Wouldn't a touch sensitive surface be sufficient? Just make a mousepad touch sensitive and then put you hand on it so all five fingers touch the surface. Moving you hand is like a mouse movement and if one of the fingers if lifted and put back down the user clicked. swipe the finger downward and you used the scroll wheel.
Basically we already use all this for the ipad/iphone so what are the camera and infrared beam needed for?
First of all.... one of the most commonly duplicated blocks is the NUL block, that is a block of data where all bits are 0, corresponding with unused space, or space that was used and then zero'd.
If you have a virtual machine on a fresh 30GB disk with 10GB actually in use, you have at least 25GB that could be freed up by dedup.
But that is a "bug" in the storage management of virtualization environments. If blocks are not used they should not be allocated. Allocating them and then saying "but we can reduce the space they use" sounds like a hack at best. It's more of a workaround rather than a solution.
Second, if you have multiple VMs on a dedup store, many of the OS files will be duplicates.
Even on a single system, many system binaries and libraries, will contain duplicate blocks.
Of course multiple binaries statically linked against the same libraries will have dups.
But also, there is a common structure to certain files in the OS, similarities between files so great, that they will contain duplicate blocks.
If you optimize your OS install you will not gain much by deduplicating all those OS files. If your infrastructure is so small that you can afford to be wasteful to get away with doing default installs then why bother with the complexity and costs of deduplication at all?
Then if the system actually contains user data, there is probably duplication within the data.
For example, mail stores... will commonly have many duplicates.
But to how many people out there does this actually apply? There may be quite a few corporate environments where this is the case but many if not most people will probably have fairly unique data in their VMs. Deduplication doesn't help much in that case.
One user sent an e-mail message to 300 people in your organization -- guess what, that message is going to be in 300 mailboxes.
If users store files on the system, they will commonly make multiple copies of their own files..
Can MS Word files be large enough to matter? Yes.. if you get enough of them.
Besides they have common structure that is the same for almost all MS Word files.
Even documents' whose text is not at all similar are likely to have some duplicate blocks, which you have just accepted in the past -- it's supposed to be a very small amount of space per file, but in reality: a small amount of waste multiplied by thousands of files, adds up.
Again this only applies to very specific environments. The 40GB MySQL db of customer A and the 60GB db of customer B don't really share any data at all and the data-to-OS-files ratio is probably in the ballpark of 100:1 so I see very little gain.
Just because data seems to be all different doesn't mean dedup won't help with storage usage.
I don't doubt there are infrastructures that will benefit hugely from this but I think those infrastructures are the minority. I just see all this undifferentiated hype about how this will reduce peoples storage troubles when it really only applies to a (relatively) small group of people out there. If you do the deduplication on a big chunk level you'll get little overhead but won't find many duplicates. If you do the deduplication more fine-grained then you'll find more duplicates but incur more overhead for the deduplication prozess.
Who does 2GB OS installs especially in a 200+ VM environment? That's insane.
I agree that deduplication is a nice addition to the virtual tool-set but it only seems to really ad a benefit to very specific environments. If I have optimized OS installs and the VMs run completely different data-sets from different organizations then the cost (both money and system resources) of deduplication seems to outweigh the benefit of saving a few G especially in a world where HDs come in 2TB sizes.
Given that usually most of the disk space is swallowed by the data of an application and that data rarely is identical to the data on another system (why would you have two systems then?) I wonder how much this approach really buys you in "normal" scenarios especially given the CPU and disk I/O cost involved in finding and maintaining the de-duplicated blocks.
There may be a few very specific examples where this could really make a difference but can someone enlighten me how this is useful on say a physical system with 10 Centos VMs running different apps or similar apps with different data? You might save a few blocks because of the shared OS files but if you did a proper minimal OS install then the gain hardly seems to be worth the effort.
Latest changelog entry from the Fedora nfs-utils package:
* Thu Jan 21 2010 Steve Dickson 1.2.1-13
- mount.nfs: Configuration file parser ignoring options
- mount.nfs: Set the default family for lookups based on defaultproto= setting
- Enabled ipv6
To me the project management of Mozilla looks messy if not broken. They make it extremely hard for people to contribute because their policies resemble those of a closed source company much more than those of open source projects. Just look at the patch review debacle that happened a while ago. If it's that hard to get code in there why would a developer even bother to waste his free time on this?
