Slashdot is policing what is good software now! Amazing how once a group gets mainstream acceptance, they too join the punditocracy in deciding what is "called for" and "useless". Hey, maybe these guys might maybe just discover something. Or perhaps it's because people get frustrated dealing with the intelligentsia on LKML. Worse than a bunch of professors arguing over grant money.
So, a bunch of people take an entenepenurial (sp.) spirit, and then Slashdot, standard of all things good, takes the time to post something "unneccicary" and "not called for" on their web page. YEAH! 'Cause only Linus' or Alan's kernel is the best one.
Why is it that every time I read slashdot, it gets to be more painful? Need... new... news... source...
Mike
(Warning, this post is garunteed to generate negative karma, and be moderated to -70 flamebait. But that's OK -- I don't care! Screw you guys, I'm going home.)
But at least you repented of it. Thank you for that. It is pretty sad to watch this. Especially to see only two comments that note that this is a deplorable action. Even the questions are cruel. When I first read them, I thought it *had* to be a joke it was so bad. But then I realised, it wasn't a joke, and felt my stomach go down into my legs.
Also, to a more general audience, if he is actually giving away rings, he obviously believes this, wholeheartedly. So we attack him, rather than the people *selling* cheap ceramic magnets at the store for $10 a pack, with approximately as much "scientific evidence" that Chiu has, and probably less belief in their own product. (I don't understand why he has a patent if he gives them away, but normal logic seems to have left the building a while ago...)
Man, it sure makes me believe that the Internet is going to produce a "great society" like you always see on here. Not that I believe that gigantic lie anyway, but if you're going to espouse it, at least try and live up to it.
People don't kick others when they're down in any "great society" that I know of.
And for a people that have so many stories on mockery and picking on in school, maybe Jon Katz should do a story on how you guys pick on people not in your on clique, and propigate the same old story. This man is heavly decieved, and needs help, not people picking on him, and attacking him cruelly on a public site. I'm sure that all true geeks reading this can remember being made fun of in front of (what seemed like) the whole school. Remember how much that hurt?? That's exactly what you are doing to this man! Maybe it's because you believed something different, and maybe you found out later that you were wrong!
This whole thing just saddens me.:-( Slashdot must apoligise to this man, this is horrible.
Cyberspace, writes Wertheim, is a completely new kind of space, a New Jerusalem, potentially welcoming male and female, First World and Third, "...is open to anyone who can afford a personal computer and a monthly Internet access fee... many cyber-enthusiasts would have us believe that that the Net dissolves the very barriers of race and gender, elevating everybody equally to a disembodied digital stream."
It's interesting how one is 'elevated' to a disembodied digital stream. Personally I like it when people respect my corporeality, and the fact that I can feel pain, and I can go hungry. I also like seeing peoples smiles, and giving hugs.
The idea of the Internet dissolving all barriers is a silly one. I've seen some of the most biggoted, opinionated garbage be posted on the net. But rather than "black or white" or "tall or short", it's "smart vs. stupid", "Linux vs. MS", "new vs. old", "technophile vs. Luddite".
Being able to love and help people doesn't come from a technology, but ONLY from a transformation within.
Actually, it also doesn't make much sense. How do you donate $350,000 worth of Open Source software to anyone? Isn't it free, as I recall...
Hardware I can see as having an assigned value, Software has no fixed value and is infinitely elastic. And especially not open source which is 'freely' available. Did they give them $350,000 of liscences?;-)
Oh, you think you can stop my flame war with your simple "Hitler" message! Hahahaha! I am Mojo-Jojo! I will rule! There shall be only one flamer, and his name is Mojo-Jojo, the one and only flamer. Because Mojo-Jojo is my name, and I am Mojo-Jojo, and I will flame greatly on Slashdot!
The complete lack of code, zero references to published literature or hard documentation on this filesystem? How is a filesystem supposed to become king of an open source OS without any source?
And I thought Microsoft was bad with hyping non-existant features...
...Now with anti-gravity packaging!...
And, by the way, journaled filesystems dont typically let you do a "begin; make install ; commit" sequence. The transactions are only for metadata updates. Otherwise accesses to the filesystem would have to be locked. Transaction isolation of that sort is usually relegated to the world of databases.
It's not neccicarily usurping the power of government, it's refusing to acknowledge powers that the governement should not have. A principle the country was founded on. I have to admit that large corporate powers are a bigger threat than the government right now, but I find them refusing to allow the government to bully in and try to install hardware for the spooks is an admirable action.
