>This is because you didn't use NetWare's tools to copy the files - the command line NCOPY, for example, would have copied the files in their compressed format..
We were moving the server content to Linux. Having it in Novells format would not have been usefull.
You could STILL be stuck with a transaction in mid-flight when you exhaust your storage because what was one block replicated hundreds of times now becomes hundreds of blocks exhausting all storage.
The Ease with which you can add storage only makes it somewhat more palatable. It doesn't hand wave the problem away.
Sooner or later every you have to upgrade storage on almost every platform. The problem with a platform that uses compression or de-duplication to store more than can really fit on its drives is that you can SUDDENLY run out of storage due to seemingly innocuous tasks. No steadily falling free-disk space to warn you ahead of time.
>I can't really see many situations where the extra complexity and cost would end up actually saving money.
I could see it for write-only media. With the proper byte-range selection, you could probably find enough duplicate blocks in just about anything to greatly expand capacity.
Bad design on Novell's part, but the problem persists in the de-duplicated world, where de-duplicating to memory only is not a solution.
Imagine a hundred very large file containing largely the same content. Not imagine CHANGING just a few characters in each file via some automated process. Now 100 files which were actually stored as ONE file balloon to 100 large files.
On a drive that was already full, changing just a few characters (not adding any total content) could cause a disk full error.
You really can't fake what you don't have. You either have enough disk to store all of your data or you run the risk of hind-sight telling you it was a really bad design.
Imagine he amount of stuff you could (unreliably) store on a hard disk if massive de-duplication was built into the drive electronics. It could even do this quietly in the background.
I say unreliably, because years ago we had a Novell server that used an automated compression scheme. Eventually, the drive got full anyway, and we had to migrate to a larger disk.
But since the copy operation de-compressed files on the fly we couldn't copy because any attempt to reference several large compressed files instantly consumed all remaining space on the drive. What ensued was a nightmare of copy and delete files beginning with the smallest, and working our way up to the largest. It took over a day of manual effort before we freed up enough space to mass-move the remaining files.
De-duplication is pretty much the same thing, compression by recording and eliminating duplicates. But any minor automated update of some files runs the risk of changing them such that what was a duplicate, must now be stored separately.
This could trigger a similar situation where there was suddenly not enough room to store the same amount of data that was already on the device. (For some values of "suddenly" and "already").
For archival stuff or OS components (executables, and source code etc) which virtually never change this would be great.
But there is a hell to pay somewhere down the road.
Since nobody drives everywhere in the country this has got to be some sort of social media test, to see how fast something like twitter could track down any given item/phenomena.
Defense research angle?
Nothing to do with the balloons is my bet.
Not even measuring how long this might take, or how people do it, because they already know the only way is via the internet.
I suspect they want to watch the internet and see what happens when people start organizing spontaneously into communities.
This is an exercise in traffic analysis. Pure and simple.
The scary part, is they have the hooks into the net deep enough that they can pull this off, apparently without warrants. Yes They Can.
I too am calling bullshit on this entire idea. There is simply not enough exhaust to do anything like what was claimed.
No matter how you work the chemical reactions, the amount of diesel required to plow a field combined with the air of combustion will never equal the amount of CO2 and nitrogen found in the proper amount of fertilizer. By sheer weight of the components alone you can deduce this is nonsense.
Plants do consume CO2. Merely plowing under his crop, or the chaff thereof would sequester come CO2, perhaps as long as the next growing season.
Sooner or later you have to add something back in, or plant some other crop that fixes nitrogen or you deplete the soil. His experiment hasn't run long enough to even account for changes in weather, let alone long term damage to the fields.
I don't think it takes any thing that cerebral to cause a shift.
One Vampire story that becomes successful begets another.
Don't mistake clever marketing ploys for something everybody wants. Its just what is temporarily in vogue. Hollywood types know how to make just about anything appeal to any selected audiance.
The current trend is vampire story meant to appeal to tweens and teen girls. They seem all the rage, but they are all just the "Bad boy attraction" revisited.
Then there is the current focus on swords. Usually associated with the above bad-boy-vampires. That's getting a lot of play right now. Nostalgia? Fear of sharp things? Penetration desire?
Nah, just copycat marketing.
You are way over thinking this in my opinion. Fads come and go, with no deeper meaning. As someone up thread said, sometimes a Cigar is just a Cigar.
People are very sensitized to risks of technology that they don't understand
Defined sensitized.