Now if that kind of tight control would allow Mozilla to keep their deadlines it would at least be explainable but given the performance in the months after the first release of Firefox I think their way of doing things needs to be changed quite a bit.
First there was the Aviary branch "crash landing" which caused a lot of bugs that weren't fixed even months after the merge. Then there was the planned 1.1 release which was originally planned for March then moved to June and I'm willing to bet they are not going to make that date either. At least the Deer Park developer release is really imminent now (Monday?).
Next is the whole Mozilla-as-a-platform thing which is something that was hyped *years* ago and yet we still don't have anything close to resembling a runtime environment. Hopefully there will be a XULRunner release soon but apparently neither Firefox nor Thunderbird will be put on top of it soon. I think most of these issues are a direct result of Mozillas bizarre desire to tightly control everything and keep the open source community pretty much locked out.
The irony is that Firefox has some exciting stuff coming up (<canvas>, svg, better extensions manager and update system) and it really hurts to imagine just how much more could be achieved if Mozilla would just open up a little more...
While I understand the need for different licenses like GPL - LGPL - BSD, creating several licenses to serve the same purpose is a waste for everyone.
What worries me is that most people seem to be so fixated on the GPL that they don't realize that this license simply doesn't work for everybody. I think there need to be three "template licenses" instead of one:
One "I only want to make my work available to other open source authors" license (GPL).
One "It's ok if my work becomes part of a non-open-source product but I still want that people contribute any changes to my code back to the community" license (LGPL).
And finally one "I don't really care" license (BSD).
I think trying to force everyone to use the GPL simply *has* to end in things like the CDDL because the companies don't feel they have any other choice.
I did enable Composite in Fedora Core 3 (+xorg from rawhide) but somehow applications think Damage and XFixes aren't there and xdpyinfo seems to agree even though according to the logfiles they *are* present and *do* get initialized. Does anyone have an idea what the problem might be? xcompmgr and luminocity refuse to run without these extensions.
This is why so many projects fail. They try too hard to create a mythical overdesigned piece of software that "works in theory" rather than create something that works and then improve it from there.
Sadly, the majority of poeple will answer back, "Well, gosh gee. You're right. Microsoft makes me feel special! Microsoft is so great."
No, the majority of people will say, "Well, gosh gee. You just handed out a security fix for a vulnerability to the government but you don't give it to me for another month so I my machines are now in grave danger even though they don't have to be. I think I'll try linux for a change, they don't have a "leave your customers hanging in the air" policy."
I have worried about that for a while now until I wrote this: earlier post
I really don't think fancy new features should (can) be a top priority right now anymore but instead the core problem of getting new developers needs to be solved not just for now but also for the future. While I agree that changing things like the versioning system won't change much I believe splitting up the codebase into more handy chunks and giving "outsiders" more power (eg regular contributers should need no code review) should be the goal. I think it's this sharp devision between core (Foundation) and outside (everybody else) developers that is the main problem here.
So you are saying that Microsoft has no problems making the embedded version secure and they introduce the holes in XP just for fun?
I fail to see how Microsofts track record should make me go "Ohhh, it the *embedded* version. In that case I trust your security completely!"
You can call bullshit all you want and you are right to do so but I don't think free speech in the US is as "pure" as you think it is. If it was how are cases like the Extreme Associates one possible and why is it not legal to show fisting sex in a video?
Really? How about all the obscenity cases in the US? AFAIK displaying fisting sex is outright illegal public or not. See also the Extreme Associates case.
...
Even if a TPM key does get pulled off a chip (which would require hundreds of thousands of dollars of reverse-engineering time and equipment, stripping it off layer by layer, using exotic devices like quantum interference based SQUID probes), the spec provides a feature to revoke a TPM key so that it will be of no use to people who want to produce fake, software-emulated TPMs....
Wouldn't this revoking mean that all the hardware released with that key becomes useless in the way that a DVD player with a new set of keys would no longer be able to play current DVDs? If that is the case then I don't see this ever happening because such a step would completely and utterly destroy the market.
When I heared of the creation of the Mozilla Foundation I thought that this would be a big step forward since the developers could leave most of the rigid, slow and often over-designed bureaucracy behind but when I look at it today I'm not so sure about that anymore.
