Whereas most people in the UK consider the Euro court of human rights to be a bunch of interfering busy bodys or jobsworths, and in general most of the rulings they come up with do come across as 'annoying'. Ruling like this however are the reason the court was set up. I do hope this ruling stands and that this court will continue to keep its eye on privacy issues like this and prove to the population in general that it does have a purpose.
Unfortunately, when you've got a general public which is by and large fairly happy with the job the police are doing, places absolute faith in the science and knows little or nothing of miscarriages of justice, rulings like this tend to reinforce such views.
Well, if this ruling didn't stand, the following could take place: A person is arrested for sexual assault. As part of the standard procedure, the police take a DNA sample. It doesn't match the victim, and that person is released. Later, another victim comes forward and they run a test on the DNA taken from the assault. This time it does match, and although the victim didn't know the attacker, the attacker is thus arrested. With this ruling, what they're saying now is that this hypothetical person would walk, because the DNA sample would not be in the database.
Which is true.
Except I don't know (and I'd love to find out) - how many cases have there been where DNA evidence from people who've never been convicted or even charged have been used to successfully solve a crime?
Note I'm explicitly excluding DNA which was kept from people who were later convicted.
Either way, if this decision went in favor of Pystar, I don't see it being anything but good for the other major computer manufacturers.
In the short term, maybe. But in the longterm Apple would lose all the nice margin they get on hardware right now - and without that margin, there's no money to develop OS X.
Because they didn't build their business around patents or specifications, and once their business really took off the only logical place it could expand to was to compete with others selling software for their platform (eg. Borland, Lotus, Corel).
That's pretty generous. My guess is that the HMO will hem and haw about your claim until it's too late to save you, then approve it. That way, they can say that they can claim the best intentions without spending a dime.
Dead people usually stop paying insurance premiums.
Macs used to have 15% to 20% marketshare in the early 1990's. Now they have less than 10%, when they had the Mac Clones they really sold a lot of them.
If Apple allowed Mac Clones again, I am sure Macs could easily capture that 20% all over again.
I'm sure they could.
But how would they finance the continued development of OS X if they have to compete with the likes of Dell on hardware?
The problem is that Exchange has put Microsoft in a very powerful position. I don't care what others say about products like Citadel, OpenGroupware, Zimbra or whatever, quite simply none of them integrate with Outlook anywhere near as well. (Yes, I've set them up in test environments). And while you can whine "But microsoft make that hard!!11", the executive who wants a shared calendar which appears on his smartphone and Outlook doesn't care about that. He cares about his calendar. And he didn't employ you to whine.
As soon as it looks like some Exchange plugin is becoming mainstream, Microsoft integrate the same functionality into Exchange (see also: Blackberry, ActiveSync over the air). This is something they've shied away from in Windows lately, mainly for anti-trust reasons, but those antitrust cases never even looked at Exchange. If that functionality happens to be something that F/OSS can't do very well (push email to smartphones is a damn good example), so much the better.
One thing I have always thought was interesting, was that MS doesn't write/sell any software to track licensing compliance themselves. I used to think that was a mistake on their part, but after hearing/seeing how much it nets them in audits, it was a genius move on their part!
It's worse than that. I've looked into license management and auditing software; I found out a few interesting things:
Most software either checks the "Add/remove programs" registry entries (won't pick up pirated copies of things which don't appear there) or checks for every executable without having the intelligence to boil the list of executables down to the applications which are actually installed (results in thousands of things showing up as being installed). This may be OK if you're the BSA and the company on the wrong end of the audit is paying for your time, it certainly isn't if you're doing this pre-emptively.
Few auditing products check for things like fonts. Yet font foundries are notoriously litigious and will happily get involved if a third-party audit shows up unlicensed fonts.
Management of the application which does the auditing itself is, as often as not, like stepping back in time 10 years. "Go to every PC you want to audit and click start, run, setup".
(This is the good one) Most of the commercial license management/audit packages have significantly more obnoxious licenses than the software that you're trying to audit
Microsoft created an entire market with operating systems.
In larger systems, an operating system is something which you stick with, often for the life of the hardware or longer. And if the hardware lasts 10 years, so does the OS.
New versions of the OS come out from time to time and it may be the case that hardware failure forces upgrade occasionally - but by and large, it's not something you do unless you really can't help it.
