I'll elaborate (slightly) about ZFS if someone else will tell
me who John Siracusa is and why I should care what he writes...
I couldn't figure that out from TFA.
ZFS is a file system developed by Sun over the past several years.
But the important thing is, in this context, that the ZFS design
philosophy (never mind the actual design, which isn't what this
discussion is about) differs from that of ordinary file system
design. Most file systems make strong assumptions about reliability
of the
underlying block storage facility: there's some gizmo down there,
whether it be a disk (for itsy-bitsy systems), a RAID set (for
not so bitsy systems), or a SAN, that reliably stores and retrieves
blocks with reasonable performance. ZFS doesn't do this. It manages
many details of the storage layers -- it does RAID its own way (to
get around problems that conventional RAID doesn't solve), and does
volume management itself as well.
From the point of view of a UNIX/Linux file system person, this
seems very weird. However, these ideas are not really new or
revolutionary (there are new things in ZFS, but this philosophy
isn't one of them). It pretty much describes how network storage
vendors (NetApp, EMC, etc) have been building things all along.
I didn't see a smiley, so I'll assume you're not being sarcastic.
Google search is a tool for selling ads. That's it. It has everything to do with
Google getting paid by businesses in return for consideration.
Google AdWords is a tool for extorting money from businesses who are trapped into
only having one kind of promotion available. If you don't pony up some cash,
you're invisible.
And then it's just a race to see who can pony up the most cash. It'll certainly
made Google's job easier when they're just a portal for WalMart.
Nobody has the right to success, but everyone has the right to a fair
and level playing field.
The current reality is that for net-based services, Google's rank determines
whether your service gets customer views or not. Google doesn't care very much
about whether the rankings are fair -- why would they? They've got a near-monopoly on
the market, and companies treated unfairly have no recourse. The ranking system
only needs to be good enough to keep people from using another search engine -- and
most users don't care very much whether some small business is getting screwed
along the way as long as they can find a web site that will sell them widgets.
They'll keep
doing it this way until it becomes unprofitable, and I don't see that happening soon.
The point is that the nearest wormhole candidate is a bajillion miles away.
And since it's a black hole, that's really not a bad thing.
I prefer black holes that are distant and aloof.
... just send some probes through what seem to be black holes, and then
see if any of them come back.
Oh, wait, there's another small problem to address first -- all the known
black holes are a bajillion miles away. Maybe we should work on answering
the question of how to get there before we start to obsess about
what's on the other side. Or perhaps the multiverse is just teasing us,
saying "Hey, there's a portal here to another universe -- want to see
what's on the other side? Too bad you won't know for a few thousand years!
Psych!"
I apologize for our inability to communicate clearly on this, but we seem to be at an impasse.
The phrase "implied commitment" has no standard, accepted meaning, and the notion of
"offering a service" clearly means something different to you than the legal or business
interpretations of this term.
I find it odd that people get pissed off because Google is failing to do something that they're
under no obligation to do. There's not even an accusation that Google is acting in bad faith. Getting
angry at them makes as much sense as getting angry about the weather when it rains -- but of course,
there are people who do get angry about the weather.
If you hit me over the head with a wooden bat -- or even if you try to -- you
will be in violation of the law. It doesn't matter whether or not you said you would.
There's no technicality here. Head out of ass, please.
Google never promised you they'd protect your data. Ever. In fact, those terms
of use (that
you, and most other people, didn't read) specifically said that they cannot be held liable for loss of
your data. What you call an implied commitment is really just wishful thinking.
If you want to be pissed off, that's fine. Just point the stream of urine at the person
who didn't read the fine print, not Google.
Yes, but hosting all your data on Google is putting all your eggs in someone else's basket.
Someone who is under no obligation to ever give you back any of those eggs.
If you value your data, back it up. Or contract someone to do it for you.
Nothing new here.
as in, don't put all of your eggs in the same basket.
And don't count your chickens before they hatch.
Google has never made any binding promises about the
availability of many of its services or the data that
users entrust to them. If Google loses all your
email, tough noogies. They are not accountable.
Stop pretending that they are.
The NSF is supporting a bunch of researchers and
academics to think about the problem (which is fine;
that's what the NSF does) to the tune of tens of
millions of dollars. But this is a far cry
from "billions of dollars to replace all the software and hardware
in legacy systems." It's the owners of those systems
that are going to pay that.
IPv6 addresses many of the current problems.
IPv6 is a standard, supported by many vendors.
IPv6 plays nicely with IPv4, so you don't have
to break the world in order to deploy it.
IPv6 has been around for years...
... and IPv6 adoption is negligible.
Seriously, if we can't get people to adopt IPv6,
what's the chance that people are going to adopt
something more disruptive?
