The only way I can see this as CYA is in a corporate environment, it would protect (in a very small way) the distributor from accusations by someone who reused the code in an application that was released in a way that contravened the GPL.
I still don't get how this is relevant. It cannot possibly be commont corporate practice to download code and reuse it without so much as asking, let alone checking the licensing terms (spelled out very clearly at the top of the source files and in a file called "LICENSE")...
I've seen some corporate lawyers go bats over developers and techies who downloaded tools, and some of the developers tried to claim they were unaware of licensing limitations on copying the code.
Except, of course, that if the license wasn't there, they would not be allowed to copy the code. Other licenses explicitly forbid copying.
Really, this is dumb. If my ass is being covered by common law, I really don't see the need for additional protection.
For the record, a UPS is something every computer should have in the first place. Whether it's two hours ago or five seconds ago, power fail without a sync means you WILL lose data.
Also, I have never seen XFS or ReiserFS need a FSCK. I've seen Reiser4 need one, but only on a box that I routinely overclock.
The good news is, email, at least, is likely to last a lot longer than we'd think, if only because most people don't bother to empty their trash, or even their inbox. Certainly at work, where the company email server is a RAID affair that gets backed up to tape nightly, and you don't dare update the servers without a migration path for the old emails, or people will go berserk.
So, while it may not happen physically, it may happen anyway. For instance, if I decide that my personal data is worth preserving, I'll try backing up most of my home directory, with obvious exceptions (.cedega being a big one). I do try to keep it relatively clean, but I still often find things in there from many years ago that I didn't necessarily want to save.
Besides, our data driven society may actually provide a huge amount of information to future generations, but it would be in the form of archived Slashdot discussions and the like. Or MySpace -- not exactly the most accurate portrayal of us, and certainly not the most flattering.
I've had to run backups that are supposed to last as long as we need them, and more on the order of gigabytes. Where, exactly, am I off here? You did read past "that's easy enough", right? I don't mean to imply that there are no issues whatsoever, merely that this isn't as complex as people think it is, especially when compared to paper filing methods.
In fact, I can't help but wonder if I've obsoleted your field with that one paragraph. If so, I'm sorry.
Definitely made an ass of you, or rather, made more of an ass of you. What does your camera software have to do with the comments about QoS?
I was not assuming anything except that the behavior I'd observed on every single personal network I've ever seen was probably universal. This is behavior at the network layer, so unless you've created routers designed specifically to handle this camera app, bringing this up is completely beside the point.
How can you be such a tool to type without using an ounce of your brain?
Really? An ounce of my brain would enable me with the telepathy needed to grok not only what it is you do (without even a hint), but how it relates to what we were talking about? I still don't see that connection.
Tell you what, why don't you use your ounce of brain and try to figure out how to inform people, even ignorant people, without also flaming them. All three of your posts in this thread have been needlessly inflammatory, and you barely have enough content to convince me you're not a troll. Frankly, I'm amazed you were able to work with the developers of your "software I couldn't possibly comprehend" for more than 3 seconds without driving them all away in a fit of rage.
So his complaint about GNU Tar is that it requires you to remember options... Just look at his Dar command! Seriously, I just do "tar -cjpSf foo.tar.bz2 bar/ baz/" and it just works. And since you should be automating this anyway, it doesn't matter at all.
There is also a separate utility which can split any file into multipile pieces. It's called "split". They can be joined together with cat.
As for mtimes, I ran his test. touch a; touch b; mv b a... Unless the mtimes are identical, backup software will notice that a has changed. This is actually pretty damned reliable, although I'd recommend doing a full backup every now and then just in case. Of course, we could also check inode (or the equivalent), but the real solution would be a hash check. Reiser4 could provide something like this -- a hash that is kept current on each file, without much of a performance hit. But this is only to prevent the case where one file is moved on top of another, and each has the exact same size and mtime -- how often is that going to happen in practice?
Backing up to a filesystem: Duh, so don't keep that filesystem mounted. You might just as easily touch the file metadata by messing with your local system anyway. Sorry, but I'm not buying this -- it's for people who 'alias rm="rm -i"' to make sure they don't accidentally delete something. Except in this case, it's much less likely that you'll accidentally do something, and his proposed solutions are worse -- a tar archive is much harder to access if you just need a single file, which happens more than you'd expect. We used BackupPC at my last job, but even that has a 1:1 relationship between files being backed up and files in the store, except for the few files it keeps to handle metadata.
No need to split up files. If you have to burn them to CD or DVD, you can split them up while you burn. But otherwise, just use a modern filesystem -- God help you if you're forced onto FAT, but other than that, you'll be fine. Yes, it's perfectly possible to put files larger than 2 gigs onto a DVD, and all three modern OSes will read them.