We jump in cars and elevators without a thought, we yak on cell phones and play on computers, we plug things into electrical outlets without a care, buy game consoles, and generally adopt new technology readily, be they gadgets, GPSs, phones, emission controls, electric vehicles or solar power.
Sensitization to risks, to the extent it exists, is not driven by Joe User, but rather by the fear mongering groups opposed to something and their press lapdogs.
30 years of Nuclear fears generated by hype from green movement groups is now seen by those same groups as having been a huge tactical mistake. But it will take 20 years to undo the fear, with the coal plants running full tilt in the meantime.
Americans have great faith in Science, largely justified.
But, beginning in the 60s this believe has been progressively poisoned by years of attempts to ban/reduce everything from peanuts to salt to coffee to aspirin to sugar, potatoes, wheat, and rock and roll. The stories of lake Eire being permanently a dead lake, of imminent death due to any number natural disasters largely foisted by pseudo-scientists with a political ax to grind has taken its toll. Always the FUD before the FACTS, the Fear before the Data, the Restrictions before the Research.
This seems a bit of a stretch, since Americans embrace Science and Technology readily.
Seems more likely a personification of fear of death.
However, I personally don't lend much credence to these mumbo-jumbo pseudo scientific explanations of things people do for the sheer fun of it. Some things don't have a deeper meaning.
Ask to look at any friend's non-jail broken phone.
Page thru the apps. They are a mess. You can't find anything. You are looking at little pictures but nothing sinks in.
Give your phone to any 5 year old and two minutes later it will look just like that friends phone.
It takes time to figure out how to arrange them by function, so you can find them. Then you end up searching all over for the ones you use frequently. So you put the frequent ones all in one screen and page all over looking for the one you need every other day instead of every day.
Whats wrong with structured lists of apps? Especially when apps can appear on more than one list, and can come with some built in suggested lists as well as the users list structure.
I can't seriously believe any intelligent person would argue for the status quo here. The current method is unworkable beyond a couple screens.
Mark my words, when Apple's next iPhone OS 4.0 comes out you WILL find lists and menus, and you WILL remember this slashdot thread and you may even recall how you scoffed.
Somehow when Apple does it, the fanboys fall in line, but if anyone else suggests the very same thing its like disparaging Islam, and the Apple Jihadists come out of the wood work.
True there are alternative sources for apps on other platforms, including the possibility of "side loading" them on memory, or from your computer. You can often buy these on company web sites of the developer.
Of course you have to find them somehow, and Google can be your friend in this. I suspect not one in 10 Blackberry users has ever heard of handango.
But you do bring up another aspect of the problem. As long as Apple insists on maintaining total control there is an avenue for competition by other platforms by simply being less controlling and making it easier.
We don't need Either of the STEVEs permission to install software on our computers, unless that computer fits in your pocket.
So there is CLEARLY an opportunity there for Android to make some inroad. But I suspect its largely squandered at this point because the absurd prices at Handango and the obscurity of these sites. If the apps are either too expensive or hard to find, Joe Android user will sooner or later succumb to the All In One Place shopping mentality of the App store and just buy the next iPhone.
You mean the free categorisation of apps into separate sections on the home screen?
Not at all. A bigger heap is still a heap. Cutter that expands to fill multiple desktops is still clutter.
I mean the categorizing apps by function, as well as by any other category the user wants.
Take a look at the menu system of any modern linux distribution. If you are a windows user you will be shocked to learn that the category structure is simple, well organized, and automatically maintained, but still allows users to customize it.
I'm not talking about the graphical layout on the screen. There many ways you can arrange things on the screen IF, and ONLY IF you have some meta data to deal with in the first place. Otherwise its just a heap.
Look, there is nothing special about the Iphone OS any more.
Neither the hardware or or the OS is the significant factor, as both platforms have achieved rough parity.
The Apple APP store defines the difference these days.
With 90,000 apps (75,000 of which are redundant "Crapps") it has the clear lead in developer mind share, monitization infrastructure, and deployment.
When someone writes a wrapper for these App store Apps that allows them to run on Android, its game over for this particular advantage.
Apple is entrenched and the clear leader. But lets face it, the hardware has no particular advantage any more, and the User Interface is pretty much Windows 3.1 looking with a desk top full of random icons with no organization.
Its not Apples fault. The iPhone OS was never designed with all of those app in mind. If/When Apple re-works the interface, with categorization of apps, (folders if you will) they can maintain the lead.
But Android has the advantage of youth, and none of the baggage of middle age.