The first thing that I'm wondering about is the way the releases are organized. Why was most of the Firefox work done on a branch and then "crash landed" on the trunk? Some of the bugs resulting from this crash are yet to be fixed. Why make things so complicated? If the main development had happened on the trunk and the releases had been branched off of that this process would have been a lot easier to manage in my view. Almost all other open-spurce projects do it like that.
What about the closing of the source tree for releases? For a while I was wondering why so few checkins got made despite the pending release of Firefox 1.1 in March but then I realized that the tree was closed for a Mozilla release instead. This looks a bit like the Big Kernel Lock to me. One process has to wait for the lock to be released even if ultimately it isn't dependant on the resources the lock has been acquired for.
When I read the projects roadmap I had hoped it would get split up in distinct pieces like Gecko, Toolkit, Firefox-UI, etc. which could be developed individually instead of in one X11-like monolithic blob that requires a global closing/opening process. Gecko for example could be shared by Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. and have independent releases that the other bits could rely on just like QT or GTK applications rely on respective releases of these toolkits. A Gecko 1.8 release could be branched off of the trunk and developers could just continue to check in new and potentially dangerous code on the trunk despite any impending release of higher-level components. These would simply rely on the last stable release of the lower-level ones.
Maybe I just get a lot about the Mozilla process wrong because it seems to be quite opaque at times just like the X11 one still is. There still seems to be no clear decision wether X11 is going to be modularized or not for example, just like with Mozilla. Anyway I hope most of this was caused by the first Firefox release and that 2005 will be used to chop Mozilla up in smaller more easier to swallow pieces because otherwise I'm not sure the project posesses the agility to compete with Microsoft for long.
You also have to remember that the conditions up there are quite different from what they are down here so I doubt a simple webcam type camera would survive such conditions.
Add to that the fact that the craft was actually launched in 1997 and had to be build before that so the technology aboard cannot be up to todays standards obviously.
Are you kidding me? You do not actually suggesting using MySQL for this kind of task on that scale, do you?
How are you going to do hot backups? Lock the whole db for the duration of this backup? This might be sufficient for your "me and my family" homepage but it's certainly impossible for Amazon. Hell they have just introduced Views and "Initial support for rudimentary triggers".
I use MySQL exclusively and like it but even I know that it isn't suitable for the really big stuff...
now no one listens to me:(
Well, since you obviously spread false information about applications you haven't even tested yourself that doesn't exactly make you a credible source of information, does it?
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't a touch sensitive surface be sufficient? Just make a mousepad touch sensitive and then put you hand on it so all five fingers touch the surface. Moving you hand is like a mouse movement and if one of the fingers if lifted and put back down the user clicked. swipe the finger downward and you used the scroll wheel. Basically we already use all this for the ipad/iphone so what are the camera and infrared beam needed for?
First of all.... one of the most commonly duplicated blocks is the NUL block, that is a block of data where all bits are 0, corresponding with unused space, or space that was used and then zero'd.
If you have a virtual machine on a fresh 30GB disk with 10GB actually in use, you have at least 25GB that could be freed up by dedup.
But that is a "bug" in the storage management of virtualization environments. If blocks are not used they should not be allocated. Allocating them and then saying "but we can reduce the space they use" sounds like a hack at best. It's more of a workaround rather than a solution.
Second, if you have multiple VMs on a dedup store, many of the OS files will be duplicates.
Even on a single system, many system binaries and libraries, will contain duplicate blocks.
Of course multiple binaries statically linked against the same libraries will have dups.
But also, there is a common structure to certain files in the OS, similarities between files so great, that they will contain duplicate blocks.
If you optimize your OS install you will not gain much by deduplicating all those OS files. If your infrastructure is so small that you can afford to be wasteful to get away with doing default installs then why bother with the complexity and costs of deduplication at all?
Then if the system actually contains user data, there is probably duplication within the data.
For example, mail stores... will commonly have many duplicates.
But to how many people out there does this actually apply? There may be quite a few corporate environments where this is the case but many if not most people will probably have fairly unique data in their VMs. Deduplication doesn't help much in that case.
One user sent an e-mail message to 300 people in your organization -- guess what, that message is going to be in 300 mailboxes.
If users store files on the system, they will commonly make multiple copies of their own files..
Ex... mydocument-draft1.doc, mydocument-draft2.doc, mydocument-draft3.doc
Can MS Word files be large enough to matter? Yes.. if you get enough of them.