So out of curiosity, what is the right attitude? Pointing out peoples flaws and being antagonistic towards those "non-Linux" rather than giving constructive criticism seems to be popular. I personally liked Linux much more when it had less dogmatic a consituency.;-)
If you do want to debate the generic transaction handling code, I'd love to. Drop me a line so i can Cc you and linux-kernel, and linux-fsdev. (I promise not to be as sarcastic as above.) I've been meaning to put my objections into a good form for a while, but you are right,/. isn't the best forum. It's just that the example in the story which got posted somehow moved the debate here.
I've been thinking about doing this myself. I've got plenty on my own project, but since this is directly relevant, i can definately give it priority. So feel free to drop me an email.
1 - No, the generic_ip problem is not the problem that will help HFS, but having a generic, opaque pointer passed with read_inode(), (and perhaps a new get_inode() function to also pass the context) would. Would you be hesitant to include such a patch? (Which any fs which requires an context to read an inode, i.e. Journaling, would require.) Also, what bugginess would a simple extension like this that's well needed have the chance to introduce?
2 - Your preferences are irrelevant to the design of a VFS. It's a VIRTUAL file system. It shouldn't dictate what mechanisms that filesystems should use to ensure consistency. It controls the way in which a user accesses a namespace.
3 - Yes, but try writing a filter driver with the current VFS on a filesystem not designed for it.
6 - Bullshit. I hardly ever see design stuff on linux-fsdev. Maybe i only get a few of the messages, and somethings wrong with my mail server, but i ususally find out about the changes when some of my code breaks. I understand that it's bleeding edge development, but I keep the developers that depend on the code I write half-way informed of changes I'm making. Even just posting a summary of the patch to linux-fsdev would be better than what I get in my mailbox. I have little time, and i still make it a point to write a CVS log so people can know what I did. (And i can know what i did later.)
May i say that elitist attitudes like this are what lead to politics in software. So what is a REAL kernel developer? Or an outsider? Just because i haven't released my work yet because i want it in a consistent state, but i do keep up with and are intimately familiar with the changes, does that make me an "imaginary" kernel developer?
Could you post a list of your patches for us to see? I'm curious to see what a real kernel hacker is like...
Actually, Al, I have been working with the VFS, and alot of the problems is the undocumented, unnanouced way in which the VFS gets changed. I try reading through linux-kernel, but the volume of messages is WAY too much to sort through daily. And linux-fsdev is a low volume list that rarely gets a post. So the way that i find out about changes is to have my filesystem break in some wierd way, and find the diffs for ext2, go through them, and see what changed. And i also haven't seen any reason for the symlink change, other than an "aesthetic". (If there are reasons, please feel free to direct me to them.) So one of the gripes that Reiser had that is valid -- that the changes to the VFS are kept opaque, and you end up having to read the source to ext2 to figure out what the hell is going on. Meanwhile, I am trying to write a filesystem, which is a rather mammoth task in itself.
And as another point, from a logistical issue, there have been a couple "feature freezes" announced for Linux 2.4. Which makes people really hesitent to send in patches since by all rights they will probably be ignored. Feature freeze to me ususally means bugfixes only. Yet the VFS has changed ENTIRE SEMANTICS for certian functions since the last two "feature freezes." This by itself is a little odd. Since you have name recognition with Linus, it's easier for you to get patches recognized than anyone new to the kernel team, yet the level of change is the same.
So as a polite request, could we utilize linux-fsdev more for the VFS traffic, and just keep good summaries of what VFS patches are going in? That by itself would help clear up alot of the debates.