Syncing: I thought filesystems generally serialized this sort of thing? At least, some do. But by all means, sync between backup and clean, and after clean. But his syncs are overkill, and there's no need to sleep -- sync will block until it's done. No need to sync before umount -- umount will sync before detaching. And "sync as much as possible", taken to a literal extreme, would kill performance.
File system replication: You just described dump, in every way except that I don't know if dump can restrict to specific directories. But this doesn't really belong in the filesystem itself. The right way to do this is use dm-snapshot. Take a copy-on-write snapshot of the filesystem -- safest because additional changes go straight to the master disk, not to the snapshot device. Mount the snapshot somewhere else, read-only. Then do a filesystem backup.
"But the metadata!" I hear him scream. This is 2006. We know how to read metadata through the filesystem. If you know enough to implement ACLs, you know enough to back them up.
As for ReiserFS vs ext3, there actually is a solid reason to prefer ext3, but it's not the journalling. Journalling data is absolutely, completely, totally, utterly meaningless when you don't have a concept of a transaction. I believe Reiser4 attempts to use the write() call for that purpose, but there's no guarantee until they finish the transaction API. This is why databases call fsync on their own -- they cannot trust any journalling, whatsoever. In fact, they'd almost be better off without a filesystem in the first place.
The solid reason to prefer ext3 is that ReiserFS can run out of potential keys. This takes a lot longer than it takes ext3 to run out of inodes, but at least you can check how many inodes you have left. Still, I prefer XFS or Reiser4, depending on how solid I need the system to be. To think that it comes down to "ext3 vs reiserfs" means this person has obviously never looked at the sheer number of options available.
As for network backups, we used both BackupPC and DRBD. BackupPC to keep things sane -- only one backup per day. DRBD to replicate the backup server over the network to a remote copy.
People seem to feel that somehow and exception should be granted for this particular case. The absurdity of that was my point.
I don't, I'm just not entirely aware of the rules surrounding this.
Yes, it's entirely different. There is no justification for allowing exceptions for certain inmates to continue their professional work once incarcerated.
So you couldn't give pen and paper to an author?
Of course the author couldn't sell books while in prison. But presumably Hans would no longer be a Namesys employee anyway, just a volunteer.
Giving up your freedoms is part of the cost of committing crimes.
That loses sight of the goal. Granted, often part of the solution is making jail unpleasant. However, the real goal is to reduce crime. Now, Hans is not being accused of computer crimes of any sort, so this isn't like a hacker case where you take all computer privileges. Certainly, he can't be free to roam the streets, but he should be harmless on the Internet.
Of course, you also have a point, and IANAL, nor am I a sociologist.
After three people or so are on Camfrog, without any sort of QOS, I'd expect a fourth person to start breaking up your video quality, especially if it was a torrent. I've seen bandwidth be almost saturated, ping times go up to 800 or 1000 ms, but it doesn't take that many round trips before BT will start pulling bandwidth back.
I'd love to test that on your network, but there's almost no chance I live anywhere near you. Oh well.
Just because he may work on a project of personal interest to you doesn't mean that he makes a "productive contribution to society".
Don't people in prison generally have at least some free time? Time to keep a journal, or write a book? Or read a book?
What about letters?
ReiserFS isn't as valuable as a human life. If it were, how many free murders would Linus be allowed to commit?
This is not the point.
Contrary to popular belief, no healthy programmer spends 100% of their free time coding. They go out for beer, or for a walk. They do things online other than work on their own project.
Give Hans a computer and an Internet connection. Filter the hell out of that connection -- email only, and only on the reiserfs lists. Web restricted to distro updates and kernel.org. Is that really so different than giving him a pen and some paper and letting him write a book?
It certainly won't mean he isn't punished. And punishment isn't always the real point of prison -- if he gets life, it means he won't be able to kill again. Internet connections won't change that.
Wordpress plugins are easy, but not incredibly powerful. The company I'm working for just recently jumped from b2evolution to Wordpress, and then to Drupal. It looks like we'll actually stick with Drupal.
Not applicable anymore. BitTorrent ports are randomized, and many clients set it to something weird out-of-the-box. Unless you're blocking everything except port 80, BT will easily slip past that.
It is possible to throttle BitTorrent, but not in the way you expect to.
Most places that filter BitTorrent don't even consider ports, because those are so often randomized now. They check for something that looks like a BitTorrent header. Of course, it's possible to fool these, too, but port 80 simply doesn't matter at all.
If you start deliberately trying to kill my services on my network, just so you can eat up more bandwidth, you're breaking the ToS, you're pissing everyone else off, and you deserve to have your ass beat in the first place.
So go beat the bandwidth hogs. Remember, WoW uses an insanely tiny amount of bandwidth, even compared to typical web browsing. BitTorrent, OTOH, sucks down as much bandwidth as is available, effectively killing off other services.