Besides they have common structure that is the same for almost all MS Word files. Even documents' whose text is not at all similar are likely to have some duplicate blocks, which you have just accepted in the past -- it's supposed to be a very small amount of space per file, but in reality: a small amount of waste multiplied by thousands of files, adds up.
Again this only applies to very specific environments. The 40GB MySQL db of customer A and the 60GB db of customer B don't really share any data at all and the data-to-OS-files ratio is probably in the ballpark of 100:1 so I see very little gain.
Just because data seems to be all different doesn't mean dedup won't help with storage usage.
I don't doubt there are infrastructures that will benefit hugely from this but I think those infrastructures are the minority. I just see all this undifferentiated hype about how this will reduce peoples storage troubles when it really only applies to a (relatively) small group of people out there. If you do the deduplication on a big chunk level you'll get little overhead but won't find many duplicates. If you do the deduplication more fine-grained then you'll find more duplicates but incur more overhead for the deduplication prozess.
Who does 2GB OS installs especially in a 200+ VM environment? That's insane. I agree that deduplication is a nice addition to the virtual tool-set but it only seems to really ad a benefit to very specific environments. If I have optimized OS installs and the VMs run completely different data-sets from different organizations then the cost (both money and system resources) of deduplication seems to outweigh the benefit of saving a few G especially in a world where HDs come in 2TB sizes.
Given that usually most of the disk space is swallowed by the data of an application and that data rarely is identical to the data on another system (why would you have two systems then?) I wonder how much this approach really buys you in "normal" scenarios especially given the CPU and disk I/O cost involved in finding and maintaining the de-duplicated blocks. There may be a few very specific examples where this could really make a difference but can someone enlighten me how this is useful on say a physical system with 10 Centos VMs running different apps or similar apps with different data? You might save a few blocks because of the shared OS files but if you did a proper minimal OS install then the gain hardly seems to be worth the effort.
and I have no idea when NFSv6 support will land
Latest changelog entry from the Fedora nfs-utils package:
* Thu Jan 21 2010 Steve Dickson 1.2.1-13
- mount.nfs: Configuration file parser ignoring options
- mount.nfs: Set the default family for lookups based on defaultproto= setting
- Enabled ipv6
To me the project management of Mozilla looks messy if not broken. They make it extremely hard for people to contribute because their policies resemble those of a closed source company much more than those of open source projects. Just look at the patch review debacle that happened a while ago. If it's that hard to get code in there why would a developer even bother to waste his free time on this?
Now if that kind of tight control would allow Mozilla to keep their deadlines it would at least be explainable but given the performance in the months after the first release of Firefox I think their way of doing things needs to be changed quite a bit.
First there was the Aviary branch "crash landing" which caused a lot of bugs that weren't fixed even months after the merge. Then there was the planned 1.1 release which was originally planned for March then moved to June and I'm willing to bet they are not going to make that date either. At least the Deer Park developer release is really imminent now (Monday?).
Next is the whole Mozilla-as-a-platform thing which is something that was hyped *years* ago and yet we still don't have anything close to resembling a runtime environment. Hopefully there will be a XULRunner release soon but apparently neither Firefox nor Thunderbird will be put on top of it soon. I think most of these issues are a direct result of Mozillas bizarre desire to tightly control everything and keep the open source community pretty much locked out.
The irony is that Firefox has some exciting stuff coming up (<canvas>, svg, better extensions manager and update system) and it really hurts to imagine just how much more could be achieved if Mozilla would just open up a little more...
One "I only want to make my work available to other open source authors" license (GPL).
One "It's ok if my work becomes part of a non-open-source product but I still want that people contribute any changes to my code back to the community" license (LGPL).
And finally one "I don't really care" license (BSD).
I think trying to force everyone to use the GPL simply *has* to end in things like the CDDL because the companies don't feel they have any other choice.
I did enable Composite in Fedora Core 3 (+xorg from rawhide) but somehow applications think Damage and XFixes aren't there and xdpyinfo seems to agree even though according to the logfiles they *are* present and *do* get initialized. Does anyone have an idea what the problem might be? xcompmgr and luminocity refuse to run without these extensions.
"It's theoretically going to be much better."
This is why so many projects fail. They try too hard to create a mythical overdesigned piece of software that "works in theory" rather than create something that works and then improve it from there.
*waves hand*
"This isn't the webpage you are looking for."