But that's not how Windows has been sold for the last 20 years.
I like the look of Macs and OSX, but Apple products are still frightfully expensive here in Europe (well, UK/IRL at any rate)
They're expensive the world over. They're a luxury product and as such command a luxury price - put simply, Apple have not, do not and will not produce an equivalent to the cheap tacky £300 laptop that Dell offer.
If you're already experienced and have a good job in IT without a degree, great!
However, I've interviewed and worked with people with and without degrees. It may not be the case later on in your career, but early on you can tell the difference a mile away.
I have found that those with degrees have much greater ability to pick things up under their own steam, and the theoretical knowledge is more helpful than you'd imagine because it means that you spend less time guessing what a problem is and more time being able to work it out properly.
It may be tempting in the current economy to get a job and so avoid all the debt that accompanies a degree - but the recession won't last forever, and while it's going on you'll be competing for work with a lot of people with far greater qualifications who may well be prepared to drop their salary expectations just to get food on the table. To my thinking, sitting out a recession in college is a very smart move. You're not seriously looking for work in your chosen profession at a time where there is little work to be found, and with any luck the economy will be recovering when you graduate and you'll find a job that much more easily.
It's referred to as 'Exam Technique' and is total bullshit. But hey, I did it, and got 11A*s, so who am I to complain? Anyway, things seem a little better at A- (AS-) Level, from what I've seen so far.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say from what you've said that you're only doing your A/AS levels now.
I did my GCSEs in 1995, A levels in 1997. (Didn't do the "5 AS, take 3 on to A-levels next year" back then).
That really isn't very long ago. A lot of people bemoaning a drop in standards are comparing with things 30 or 40 years ago.
You'd come out of your GCSEs with reasonable grades, spend all summer swaggering around thinking "Yeah, I know what I'm doing, I'm almighty clever", come back for the sixth form and in the first week... Oh. My. God. The gap was absolutely huge, and even with teachers telling you this it doesn't really hit home until you see it for real.
If the best you can say is "a little better", then I am genuinely worried.
The problem here is cultural. We, at least here in the US and apparently in the UK as well, do not have a culture that places a high value on education in its own rite.
"Right". "Rite" in this context would be talking about rituals and magic, and I don't think we're discussing Hogwarts.
(On a more serious note, kids can get bullied horrifically basically for being clever, so I'd say that culture is a huge problem here. I have found university and most professions that being halfway good at what you are doing will tend to earn respect, but of course that doesn't help much for the first 13 years of education).
In the U.S., #4 is incorrect. I'm not sure how things are in the UK. But in America, private schools pay less than public schools. Is that different from the UK? I believe the reasoning is that teaching in a private school is more desirable than teaching in a public school. Where I live, which has terrible terrible schools, teachers get paid higher. It's like hazard pay.
From what I know of the UK (which isn't a great deal about specifics concerning wages and working conditions, so take with as much salt as you think it needs), there is a nationwide payscale within the state system which pays based on experience and responsibilities. Private schools are free to set their own payscales, but would usually guarantee to equal or better the state system.
What often attracts teachers to the private schools is that you generally have smaller class sizes, disruptive pupils can and will be expelled and parents are encouraging their children's education. All of which makes the job a whole heck of a lot more pleasant.
The difference between now and then is that in the 1950s 'O' levels were taken by about 20% of school children and were designed by the universities to prepare students for further study. GCSEs serve a different purpose: They are designed to be accessible to all students and to measure a broader range of skills and knowledge. GCSEs are certainly easier than 'O' levels, but they do the job they are designed to do well.
"Accessible" is one thing.
"Meaningless" is quite another.
The problem is, in the rush to give every pupil a good grade, the grades at the top start to mean less and less.
Rather than being obsessed with book learning, we should perhaps accept that some people are quite simply not very good at that kind of thing, and instead offer some useful alternative. We had such a system 40 years ago - it was called apprenticeship and it was something you went into quite young - but today it seems that nobody quite knows what to do with 15-17 year olds who aren't particularly academically-minded.
This is not an argument anyone in a position of power can possibly win. More students fail? Your teaching standards are falling, your education system is lousy. More students pass? Your exams are too easy.
So instead, let's look at what organisations which aren't obliged to follow the state-designed education system think.
