impossible to run until they were reverse-engineered. Yeah, I'm sure that was unintentional.
Many Japanese Automotive ECUs are unreliable/unworkable to communicate with using the USB to RS232 adapters as well. In addition, some particular adapters seem better than others, but so far I haven't found one as reliable as an onboard controller.
That was one of the first things I notice about USB cables, the logo on one side. I was still shuddering from the ease of use, can't-go-wrong aspect of it all, so imagine my joy when I learned they'd even gone and standardised which side of the plug the logo goes on so that the (apparently uncommon) people like you and me that pick up on details like this can actually use it to save time.
...
Then imagine my dismay when the inevitable cheap knock-offs hit the market, with the logo on both sides, or neither, cables with male 'A' connectors at both ends, etc. Just when you start to rely on something, it becomes unreliable.
I don't think the G.P. understands that the OS itself will need code rewrites to support USB 3.0 and is probably of the impression the increases have come about simply from 'beefing things up', as it were.
I agree that since XP has always supported USB 1.1 & 2.0, it's a fair expectation for 3.0 to become supported. I think for MS not to do that would be an extremely risky move - sure they spew to the media that Vista has been an overwhelming success, but surely they don't actually believe that themselves. Do they? Because as long as XP users are the mainstay of their single-user workstation install, anything they do to antagonise them will only drive more people over to Apple / Linux etc. Then again, the emigration of users to those platforms could also be something they've deluded themselves about as well.
You mean like they do with Ethernet NICs and TCP/IP Checksum offload, SCSI/FC HBAs, etc.?
I'll happily pay more for better silicon that relieves my CPU of cycles. That's why (in the dialup ages) I continued to use an external modem rather than a reverse-engineered driver with a PCI WinModem. I do realise I'm in the minority - most consumers would settle for the cheaper controllers (and probably don't tax their CPU like I do sometimes). Hell, imagine if the controller was smart enough to mirror / stripe block access (providing RAID), or handling block-level copies between devices under supervision of the CPU. OK, I'm probably dreaming now - there might be very few people who would like that and also several reasons why it's not possible, but you can see what I'm saying, right? Anything that lets the hardware leave the CPU alone for longer has got to be good.
Good for you. I'm the meat in the sandwich between you and those "idiot users" that you badly need more of. Naturally, the onus is on everybody but you to lift the game. That you need such careful treatment shows me you're not in it to write good code, you're in it for headswell and kinship among similar elitist jerks.
My job is keeping these "idiot users" paying for my time, appealing to precious egos when I myself need help, and keeping obnoxious pricks like you well out of sight - lest they think I'm just a front for a bunch of schoolkids.
Grow up - and you too can make money by taking what you do for free, and delivering it with a scrap of professionalism. Until then, that's my pie, and your biggest satisfactions will continue to come simply from others failure to grasp the inner details of your 'profession' - you might not realise for years how soul destroying that will be for you.
Sibling is correct in some ways. I've been able to write in C, VB, Perl for several years now, but I have to admit I'm just not a developer. Many projects need to learn that they will recieve bugfixes / criticisms from people who can't just open a terminal and fix them - and not for lack of trying. In fact some of the best criticisms in my experience come from your lay-people who understand the apps from a different level. At this point, most forums flam the hell out of the critic, burying him in technobabble and elitism, making him wish he hadn't bothered.
I'll tell you how I'm helping FOSS - Advocacy.
Over the last 12 years I've been in and out of various small to medium companies, tearing out expensive proprietary systems leaving Linux-based OSS solutions in my wake. No - I can't fix the DNS vulnerability that we just had, and I'll probably never be instrumental in getting Flash working on Linux. What I can do is teach the masses what's available to them from the FOSS world in a professional and non-rabid manner (I'm looking at you, Twitter), and get them using and talking about it.
I've even (in an uncommon fit of diplomacy) attempted to bring the Gentoo crowd together and try and start acting like adults, concentrate effort on the distribution rather than all the factionism - but like trying to figure out why my Sparc20 would hang when I loaded the fibre-channel module - some things are simply beyond me.
What do you think happens to all these non-dev / non-tech people who encounter the "submit-a-diff-or-GTFO" mentality? Do they actually spend the rest of their days learning to code? No - they bugger off back where they came from - Proprietary Closed-Source Software, probably never to return. Thanks pal, that's all my work down the drain, thanks to some smug elitist twit that doesn't realise that - as good a developer he is - he is only one part of the puzzle.
Without sane and reasoned advocates, FOSS will wind up being excellent software (only by virtue of defeating their critics) used only by those that develop it. I've a sneaking suspicion that's exactly what some devs want.