I don't quite find it to be the case that Viro is the only one patching the VFS. The GFS group, Reiser, and several other groups have patches that go into the VFS to add support for simple things. One such very simple patch that ReiserFS requires, is to be able to pass additional data with an inode on read_inode. Unfortunately Viro doesn't seem to be willing to incorporate ANY solution to this problem. And any filesystem which does journaling, or has inode numbering semantics that differ from FFS derivatives (such as the one I am developing) need such context on reading an inode. Admitedly, Reisers patch isn't the most aesthetically pleasing in the world (read_inode2), but something similar could be added to read_inode, and have the default behavior of iget to pass NULL, and would solve everyones problem with minimal effort. Yes, every filesystem in existence would need to be patched, but that's allready been the case with alot of Viro's changes. I think he's broken every FS in the kernel at least 10 times, so using that as an exuse is bullshit. But with Viro being so hesitant to add a simple change to the VFS, that has been needed for months to make ReiserFS work, it really makes me hesitent to make my filesystem dependent on the VFS. So i have to write extra code to route around the damage. It's also interesting in terms of my original experiences when i started on my filesystem. I asked a question about the use of the generic_ip pointer, the only answer i got was that you can't, you have to patch the kernel and add your code to the union. So I ignored them, and have a working filesystem. But it's an attitude i see prevalent in the VFS area. I guess FS developers aren't excatly a dime a dozen, so it's an easy area for an elitist, silly, almost PROPRIETARY (in the sense of being someones property) approach to the development of a "VIRTUAL" interface. (and in case you are wondering, no, my FS hasn't been released yet. It should be soon, I'm just currently trying to get it into a stable state. If anyone is interested in it, please mail me (remove the obvious NOSPAM), and i'll give you an update when i've gotten it together.)
The local filesystem is used as a cache by mirroring partial block structure local to a file. (Unless the client is a replicant, in which case the file is pushed over from the other servers) Only the blocks of a file that are needed are slurped to a client. For some of the applications we are using it for, copying the whole file over would DEFINATELY not work.
In terms of namespaces, the volumes are mountable anywhere in the VFS. I find global namespaces to be a bit distasteful and inflexible.;-)
Actually before going to the kernel list, if you want, email me. (zapman@interlan.net) I'm the chief architect. I just don't have time now to answer all of the questions that would be generated on the kernel list. I'm trying to get all of the basic modules done before i do a public release of code, so that i can tackle down the major problems and get the architecture in place for others to develop on.
No, not initially. It definately won't in the first version. There are too many issues to sort out, but they are probably solvable, and we may put it in release 2.0.
Yeah, actually, that is the part we're ironing out now. We need it done to fully test the ACL and Quota support, so, although it isn't my favorite coding, it needs to get done...;-) Instead of Kerberos, I'm using a protocol based on SRP (http://srp.stanford.edu/) in order to do the authentication. And like Kerberos, it's ticket based.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is policing what is good software now! Amazing how once a group gets mainstream acceptance, they too join the punditocracy in deciding what is "called for" and "useless". Hey, maybe these guys might maybe just discover something. Or perhaps it's because people get frustrated dealing with the intelligentsia on LKML. Worse than a bunch of professors arguing over grant money.
So, a bunch of people take an entenepenurial (sp.) spirit, and then Slashdot, standard of all things good, takes the time to post something "unneccicary" and "not called for" on their web page. YEAH! 'Cause only Linus' or Alan's kernel is the best one.
Why is it that every time I read slashdot, it gets to be more painful? Need... new... news... source...
Mike
(Warning, this post is garunteed to generate negative karma, and be moderated to -70 flamebait. But that's OK -- I don't care! Screw you guys, I'm going home.)
But at least you repented of it. Thank you for that. It is pretty sad to watch this. Especially to see only two comments that note that this is a deplorable action. Even the questions are cruel. When I first read them, I thought it *had* to be a joke it was so bad. But then I realised, it wasn't a joke, and felt my stomach go down into my legs.
:-( Slashdot must apoligise to this man, this is horrible.
Also, to a more general audience, if he is actually giving away rings, he obviously believes this, wholeheartedly. So we attack him, rather than the people *selling* cheap ceramic magnets at the store for $10 a pack, with approximately as much "scientific evidence" that Chiu has, and probably less belief in their own product. (I don't understand why he has a patent if he gives them away, but normal logic seems to have left the building a while ago...)
Man, it sure makes me believe that the Internet is going to produce a "great society" like you always see on here. Not that I believe that gigantic lie anyway, but if you're going to espouse it, at least try and live up to it.
People don't kick others when they're down in any "great society" that I know of.
And for a people that have so many stories on mockery and picking on in school, maybe Jon Katz should do a story on how you guys pick on people not in your on clique, and propigate the same old story. This man is heavly decieved, and needs help, not people picking on him, and attacking him cruelly on a public site. I'm sure that all true geeks reading this can remember being made fun of in front of (what seemed like) the whole school. Remember how much that hurt?? That's exactly what you are doing to this man! Maybe it's because you believed something different, and maybe you found out later that you were wrong!
This whole thing just saddens me.