Several universities are introducing entrance exams, whereas previously this was more-or-less exclusive to Oxford and Cambridge.
Several universities are having to introduce more basic maths into their first year syllabus to get students up to speed.
Private schools are seriously considering dropping the state-set exams (GCSEs and A-levels) in favour of something else such as the International Baccalaureate. I myself have looked at papers which were set only 5 or 6 years after I left school and exams which I should by rights have been completely lost on - I could immediately see how to answer at least half the questions.
On the other hand, a lot of countries in north Africa and the Middle East consider that education is the only way they're going to improve their lot in the long term. Tunisia, for example, spends a third of its money on education and children leave school speaking at least three languages reasonably fluently. Many of the Arab emirates are doing something similar - they know the oil's not going to be there forever, and they want to be prepared for the day the wells dry up. No chance they can do that if most of their population can hardly read.
As for China - if you think you can move all your manufacturing out there and the locals won't one day say to themselves "Hang on a minute. We own all the factories, we know exactly how to build the kind of things that they buy in the West - why don't we design them ourselves and keep all the money?" you're living on another planet.
20 years from now, the West isn't going to be the technical research place it is today.
NFS semantics require that the data be stably written on disk before it can be client's RPC request can be acknowledged. This can cause some very nasty performance problems. One of the things that can help is to use a second hard drive to store an external journal. Since the journal is only written during normal operation (you need it when you recover after an system crash), and the writes are contiguous on disk, this eliminates nearly all of the seek delays associated with the journal. If you use data journalling, so that data blocks are written to the journal, the fact that no writes are required means that the data can be written onto stable storage very quickly, and thus will accelerate your NFS clients. If you want things to go _really_ fast, use a battery-backed NVRAM for your external journal device.
Interesting. I wonder if something similar would help with filesystems which are used as the backend to a database - no ACID-compliant database will return until such time as the data is stable on disk.
There's no reason (IMHO) not to expose the LVM API to the filesystem layer of course, allowing the filesystem to make these determinations intelligently as ZFS dos.
Except that now a change to the LVM API requires both the maintainers of the LVM tools and the maintainers of the filesystem tools to update their code. Sooner or later, you can't change your API much at all because any change would break too much existing work.
All these fancy features, but we are still using filename extensions (eg..zip) to specify data types.
Did OOP even happen?
I really don't know what you're talking about.
Apple Macs don't need the filetype specified in a file extension. Neither does Gnome, nor (IIRC) KDE - and the underlying OS certainly doesn't.
In fact, if you go back in time a little, RISC OS didn't either - it stored the filetype in a small piece of metadata. (And applications were actually directories but with a filename starting in "!" - the OS automatically ran a program called "!Run" inside the directory when you double clicked on it. OS X does something fairly similar today).
The only operating system I can think of in common use today which does is Windows - but seeing as we're talking about Linux filesystems, you can't possibly be referring to that.
...about the impossibility of running DirectX 10 on Windows XP. If you can run it on software you'll be able to run it on any OS version.
Gee... that was another lie from Redmond, why am I not surprised... maybe 'cause I do run he DirectX 10 hack on my XP and no it didn't raise the CPU usage (as claimed be the union of MS Windoze Vista Fanboyz)... it lowered it.
It was always a lie. Basic computer science theory shows that.
Now, if they'd said "We can't port DirectX 10 to XP because it requires a whole bunch of changes to the underlying graphics system which simply aren't practical to make", or "We can't port DirectX 10 to XP because the sales and marketing teams won't let us", either of these may have been closer to the truth. But would have been significantly less snappy, and when was the last time Microsoft explained the reasoning behind their decisions in any great detail?
Problem is, for the last 10 or 15 years there's been a trend to move more and more away from hardware and into the driver. The earliest instances of this were WinPrinters and WinModems, though today there's lots of hardware which for all practical purposes can never work without a proprietary driver and/or a binary blob.
I can't speak for RMS, but I have a problem with such hardware because basically it becomes obsolete the minute the manufacturer says "Right, no more drivers for that". Even if there's plenty of life left in my hardware, even if I was unlucky enough to buy it only a few months before the manufacturer took that decision, it means that it's tied to my current system unless by sheer blind luck the existing drivers work in the next major update.
Even proprietary blobs distributed with otherwise free Linux distributions F/OSS aren't immune. What if the manufacturer changes their mind or gets bought out by someone less sympathetic towards free software?