Or is it that you own the network, and you're running BitTorrent? That seems a bit different than the situation in most coffee shops.
It's not. Given two open HTTP downloads, they'll usually even out to about the same speed. The reason BT always soaks up more bandwidth is it will open an unlimited number of connections.
A senior citizen putting out a candy bowl is kind of like a coffee shop putting out a Linksys router.
An ISP is more like a supermarket. If I go to the supermarket and buy up every last bit of Halloween candy, that's my right. My mother should not be standing there at Wall-Mart telling me I should buy some vegetables.
At Iowa State University, there were very light firewall rules, and students actually had external IP addresses. The only outbound connection that I know of which was actually blocked outright was SMTP, to prevent the school from getting blacklisted for spambots.
BitTorrent was throttled, but not quite to oblivion. I got about 5 kilobytes per second before I discovered Azureus' "encryption" feature, after which I was able to use about half of the 10 mbit pipe. Still, it did the job effectively enough -- I rarely downloaded anything (maybe once a week), and I'm guessing most people didn't know about this option.
BitTorrent seemed to be the only thing throttled. HTTP obviously had a priority, because I was able to absolutely saturate the pipe -- 1 megabyte per second downloads -- over some HTTP downloads. But I was also able to get respectable speeds with SSH, and I never noticed significant lag with gaming. In fact, no one else ever complained about the Internet except when it was down.
Outages did happen, more often than a private ISP, but more like 2-3 hours at 2 AM, and not every day. Towards the end of the year, they were pretty much on top of it.
Literally and figuratively. My Sharp Actius MM10 might have gotten just slightly hotter than my Powerbook -- hard to tell, because it was dead for months before I got the Mac.
It might've been even cooler if it had been possible to bypass their "code morphing software" and natively compile VLIW code. As it is, this little sub-notebook was effectively an x86 PDA. It was insanely small -- 10" screen, about a half inch thick (the whole notebook, not just the screen). It could open completely flat -- unfold until it was a flat board of monitor, keyboard, and mouse. With the builtin battery, it lasted about 3 hours, which is respectable compared to my Powerbook, but with a much smaller battery. With a bigger battery, it easily lasted 9 hours.
It had 256 megs of RAM, I think -- or maybe only 128? -- and a 1 ghz processor that felt like it was 500 mhz. But the battery life and the physical coolness of it -- the thing was passively cooled! -- more than made up for it when used as a work machine (mostly a web browser and an ssh terminal). My new Powerbook is just short of being able to play high def, and this thing couldn't even play DVDs. My Powerbook has an 80 gig or so hard drive, this thing had a 15 gig, and was fragile as hell. But there are two things I desperately miss from it:
1.) x86 arch. There's a 2D Windows MMO that might've played reasonably well on it, but I haven't yet succeeded in making work on my Powerbook. If I did make it work, the x86 emulation would probably kill battery life and make it hot. 2.) insomnia. I've tried a program for my Powerbook called "InsomniaX", which tells OS X not to go to sleep when the lid is closed. With the Sharp, I could put it in my backpack, put headphones on, and listen to random music all the way home -- no need to buy an iPod, and as it used an iPod hard drive anyway, I figured it was reasonably safe from being jostled.
The Powerbook, probably sensing the motion as I walk, kills the music randomly and quite often. If that's indeed the case, I can't really complain, as the motion sensor has saved my ass more than once. Drop the Sharp and lose data, or possibly the disk. Drop the Powerbook and I just get a dent. Still, I miss being able to do that, especially considering how much more space I have now. I shouldn't have to buy an iPod -- everywhere I walk, I carry my laptop in a backpack.
But even if I were to compensate for that -- say, preload a half hour of music to RAM just before I leave, or kill the motion sensor somehow (probably a Bad Thing) -- I'd still have this strange problem where, exactly 11 minutes after I close the lid, it hard powers itself off.
Anyway, I thought it was pretty impressive, and ideal for high school. I never got it to sleep properly (using Linux), though hibernation occasionally worked, but I didn't care, because I could run a full school day on those two batteries. Worst case, I'd have to hibernate, swap out the battery once, and resume -- admittedly the Powerbook has me beat there, it has about 10 mins worth of power separate from the battery, but I'd still need a few more batteries, I'd have to switch them more often, and it kind of starts to defeat the purpose of a laptop.
And I am still amazed at the fact that the only thing my Powerbook actually does better, in any significant way, is video. That's significant, it's a 17". Given the choice, I don't know which I'd choose. I'd definitely take either of them over a Macbook, though. Anything which gets that hot, or which gets that loud when it's hot, isn't worth it. I have my desktop for brute CPU strength, my laptop should be spartan and elegant.
I do seem to be a target market of 1, though.