Oh my god who modded that Inforamtive? Modules run in kernel space (by virtue of becoming part of the running kernel. They can access any and all of the memory and hardware that the kernel can - that's the point. Because the module / driver doesn't run in process context, there's no "guilty" process to kill. The ability to put the hardware in an unrecoverable state is part and parcel of being able to "drive it".
To put it another way: Drivers - whether compiled into the kernel or built as modules - have every bit as much ability to crash the system as the kernel itself does. Sure, a processes memory space is kept to itself, meaning it's unlikely that a process itself can bring a system down. But by the time a (bad) driver has done its damage, there's probably not a sane kernel left, letalone one that can recover and kill the process in question - there is none!
Yes, believe it or not he was being facetious. I know, I know - for a moment there, I too genuiniely believed he'd researched every Linux install in the history of the universe and confirmed what I suspected to be true.
Let's see who's laughing when the Political Correctness brigade catch up with the Gregorian Calendar and hold it to task for picking on poor, old February.
Unless the result of this "bad press and fallout" results in a complete change in how VMWare handle licensing, you've hardly rebutted the parent's point at all.
If they merely fix this particlar bug, I'd say he's got a point.
That's how it works in theory. In reality, the impact of snapshotting & replicating our VMs has been worse than simply shutting them down and copying the images - and we don't seem to be alone, google "esx snapshot hang". It turns out merging a 4 gig "delta" back into a Virtual machine can take hours and hours, with the VM seeming to be hung most of that time.
Implementing VMWare ESX went from one of the most exciting to the most annoying and disappointing project I've ever witnessed. As someone else has said, fortunatetly the hypervisor itself is quite stable, but most of the support apps are horrendous. VMWare Infrastructure Client is the slowest and most unreliable app I use. We've already lost one 200GiB virtual disk - the file was there but it refused to honour it as a "Virtual Disk" rather than "File". Good thing it was only a test server, but it's surely only a matter of time before we lose a production disk.
My prediction: In two years we'll look back on VMWare ESX, cringe at all the data-eating server-downing bugs we've found, wonder what all the fuss was about, and go back to *shock horror* running multiple services on single machines again, using operating systems capable of protecting one process from another.
Maybe I'm bitter and our project itself hasn't gone well, but I know I'm not alone. Not alone in wondering why my Linux PC at home with two SATA disks pisses all over our main fileserver who looks down a 4Gb FC at ten-disk 15kRPM Fibre Channel Stripe. Yes, it's an EMC SAN for those of you wondering quietly. One day, someone's going to cluster a bunch of old PowerMacs with USB/Firewire drives, software RAID, and show those EMC fuckers up.
Slashdot Mirror
If my interpretation is correct, you're still $20 behind (unless you actually value an 80GB drive), since if you win you get to keep the drive, but apparently aren't refunded your $60 deposit. This was exactly why I read the article - and when I found out what's at stake I thought it pretty obvious why even ten-year-old johnny with his hex editor haven't entered - this is the most pathetic competetition I have read of in all my time.
No, to read his post it certainly looks like he's bought into the whole FSM thing, hook, line and pasta-fork. Of course, now you've gone and attacked something he holds so dear, I can feel the flames licking at my heels already.
Sheesh, seriously, how the hell did you get this impression!?
Not really necessary - most RAID technologies don't rely on the disks physical address (host, bus, ID, LUN) but rather some persistent "superblock" uniquely identifying the disk and it's specific participation in the group.
I usually have the torx bit close to hand, and it is easier to (un)tighten them than a phillips. I don't mind them at all.
Likewise I see your point, and agree you get more bang for buck out of CPUs. Going forward, it's probably going to be cost effective to have cheaper peripherals and more processes running on the CPU for all but the higher-end servers (whose CPUs spend enough time at 100% to REALLY justify offloading). CPU usage aside, WinModems were impossible to run until they were reverse-engineered. Yeah, I'm sure that was unintentional.
Many Japanese Automotive ECUs are unreliable/unworkable to communicate with using the USB to RS232 adapters as well. In addition, some particular adapters seem better than others, but so far I haven't found one as reliable as an onboard controller.
Then imagine my dismay when the inevitable cheap knock-offs hit the market, with the logo on both sides, or neither, cables with male 'A' connectors at both ends, etc. Just when you start to rely on something, it becomes unreliable.
I agree that since XP has always supported USB 1.1 & 2.0, it's a fair expectation for 3.0 to become supported. I think for MS not to do that would be an extremely risky move - sure they spew to the media that Vista has been an overwhelming success, but surely they don't actually believe that themselves. Do they? Because as long as XP users are the mainstay of their single-user workstation install, anything they do to antagonise them will only drive more people over to Apple / Linux etc. Then again, the emigration of users to those platforms could also be something they've deluded themselves about as well.