Still, its the Apps. Android doesn't need as many apps to make it a complete user tool, because so much is bundled, but they still need more than currently exist.
If you find the same registry entries being cleaned time and time again, its time to pay attention and see just what it is they are removing. Google helps in this.
But wantonly wading thru the registry tossing out stuff is not a good idea. Keeping the packages that stuff unwanted crap in the registry makes far more sense.
I'm waiting for Spybot Search and Destroy http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html to state it works with Windows 7 before I apply it. It pre-loads registry entries that malware tends to use, but its no panacea. If Spybot can put in these entries, so can any other software.
Half the things you listed are malware themselves.
But your point is well taken regarding just about any flavor of Linux or OSX.
When Windows 7, fresh out of the box from Redmond nags you go get an antivirus that says something right there.
First it says Microsoft has no confidence in the ability of this version to stop any malware.
Second it transfers blame to a sketchy industry that had grown up based on a dodgy OS, and actually lobbied Microsoft not to lock them out, demanding the same holes in the OS that allow viruses in, in order to install their slow-ware.
If Windows 7 was half the Operating system Microsoft claims it is it wouldn't need an antivirus. It would just delete your user account every time you switched to your guest account like OSX and be done with it. (Hey, its a joke. No flames..).
Slashdot Mirror
>The big win here is in saving RAM, not disk space.]
Then why are we talking about it in relation to a file system?
>This is because you didn't use NetWare's tools to copy the files - the command line NCOPY, for example, would have copied the files in their compressed format..
We were moving the server content to Linux. Having it in Novells format would not have been usefull.
You could STILL be stuck with a transaction in mid-flight when you exhaust your storage because what was one block replicated hundreds of times now becomes hundreds of blocks exhausting all storage.
The Ease with which you can add storage only makes it somewhat more palatable. It doesn't hand wave the problem away.
Sooner or later every you have to upgrade storage on almost every platform. The problem with a platform that uses compression or de-duplication to store more than can really fit on its drives is that you can SUDDENLY run out of storage due to seemingly innocuous tasks. No steadily falling free-disk space to warn you ahead of time.
>I can't really see many situations where the extra complexity and cost would end up actually saving money.
I could see it for write-only media.
With the proper byte-range selection, you could probably find enough duplicate blocks in just about anything to greatly expand capacity.
Bad design on Novell's part, but the problem persists in the de-duplicated world, where de-duplicating to memory only is not a solution.
Imagine a hundred very large file containing largely the same content. Not imagine CHANGING just a few characters in each file via some automated process. Now 100 files which were actually stored as ONE file balloon to 100 large files.
On a drive that was already full, changing just a few characters (not adding any total content) could cause a disk full error.
You really can't fake what you don't have. You either have enough disk to store all of your data or you run the risk of hind-sight telling you it was a really bad design.
If blocks that are supposedly from different files have the same block data, does it really matter if it's marked redundant?
I thing the hash collision people are worrying about is when two blocks/files/byte-ranges are hashed to be identical but in fact differ.
When that happens your Power Point presentation contains your Bosses bedroom-cam shots.
Imagine he amount of stuff you could (unreliably) store on a hard disk if massive de-duplication was built into the drive electronics. It could even do this quietly in the background.
I say unreliably, because years ago we had a Novell server that used an automated compression scheme. Eventually, the drive got full anyway, and we had to migrate to a larger disk.
But since the copy operation de-compressed files on the fly we couldn't copy because any attempt to reference several large compressed files instantly consumed all remaining space on the drive. What ensued was a nightmare of copy and delete files beginning with the smallest, and working our way up to the largest. It took over a day of manual effort before we freed up enough space to mass-move the remaining files.
De-duplication is pretty much the same thing, compression by recording and eliminating duplicates. But any minor automated update of some files runs the risk of changing them such that what was a duplicate, must now be stored separately.
This could trigger a similar situation where there was suddenly not enough room to store the same amount of data that was already on the device. (For some values of "suddenly" and "already").
For archival stuff or OS components (executables, and source code etc) which virtually never change this would be great.
But there is a hell to pay somewhere down the road.
What is an awesome idea? You have no idea what they are doing.
And who precisely told you it was twitter related? Please be specific to names and web sites.
Yes, they do need warrants to look at your email traffic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Privacy_Act
Just because you are ignorant of the law is no excuse for DARPA to be.
Since nobody drives everywhere in the country this has got to be some sort of social media test, to see how fast something like twitter could track down any given item/phenomena.
Defense research angle?
Nothing to do with the balloons is my bet.