As for patent trolling, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. They did create something very cool, even if it wasn't as profitable as I'd hoped, and it was nice to have a competitor to Intel. If I cared more, I'd take a long, hard look at those patents and their claims -- if there's any validity to them, it would seem that Intel and AMD ripping off some of their power-saving features would be killing the only edge they have. If it's a legitimate edge, they should be allowed to collect some royalties on that.
That means that the "copy protection" works exactly as intended unless you make a work-around.
On Windows, maybe. On Linux and OSX, it's been my default practice to rip DVD images, not VIDEO_TS folders. In fact, I do this any time I want to copy a disc -- I can always mount it loop and pull the files off of it if I discover I don't need an exact image.
I don't suppose it's intended to let me copy it perfectly as many times as I want, but never be able to play it. I don't suppose they'd mind that, and I guess it would probably take a workaround to eventually play them. I'll have to rent one of these discs and find out.
The non-trivial aspect is trying to make sure that the playback software routines can abstract to both data access systems and are not dependent on specific file access subroutines.
Ah, that is tricky. However, since just about all my DVD playing software goes through libdvdread, probably because that automatically falls back on libdvdcss, I suspect it wouldn't be a big deal.
A custom "ripper" on the other hand would only need to read the sectors off of the DVD disc and "recreate" the files directly from the sector reads. Then you could re-burn the DVD with the "correct" file format as a very trivial exercise.
Since most player software seems capable of reading VIDEO_TS folders, even if it has to be coerced into it somehow (manually entering a pathname), this could be done as a filesystem driver. Another possibility would be to simply do it as a FIFO -- you can easily tell the player software to use another device instead of/dev/dvd. On Linux, block device access is pretty much the same as file access, and in fact, I can play a DVD image simply by pointing my player software to that image as the "dvd device".
As has been said by others, this only screws up legitimate users who have paid for a legitimate copy of the content.
Amen.
Very few people are willing to "donate" the bandwidth necessary for hundreds of DVD-quality downloads on a public webserver.
Ah, here, you'd be surprised. BitTorrent completely changes this equation. You don't even need your own tracker, just use something like The Pirate Bay.
And this is but a minor speed bump for hardcore pirates, including the amature variety.
I'd call it barely a speed bump for people who know about it and understand it, seeing as AnyDVD already circumvents it. As usual, it's just a pain for the people who don't know how to deal with it, or refuse to because it's illegal.
We really need to repeal the DMCA. It does more harm than good to absolutely everyone involved, and laws like that should go the way of Prohibition.
Ten years from now when your datacenters are hunting for ancient RAID controllers that are not longer made
Maybe yours, not mine. By the time that's a problem, the simple solution is to get a new RAID controller or build a completely new system. That's what redundancy over the Internet is for -- or at the very least, two completely separate boxes, each with a complete copy.
can't afford the power and A/C bills without charging you pound-me-in-the-ass prices
That depends, I guess. Suppose you built a green system to begin with? Solar/wind, and your local energy company as backup. Doesn't matter how much they try to rape you with prices, you'll be selling it back to them for just as much. I've seen places that handle A/C by running ducts underground -- you get fresh air coming in (healthy for humans), but it goes into that nice, constant temperature of underground before it gets to you. Couple of big fans is a lot cheaper than actual A/C.
can't reliably syncronize over a tiered internet
Doesn't have to be 100% reliable, but let's try to avoid the situation of a tiered Internet in the first place. Besides, why would they shoot themselves in the foot that way? Wouldn't they rather have my business, paying extra for faster, more reliable service?
can't cough up your data any faster than you could drive there and haul it all back on a single plastic chip the size of your thumbnail
Explain to me why the plastic chip is a bad thing.
Worst case, you unplug your massive Internet pipes, invest in some plastic chips, and use them for backup. Run your daily or weekly syncs via FedEx or something.
Data storage is easy. Retrieval is a bitch. Throwing the techno-fad of the day at the problem doesn't solve it.
I specifically mentioned two separate solutions, in addition to whatever popular backup of the day is warranted. Redundancy is not a techno-fad, we just have much easier ways of achieving it in the digital world.
And yes, I do believe that archives people do want to keep around for centuries will be kept around at least that long, even if they end up piggybacking on something else. For instance, gmail uses storage on the Google grid, which has to exist anyway, and has to have far more storage than they're using for gmail. Thus, gmail doesn't itself have to be worth investing massive amounts in redundancy. As long as Google profits so heavily from search, they will need the grid, so they will keep updating the pipes, RAIDs, clusters, or thumbnail-sized plastic chips, and gmail will survive.
Is this really so much different than, say, the Library of Congress? One piggybacks on our government, the other piggybacks on a successful business.
Point is, don't confuse the need for a good, reliable, redundant system that will last 5-10 years with the need for storage lasting centuries. In fact, if you only do a complete overhaul every ten years, your data will last 100 years with exactly 10 upgrades. This would be kind of like photocopying all the old records every now and then, but photocopies are not a perfect copy.