I'll happily pay more for better silicon that relieves my CPU of cycles. That's why (in the dialup ages) I continued to use an external modem rather than a reverse-engineered driver with a PCI WinModem. I do realise I'm in the minority - most consumers would settle for the cheaper controllers (and probably don't tax their CPU like I do sometimes). Hell, imagine if the controller was smart enough to mirror / stripe block access (providing RAID), or handling block-level copies between devices under supervision of the CPU. OK, I'm probably dreaming now - there might be very few people who would like that and also several reasons why it's not possible, but you can see what I'm saying, right? Anything that lets the hardware leave the CPU alone for longer has got to be good.
When 419s are outlawed, only outlaws will send money to 419'ers
I think we all who's buried in meth
The book of Genesis?
...I'm gonna burrrn.
Well, move over MS QA team! AC hasn't had any problems all day!
Meh, I could care less.
My job is keeping these "idiot users" paying for my time, appealing to precious egos when I myself need help, and keeping obnoxious pricks like you well out of sight - lest they think I'm just a front for a bunch of schoolkids.
Grow up - and you too can make money by taking what you do for free, and delivering it with a scrap of professionalism. Until then, that's my pie, and your biggest satisfactions will continue to come simply from others failure to grasp the inner details of your 'profession' - you might not realise for years how soul destroying that will be for you.
I'll tell you how I'm helping FOSS - Advocacy.
Over the last 12 years I've been in and out of various small to medium companies, tearing out expensive proprietary systems leaving Linux-based OSS solutions in my wake. No - I can't fix the DNS vulnerability that we just had, and I'll probably never be instrumental in getting Flash working on Linux. What I can do is teach the masses what's available to them from the FOSS world in a professional and non-rabid manner (I'm looking at you, Twitter), and get them using and talking about it.
I've even (in an uncommon fit of diplomacy) attempted to bring the Gentoo crowd together and try and start acting like adults, concentrate effort on the distribution rather than all the factionism - but like trying to figure out why my Sparc20 would hang when I loaded the fibre-channel module - some things are simply beyond me.
What do you think happens to all these non-dev / non-tech people who encounter the "submit-a-diff-or-GTFO" mentality? Do they actually spend the rest of their days learning to code? No - they bugger off back where they came from - Proprietary Closed-Source Software, probably never to return. Thanks pal, that's all my work down the drain, thanks to some smug elitist twit that doesn't realise that - as good a developer he is - he is only one part of the puzzle.
Without sane and reasoned advocates, FOSS will wind up being excellent software (only by virtue of defeating their critics) used only by those that develop it. I've a sneaking suspicion that's exactly what some devs want.
As do many packages that begin with 'G', I have to say...
emacs, emacs, emacs, Picard
Cue the 'apt-get ...' responses
To put it another way: Drivers - whether compiled into the kernel or built as modules - have every bit as much ability to crash the system as the kernel itself does. Sure, a processes memory space is kept to itself, meaning it's unlikely that a process itself can bring a system down. But by the time a (bad) driver has done its damage, there's probably not a sane kernel left, letalone one that can recover and kill the process in question - there is none!
Yes, believe it or not he was being facetious. I know, I know - for a moment there, I too genuiniely believed he'd researched every Linux install in the history of the universe and confirmed what I suspected to be true.
Let's see who's laughing when the Political Correctness brigade catch up with the Gregorian Calendar and hold it to task for picking on poor, old February.
If they merely fix this particlar bug, I'd say he's got a point.
Implementing VMWare ESX went from one of the most exciting to the most annoying and disappointing project I've ever witnessed. As someone else has said, fortunatetly the hypervisor itself is quite stable, but most of the support apps are horrendous. VMWare Infrastructure Client is the slowest and most unreliable app I use. We've already lost one 200GiB virtual disk - the file was there but it refused to honour it as a "Virtual Disk" rather than "File". Good thing it was only a test server, but it's surely only a matter of time before we lose a production disk.
My prediction: In two years we'll look back on VMWare ESX, cringe at all the data-eating server-downing bugs we've found, wonder what all the fuss was about, and go back to *shock horror* running multiple services on single machines again, using operating systems capable of protecting one process from another.
Maybe I'm bitter and our project itself hasn't gone well, but I know I'm not alone. Not alone in wondering why my Linux PC at home with two SATA disks pisses all over our main fileserver who looks down a 4Gb FC at ten-disk 15kRPM Fibre Channel Stripe. Yes, it's an EMC SAN for those of you wondering quietly. One day, someone's going to cluster a bunch of old PowerMacs with USB/Firewire drives, software RAID, and show those EMC fuckers up.
Parent really should be modded 'Informative' - there's probably even a patent for doing that.