I am sorry that you were screwed over. But please assign the blame where it belongs. The drunk shithead and the asshole federal courts/judges. They had the responsibility not to harm you, but chose to ignore than responsibility and harm you anyway. You probably could not punish those bastards enough even if you tried, and I would not lose any sleep if you did.
But, disabled or not, no one has the DUTY to employ you against their will. If you wish to be employed, then you need to do the same thing everyone else must do, again whether disabled or not: find something you can do well, that other people would be willing to pay you to do. It may not be easy, but it is possible.
And, before you go on your "killing spree" please consider that these CEOs of these corporations are NOT responsible for what you are going through. The drunk shithead is. However, the great majority of them ARE directly and personally responsible for producing and distributing every product and every service that you and I and everyone else needs in order to survive and to live with any semblance of comfort. While a number of them are guilty of crimes of one sort or another, and should be held accountable, not one has been formally charged, tried, and convicted. You do NOT have the right to be their prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. You do NOT have all the facts you would need even to decide whether they should be charged. I feel bad for your suffering, but you would inflict even greater suffering on others, without any opportunity for them to defend themselves, and without any way of ensuring that the punishment you would mete out would actually fit the crime, or would actually make society better. If even 1% of us thought or acted the way you say you would, they would end up killing nearly everyone on the planet, and making every one of the living envy every one of the dead.
Austrian/an-cap here also. I would not count on being able to pay debt in valueless dollars. The banks would never allow this. Instead, I would expect a new currency to be introduced, and old debts to be "re-valued" in the new currency, suddenly transferring ownership of even more private wealth into the hands of banks (which by that time will be largely government-owned). Thus my advice is to continue to pay down debt even if one does expect massive inflation. But I'd want some gold and other commodities as well, preferably located outside the reach of the U.S. government, which may well try to confiscate both.
You might be onto something. Smart money has been working for some time to hedge against the impending decline (and possible collapse) of the dollar. For ordinary people, getting/staying out of debt, then buying real assets (silver, gold, oil, reasonably priced and secure real estate, etc.), would be my recommendation. However, accounting and tax rules make this more difficult for larger companies. What Microsoft is doing doesn't sound like a great option to me, but it might well be the least bad of the several bad options available to it. (Disclaimer: I hate Microsoft's products, business practices, extortion, etc. as much as anyone, but I must nonetheless concede that where financial and marketing matters are involved, they are smarter than most publicly-traded companies.)
Of course the way things are going, eventually this would run right up the middle of one big metro area.
American-style suburban development (aka "sprawl") depends on, among other things, plentiful energy and real personal incomes and wealth far (2-5x) above the world median. These conditions do not exist now and are unlikely to recur anytime soon. "Sprawl" thus is probably near or at an end.
On the other hand, this does not guarantee a mass flight back to the cities either. Suburbanization was, in large part, a reaction to the problems of U.S. urban centers - corruption, violence, high taxes, racial tensions, pollution, overcrowding, schools that are bad even by U.S. standards, and so forth. I for one have no wish to return to city living while these problems continue to worsen, but I'd do so in a heartbeat if it became reasonably safe and affordable to live and raise children there.
There are noncoercive methods of resistance. No government, no matter how violent, could last long without at least the implicit support of those whom it enslaves. If people were willing to refuse to be enslaved . . refuse to support the violence done by it in their name . . . it would collapse overnight. That has not happened very often but it has happened on occasion, for instance in Romania and a few other Eastern European states circa 1989. It could happen again. It could provoke a violent response of course . . . and probably would if only a few of us resisted. But if enough of us resisted, it could never get us all. If enough of us cared enough for freedom to risk even a little for it, we would have it. The fact that we don't is therefore at least as much our fault as government's. I have trouble looking at myself in the mirror when I recognize this. It is very easy to point out the corruption, cowardice and decadence of our so-called "leaders" and I do so regularly. It's much harder to admit one's own. But we must. Revolution truly does start in hearts and minds, and by far the most successful kind is the kind that occurs without violence, at least on the part of those who resist. Perhaps one day I will truly be ready for it, but until then, I suppose I deserve to be a slave. But my children, and their children, and all of our children, do not. I hope and pray I will leave them a free world, or if not, at least the most free world I can help to achieve.