Not even measuring how long this might take, or how people do it, because they already know the only way is via the internet.
I suspect they want to watch the internet and see what happens when people start organizing spontaneously into communities.
This is an exercise in traffic analysis. Pure and simple.
The scary part, is they have the hooks into the net deep enough that they can pull this off, apparently without warrants. Yes They Can.
Or, maybe its just Halloween...
> I still don't see how this works, but I'm sure enough people will test it eventually.
This was done in a far off place. Australia. You and I can't afford go there and watch, and can't be sure of what he put on the field.
It was developed by someone in yet another country. Canada. Why wasn't it tested in Canada?
So we have the experiment performed in a place where it can't be verified, and developed in a place where it wasn't even tested.
Brilliant. Now lets make the infomercial and get down to business.
I too am calling bullshit on this entire idea. There is simply not enough exhaust to do anything like what was claimed.
No matter how you work the chemical reactions, the amount of diesel required to plow a field combined with the air of combustion will never equal the amount of CO2 and nitrogen found in the proper amount of fertilizer. By sheer weight of the components alone you can deduce this is nonsense.
Plants do consume CO2. Merely plowing under his crop, or the chaff thereof would sequester come CO2, perhaps as long as the next growing season.
Sooner or later you have to add something back in, or plant some other crop that fixes nitrogen or you deplete the soil. His experiment hasn't run long enough to even account for changes in weather, let alone long term damage to the fields.
I don't think it takes any thing that cerebral to cause a shift.
One Vampire story that becomes successful begets another.
Don't mistake clever marketing ploys for something everybody wants. Its just what is temporarily in vogue. Hollywood types know how to make just about anything appeal to any selected audiance.
The current trend is vampire story meant to appeal to tweens and teen girls. They seem all the rage, but they are all just the "Bad boy attraction" revisited.
Then there is the current focus on swords. Usually associated with the above bad-boy-vampires. That's getting a lot of play right now. Nostalgia? Fear of sharp things? Penetration desire?
Nah, just copycat marketing.
You are way over thinking this in my opinion. Fads come and go, with no deeper meaning. As someone up thread said, sometimes a Cigar is just a Cigar.
People are very sensitized to risks of technology that they don't understand
Defined sensitized.
We jump in cars and elevators without a thought, we yak on cell phones and play on computers, we plug things into electrical outlets without a care, buy game consoles, and generally adopt new technology readily, be they gadgets, GPSs, phones, emission controls, electric vehicles or solar power.
Sensitization to risks, to the extent it exists, is not driven by Joe User, but rather by the fear mongering groups opposed to something and their press lapdogs.
30 years of Nuclear fears generated by hype from green movement groups is now seen by those same groups as having been a huge tactical mistake. But it will take 20 years to undo the fear, with the coal plants running full tilt in the meantime.
Americans have great faith in Science, largely justified.
But, beginning in the 60s this believe has been progressively poisoned by years of attempts to ban/reduce everything from peanuts to salt to coffee to aspirin to sugar, potatoes, wheat, and rock and roll. The stories of lake Eire being permanently a dead lake, of imminent death due to any number natural disasters largely foisted by pseudo-scientists with a political ax to grind has taken its toll. Always the FUD before the FACTS, the Fear before the Data, the Restrictions before the Research.
This seems a bit of a stretch, since Americans embrace Science and Technology readily.
Seems more likely a personification of fear of death.
However, I personally don't lend much credence to these mumbo-jumbo pseudo scientific explanations of things people do for the sheer fun of it. Some things don't have a deeper meaning.
Ask to look at any friend's non-jail broken phone.
Page thru the apps. They are a mess. You can't find anything. You are looking at little pictures but nothing sinks in.
Give your phone to any 5 year old and two minutes later it will look just like that friends phone.
It takes time to figure out how to arrange them by function, so you can find them. Then you end up searching all over for the ones you use frequently. So you put the frequent ones all in one screen and page all over looking for the one you need every other day instead of every day.
Whats wrong with structured lists of apps? Especially when apps can appear on more than one list, and can come with some built in suggested lists as well as the users list structure.
I can't seriously believe any intelligent person would argue for the status quo here. The current method is unworkable beyond a couple screens.
Mark my words, when Apple's next iPhone OS 4.0 comes out you WILL find lists and menus, and you WILL remember this slashdot thread and you may even recall how you scoffed.
Somehow when Apple does it, the fanboys fall in line, but if anyone else suggests the very same thing its like disparaging Islam, and the Apple Jihadists come out of the wood work.