Slashdot Mirror
Whereas most people in the UK consider the Euro court of human rights to be a bunch of interfering busy bodys or jobsworths, and in general most of the rulings they come up with do come across as 'annoying'.
Ruling like this however are the reason the court was set up. I do hope this ruling stands and that this court will continue to keep its eye on privacy issues like this and prove to the population in general that it does have a purpose.
Unfortunately, when you've got a general public which is by and large fairly happy with the job the police are doing, places absolute faith in the science and knows little or nothing of miscarriages of justice, rulings like this tend to reinforce such views.
Well, if this ruling didn't stand, the following could take place: A person is arrested for sexual assault. As part of the standard procedure, the police take a DNA sample. It doesn't match the victim, and that person is released. Later, another victim comes forward and they run a test on the DNA taken from the assault. This time it does match, and although the victim didn't know the attacker, the attacker is thus arrested. With this ruling, what they're saying now is that this hypothetical person would walk, because the DNA sample would not be in the database.
Which is true.
Except I don't know (and I'd love to find out) - how many cases have there been where DNA evidence from people who've never been convicted or even charged have been used to successfully solve a crime?
Note I'm explicitly excluding DNA which was kept from people who were later convicted.
Either way, if this decision went in favor of Pystar, I don't see it being anything but good for the other major computer manufacturers.
In the short term, maybe. But in the longterm Apple would lose all the nice margin they get on hardware right now - and without that margin, there's no money to develop OS X.
Because they didn't build their business around patents or specifications, and once their business really took off the only logical place it could expand to was to compete with others selling software for their platform (eg. Borland, Lotus, Corel).
That's pretty generous. My guess is that the HMO will hem and haw about your claim until it's too late to save you, then approve it. That way, they can say that they can claim the best intentions without spending a dime.
Dead people usually stop paying insurance premiums.
Macs used to have 15% to 20% marketshare in the early 1990's. Now they have less than 10%, when they had the Mac Clones they really sold a lot of them.
If Apple allowed Mac Clones again, I am sure Macs could easily capture that 20% all over again.
I'm sure they could.
But how would they finance the continued development of OS X if they have to compete with the likes of Dell on hardware?
Agreed 100%.
The problem is that Exchange has put Microsoft in a very powerful position. I don't care what others say about products like Citadel, OpenGroupware, Zimbra or whatever, quite simply none of them integrate with Outlook anywhere near as well. (Yes, I've set them up in test environments). And while you can whine "But microsoft make that hard!!11", the executive who wants a shared calendar which appears on his smartphone and Outlook doesn't care about that. He cares about his calendar. And he didn't employ you to whine.
As soon as it looks like some Exchange plugin is becoming mainstream, Microsoft integrate the same functionality into Exchange (see also: Blackberry, ActiveSync over the air). This is something they've shied away from in Windows lately, mainly for anti-trust reasons, but those antitrust cases never even looked at Exchange. If that functionality happens to be something that F/OSS can't do very well (push email to smartphones is a damn good example), so much the better.
Only if you're analysing a relatively small amount of data.
I promise you that as soon as you go over that limit, the price will give you one hell of a shock.
One thing I have always thought was interesting, was that MS doesn't write/sell any software to track licensing compliance themselves. I used to think that was a mistake on their part, but after hearing/seeing how much it nets them in audits, it was a genius move on their part!
It's worse than that. I've looked into license management and auditing software; I found out a few interesting things:
Microsoft created an entire market with operating systems.
In larger systems, an operating system is something which you stick with, often for the life of the hardware or longer. And if the hardware lasts 10 years, so does the OS.
New versions of the OS come out from time to time and it may be the case that hardware failure forces upgrade occasionally - but by and large, it's not something you do unless you really can't help it.
But that's not how Windows has been sold for the last 20 years.
I like the look of Macs and OSX, but Apple products are still frightfully expensive here in Europe (well, UK/IRL at any rate)
They're expensive the world over. They're a luxury product and as such command a luxury price - put simply, Apple have not, do not and will not produce an equivalent to the cheap tacky £300 laptop that Dell offer.
If you're already experienced and have a good job in IT without a degree, great!
However, I've interviewed and worked with people with and without degrees. It may not be the case later on in your career, but early on you can tell the difference a mile away.