With ALL CONDITIONS EQUAL, anything that would destroy a paper archive can potentially destroy a digital media (time, fire, structure compromise).
Except it's much harder to constantly be storing paper in one location, and faxing it to another to store, versus keeping something like DRBD running over the Internet.
With paper archives and books, you have the most universal chance to access the material. Paper requres no admin or user accounts (past a security check or otherwise)to access the system needed to read them in a security environment - for that matter, paper requires no external device period to access the material, except the ole eyeballs. As long as you can read, and have proper clearance, you have the documents ready - no fuss.
With computers, you have the best chance to be able to find the material. Filing, sorting, and searching can be done by the computer. Also, computers do not necessarily require admin or user accounts, any more than paper does, and both can have such accounts.
Personally, I much prefer a digital copy, especially of a reference. Searchability is just huge when it comes to reference material, and an index is a lot slower.
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't get how this is relevant. It cannot possibly be commont corporate practice to download code and reuse it without so much as asking, let alone checking the licensing terms (spelled out very clearly at the top of the source files and in a file called "LICENSE")...
Except, of course, that if the license wasn't there, they would not be allowed to copy the code. Other licenses explicitly forbid copying.
Really, this is dumb. If my ass is being covered by common law, I really don't see the need for additional protection.
For the record, a UPS is something every computer should have in the first place. Whether it's two hours ago or five seconds ago, power fail without a sync means you WILL lose data.
Also, I have never seen XFS or ReiserFS need a FSCK. I've seen Reiser4 need one, but only on a box that I routinely overclock.
The good news is, email, at least, is likely to last a lot longer than we'd think, if only because most people don't bother to empty their trash, or even their inbox. Certainly at work, where the company email server is a RAID affair that gets backed up to tape nightly, and you don't dare update the servers without a migration path for the old emails, or people will go berserk.
So, while it may not happen physically, it may happen anyway. For instance, if I decide that my personal data is worth preserving, I'll try backing up most of my home directory, with obvious exceptions (.cedega being a big one). I do try to keep it relatively clean, but I still often find things in there from many years ago that I didn't necessarily want to save.
Besides, our data driven society may actually provide a huge amount of information to future generations, but it would be in the form of archived Slashdot discussions and the like. Or MySpace -- not exactly the most accurate portrayal of us, and certainly not the most flattering.
I've had to run backups that are supposed to last as long as we need them, and more on the order of gigabytes. Where, exactly, am I off here? You did read past "that's easy enough", right? I don't mean to imply that there are no issues whatsoever, merely that this isn't as complex as people think it is, especially when compared to paper filing methods.
In fact, I can't help but wonder if I've obsoleted your field with that one paragraph. If so, I'm sorry.
Definitely made an ass of you, or rather, made more of an ass of you. What does your camera software have to do with the comments about QoS?
I was not assuming anything except that the behavior I'd observed on every single personal network I've ever seen was probably universal. This is behavior at the network layer, so unless you've created routers designed specifically to handle this camera app, bringing this up is completely beside the point.
Really? An ounce of my brain would enable me with the telepathy needed to grok not only what it is you do (without even a hint), but how it relates to what we were talking about? I still don't see that connection.
Tell you what, why don't you use your ounce of brain and try to figure out how to inform people, even ignorant people, without also flaming them. All three of your posts in this thread have been needlessly inflammatory, and you barely have enough content to convince me you're not a troll. Frankly, I'm amazed you were able to work with the developers of your "software I couldn't possibly comprehend" for more than 3 seconds without driving them all away in a fit of rage.
So his complaint about GNU Tar is that it requires you to remember options... Just look at his Dar command! Seriously, I just do "tar -cjpSf foo.tar.bz2 bar/ baz/" and it just works. And since you should be automating this anyway, it doesn't matter at all.
There is also a separate utility which can split any file into multipile pieces. It's called "split". They can be joined together with cat.
As for mtimes, I ran his test. touch a; touch b; mv b a... Unless the mtimes are identical, backup software will notice that a has changed. This is actually pretty damned reliable, although I'd recommend doing a full backup every now and then just in case. Of course, we could also check inode (or the equivalent), but the real solution would be a hash check. Reiser4 could provide something like this -- a hash that is kept current on each file, without much of a performance hit. But this is only to prevent the case where one file is moved on top of another, and each has the exact same size and mtime -- how often is that going to happen in practice?
Backing up to a filesystem: Duh, so don't keep that filesystem mounted. You might just as easily touch the file metadata by messing with your local system anyway. Sorry, but I'm not buying this -- it's for people who 'alias rm="rm -i"' to make sure they don't accidentally delete something. Except in this case, it's much less likely that you'll accidentally do something, and his proposed solutions are worse -- a tar archive is much harder to access if you just need a single file, which happens more than you'd expect. We used BackupPC at my last job, but even that has a 1:1 relationship between files being backed up and files in the store, except for the few files it keeps to handle metadata.