There is a third option: work for the peaceful abolition of coercive government itself.
Coercive government, no matter how seemingly benign or "democratic," is nothing more or less than the institutionalized belief that some people have the right to rule over all the rest without their consent, but the rest are not entitled to rule even themselves. It is therefore very much a form of slavery. Like all other forms of slavery it is doomed to fail, but will continue to cause untold human suffering and evil of every kind until it ends. That makes it imperative that people of good will work together to alter its coercive and totalitarian nature (at a very minimum), or, preferably, to abolish it completely.
Without coercive government, people will learn non-coercive ways to prevent and when necessary resolve conflict. The link in my sig explains some of the details of how this might work.
Bruce, you are a smart guy, a tremendous supporter of Free and Open Source software, and probably 10x smarter than the average/. denizen. So hopefully you understand that while governments pretend to represent the interest of those who help appoint them, they in fact consistently represent their own. They consistently attempt to transfer power and money away from others and to themselves. They tend to be composed of people of great intelligence, ambition and drive, and initially they are often ethical and principled people as well. But there is something about a system of unlawful power and control over others that tends to erode ethics and principle over time. Every decision tends to be a compromise between the bad and the worse. Every decision represents an attempt to force some people to do the will of others, to act against their own interests, under threat of prison rape and death. The "decision" is merely which lobbying group gets to be on top. Government is at its very core the institutionalization of one of the most evil religious beliefs that has ever existed: that some people have the right to control others without the latter's consent. You say you are "pro-government," yet you've demonstrated by your actions that you are neither evil nor stupid. The only other possibility is that you are misinformed; that you do not understand the nature of what it is that you support. I would like to challenge you to become informed. LewRockwell.com is one of many great places to start; the link in my sig is another. Both sites are unashamedly libertarian, as I am; however, you needn't be in order to understand and appreciate that government is evil. Actually, governments act against genuine liberal interests (e.g., the environment, free speech, due process, medical and religious freedom) just as often as conservative ones. You probably agree that the Bush administration was evil to the core, but every power the Bush regime appropriated for its own use still exists and even if you support the way Obama uses this power, eventually another regime will arise which you do not, and these powers will then be used against you. In the end, freedom and despotism are the only options; there is no in-between, because once power can be abused, it will be abused, and one will surely and inevitably give way to the other. By being "pro-government" you are throwing your hand in with the despots. I would urge you to reconsider.
That scares me. BASIC was designed to be a teaching tool. Now people are using Microsoft's version of it to write business-critical systems. I support these kinds of systems for a living, and it is rare for any of them to live beyond five years. Most fail not because of flaws in VB itself (though there are plenty), but because of poor programming practices, which VB tolerates and encourages in a way that most other languages do not. Perhaps Dijkstra was correct that "[i]t is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." A language forgiving of mistakes may be useful as a teaching tool but it is not necessarily the right thing to base our economies or livelihoods on. Minix is not nearly as bad as BASIC, but it remains to be seen whether it can be adapted to the needs of high-security environments when that was never its design goal to begin with.
You have a reasonable chance of improving your odds in a car if you drive safely and defensively. You are (or at least have the illusion of being) somewhat in control. While flying is almost infinitely safer, there is very little you can do to influence the chances of an accident, or to more than marginally improve your odds of surviving one. This is why many of us fear flying more than driving even knowing the latter is far more dangerous, and it also is why we fear terrorist attacks which are even less dangerous (at least at present): because we perceive that there is little to nothing we can do to protect ourselves against them.
This is exactly why this sounds so implausible to me. You often have to take the category name and weave it in with the question (or rather, answer). A lot depends not on the knowledge, but on the phrasing of the "queries". Give me one example of translation software which can translate entire paragraphs well.
Sure! From my handy-dandy English-to-Tech Manual-to-English translator:
According to precise how from unlikely sounding me hereto. Must needs question category name sewing needle rapprochement. Mucho lots of good knowling head phrases queryig well; show you macihine human texts swimmingly.
We know (because of AIDS) that it is possible to craft viruses with very specific traits that attack very limited subsets of the population, and mostly ignore others. This one sounds like an equal-opportunity killer. It might be a deliberate attempt to cull the population on a very broad basis, since it seems likely to have exactly that effect, but I doubt very highly that it was designed by one specific nation-state to target the members of another.