I do have to say, it's pretty scary that anyone even asked this question, without the answer being glaringly obvious... :-(
It's interesting how one is 'elevated' to a disembodied digital stream. Personally I like it when people respect my corporeality, and the fact that I can feel pain, and I can go hungry. I also like seeing peoples smiles, and giving hugs.
The idea of the Internet dissolving all barriers is a silly one. I've seen some of the most biggoted, opinionated garbage be posted on the net. But rather than "black or white" or "tall or short", it's "smart vs. stupid", "Linux vs. MS", "new vs. old", "technophile vs. Luddite".
Being able to love and help people doesn't come from a technology, but ONLY from a transformation within.
Actually, it also doesn't make much sense. How do you donate $350,000 worth of Open Source software to anyone? Isn't it free, as I recall...
Hardware I can see as having an assigned value, Software has no fixed value and is infinitely elastic. And especially not open source which is 'freely' available. Did they give them $350,000 of liscences? ;-)
Yes, propaganda at its finest!
Ehhh, the intelligence/credibility of this whole thread is questionable, to say the least, so I figure Mojo-Jojo is about as applicable as Tux2.
Oh, you think you can stop my flame war with your simple "Hitler" message! Hahahaha! I am Mojo-Jojo! I will rule! There shall be only one flamer, and his name is Mojo-Jojo, the one and only flamer. Because Mojo-Jojo is my name, and I am Mojo-Jojo, and I will flame greatly on Slashdot!
The complete lack of code, zero references to published literature or hard documentation on this filesystem? How is a filesystem supposed to become king of an open source OS without any source?
And I thought Microsoft was bad with hyping non-existant features...
...Now with anti-gravity packaging!...
And, by the way, journaled filesystems dont typically let you do a "begin; make install ; commit" sequence. The transactions are only for metadata updates. Otherwise accesses to the filesystem would have to be locked. Transaction isolation of that sort is usually relegated to the world of databases.
Mike
It's not neccicarily usurping the power of government, it's refusing to acknowledge powers that the governement should not have. A principle the country was founded on. I have to admit that large corporate powers are a bigger threat than the government right now, but I find them refusing to allow the government to bully in and try to install hardware for the spooks is an admirable action.
So out of curiosity, what is the right attitude? Pointing out peoples flaws and being antagonistic towards those "non-Linux" rather than giving constructive criticism seems to be popular. I personally liked Linux much more when it had less dogmatic a consituency. ;-)
/. isn't the best forum. It's just that the example in the story which got posted somehow moved the debate here.
If you do want to debate the generic transaction handling code, I'd love to. Drop me a line so i can Cc you and linux-kernel, and linux-fsdev. (I promise not to be as sarcastic as above.) I've been meaning to put my objections into a good form for a while, but you are right,
I've been thinking about doing this myself. I've got plenty on my own project, but since this is directly relevant, i can definately give it priority. So feel free to drop me an email.
1 - No, the generic_ip problem is not the problem that will help HFS, but having a generic, opaque pointer passed with read_inode(), (and perhaps a new get_inode() function to also pass the context) would. Would you be hesitant to include such a patch? (Which any fs which requires an context to read an inode, i.e. Journaling, would require.) Also, what bugginess would a simple extension like this that's well needed have the chance to introduce?
2 - Your preferences are irrelevant to the design of a VFS. It's a VIRTUAL file system. It shouldn't dictate what mechanisms that filesystems should use to ensure consistency. It controls the way in which a user accesses a namespace.
3 - Yes, but try writing a filter driver with the current VFS on a filesystem not designed for it.
6 - Bullshit. I hardly ever see design stuff on linux-fsdev. Maybe i only get a few of the messages, and somethings wrong with my mail server, but i ususally find out about the changes when some of my code breaks. I understand that it's bleeding edge development, but I keep the developers that depend on the code I write half-way informed of changes I'm making. Even just posting a summary of the patch to linux-fsdev would be better than what I get in my mailbox. I have little time, and i still make it a point to write a CVS log so people can know what I did. (And i can know what i did later.)
Oh, it's definately not contained in the ReiserFS patch at ftp://ftp.devlinux.com/pub/namesys/.
May i say that elitist attitudes like this are what lead to politics in software. So what is a REAL kernel developer? Or an outsider? Just because i haven't released my work yet because i want it in a consistent state, but i do keep up with and are intimately familiar with the changes, does that make me an "imaginary" kernel developer?