True there are alternative sources for apps on other platforms, including the possibility of "side loading" them on memory, or from your computer. You can often buy these on company web sites of the developer.
Of course you have to find them somehow, and Google can be your friend in this. I suspect not one in 10 Blackberry users has ever heard of handango.
But you do bring up another aspect of the problem. As long as Apple insists on maintaining total control there is an avenue for competition by other platforms by simply being less controlling and making it easier.
We don't need Either of the STEVEs permission to install software on our computers, unless that computer fits in your pocket.
So there is CLEARLY an opportunity there for Android to make some inroad. But I suspect its largely squandered at this point because the absurd prices at Handango and the obscurity of these sites. If the apps are either too expensive or hard to find, Joe Android user will sooner or later succumb to the All In One Place shopping mentality of the App store and just buy the next iPhone.
You mean the free categorisation of apps into separate sections on the home screen?
Not at all. A bigger heap is still a heap. Cutter that expands to fill multiple desktops is still clutter.
I mean the categorizing apps by function, as well as by any other category the user wants.
Take a look at the menu system of any modern linux distribution. If you are a windows user you will be shocked to learn that the category structure is simple, well organized, and automatically maintained, but still allows users to customize it.
I'm not talking about the graphical layout on the screen. There many ways you can arrange things on the screen IF, and ONLY IF you have some meta data to deal with in the first place. Otherwise its just a heap.
I'm talking about organizing applications into groups so that you can find them when your collection of apps exceeds more than just a few.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_uGeBM7SoqcQ/SQrgc9tDmNI/AAAAAAAAEQU/gtmLj_XA99c/s1600-h/kmenu.png
My iPhone has 9 pages. It takes forever to find something, and searching does not help if you don't remember the name of a seldom used app.
Look, there is nothing special about the Iphone OS any more.
Neither the hardware or or the OS is the significant factor, as both platforms have achieved rough parity.
The Apple APP store defines the difference these days.
With 90,000 apps (75,000 of which are redundant "Crapps") it has the clear lead in developer mind share, monitization infrastructure, and deployment.
When someone writes a wrapper for these App store Apps that allows them to run on Android, its game over for this particular advantage.
Apple is entrenched and the clear leader. But lets face it, the hardware has no particular advantage any more, and the User Interface is pretty much Windows 3.1 looking with a desk top full of random icons with no organization.
Its not Apples fault. The iPhone OS was never designed with all of those app in mind. If/When Apple re-works the interface, with categorization of apps, (folders if you will) they can maintain the lead.
But Android has the advantage of youth, and none of the baggage of middle age.
Still, its the Apps. Android doesn't need as many apps to make it a complete user tool, because so much is bundled, but they still need more than currently exist.
LOL...
Wise move.
That's why I referred you to the same link at
the side of panel of the Linked page in TFA.
Yup.
Registry cleaners can do a lot of harm.
If you find the same registry entries being cleaned time and time again, its time to pay attention and see just what it is they are removing. Google helps in this.
But wantonly wading thru the registry tossing out stuff is not a good idea. Keeping the packages that stuff unwanted crap in the registry makes far more sense.
I'm waiting for Spybot Search and Destroy http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html
to state it works with Windows 7 before I apply it. It pre-loads registry entries that malware tends to use, but its no panacea. If Spybot can put in these entries, so can any other software.
Dead you say?
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
The site is up, the forums are running, its stable.
Is there a way for the researchers to use the sinkhole to clean the worm?
Probably not.
But YOU CAN HELP:
Just Click the the CornFlicker Eye Chart to test your machine:
http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html
You can read about it in the link posted in TFA.
Half the things you listed are malware themselves.
But your point is well taken regarding just about any flavor of Linux or OSX.
When Windows 7, fresh out of the box from Redmond nags you go get an antivirus that says something right there.
First it says Microsoft has no confidence in the ability of this version to stop any malware.
Second it transfers blame to a sketchy industry that had grown up based on a dodgy OS, and actually lobbied Microsoft not to lock them out, demanding the same holes in the OS that allow viruses in, in order to install their slow-ware.
If Windows 7 was half the Operating system Microsoft claims it is it wouldn't need an antivirus. It would just delete your user account every time you switched to your guest account like OSX and be done with it. (Hey, its a joke. No flames..).
Its far from limited in my experience.
I have used it when traveling visiting etc and don't want to drag a laptop. Boot from a thumb drive in any library.
It has everything you need for every day use.