We (including the adherents of the closest thing to the faith I believe to be objectively correct) still are a LONG way from living up to "thou shalt not kill." We tolerate and even encourage murder as long as it is done by states, and to people we do not closely identify with. Frankly, we have no consistent morals other than acting in ways calculated to make others like us. We are horrifically selfish beings (myself included, unfortunately). We've simply invented tons of ways to convince ourselves otherwise, religion included. We still have yet found a way to change ourselves.
I had terrible problems with my teeth right up until the point that I started to rinse my mouth daily with hydrogen peroxide and (next) sodium bicarbonate before bed. The poor bacteria simply have no defense against this, and no they will never develop an immunity to HP, ever.
Umm.... are you sure? If I understand this article correctly, virtually all organisms possess some ability to break down HP naturally, and it is not a stretch to imagine that some would have a greater ability to do so than others and would pass this ability on to their descendants and so forth. Which isn't to say that your strategy is necessarily a bad idea, but only that nature sometimes does manage to work around our best efforts to thwart it.
Can I audit their code so I can know for sure, or pay someone else to do so? I can with OpenBSD, or any Linux distribution, or any other piece of open-source code. If not, then there is no way to know whether it is more or less secure. Openness is a necessary prerequisite, not necessarily to security itself, but to the ability to verify that security.
It does not follow that just because unauthorized use of software may be wrong, cooperating with an organized extortion ring such as the BSA is therefore right. It is not. The BSA does far more than merely enforce compliance with licensing restrictions; it also extorts money from organizations that may well have valid licenses, but can't prove it. Proof of licensing compliance is inherently difficult. But in a free society, the burden always must be on the accuser who wishes to accuse someone of wrongdoing. It should never be on the accused to prove his/her/its innocence. The BSA insists that they do, and, when they cannot, extorts large amounts of money to which neither it nor its member companies are entitled. This is wrong, and I would not voluntarily cooperate with it under any circumstance whatever (although I would not condone or willingly participate in the unauthorized use of proprietary software either).
In cities like NYC this is considered a serious offense because you are creating gridlock. But no matter where you are it is a good idea (and, in some places, a legal requirement) that you enter an intersection only if/when there is sufficient room to leave it again.
Mr. Ts'O . . . I guess I'm still confused about the "proper" behavior of both the app and the FS in this case. Clearly an app should not make assumptions beyond what POSIX guarantees, but unless we do, we would seem to have no way that is both clean and fast to preserve the quasi-transactional behavior that we want . . . we can't guarantee that either the old file, or the new one, would remain, before making the potentially expensive fsync() call. And no matter how frequently we do so, unless we fsync() before we rename, we still could lose not just the new file we're trying to write but the old file as well. Am I missing something? Is this a problem that even can be solved, short of adding new API calls to POSIX?
I do mostly app development, not system, but, as I understand it, many apps including KDE and Gnome are doing a bunch of small truncate-and-writes in style (a) or (b), presumably because style (c) would be too expensive due to the overhead of fsync().
Am I missing something, or couldn't they just do the writes in style (c), except not do the fsync() each time, but rather call fsync() every five seconds or so in a separate thread? Wouldn't that allow for the reasonably fast writes without the risk of corruption?
I see the current economic correction as a challenge, for sure, but (minus stupid government attempts to "fix" it) also a great opportunity. Any business that wishes to survive must become more competitive, and must learn to do more with less. Free Software is one of the tools that will help many of them to do so.
I expect to be laid off soon by the financial services megacorp I work for. The moment that happens, Free / Open Source Software will benefit in two ways. First, I will have vastly more time to contribute toward the software itself. Second, I'll be working with small and medium sized businesses to assess their software needs and find them ways to save money. I expect to find a great deal of unnecessary proprietary software, and therefore to introduce many of these businesses to Free alternatives where it makes business sense (which is not always, but quite often). I also expect to be able to make a decent living installing, configuring, supporting, and training people around these installations.
If you're dogmatic about a product, you're putting your religious beliefs (those that tack 'good' and 'evil' labels on things such as Microsoft, GNU or the open-source community) before the interests of your employer, and we wouldn't touch you with a 10-meter pole.
