so it's probably the first instance of interesting business practices by MS
Starting up after dumpster diving for BASIC interpreter source code wasn't interesting enough?
The MS business model has always been to sell something that has already been demonstrated as a success by someone else and then use lawyers to stop the next in line doing the same thing. It's not unique (outside of computing) and it's not as bad as some of the practices of Cisco, HP etc (and MS being underhanded enough to deal with clones led to the cheap PC) - the only tragedy is they came to dominate so there wasn't really a lot of other stuff to copy and compete with. That's probably a major reason why computers generally still suck to use compared to what we would have expected by now. The MS Windows 10 desktop looks like a linux desktop from before this site even existed and the back end is nowhere near as good - how pathetic is that?
If the USSR had planted Rand as a conspiracy to fuck up US politics they couldn't have planned it better (which is of course why it was an accident and not a conspiracy).
That is pretty well the basis of the first couple of years of an engineering degree is about, which you would know if your title was earned instead of bestowed by HR to make a technician feel more important.
No he said "I took the initiative in creating the internet" as quoted and not your personal interpretation which makes zero sense as long as context is considered. You interpretation is something like pretending someone saying "good morning" has suggested that they have personally made the sun rise and simply makes you look ridiculous. Gore was in politics, everyone should know that (even someone like me from outside the US that doesn't have a political dog in the fight), of course he didn't invent the internet, he just tossed money in the direction of the people who did.
Can we get back to having something vaguely like a tech site instead of Reds versus Blues?
Either way it seems chronically fucked up and a recipie for taking a back seat in world affairs while China, India etc are moving towards giving millions the sort of education we used to value. You don't need critical thinking in a country if your ambition is reduced to making movies and selling stuff to tourists.
I've done weeks like that during plant shutdowns but never for more than five weeks in a row. Possible, but stupid for a wide range of reasons. Medical interns put in those sort of hours too but get sleep here and there during that time when they are on duty. Not just possible, but widespread, and stupid for an even wider range of reasons.
That's the libertarian dream - power to the powerful and the rest can go hang if they can't afford to pay a lawyer to impose some power. Hopefully I'm dumbed that down enough so that those who will be offended by it can understand before their replies about how that isn't a "real" libertarian view, just that bunch over there that call themselves libertarians but somehow are not.
ZFS raidz2 is pretty well RAID6 with an awareness of what is going on with the files in the array giving a variety of improvements (eg. resilver time normally being vastly shorter than a RAID6 rebuild time). A few years of seeing RAID6 in action was ultimately what drove me to ZFS on hardware that's perfectly capable of doing RAID6. Anyway, the "raid only has five more years" article keeps on getting warmed up, and keeps getting disproved by the very reasons given for the RAID use by date. Increasing capacity has only been possible by increasing the data density on the disks which means the heads pick up more information - thus faster read and write speeds. Better controllers also made a massive difference. Now dedicating lots of cycles to many cores of fast CPUs (instead of the processors in the controllers) is once again making a massive difference. It's only three hours to do a scrub on a 12 x 1TB 7200rpm drive system here with an i5 CPU and it would take close to the same to resilver a new drive. That is six mirrors so faster than raidz or raidz2, but still, it's not a huge amount of time to replace drives now even though that's bigger than the 500GB or so that was supposed to take forever to rebuild.
No point nitpicking just because the "b" denoting Megabits was forgotten. A speed of 200Mb/s is not huge but it's not too bad either, even though a fairly old machine (6 years) with a few disks in an array can get close to five times that and saturate gigabit (or even twice over if a second connection is going somewhere else).
I've seen PDFs almost that big that were made by printing out large MS Word documents and then scanning them at 600dpi, 24 bit color. For added fun they used full sentences, including punctuation and variable whitespace, as their filenames. Various problems associated with making and opening such things I have been assured are due to a slow gigabit network and "crappy ten year old" i7 machines and not whoever decided to not just save as PDF. A few versions of files done that way and you've got GB and vast amounts of shredded paper before you know it. I'm not sure that some people even get the point of using computers in an office.
It's a block size vs available space issue so 90% full kills performance on small drives with big blocks (eg. SSDs from a couple of years back) but at 90% of 4TB you've still got a vast quantity of available blocks so it still performs very well. So although I'm not the poster above I've had experience of both - the percent full number is only a rough guide and falls down when the block size is very small compared with the available space.