Could you post a list of your patches for us to see? I'm curious to see what a real kernel hacker is like...
Actually, Al, I have been working with the VFS, and alot of the problems is the undocumented, unnanouced way in which the VFS gets changed. I try reading through linux-kernel, but the volume of messages is WAY too much to sort through daily. And linux-fsdev is a low volume list that rarely gets a post. So the way that i find out about changes is to have my filesystem break in some wierd way, and find the diffs for ext2, go through them, and see what changed. And i also haven't seen any reason for the symlink change, other than an "aesthetic". (If there are reasons, please feel free to direct me to them.) So one of the gripes that Reiser had that is valid -- that the changes to the VFS are kept opaque, and you end up having to read the source to ext2 to figure out what the hell is going on. Meanwhile, I am trying to write a filesystem, which is a rather mammoth task in itself.
And as another point, from a logistical issue, there have been a couple "feature freezes" announced for Linux 2.4. Which makes people really hesitent to send in patches since by all rights they will probably be ignored. Feature freeze to me ususally means bugfixes only. Yet the VFS has changed ENTIRE SEMANTICS for certian functions since the last two "feature freezes." This by itself is a little odd. Since you have name recognition with Linus, it's easier for you to get patches recognized than anyone new to the kernel team, yet the level of change is the same.
So as a polite request, could we utilize linux-fsdev more for the VFS traffic, and just keep good summaries of what VFS patches are going in? That by itself would help clear up alot of the debates.
I don't quite find it to be the case that Viro is the only one patching the VFS. The GFS group, Reiser, and several other groups have patches that go into the VFS to add support for simple things. One such very simple patch that ReiserFS requires, is to be able to pass additional data with an inode on read_inode. Unfortunately Viro doesn't seem to be willing to incorporate ANY solution to this problem. And any filesystem which does journaling, or has inode numbering semantics that differ from FFS derivatives (such as the one I am developing) need such context on reading an inode. Admitedly, Reisers patch isn't the most aesthetically pleasing in the world (read_inode2), but something similar could be added to read_inode, and have the default behavior of iget to pass NULL, and would solve everyones problem with minimal effort. Yes, every filesystem in existence would need to be patched, but that's allready been the case with alot of Viro's changes. I think he's broken every FS in the kernel at least 10 times, so using that as an exuse is bullshit. But with Viro being so hesitant to add a simple change to the VFS, that has been needed for months to make ReiserFS work, it really makes me hesitent to make my filesystem dependent on the VFS. So i have to write extra code to route around the damage. It's also interesting in terms of my original experiences when i started on my filesystem. I asked a question about the use of the generic_ip pointer, the only answer i got was that you can't, you have to patch the kernel and add your code to the union. So I ignored them, and have a working filesystem. But it's an attitude i see prevalent in the VFS area. I guess FS developers aren't excatly a dime a dozen, so it's an easy area for an elitist, silly, almost PROPRIETARY (in the sense of being someones property) approach to the development of a "VIRTUAL" interface. (and in case you are wondering, no, my FS hasn't been released yet. It should be soon, I'm just currently trying to get it into a stable state. If anyone is interested in it, please mail me (remove the obvious NOSPAM), and i'll give you an update when i've gotten it together.)
The local filesystem is used as a cache by mirroring partial block structure local to a file. (Unless the client is a replicant, in which case the file is pushed over from the other servers) Only the blocks of a file that are needed are slurped to a client. For some of the applications we are using it for, copying the whole file over would DEFINATELY not work.
;-)
In terms of namespaces, the volumes are mountable anywhere in the VFS. I find global namespaces to be a bit distasteful and inflexible.
Actually before going to the kernel list, if you want, email me. (zapman@interlan.net) I'm the chief architect. I just don't have time now to answer all of the questions that would be generated on the kernel list. I'm trying to get all of the basic modules done before i do a public release of code, so that i can tackle down the major problems and get the architecture in place for others to develop on.
No, not initially. It definately won't in the first version. There are too many issues to sort out, but they are probably solvable, and we may put it in release 2.0.
Yeah, actually, that is the part we're ironing out now. We need it done to fully test the ACL and Quota support, so, although it isn't my favorite coding, it needs to get done... ;-) Instead of Kerberos, I'm using a protocol based on SRP (http://srp.stanford.edu/) in order to do the authentication. And like Kerberos, it's ticket based.