Too bad for you then. I prefer Free Software wherever possible, for solid business reasons which I am happy to demonstrate on request. I tolerate the rest, and even develop for Windows about half of my time on average. But even then, I leverage Free technologies such as Python, SharpDevelop and Cygwin to make this job easier and more productive and to deliver maximal business value to my employer. These tools, plus the knowledge and experience I've gained using Free Software, make me a better Windows developer than most of my peers (in fact, better than any of those who do not do pretty much the same thing I do). This approach has served both my current employer and me for the better part of 10 years now, even though it does not (yet) see the benefits of Freedom to quite the same extent as I. It's a shame you'd deny your company the benefits of someone who can not only "drive any car" as you put it, but also help you pick the one that is best for your particular needs.
In Cleveland, Ohio, the transit authority actually operates separate buses for commuter routes serving middle class riders (most originating from "park & ride" lots) and these are not bad at all. But, generally speaking, regular city buses stink like hell. So bad that if you sit on one you will smell for days, no matter how much you wash. Short of banning people from the bus if they are covered with urine, excrement, alcohol, vomit, or clothing that hasn't been washed in over a month, I don't know a solution to this problem. I understand that many people here are poor, as I once was . . . but what I don't understand is how a society can last when so many of its members don't have enough respect for themselves or those around them to even bathe once in a while. There are things that can be done to help deserving people pull themselves out of poverty, but I don't know how to deal with a person who has no respect for anyone.
Don't forget (e) We the People, by tolerating a rogue "government" purporting to act in our name, directly and knowingly contributed to the violence and death directed toward innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Thus, in the minds of some at least, making us legitimate targets.
(I don't believe it is ever legitimate to target innocent civilians, regardless of the excuse; however, it is hard for someone who knowingly tolerates murder in their name to profess complete innocence, and any argument in favor of "collective punishment" of Palestinians or Iraqis or anyone else is an equally valid argument in favor of what happened on 9/11. We can tolerate such arguments, and the endless cycle of carnage and suffering that results, OR we can start recognizing that this cycle of violence must be broken, and that better solutions to these and all other similar conflicts must be sought, found, and implemented, while there is still a human race left to save.)
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I am sorry that you were screwed over. But please assign the blame where it belongs. The drunk shithead and the asshole federal courts/judges. They had the responsibility not to harm you, but chose to ignore than responsibility and harm you anyway. You probably could not punish those bastards enough even if you tried, and I would not lose any sleep if you did.
But, disabled or not, no one has the DUTY to employ you against their will. If you wish to be employed, then you need to do the same thing everyone else must do, again whether disabled or not: find something you can do well, that other people would be willing to pay you to do. It may not be easy, but it is possible.
And, before you go on your "killing spree" please consider that these CEOs of these corporations are NOT responsible for what you are going through. The drunk shithead is. However, the great majority of them ARE directly and personally responsible for producing and distributing every product and every service that you and I and everyone else needs in order to survive and to live with any semblance of comfort. While a number of them are guilty of crimes of one sort or another, and should be held accountable, not one has been formally charged, tried, and convicted. You do NOT have the right to be their prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. You do NOT have all the facts you would need even to decide whether they should be charged. I feel bad for your suffering, but you would inflict even greater suffering on others, without any opportunity for them to defend themselves, and without any way of ensuring that the punishment you would mete out would actually fit the crime, or would actually make society better. If even 1% of us thought or acted the way you say you would, they would end up killing nearly everyone on the planet, and making every one of the living envy every one of the dead.
Austrian/an-cap here also. I would not count on being able to pay debt in valueless dollars. The banks would never allow this. Instead, I would expect a new currency to be introduced, and old debts to be "re-valued" in the new currency, suddenly transferring ownership of even more private wealth into the hands of banks (which by that time will be largely government-owned). Thus my advice is to continue to pay down debt even if one does expect massive inflation. But I'd want some gold and other commodities as well, preferably located outside the reach of the U.S. government, which may well try to confiscate both.
You might be onto something. Smart money has been working for some time to hedge against the impending decline (and possible collapse) of the dollar. For ordinary people, getting/staying out of debt, then buying real assets (silver, gold, oil, reasonably priced and secure real estate, etc.), would be my recommendation. However, accounting and tax rules make this more difficult for larger companies. What Microsoft is doing doesn't sound like a great option to me, but it might well be the least bad of the several bad options available to it. (Disclaimer: I hate Microsoft's products, business practices, extortion, etc. as much as anyone, but I must nonetheless concede that where financial and marketing matters are involved, they are smarter than most publicly-traded companies.)