The linked article used to be about how RAID was going to stop working in 2005 or similar. It didn't because disks and controllers got much faster as well as dealing with more capacity, while the premise assumed nothing but a change in capacity. So now we have arrays 10x larger that rebuild in less than half the time of the old ones. We also have stuff like ZFS that acts like RAID6 in many ways (with raidz2) but can have much shorter rebuild (resilver) times because it only copies data instead of rebuilding the full capacity of the disk like a hardware RAID controller would do. I'd expect someone running FreeNAS to know more than a journalist rewarming an old article that was a poor prediction in the first place, but I suppose seeing it in magazine format does make it look more credible.
It's 2014 - just get a shitload of cheap small drives and stripe across a lot of mirrors if you can't put up with the speed of one drive. Even if they are old and slow laptop (or "green") drives if you have enough of them it's still going to be faster than short stroking a single drive even if it is 10k rpm and SAS. If budget is a problem, then yes, get the couple of percent improvement from only using part of the drive instead of doubling the speed or more with mirrors.
But does that server use local disc? The discussion is a bit closer to the metal here than something in a virtual machine dealing with data on a SAN even though that technically is also a server. It's just not a file server.
Writing a program that demands admin rights when it does not need them (eg. to put a lock file in the root of the system drive instead of elsewhere for a purely arbitrary reason) is even lazier.
Sometimes it's better to go after the root cause of the problem and get the developers that have been left behind to understand that it's the 21st century and their desktop software is likely to be running in a multi-user, networked, multi-core, 64 bit environment. There are far too many that can't even get ONE of those things in the list right which is a major part of why so many MS Windows systems are drowning in a malware swamp. We need to get away from the "we've always done it this way" culture of being acceptable when the way it's "always been done" only makes sense on single user systems with no network connection.
grant a specific whitelist of additional privileges to the users who need to use said application
So what do you suggest when that is all of them? Apart from of course trying various methods to convince the developer to learn how to do his job properly?
However when you have inhouse software that only runs as admin because your VB jockeys haven't worked out that it's no longer 1995 then you are fucked - frequently - when each new wave of malware hits. MS Windows is no longer the problem. Losers who treat it like MSDOS and write software are the problem.
Name dropping? Hasn't everyone and their dog at least read Heart of Darkness? I'll bet it's still a set school text in a lot of places. Conrad was a popular writer in his time with contemporary technology and politics featuring in his novels so I think it's fair to compare him with a popular hard SF writer. He had some science in his fiction. Of course it would make far more sense to compare Conrad's two spy novels and Tom Clancy, but that would be cruel.
It's just the people that are utterly feral about the situation that need to change. One medical example is a city where all the orthopedic surgeons had played Rugby and for some reason nobody who hadn't passed the requirements for the medical specialty. Even the woman that thought she could get around the unspoken qualification by being a match doctor at state level games didn't pass despite high scores. So no girls or weedy nerds allowed. We've got similar shit festering in IT and it's dragging us down by creating monocultures where it manifests. So it's not about change unless there's counterproductive unwritten rules that probably need to be changed.
Actually CS classes were what engineering boys in the 1980s enrolled in if they wanted to meet girls (also they very easy subjects for the first two years). In 1987 the introductory CS subject at the university I attended was just over 50% female. Less than 1% in engineering. I don't know how many of that 50% ended up finding a job related to CS. I suspect it was very few of them.
Or maybe he just wrote about what he knew. Many of his settings were either like New York or a little Russian village after all. It could be argued that since most of the stuff was about ideas the setting and characterisation didn't matter so much. While most of his writing is good stuff he wasn't exactly Joseph Conrad so there's not so much focus on the people in the stories.
The legacy of "Charlie Wilson's War" means anyone who cares about the future is going to spend a bit of time checking details. If we'd asked our "allies" the Saudis for advice they would have recommended doing the same as them and giving ISIS money and guns. The real answer to the stability of the region is stop buying oil from the Saudis so that they can't fund terrorists. You'd think we would have worked that out in 9/11 considering where Bin Laden got his funding.
Slashdot Mirror
E17
Starting up after dumpster diving for BASIC interpreter source code wasn't interesting enough?