I've seen some of these proposals, and technically
they're interesting. From the perspective of getting
the market to move in a new direction, things will
have to get a lot worse before they're even taken
seriously.
Just to clarify, I'm only talking about computer programs.
Detecting plagarism in essays is even easier -- there are more
degrees of freedom in prose than in computer code (especially
when the code is written to conform to some style guide).
Funny, that's how we catch students who plagarize, too.
Coming up with the same algorithm isn't terribly unlikely.
Structuring it in the same way is not uncommon either.
Making exactly the same mistakes, however, is hard to believe.
They'll probably feel the same way that they do about
paying higher taxes to give someone else's kid a
better education, or some else's parents a better
senior center, or the people on a different street
a better sidewalk...
Part of being a community is pooling resources in to help others.
Even if you don't have any children of your own, for example,
someone paid for your schooling, and when you're an adult you
pay it back.
Of course, then there are the endless arguments about
exactly how this money should be spent...
The sad thing is, 90% of this stuff isn't software at all, but hardware.
People from the software side of the world tend to have no clue what is involved
in designing, validating, and manufacturing hardware. (as a simple example,
"FCC approval" isn't on your wish list, but without it, none of the other items
matter...)
If you can even get so far as taping out a design for "maybe a million, initially",
I'll eat my hat. And this is not a claim I make lightly -- my hat is particularly
large and
unappetizing.
... at the same conference, Bianca Schroeder presented a
paper
disk reliability that developed sophisticated statistical models for disk failures,
building on earlier work by Qin Xin
and dozen papers by John Elerath...
C'mon, slashdot. There were about twenty other papers presented at FAST this year.
Let's not focus only on the one with Google authors...
If online screen names were the same as real names, or if they could be made so for some subset of the population (i.e., people who would want to hide their identities for the wrong reasons) then this would make sense. But they're not.
Detterance seems like the right approach here: there's no way to prevent people from misbehaving, but you can make it costly. So let's say: go ahead and choose any screen name you want. If you use a fictitious screen name in a way related to a crime, then some extra penalty gets added in, no questions asked, no appeal.
Gack! Without the 250,000 (later 300,000) mice, the book doesn't lead up to anything.
But deconstructing things, the Fists are only really necessary to fight the army of mice.
And the drummers are probably too confusing to survive television... as are the Castle
Turing (and all the other puzzles after that).
I know I'll be branded a heretic, but I think you could make a pretty good screenplay
that stopped right around half-way through Nell's stay with the Vickys. The whole
Alchemist thing never appealed to me -- although it's essential to the message of
the book, it just was as fun to read as the adventures of Princess Nell.
The idea that "the person sitting in front of the keyboard should have complete
freedom to do whatever they want on the computer" is, at best, misleading.
The person who owns the computer should have that freedom, not some
random person who happens to be physically proximate. It's their
computer, not the operator's.
If Stallman just got upset about the rules laid down by the owners of the
assets he was permitted, at their discretion, to access, then he'd just be
a nut. This was just a trigger that got people thinking about control over
things they did own -- and whether certain things should even be owned in
the usual sense of the word.
Slashdot Mirror
Highly suspicious to base an analysis on this. How can they be sure of the provenance of these bullets?
After all, there still exist enough pieces of the true cross to build a cathedral, it is said.
I'd also be a bit creeped out dealing with someone who collects bullets for this reason. Weird.
That's fine, but the summary is quite clear: this is the "40 year anniversary of the first games hooked up to the television."
Otherwise, we'd be talking about how much fun it was to play with the Whirlwind displays.
ZFS is a file system developed by Sun over the past several years. But the important thing is, in this context, that the ZFS design philosophy (never mind the actual design, which isn't what this discussion is about) differs from that of ordinary file system design. Most file systems make strong assumptions about reliability of the underlying block storage facility: there's some gizmo down there, whether it be a disk (for itsy-bitsy systems), a RAID set (for not so bitsy systems), or a SAN, that reliably stores and retrieves blocks with reasonable performance. ZFS doesn't do this. It manages many details of the storage layers -- it does RAID its own way (to get around problems that conventional RAID doesn't solve), and does volume management itself as well.
From the point of view of a UNIX/Linux file system person, this seems very weird. However, these ideas are not really new or revolutionary (there are new things in ZFS, but this philosophy isn't one of them). It pretty much describes how network storage vendors (NetApp, EMC, etc) have been building things all along.
Google search is a tool for selling ads. That's it. It has everything to do with Google getting paid by businesses in return for consideration.
Google AdWords is a tool for extorting money from businesses who are trapped into only having one kind of promotion available. If you don't pony up some cash, you're invisible.
And then it's just a race to see who can pony up the most cash. It'll certainly made Google's job easier when they're just a portal for WalMart.