Of course the way things are going, eventually this would run right up the middle of one big metro area.
American-style suburban development (aka "sprawl") depends on, among other things, plentiful energy and real personal incomes and wealth far (2-5x) above the world median. These conditions do not exist now and are unlikely to recur anytime soon. "Sprawl" thus is probably near or at an end.
On the other hand, this does not guarantee a mass flight back to the cities either. Suburbanization was, in large part, a reaction to the problems of U.S. urban centers - corruption, violence, high taxes, racial tensions, pollution, overcrowding, schools that are bad even by U.S. standards, and so forth. I for one have no wish to return to city living while these problems continue to worsen, but I'd do so in a heartbeat if it became reasonably safe and affordable to live and raise children there.
There are noncoercive methods of resistance. No government, no matter how violent, could last long without at least the implicit support of those whom it enslaves. If people were willing to refuse to be enslaved . . refuse to support the violence done by it in their name . . . it would collapse overnight. That has not happened very often but it has happened on occasion, for instance in Romania and a few other Eastern European states circa 1989. It could happen again. It could provoke a violent response of course . . . and probably would if only a few of us resisted. But if enough of us resisted, it could never get us all. If enough of us cared enough for freedom to risk even a little for it, we would have it. The fact that we don't is therefore at least as much our fault as government's. I have trouble looking at myself in the mirror when I recognize this. It is very easy to point out the corruption, cowardice and decadence of our so-called "leaders" and I do so regularly. It's much harder to admit one's own. But we must. Revolution truly does start in hearts and minds, and by far the most successful kind is the kind that occurs without violence, at least on the part of those who resist. Perhaps one day I will truly be ready for it, but until then, I suppose I deserve to be a slave. But my children, and their children, and all of our children, do not. I hope and pray I will leave them a free world, or if not, at least the most free world I can help to achieve.
There is a third option: work for the peaceful abolition of coercive government itself.
Coercive government, no matter how seemingly benign or "democratic," is nothing more or less than the institutionalized belief that some people have the right to rule over all the rest without their consent, but the rest are not entitled to rule even themselves. It is therefore very much a form of slavery. Like all other forms of slavery it is doomed to fail, but will continue to cause untold human suffering and evil of every kind until it ends. That makes it imperative that people of good will work together to alter its coercive and totalitarian nature (at a very minimum), or, preferably, to abolish it completely.
Without coercive government, people will learn non-coercive ways to prevent and when necessary resolve conflict. The link in my sig explains some of the details of how this might work.
Bruce, you are a smart guy, a tremendous supporter of Free and Open Source software, and probably 10x smarter than the average /. denizen. So hopefully you understand that while governments pretend to represent the interest of those who help appoint them, they in fact consistently represent their own. They consistently attempt to transfer power and money away from others and to themselves. They tend to be composed of people of great intelligence, ambition and drive, and initially they are often ethical and principled people as well. But there is something about a system of unlawful power and control over others that tends to erode ethics and principle over time. Every decision tends to be a compromise between the bad and the worse. Every decision represents an attempt to force some people to do the will of others, to act against their own interests, under threat of prison rape and death. The "decision" is merely which lobbying group gets to be on top. Government is at its very core the institutionalization of one of the most evil religious beliefs that has ever existed: that some people have the right to control others without the latter's consent. You say you are "pro-government," yet you've demonstrated by your actions that you are neither evil nor stupid. The only other possibility is that you are misinformed; that you do not understand the nature of what it is that you support. I would like to challenge you to become informed. LewRockwell.com is one of many great places to start; the link in my sig is another. Both sites are unashamedly libertarian, as I am; however, you needn't be in order to understand and appreciate that government is evil. Actually, governments act against genuine liberal interests (e.g., the environment, free speech, due process, medical and religious freedom) just as often as conservative ones. You probably agree that the Bush administration was evil to the core, but every power the Bush regime appropriated for its own use still exists and even if you support the way Obama uses this power, eventually another regime will arise which you do not, and these powers will then be used against you. In the end, freedom and despotism are the only options; there is no in-between, because once power can be abused, it will be abused, and one will surely and inevitably give way to the other. By being "pro-government" you are throwing your hand in with the despots. I would urge you to reconsider.