The MS business model has always been to sell something that has already been demonstrated as a success by someone else and then use lawyers to stop the next in line doing the same thing. It's not unique (outside of computing) and it's not as bad as some of the practices of Cisco, HP etc (and MS being underhanded enough to deal with clones led to the cheap PC) - the only tragedy is they came to dominate so there wasn't really a lot of other stuff to copy and compete with. That's probably a major reason why computers generally still suck to use compared to what we would have expected by now. The MS Windows 10 desktop looks like a linux desktop from before this site even existed and the back end is nowhere near as good - how pathetic is that?
If the USSR had planted Rand as a conspiracy to fuck up US politics they couldn't have planned it better (which is of course why it was an accident and not a conspiracy).
That is pretty well the basis of the first couple of years of an engineering degree is about, which you would know if your title was earned instead of bestowed by HR to make a technician feel more important.
No he said "I took the initiative in creating the internet" as quoted and not your personal interpretation which makes zero sense as long as context is considered.
You interpretation is something like pretending someone saying "good morning" has suggested that they have personally made the sun rise and simply makes you look ridiculous.
Gore was in politics, everyone should know that (even someone like me from outside the US that doesn't have a political dog in the fight), of course he didn't invent the internet, he just tossed money in the direction of the people who did.
Can we get back to having something vaguely like a tech site instead of Reds versus Blues?
Either way it seems chronically fucked up and a recipie for taking a back seat in world affairs while China, India etc are moving towards giving millions the sort of education we used to value.
You don't need critical thinking in a country if your ambition is reduced to making movies and selling stuff to tourists.
It was only a short post so I'm not sure why you didn't read to the end of the second sentence which is the one that addressed that.
I've done weeks like that during plant shutdowns but never for more than five weeks in a row. Possible, but stupid for a wide range of reasons. Medical interns put in those sort of hours too but get sleep here and there during that time when they are on duty. Not just possible, but widespread, and stupid for an even wider range of reasons.
That's the libertarian dream - power to the powerful and the rest can go hang if they can't afford to pay a lawyer to impose some power.
Hopefully I'm dumbed that down enough so that those who will be offended by it can understand before their replies about how that isn't a "real" libertarian view, just that bunch over there that call themselves libertarians but somehow are not.
ZFS raidz2 is pretty well RAID6 with an awareness of what is going on with the files in the array giving a variety of improvements (eg. resilver time normally being vastly shorter than a RAID6 rebuild time). A few years of seeing RAID6 in action was ultimately what drove me to ZFS on hardware that's perfectly capable of doing RAID6.
Anyway, the "raid only has five more years" article keeps on getting warmed up, and keeps getting disproved by the very reasons given for the RAID use by date. Increasing capacity has only been possible by increasing the data density on the disks which means the heads pick up more information - thus faster read and write speeds. Better controllers also made a massive difference. Now dedicating lots of cycles to many cores of fast CPUs (instead of the processors in the controllers) is once again making a massive difference. It's only three hours to do a scrub on a 12 x 1TB 7200rpm drive system here with an i5 CPU and it would take close to the same to resilver a new drive. That is six mirrors so faster than raidz or raidz2, but still, it's not a huge amount of time to replace drives now even though that's bigger than the 500GB or so that was supposed to take forever to rebuild.
No point nitpicking just because the "b" denoting Megabits was forgotten. A speed of 200Mb/s is not huge but it's not too bad either, even though a fairly old machine (6 years) with a few disks in an array can get close to five times that and saturate gigabit (or even twice over if a second connection is going somewhere else).
I've seen PDFs almost that big that were made by printing out large MS Word documents and then scanning them at 600dpi, 24 bit color. For added fun they used full sentences, including punctuation and variable whitespace, as their filenames. Various problems associated with making and opening such things I have been assured are due to a slow gigabit network and "crappy ten year old" i7 machines and not whoever decided to not just save as PDF. A few versions of files done that way and you've got GB and vast amounts of shredded paper before you know it. I'm not sure that some people even get the point of using computers in an office.
It's a block size vs available space issue so 90% full kills performance on small drives with big blocks (eg. SSDs from a couple of years back) but at 90% of 4TB you've still got a vast quantity of available blocks so it still performs very well.