No need to split up files. If you have to burn them to CD or DVD, you can split them up while you burn. But otherwise, just use a modern filesystem -- God help you if you're forced onto FAT, but other than that, you'll be fine. Yes, it's perfectly possible to put files larger than 2 gigs onto a DVD, and all three modern OSes will read them.
Syncing: I thought filesystems generally serialized this sort of thing? At least, some do. But by all means, sync between backup and clean, and after clean. But his syncs are overkill, and there's no need to sleep -- sync will block until it's done. No need to sync before umount -- umount will sync before detaching. And "sync as much as possible", taken to a literal extreme, would kill performance.
File system replication: You just described dump, in every way except that I don't know if dump can restrict to specific directories. But this doesn't really belong in the filesystem itself. The right way to do this is use dm-snapshot. Take a copy-on-write snapshot of the filesystem -- safest because additional changes go straight to the master disk, not to the snapshot device. Mount the snapshot somewhere else, read-only. Then do a filesystem backup.
"But the metadata!" I hear him scream. This is 2006. We know how to read metadata through the filesystem. If you know enough to implement ACLs, you know enough to back them up.
As for ReiserFS vs ext3, there actually is a solid reason to prefer ext3, but it's not the journalling. Journalling data is absolutely, completely, totally, utterly meaningless when you don't have a concept of a transaction. I believe Reiser4 attempts to use the write() call for that purpose, but there's no guarantee until they finish the transaction API. This is why databases call fsync on their own -- they cannot trust any journalling, whatsoever. In fact, they'd almost be better off without a filesystem in the first place.
The solid reason to prefer ext3 is that ReiserFS can run out of potential keys. This takes a lot longer than it takes ext3 to run out of inodes, but at least you can check how many inodes you have left. Still, I prefer XFS or Reiser4, depending on how solid I need the system to be. To think that it comes down to "ext3 vs reiserfs" means this person has obviously never looked at the sheer number of options available.
As for network backups, we used both BackupPC and DRBD. BackupPC to keep things sane -- only one backup per day. DRBD to replicate the backup server over the network to a remote copy.
I don't, I'm just not entirely aware of the rules surrounding this.
So you couldn't give pen and paper to an author?
Of course the author couldn't sell books while in prison. But presumably Hans would no longer be a Namesys employee anyway, just a volunteer.
That loses sight of the goal. Granted, often part of the solution is making jail unpleasant. However, the real goal is to reduce crime. Now, Hans is not being accused of computer crimes of any sort, so this isn't like a hacker case where you take all computer privileges. Certainly, he can't be free to roam the streets, but he should be harmless on the Internet.
Of course, you also have a point, and IANAL, nor am I a sociologist.
After three people or so are on Camfrog, without any sort of QOS, I'd expect a fourth person to start breaking up your video quality, especially if it was a torrent. I've seen bandwidth be almost saturated, ping times go up to 800 or 1000 ms, but it doesn't take that many round trips before BT will start pulling bandwidth back.
I'd love to test that on your network, but there's almost no chance I live anywhere near you. Oh well.
What has happened to this boyfriend? Has he also bene arrested?
But thanks for posting this. Nice to have some hope.
Don't people in prison generally have at least some free time? Time to keep a journal, or write a book? Or read a book?
What about letters?
This is not the point.
Contrary to popular belief, no healthy programmer spends 100% of their free time coding. They go out for beer, or for a walk. They do things online other than work on their own project.
Give Hans a computer and an Internet connection. Filter the hell out of that connection -- email only, and only on the reiserfs lists. Web restricted to distro updates and kernel.org. Is that really so different than giving him a pen and some paper and letting him write a book?
It certainly won't mean he isn't punished. And punishment isn't always the real point of prison -- if he gets life, it means he won't be able to kill again. Internet connections won't change that.
WTF? How does it obstruct justice to purchase a fucking book? How is it PREmeditation if he bought them after the fact?
How much blood before we can reasonably assume that a murder has even occurred, much less that it was Hans who did it?
Wordpress plugins are easy, but not incredibly powerful. The company I'm working for just recently jumped from b2evolution to Wordpress, and then to Drupal. It looks like we'll actually stick with Drupal.
Not applicable anymore. BitTorrent ports are randomized, and many clients set it to something weird out-of-the-box. Unless you're blocking everything except port 80, BT will easily slip past that.
It is possible to throttle BitTorrent, but not in the way you expect to.
Most places that filter BitTorrent don't even consider ports, because those are so often randomized now. They check for something that looks like a BitTorrent header. Of course, it's possible to fool these, too, but port 80 simply doesn't matter at all.