That scares me. BASIC was designed to be a teaching tool. Now people are using Microsoft's version of it to write business-critical systems. I support these kinds of systems for a living, and it is rare for any of them to live beyond five years. Most fail not because of flaws in VB itself (though there are plenty), but because of poor programming practices, which VB tolerates and encourages in a way that most other languages do not. Perhaps Dijkstra was correct that "[i]t is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." A language forgiving of mistakes may be useful as a teaching tool but it is not necessarily the right thing to base our economies or livelihoods on. Minix is not nearly as bad as BASIC, but it remains to be seen whether it can be adapted to the needs of high-security environments when that was never its design goal to begin with.
You have a reasonable chance of improving your odds in a car if you drive safely and defensively. You are (or at least have the illusion of being) somewhat in control. While flying is almost infinitely safer, there is very little you can do to influence the chances of an accident, or to more than marginally improve your odds of surviving one. This is why many of us fear flying more than driving even knowing the latter is far more dangerous, and it also is why we fear terrorist attacks which are even less dangerous (at least at present): because we perceive that there is little to nothing we can do to protect ourselves against them.
Sure! From my handy-dandy English-to-Tech Manual-to-English translator:
According to precise how from unlikely sounding me hereto. Must needs question category name sewing needle rapprochement. Mucho lots of good knowling head phrases queryig well; show you macihine human texts swimmingly.
We know (because of AIDS) that it is possible to craft viruses with very specific traits that attack very limited subsets of the population, and mostly ignore others. This one sounds like an equal-opportunity killer. It might be a deliberate attempt to cull the population on a very broad basis, since it seems likely to have exactly that effect, but I doubt very highly that it was designed by one specific nation-state to target the members of another.
We (including the adherents of the closest thing to the faith I believe to be objectively correct) still are a LONG way from living up to "thou shalt not kill." We tolerate and even encourage murder as long as it is done by states, and to people we do not closely identify with. Frankly, we have no consistent morals other than acting in ways calculated to make others like us. We are horrifically selfish beings (myself included, unfortunately). We've simply invented tons of ways to convince ourselves otherwise, religion included. We still have yet found a way to change ourselves.
I had terrible problems with my teeth right up until the point that I started to rinse my mouth daily with hydrogen peroxide and (next) sodium bicarbonate before bed. The poor bacteria simply have no defense against this, and no they will never develop an immunity to HP, ever.
Umm.... are you sure? If I understand this article correctly, virtually all organisms possess some ability to break down HP naturally, and it is not a stretch to imagine that some would have a greater ability to do so than others and would pass this ability on to their descendants and so forth. Which isn't to say that your strategy is necessarily a bad idea, but only that nature sometimes does manage to work around our best efforts to thwart it.
Can I audit their code so I can know for sure, or pay someone else to do so? I can with OpenBSD, or any Linux distribution, or any other piece of open-source code. If not, then there is no way to know whether it is more or less secure. Openness is a necessary prerequisite, not necessarily to security itself, but to the ability to verify that security.
It does not follow that just because unauthorized use of software may be wrong, cooperating with an organized extortion ring such as the BSA is therefore right. It is not. The BSA does far more than merely enforce compliance with licensing restrictions; it also extorts money from organizations that may well have valid licenses, but can't prove it. Proof of licensing compliance is inherently difficult. But in a free society, the burden always must be on the accuser who wishes to accuse someone of wrongdoing. It should never be on the accused to prove his/her/its innocence. The BSA insists that they do, and, when they cannot, extorts large amounts of money to which neither it nor its member companies are entitled. This is wrong, and I would not voluntarily cooperate with it under any circumstance whatever (although I would not condone or willingly participate in the unauthorized use of proprietary software either).
In cities like NYC this is considered a serious offense because you are creating gridlock. But no matter where you are it is a good idea (and, in some places, a legal requirement) that you enter an intersection only if/when there is sufficient room to leave it again.