So although I'm not the poster above I've had experience of both - the percent full number is only a rough guide and falls down when the block size is very small compared with the available space.
The linked article used to be about how RAID was going to stop working in 2005 or similar.
It didn't because disks and controllers got much faster as well as dealing with more capacity, while the premise assumed nothing but a change in capacity.
So now we have arrays 10x larger that rebuild in less than half the time of the old ones. We also have stuff like ZFS that acts like RAID6 in many ways (with raidz2) but can have much shorter rebuild (resilver) times because it only copies data instead of rebuilding the full capacity of the disk like a hardware RAID controller would do.
I'd expect someone running FreeNAS to know more than a journalist rewarming an old article that was a poor prediction in the first place, but I suppose seeing it in magazine format does make it look more credible.
It's 2014 - just get a shitload of cheap small drives and stripe across a lot of mirrors if you can't put up with the speed of one drive. Even if they are old and slow laptop (or "green") drives if you have enough of them it's still going to be faster than short stroking a single drive even if it is 10k rpm and SAS.
If budget is a problem, then yes, get the couple of percent improvement from only using part of the drive instead of doubling the speed or more with mirrors.
But does that server use local disc?
The discussion is a bit closer to the metal here than something in a virtual machine dealing with data on a SAN even though that technically is also a server. It's just not a file server.
Yes I know, but throttling users who set poor limits is generally frowned upon and tends to hurt your fingers after a while.
Writing a program that demands admin rights when it does not need them (eg. to put a lock file in the root of the system drive instead of elsewhere for a purely arbitrary reason) is even lazier.
Sometimes it's better to go after the root cause of the problem and get the developers that have been left behind to understand that it's the 21st century and their desktop software is likely to be running in a multi-user, networked, multi-core, 64 bit environment. There are far too many that can't even get ONE of those things in the list right which is a major part of why so many MS Windows systems are drowning in a malware swamp. We need to get away from the "we've always done it this way" culture of being acceptable when the way it's "always been done" only makes sense on single user systems with no network connection.
So what do you suggest when that is all of them? Apart from of course trying various methods to convince the developer to learn how to do his job properly?
However when you have inhouse software that only runs as admin because your VB jockeys haven't worked out that it's no longer 1995 then you are fucked - frequently - when each new wave of malware hits.
MS Windows is no longer the problem. Losers who treat it like MSDOS and write software are the problem.
Name dropping? Hasn't everyone and their dog at least read Heart of Darkness? I'll bet it's still a set school text in a lot of places. Conrad was a popular writer in his time with contemporary technology and politics featuring in his novels so I think it's fair to compare him with a popular hard SF writer. He had some science in his fiction.
Of course it would make far more sense to compare Conrad's two spy novels and Tom Clancy, but that would be cruel.
It's just the people that are utterly feral about the situation that need to change. One medical example is a city where all the orthopedic surgeons had played Rugby and for some reason nobody who hadn't passed the requirements for the medical specialty. Even the woman that thought she could get around the unspoken qualification by being a match doctor at state level games didn't pass despite high scores. So no girls or weedy nerds allowed.
We've got similar shit festering in IT and it's dragging us down by creating monocultures where it manifests.
So it's not about change unless there's counterproductive unwritten rules that probably need to be changed.
Actually CS classes were what engineering boys in the 1980s enrolled in if they wanted to meet girls (also they very easy subjects for the first two years). In 1987 the introductory CS subject at the university I attended was just over 50% female. Less than 1% in engineering.
I don't know how many of that 50% ended up finding a job related to CS. I suspect it was very few of them.
Or maybe he just wrote about what he knew. Many of his settings were either like New York or a little Russian village after all. It could be argued that since most of the stuff was about ideas the setting and characterisation didn't matter so much.
While most of his writing is good stuff he wasn't exactly Joseph Conrad so there's not so much focus on the people in the stories.
The legacy of "Charlie Wilson's War" means anyone who cares about the future is going to spend a bit of time checking details.
If we'd asked our "allies" the Saudis for advice they would have recommended doing the same as them and giving ISIS money and guns. The real answer to the stability of the region is stop buying oil from the Saudis so that they can't fund terrorists. You'd think we would have worked that out in 9/11 considering where Bin Laden got his funding.