I have found that those with degrees have much greater ability to pick things up under their own steam, and the theoretical knowledge is more helpful than you'd imagine because it means that you spend less time guessing what a problem is and more time being able to work it out properly.
It may be tempting in the current economy to get a job and so avoid all the debt that accompanies a degree - but the recession won't last forever, and while it's going on you'll be competing for work with a lot of people with far greater qualifications who may well be prepared to drop their salary expectations just to get food on the table. To my thinking, sitting out a recession in college is a very smart move. You're not seriously looking for work in your chosen profession at a time where there is little work to be found, and with any luck the economy will be recovering when you graduate and you'll find a job that much more easily.
It's referred to as 'Exam Technique' and is total bullshit. But hey, I did it, and got 11A*s, so who am I to complain? Anyway, things seem a little better at A- (AS-) Level, from what I've seen so far.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say from what you've said that you're only doing your A/AS levels now.
I did my GCSEs in 1995, A levels in 1997. (Didn't do the "5 AS, take 3 on to A-levels next year" back then).
That really isn't very long ago. A lot of people bemoaning a drop in standards are comparing with things 30 or 40 years ago.
You'd come out of your GCSEs with reasonable grades, spend all summer swaggering around thinking "Yeah, I know what I'm doing, I'm almighty clever", come back for the sixth form and in the first week... Oh. My. God. The gap was absolutely huge, and even with teachers telling you this it doesn't really hit home until you see it for real.
If the best you can say is "a little better", then I am genuinely worried.
All joking aside, does anyone actually know how to write a test which tests understanding of the subject rather than ability to pass a test by rote?
The problem here is cultural. We, at least here in the US and apparently in the UK as well, do not have a culture that places a high value on education in its own rite.
"Right". "Rite" in this context would be talking about rituals and magic, and I don't think we're discussing Hogwarts.
(On a more serious note, kids can get bullied horrifically basically for being clever, so I'd say that culture is a huge problem here. I have found university and most professions that being halfway good at what you are doing will tend to earn respect, but of course that doesn't help much for the first 13 years of education).
In the U.S., #4 is incorrect. I'm not sure how things are in the UK. But in America, private schools pay less than public schools. Is that different from the UK? I believe the reasoning is that teaching in a private school is more desirable than teaching in a public school. Where I live, which has terrible terrible schools, teachers get paid higher. It's like hazard pay.
From what I know of the UK (which isn't a great deal about specifics concerning wages and working conditions, so take with as much salt as you think it needs), there is a nationwide payscale within the state system which pays based on experience and responsibilities. Private schools are free to set their own payscales, but would usually guarantee to equal or better the state system.
What often attracts teachers to the private schools is that you generally have smaller class sizes, disruptive pupils can and will be expelled and parents are encouraging their children's education. All of which makes the job a whole heck of a lot more pleasant.
The difference between now and then is that in the 1950s 'O' levels were taken by about 20% of school children and were designed by the universities to prepare students for further study. GCSEs serve a different purpose: They are designed to be accessible to all students and to measure a broader range of skills and knowledge. GCSEs are certainly easier than 'O' levels, but they do the job they are designed to do well.
"Accessible" is one thing.
"Meaningless" is quite another.
The problem is, in the rush to give every pupil a good grade, the grades at the top start to mean less and less.
Rather than being obsessed with book learning, we should perhaps accept that some people are quite simply not very good at that kind of thing, and instead offer some useful alternative. We had such a system 40 years ago - it was called apprenticeship and it was something you went into quite young - but today it seems that nobody quite knows what to do with 15-17 year olds who aren't particularly academically-minded.
First, let's get one thing straight.
This is not an argument anyone in a position of power can possibly win. More students fail? Your teaching standards are falling, your education system is lousy. More students pass? Your exams are too easy.
So instead, let's look at what organisations which aren't obliged to follow the state-designed education system think.
Several universities are introducing entrance exams, whereas previously this was more-or-less exclusive to Oxford and Cambridge.
Several universities are having to introduce more basic maths into their first year syllabus to get students up to speed.
Private schools are seriously considering dropping the state-set exams (GCSEs and A-levels) in favour of something else such as the International Baccalaureate. I myself have looked at papers which were set only 5 or 6 years after I left school and exams which I should by rights have been completely lost on - I could immediately see how to answer at least half the questions.