Mr. Ts'O . . . I guess I'm still confused about the "proper" behavior of both the app and the FS in this case. Clearly an app should not make assumptions beyond what POSIX guarantees, but unless we do, we would seem to have no way that is both clean and fast to preserve the quasi-transactional behavior that we want . . . we can't guarantee that either the old file, or the new one, would remain, before making the potentially expensive fsync() call. And no matter how frequently we do so, unless we fsync() before we rename, we still could lose not just the new file we're trying to write but the old file as well. Am I missing something? Is this a problem that even can be solved, short of adding new API calls to POSIX?
I do mostly app development, not system, but, as I understand it, many apps including KDE and Gnome are doing a bunch of small truncate-and-writes in style (a) or (b), presumably because style (c) would be too expensive due to the overhead of fsync().
Am I missing something, or couldn't they just do the writes in style (c), except not do the fsync() each time, but rather call fsync() every five seconds or so in a separate thread? Wouldn't that allow for the reasonably fast writes without the risk of corruption?
Comparing Bush to a chimp is considered fair game. Comparing Obama to one is considered unacceptable.
If I were a chimp, I would be outraged by either comparison.
I see the current economic correction as a challenge, for sure, but (minus stupid government attempts to "fix" it) also a great opportunity. Any business that wishes to survive must become more competitive, and must learn to do more with less. Free Software is one of the tools that will help many of them to do so.
I expect to be laid off soon by the financial services megacorp I work for. The moment that happens, Free / Open Source Software will benefit in two ways. First, I will have vastly more time to contribute toward the software itself. Second, I'll be working with small and medium sized businesses to assess their software needs and find them ways to save money. I expect to find a great deal of unnecessary proprietary software, and therefore to introduce many of these businesses to Free alternatives where it makes business sense (which is not always, but quite often). I also expect to be able to make a decent living installing, configuring, supporting, and training people around these installations.
are working on Perl 6.
If you're dogmatic about a product, you're putting your religious beliefs (those that tack 'good' and 'evil' labels on things such as Microsoft, GNU or the open-source community) before the interests of your employer, and we wouldn't touch you with a 10-meter pole.
Too bad for you then. I prefer Free Software wherever possible, for solid business reasons which I am happy to demonstrate on request. I tolerate the rest, and even develop for Windows about half of my time on average. But even then, I leverage Free technologies such as Python, SharpDevelop and Cygwin to make this job easier and more productive and to deliver maximal business value to my employer. These tools, plus the knowledge and experience I've gained using Free Software, make me a better Windows developer than most of my peers (in fact, better than any of those who do not do pretty much the same thing I do). This approach has served both my current employer and me for the better part of 10 years now, even though it does not (yet) see the benefits of Freedom to quite the same extent as I. It's a shame you'd deny your company the benefits of someone who can not only "drive any car" as you put it, but also help you pick the one that is best for your particular needs.
joe@joe ~ $ sudo emerge kino
In Cleveland, Ohio, the transit authority actually operates separate buses for commuter routes serving middle class riders (most originating from "park & ride" lots) and these are not bad at all. But, generally speaking, regular city buses stink like hell. So bad that if you sit on one you will smell for days, no matter how much you wash. Short of banning people from the bus if they are covered with urine, excrement, alcohol, vomit, or clothing that hasn't been washed in over a month, I don't know a solution to this problem. I understand that many people here are poor, as I once was . . . but what I don't understand is how a society can last when so many of its members don't have enough respect for themselves or those around them to even bathe once in a while. There are things that can be done to help deserving people pull themselves out of poverty, but I don't know how to deal with a person who has no respect for anyone.
Don't forget (e) We the People, by tolerating a rogue "government" purporting to act in our name, directly and knowingly contributed to the violence and death directed toward innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Thus, in the minds of some at least, making us legitimate targets.
(I don't believe it is ever legitimate to target innocent civilians, regardless of the excuse; however, it is hard for someone who knowingly tolerates murder in their name to profess complete innocence, and any argument in favor of "collective punishment" of Palestinians or Iraqis or anyone else is an equally valid argument in favor of what happened on 9/11. We can tolerate such arguments, and the endless cycle of carnage and suffering that results, OR we can start recognizing that this cycle of violence must be broken, and that better solutions to these and all other similar conflicts must be sought, found, and implemented, while there is still a human race left to save.)