This isn't just about WoW. It's also about email. Personally, I use public wireless to actually get work done, from time to time.
So go beat the bandwidth hogs. Remember, WoW uses an insanely tiny amount of bandwidth, even compared to typical web browsing. BitTorrent, OTOH, sucks down as much bandwidth as is available, effectively killing off other services.
Or is it that you own the network, and you're running BitTorrent? That seems a bit different than the situation in most coffee shops.
It's not. Given two open HTTP downloads, they'll usually even out to about the same speed. The reason BT always soaks up more bandwidth is it will open an unlimited number of connections.
A senior citizen putting out a candy bowl is kind of like a coffee shop putting out a Linksys router.
An ISP is more like a supermarket. If I go to the supermarket and buy up every last bit of Halloween candy, that's my right. My mother should not be standing there at Wall-Mart telling me I should buy some vegetables.
At Iowa State University, there were very light firewall rules, and students actually had external IP addresses. The only outbound connection that I know of which was actually blocked outright was SMTP, to prevent the school from getting blacklisted for spambots.
BitTorrent was throttled, but not quite to oblivion. I got about 5 kilobytes per second before I discovered Azureus' "encryption" feature, after which I was able to use about half of the 10 mbit pipe. Still, it did the job effectively enough -- I rarely downloaded anything (maybe once a week), and I'm guessing most people didn't know about this option.
BitTorrent seemed to be the only thing throttled. HTTP obviously had a priority, because I was able to absolutely saturate the pipe -- 1 megabyte per second downloads -- over some HTTP downloads. But I was also able to get respectable speeds with SSH, and I never noticed significant lag with gaming. In fact, no one else ever complained about the Internet except when it was down.
Outages did happen, more often than a private ISP, but more like 2-3 hours at 2 AM, and not every day. Towards the end of the year, they were pretty much on top of it.
But as for outright censorship? Never.
Hell, maybe he'll be a game coach. There are people who actually make money that way.
Literally and figuratively. My Sharp Actius MM10 might have gotten just slightly hotter than my Powerbook -- hard to tell, because it was dead for months before I got the Mac.
It might've been even cooler if it had been possible to bypass their "code morphing software" and natively compile VLIW code. As it is, this little sub-notebook was effectively an x86 PDA. It was insanely small -- 10" screen, about a half inch thick (the whole notebook, not just the screen). It could open completely flat -- unfold until it was a flat board of monitor, keyboard, and mouse. With the builtin battery, it lasted about 3 hours, which is respectable compared to my Powerbook, but with a much smaller battery. With a bigger battery, it easily lasted 9 hours.
It had 256 megs of RAM, I think -- or maybe only 128? -- and a 1 ghz processor that felt like it was 500 mhz. But the battery life and the physical coolness of it -- the thing was passively cooled! -- more than made up for it when used as a work machine (mostly a web browser and an ssh terminal). My new Powerbook is just short of being able to play high def, and this thing couldn't even play DVDs. My Powerbook has an 80 gig or so hard drive, this thing had a 15 gig, and was fragile as hell. But there are two things I desperately miss from it:
1.) x86 arch. There's a 2D Windows MMO that might've played reasonably well on it, but I haven't yet succeeded in making work on my Powerbook. If I did make it work, the x86 emulation would probably kill battery life and make it hot.
2.) insomnia. I've tried a program for my Powerbook called "InsomniaX", which tells OS X not to go to sleep when the lid is closed. With the Sharp, I could put it in my backpack, put headphones on, and listen to random music all the way home -- no need to buy an iPod, and as it used an iPod hard drive anyway, I figured it was reasonably safe from being jostled.
The Powerbook, probably sensing the motion as I walk, kills the music randomly and quite often. If that's indeed the case, I can't really complain, as the motion sensor has saved my ass more than once. Drop the Sharp and lose data, or possibly the disk. Drop the Powerbook and I just get a dent. Still, I miss being able to do that, especially considering how much more space I have now. I shouldn't have to buy an iPod -- everywhere I walk, I carry my laptop in a backpack.
But even if I were to compensate for that -- say, preload a half hour of music to RAM just before I leave, or kill the motion sensor somehow (probably a Bad Thing) -- I'd still have this strange problem where, exactly 11 minutes after I close the lid, it hard powers itself off.
Anyway, I thought it was pretty impressive, and ideal for high school. I never got it to sleep properly (using Linux), though hibernation occasionally worked, but I didn't care, because I could run a full school day on those two batteries. Worst case, I'd have to hibernate, swap out the battery once, and resume -- admittedly the Powerbook has me beat there, it has about 10 mins worth of power separate from the battery, but I'd still need a few more batteries, I'd have to switch them more often, and it kind of starts to defeat the purpose of a laptop.