I have worried about that for a while now until I wrote this: earlier post
I really don't think fancy new features should (can) be a top priority right now anymore but instead the core problem of getting new developers needs to be solved not just for now but also for the future. While I agree that changing things like the versioning system won't change much I believe splitting up the codebase into more handy chunks and giving "outsiders" more power (eg regular contributers should need no code review) should be the goal. I think it's this sharp devision between core (Foundation) and outside (everybody else) developers that is the main problem here.
So you are saying that Microsoft has no problems making the embedded version secure and they introduce the holes in XP just for fun? I fail to see how Microsofts track record should make me go "Ohhh, it the *embedded* version. In that case I trust your security completely!"
What makes you think the german users had a say in this?
You can call bullshit all you want and you are right to do so but I don't think free speech in the US is as "pure" as you think it is. If it was how are cases like the Extreme Associates one possible and why is it not legal to show fisting sex in a video?
Really? How about all the obscenity cases in the US? AFAIK displaying fisting sex is outright illegal public or not. See also the Extreme Associates case.
Apparently 110,000 people already did.
... Even if a TPM key does get pulled off a chip (which would require hundreds of thousands of dollars of reverse-engineering time and equipment, stripping it off layer by layer, using exotic devices like quantum interference based SQUID probes), the spec provides a feature to revoke a TPM key so that it will be of no use to people who want to produce fake, software-emulated TPMs. ...
Wouldn't this revoking mean that all the hardware released with that key becomes useless in the way that a DVD player with a new set of keys would no longer be able to play current DVDs? If that is the case then I don't see this ever happening because such a step would completely and utterly destroy the market.
When I heared of the creation of the Mozilla Foundation I thought that this would be a big step forward since the developers could leave most of the rigid, slow and often over-designed bureaucracy behind but when I look at it today I'm not so sure about that anymore.
The first thing that I'm wondering about is the way the releases are organized. Why was most of the Firefox work done on a branch and then "crash landed" on the trunk? Some of the bugs resulting from this crash are yet to be fixed. Why make things so complicated? If the main development had happened on the trunk and the releases had been branched off of that this process would have been a lot easier to manage in my view. Almost all other open-spurce projects do it like that.
What about the closing of the source tree for releases? For a while I was wondering why so few checkins got made despite the pending release of Firefox 1.1 in March but then I realized that the tree was closed for a Mozilla release instead. This looks a bit like the Big Kernel Lock to me. One process has to wait for the lock to be released even if ultimately it isn't dependant on the resources the lock has been acquired for.
When I read the projects roadmap I had hoped it would get split up in distinct pieces like Gecko, Toolkit, Firefox-UI, etc. which could be developed individually instead of in one X11-like monolithic blob that requires a global closing/opening process. Gecko for example could be shared by Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. and have independent releases that the other bits could rely on just like QT or GTK applications rely on respective releases of these toolkits. A Gecko 1.8 release could be branched off of the trunk and developers could just continue to check in new and potentially dangerous code on the trunk despite any impending release of higher-level components. These would simply rely on the last stable release of the lower-level ones.
Maybe I just get a lot about the Mozilla process wrong because it seems to be quite opaque at times just like the X11 one still is. There still seems to be no clear decision wether X11 is going to be modularized or not for example, just like with Mozilla. Anyway I hope most of this was caused by the first Firefox release and that 2005 will be used to chop Mozilla up in smaller more easier to swallow pieces because otherwise I'm not sure the project posesses the agility to compete with Microsoft for long.
You also have to remember that the conditions up there are quite different from what they are down here so I doubt a simple webcam type camera would survive such conditions. Add to that the fact that the craft was actually launched in 1997 and had to be build before that so the technology aboard cannot be up to todays standards obviously.
I think you really want to link to project Lightning. That's the one that brings Sunbird and Thunderbird together.
Are you kidding me? You do not actually suggesting using MySQL for this kind of task on that scale, do you? How are you going to do hot backups? Lock the whole db for the duration of this backup? This might be sufficient for your "me and my family" homepage but it's certainly impossible for Amazon. Hell they have just introduced Views and "Initial support for rudimentary triggers". I use MySQL exclusively and like it but even I know that it isn't suitable for the really big stuff...
Imagine that if you suffer from schizophrenia you can be a diverse group all by yourself. :P
now no one listens to me :(
Well, since you obviously spread false information about applications you haven't even tested yourself that doesn't exactly make you a credible source of information, does it?