The current reality is that for net-based services, Google's rank determines whether your service gets customer views or not. Google doesn't care very much about whether the rankings are fair -- why would they? They've got a near-monopoly on the market, and companies treated unfairly have no recourse. The ranking system only needs to be good enough to keep people from using another search engine -- and most users don't care very much whether some small business is getting screwed along the way as long as they can find a web site that will sell them widgets.
They'll keep doing it this way until it becomes unprofitable, and I don't see that happening soon.
The point is that the nearest wormhole candidate is a bajillion miles away. And since it's a black hole, that's really not a bad thing. I prefer black holes that are distant and aloof.
I saw that movie. It didn't end well for the human race.
Oh, wait, there's another small problem to address first -- all the known black holes are a bajillion miles away. Maybe we should work on answering the question of how to get there before we start to obsess about what's on the other side. Or perhaps the multiverse is just teasing us, saying "Hey, there's a portal here to another universe -- want to see what's on the other side? Too bad you won't know for a few thousand years! Psych!"
I find it odd that people get pissed off because Google is failing to do something that they're under no obligation to do. There's not even an accusation that Google is acting in bad faith. Getting angry at them makes as much sense as getting angry about the weather when it rains -- but of course, there are people who do get angry about the weather.
You can think that's odd, if you like.
Google never promised you they'd protect your data. Ever. In fact, those terms of use (that you, and most other people, didn't read) specifically said that they cannot be held liable for loss of your data. What you call an implied commitment is really just wishful thinking.
If you want to be pissed off, that's fine. Just point the stream of urine at the person who didn't read the fine print, not Google.
If you value your data, back it up. Or contract someone to do it for you. Nothing new here.
And don't count your chickens before they hatch.
Google has never made any binding promises about the availability of many of its services or the data that users entrust to them. If Google loses all your email, tough noogies. They are not accountable. Stop pretending that they are.
The NSF is supporting a bunch of researchers and academics to think about the problem (which is fine; that's what the NSF does) to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. But this is a far cry from "billions of dollars to replace all the software and hardware in legacy systems." It's the owners of those systems that are going to pay that.
IPv6 addresses many of the current problems. IPv6 is a standard, supported by many vendors. IPv6 plays nicely with IPv4, so you don't have to break the world in order to deploy it. IPv6 has been around for years...
Seriously, if we can't get people to adopt IPv6, what's the chance that people are going to adopt something more disruptive?
I've seen some of these proposals, and technically they're interesting. From the perspective of getting the market to move in a new direction, things will have to get a lot worse before they're even taken seriously.
"The internet is about the free exchange of other people's ideas!"
Detecting plagarism in essays is even easier -- there are more degrees of freedom in prose than in computer code (especially when the code is written to conform to some style guide).
Coming up with the same algorithm isn't terribly unlikely. Structuring it in the same way is not uncommon either. Making exactly the same mistakes, however, is hard to believe.
Part of being a community is pooling resources in to help others. Even if you don't have any children of your own, for example, someone paid for your schooling, and when you're an adult you pay it back.
Of course, then there are the endless arguments about exactly how this money should be spent...
People from the software side of the world tend to have no clue what is involved in designing, validating, and manufacturing hardware. (as a simple example, "FCC approval" isn't on your wish list, but without it, none of the other items matter...)
If you can even get so far as taping out a design for "maybe a million, initially", I'll eat my hat. And this is not a claim I make lightly -- my hat is particularly large and unappetizing.
Where are mod points when I need them? If I had any, they'd be yours.
C'mon, slashdot. There were about twenty other papers presented at FAST this year. Let's not focus only on the one with Google authors...
(i.e., people who would want to hide their identities for the wrong reasons) then this would make sense. But they're not.
Detterance seems like the right approach here: there's no way to prevent people from misbehaving, but you can make it costly.
So let's say: go ahead and choose any screen name you want. If you use a fictitious screen name in a way related to a crime,
then some extra penalty gets added in, no questions asked, no appeal.
This is the absolutely terrible idea behind ...
But deconstructing things, the Fists are only really necessary to fight the army of mice. And the drummers are probably too confusing to survive television... as are the Castle Turing (and all the other puzzles after that).
I know I'll be branded a heretic, but I think you could make a pretty good screenplay that stopped right around half-way through Nell's stay with the Vickys. The whole Alchemist thing never appealed to me -- although it's essential to the message of the book, it just was as fun to read as the adventures of Princess Nell.
The person who owns the computer should have that freedom, not some random person who happens to be physically proximate. It's their computer, not the operator's.
If Stallman just got upset about the rules laid down by the owners of the assets he was permitted, at their discretion, to access, then he'd just be a nut. This was just a trigger that got people thinking about control over things they did own -- and whether certain things should even be owned in the usual sense of the word.