And I am still amazed at the fact that the only thing my Powerbook actually does better, in any significant way, is video. That's significant, it's a 17". Given the choice, I don't know which I'd choose. I'd definitely take either of them over a Macbook, though. Anything which gets that hot, or which gets that loud when it's hot, isn't worth it. I have my desktop for brute CPU strength, my laptop should be spartan and elegant.
I do seem to be a target market of 1, though.
As for patent trolling, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. They did create something very cool, even if it wasn't as profitable as I'd hoped, and it was nice to have a competitor to Intel. If I cared more, I'd take a long, hard look at those patents and their claims -- if there's any validity to them, it would seem that Intel and AMD ripping off some of their power-saving features would be killing the only edge they have. If it's a legitimate edge, they should be allowed to collect some royalties on that.
On Windows, maybe. On Linux and OSX, it's been my default practice to rip DVD images, not VIDEO_TS folders. In fact, I do this any time I want to copy a disc -- I can always mount it loop and pull the files off of it if I discover I don't need an exact image.
I don't suppose it's intended to let me copy it perfectly as many times as I want, but never be able to play it. I don't suppose they'd mind that, and I guess it would probably take a workaround to eventually play them. I'll have to rent one of these discs and find out.
Ah, that is tricky. However, since just about all my DVD playing software goes through libdvdread, probably because that automatically falls back on libdvdcss, I suspect it wouldn't be a big deal.
Since most player software seems capable of reading VIDEO_TS folders, even if it has to be coerced into it somehow (manually entering a pathname), this could be done as a filesystem driver. Another possibility would be to simply do it as a FIFO -- you can easily tell the player software to use another device instead of /dev/dvd. On Linux, block device access is pretty much the same as file access, and in fact, I can play a DVD image simply by pointing my player software to that image as the "dvd device".
Amen.
Ah, here, you'd be surprised. BitTorrent completely changes this equation. You don't even need your own tracker, just use something like The Pirate Bay.
I'd call it barely a speed bump for people who know about it and understand it, seeing as AnyDVD already circumvents it. As usual, it's just a pain for the people who don't know how to deal with it, or refuse to because it's illegal.
We really need to repeal the DMCA. It does more harm than good to absolutely everyone involved, and laws like that should go the way of Prohibition.
Maybe yours, not mine. By the time that's a problem, the simple solution is to get a new RAID controller or build a completely new system. That's what redundancy over the Internet is for -- or at the very least, two completely separate boxes, each with a complete copy.
That depends, I guess. Suppose you built a green system to begin with? Solar/wind, and your local energy company as backup. Doesn't matter how much they try to rape you with prices, you'll be selling it back to them for just as much. I've seen places that handle A/C by running ducts underground -- you get fresh air coming in (healthy for humans), but it goes into that nice, constant temperature of underground before it gets to you. Couple of big fans is a lot cheaper than actual A/C.
Doesn't have to be 100% reliable, but let's try to avoid the situation of a tiered Internet in the first place. Besides, why would they shoot themselves in the foot that way? Wouldn't they rather have my business, paying extra for faster, more reliable service?
Explain to me why the plastic chip is a bad thing.
Worst case, you unplug your massive Internet pipes, invest in some plastic chips, and use them for backup. Run your daily or weekly syncs via FedEx or something.
I specifically mentioned two separate solutions, in addition to whatever popular backup of the day is warranted. Redundancy is not a techno-fad, we just have much easier ways of achieving it in the digital world.
And yes, I do believe that archives people do want to keep around for centuries will be kept around at least that long, even if they end up piggybacking on something else. For instance, gmail uses storage on the Google grid, which has to exist anyway, and has to have far more storage than they're using for gmail. Thus, gmail doesn't itself have to be worth investing massive amounts in redundancy. As long as Google profits so heavily from search, they will need the grid, so they will keep updating the pipes, RAIDs, clusters, or thumbnail-sized plastic chips, and gmail will survive.
Is this really so much different than, say, the Library of Congress? One piggybacks on our government, the other piggybacks on a successful business.
Point is, don't confuse the need for a good, reliable, redundant system that will last 5-10 years with the need for storage lasting centuries. In fact, if you only do a complete overhaul every ten years, your data will last 100 years with exactly 10 upgrades. This would be kind of like photocopying all the old records every now and then, but photocopies are not a perfect copy.
Except it's much harder to constantly be storing paper in one location, and faxing it to another to store, versus keeping something like DRBD running over the Internet.
With computers, you have the best chance to be able to find the material. Filing, sorting, and searching can be done by the computer. Also, computers do not necessarily require admin or user accounts, any more than paper does, and both can have such accounts.
Personally, I much prefer a digital copy, especially of a reference. Searchability is just huge when it comes to reference material, and an index is a lot slower.