On the other hand, a lot of countries in north Africa and the Middle East consider that education is the only way they're going to improve their lot in the long term. Tunisia, for example, spends a third of its money on education and children leave school speaking at least three languages reasonably fluently. Many of the Arab emirates are doing something similar - they know the oil's not going to be there forever, and they want to be prepared for the day the wells dry up. No chance they can do that if most of their population can hardly read.
As for China - if you think you can move all your manufacturing out there and the locals won't one day say to themselves "Hang on a minute. We own all the factories, we know exactly how to build the kind of things that they buy in the West - why don't we design them ourselves and keep all the money?" you're living on another planet.
20 years from now, the West isn't going to be the technical research place it is today.
NFS semantics require that the data be stably written on disk before it can be client's RPC request can be acknowledged. This can cause some very nasty performance problems. One of the things that can help is to use a second hard drive to store an external journal. Since the journal is only written during normal operation (you need it when you recover after an system crash), and the writes are contiguous on disk, this eliminates nearly all of the seek delays associated with the journal. If you use data journalling, so that data blocks are written to the journal, the fact that no writes are required means that the data can be written onto stable storage very quickly, and thus will accelerate your NFS clients. If you want things to go _really_ fast, use a battery-backed NVRAM for your external journal device.
Interesting. I wonder if something similar would help with filesystems which are used as the backend to a database - no ACID-compliant database will return until such time as the data is stable on disk.
There's no reason (IMHO) not to expose the LVM API to the filesystem layer of course, allowing the filesystem to make these determinations intelligently as ZFS dos.
Except that now a change to the LVM API requires both the maintainers of the LVM tools and the maintainers of the filesystem tools to update their code. Sooner or later, you can't change your API much at all because any change would break too much existing work.
Repeato ad absurdium...
All these fancy features, but we are still using filename extensions (eg. .zip) to specify data types.
Did OOP even happen?
I really don't know what you're talking about.
Apple Macs don't need the filetype specified in a file extension. Neither does Gnome, nor (IIRC) KDE - and the underlying OS certainly doesn't.
In fact, if you go back in time a little, RISC OS didn't either - it stored the filetype in a small piece of metadata. (And applications were actually directories but with a filename starting in "!" - the OS automatically ran a program called "!Run" inside the directory when you double clicked on it. OS X does something fairly similar today).
The only operating system I can think of in common use today which does is Windows - but seeing as we're talking about Linux filesystems, you can't possibly be referring to that.
...about the impossibility of running DirectX 10 on Windows XP.
If you can run it on software you'll be able to run it on any OS version.
Gee... that was another lie from Redmond, why am I not surprised... maybe 'cause I do run he DirectX 10 hack on my XP and no it didn't raise the CPU usage (as claimed be the union of MS Windoze Vista Fanboyz)... it lowered it.
It was always a lie. Basic computer science theory shows that.
Now, if they'd said "We can't port DirectX 10 to XP because it requires a whole bunch of changes to the underlying graphics system which simply aren't practical to make", or "We can't port DirectX 10 to XP because the sales and marketing teams won't let us", either of these may have been closer to the truth. But would have been significantly less snappy, and when was the last time Microsoft explained the reasoning behind their decisions in any great detail?
Problem is, for the last 10 or 15 years there's been a trend to move more and more away from hardware and into the driver. The earliest instances of this were WinPrinters and WinModems, though today there's lots of hardware which for all practical purposes can never work without a proprietary driver and/or a binary blob.
I can't speak for RMS, but I have a problem with such hardware because basically it becomes obsolete the minute the manufacturer says "Right, no more drivers for that". Even if there's plenty of life left in my hardware, even if I was unlucky enough to buy it only a few months before the manufacturer took that decision, it means that it's tied to my current system unless by sheer blind luck the existing drivers work in the next major update.
Even proprietary blobs distributed with otherwise free Linux distributions F/OSS aren't immune. What if the manufacturer changes their mind or gets bought out by someone less sympathetic towards free software?
What's the point of putting malware if it won't be run? Or did I miss something, and "autorun" actually works on UMS devices in Windows?
You did, it does.
We can test this theory by waiting for the anti-Hawking to run for public office.
Events since 20 January 2001 suggest this has already happened.