That answers the questions I was about to ask: Did diamonds stimulate more than non-valuable shiny objects, was there a cultural bias, how did 100 years of "Diamonds are Forever" affect the results, etc...
Not sure where you've read the countless defenses of lack-of-cut-and-paste, but Apple doesn't seem to agree. It's on their list; other things were higher on their list. I myself don't care about Exchange-server compatibility, and would MUCH rather have cut-and-paste. I'm sure others have their own personally-improved priority lists.
I think Apple's done pretty well for an OS that's only 18 months out of the gate. Anything that new is bound to have some of what I call "unconscionably absent" features. I'm looking forward to cut-and-paste.
So... musicians whose songs have been determined by the armed forces to be military-grade weapons are going to protest. And they're going to protest with silence.
A free system distribution must not assist users in obtaining any nonfree information for practical use
If I read that right, the documentation for a free system - say, a library FAQ - can't include any mention of a commercially-published book, unless that book is also available under an appropriately free license online?
What would be unacceptable is for the documentation to give people instructions for installing a nonfree program on the system, or mention conveniences they might gain by doing so.
Yeesh.
It's a short hop and a jump from here to declaring that free browsers should not allow one to browse to sites on the web that mention the advantages of nonfree software.
I wonder what the free software movement would be like if Sony v. Universal had gone the other way. The VCR could pirate movies, but it also had "significant noninfringing uses". Without that, computers (which surely have some infringing uses) would never have developed most of their capabilities, would not have become popular, and would not have made the Internet a commercially viable medium.. which would prevent the FSF from being more than an academic curiosity. Yet now, they seem determined to all but ban any "infringing information" from the free-software universe.
You know you can turn off the personalized search results by logging out of Google (or launching another browser without that cookie), right? Although, if you still want Web History to work, that'd be annoying.
Are there any "alternative firmware" choices for 802.11n? I looked about a year ago, and after trudging through a bazillion long-outdated forum posts and firmware-author flamewars, it seemed there wasn't any. So I bought a D-Link to replace my buggy Netgear.
I haven't read this book yet, but visualization tools ARE a significant part of pattern detection that we've mostly overlooked.
Much as we try to create smarter algorithms that can do feature extraction, clustering, etc., the best pattern-detection engine we have is still the human brain. There are very few systems that can detect patterns when we have NO idea what we're looking for; the brain comes pre-installed. Have you ever tried to do logfile analysis on a few thousand machines? Playing "management by exception" doesn't work at scale; even the rare errors show up a few times a second.
I saw a presentation a few weeks ago by Deb Roy, who's heading the Speechome project at MIT. He's set up a bunch of cameras recording continuous audio and video in his house, in an attempt to map the language development of his son. That's a LOT of data to sift through - some 90,000 hours. Way too much for standard audio scrubbing/speedup, which would be the equivalent of our grep-a-log-file.
So they've had to develop some incredible visualization techniques that let you view higher-level patterns across multiple "rich data" streams - things like frequent patterns of motion (there's baby playing with his toy car with Daddy), eye-gaze focal points (there's baby looking at the car before saying "KA"), etc. that just pop out at you as you view the full data stream. It's truly jaw-dropping stuff, and it's applicable to far more than speech.
Anyone here ever defragged a hard drive (yeah, I know, ext3/HFS/etc.)? Would you get a better feel for the operation if you saw a list of sector numbers that were being relocated, or the usual 2D colored-block graph?
Anyone ever seen TreeMaps for finding large files on your drive?
Anyone ever known when a process is about to crash because the patterns of UI hesitation and hard-drive head-movement sounds change as the core files get written out?
That's all that info-vis is. It's presenting data in a way that lets you use intuition and subconscious cues to find what you're looking for - even if you don't KNOW what you're looking for.
Here's Deb Roy showing how you turn motion patterns from multiple video cameras into a two-dimensional, printable chart:
I think the big news flash on this is that they actually performed four different, real attacks on real, physical keyboards.
When the first mass-transit-quality teleporter is installed in a major city, there will be a commenter on Slashdot, sneering at it: "This isn't news. They've been doing that at the quantum level for years."
I have an Alpine head unit (IVA-300? Something like that) that drops the volume a few notches when it's powered off. That way, when you start the car up again, and your ears aren't yet desensitized, the music doesn't blow your head off.
It's great, and I think all music players should have it.
But should Android or even a WinCE system get a few cool toys that apple explicitly forbids, that green light of envy will start to burn bright.
Do you really believe that?
I've owned Palms since the Palm Pilot Professional, and I've been through a few Pocket PCs and PPC Phones as well. I ditched my Verizon XV-6800 (HTC) for an iPhone 3G. The HTC had many "cool toys" that Apple either doesn't provide for, or explicitly forbids: tethering, video, MMS, copy/paste, etc.
But you know what? It didn't WORK. Even when it was functioning as designed (which was rare), it was too slow and cumbersome. The camera took 30-40 seconds to load, and scrolling was painfully slow. And after 12 years with a fairly precise stylus and a FITALY tap keyboard, I would never have guessed that I'd be raving about a finger-touch interface, but I am.
The iPhone just WORKS. It's not about the feature set. I don't miss the things my iPhone can't do, because I couldn't do them anyway, for any useful value of "do".
What if it just randomly transmits a "braking now!" message in order to cause other cars in the vicinity to put on their brakes?
We already have that in the analog world. My first car, a 1979 Pinto with a big dent on the side, would engage the backup lights if you moved the stick shift toward reverse - even while you were still in neutral. F'rinstance, if you happened to be driving on the highway.
Combine that false alarm with the Pinto's well-known tendency to blow up - reenforced by my "I XPLODE" vanity plate - and, let me tell you, I had very, very few tailgaters.
(Repurposing a post I made to the VMWare Fusion forum...)
I've found CrashPlan ($25/seat) to do a pretty good job of cross-platform, Time-Machine-like, peer-to-peer backup between Mac, Windows, and Linux servers - with the added advantage of off-site backups (for a fee, from them, or for free, from your own machines and your friends - who don't have to buy CrashPlan, either).
On the Mac, like Time Machine, it appears to use the FSEvents system to back up only the changed files. (On Linux, it uses inotify, but that has some bugs; on Windows, I think it may use Shadow Volume Copy or something like that.) It stores only the portions of the files that have changed, in an xdelta-like format, so it's highly compressed and deduplicated (kinda like git). I sprang for the Pro version, which at $60 can keep any number of previous versions for any number of days, so you've really got point-in-time restore as far back as you want it. Best: It regularly checks the integrity of the backups. Anyone who's tried to do tape backups has discovered the joy of a corrupted backup file.
Downsides: It's a CPU hog, even on Apple's 64-bit Java 6 VM. You can set it to limit its own CPU when you're at the keyboard, but obviously, that slows down your backups, and it doesn't seem entirely accurate; on an 8-core Mac Pro, I've seen it use up 100% of a core even when it was theoretically limited to less than that. There's an upgrade coming in the next few weeks that's supposed to offer 400% faster backups with 30% CPU, so that may get better.
Also, the UI for restoring is a bit clunky, and forces you to go date-first, rather than tree-first; if you know you need an older version of a file, but don't know what the last "known good" version was, you're in for a lot of mousing. It has had a number of bugs (fewer lately) that cause it to lose track of which files have actually changed. This doesn't cause any problems, since your backup peer will store only the changed bytes (=0 bytes), but it does make the CPU problems worse, and waste a lot of disk and network bandwidth.
There are free automatic updates every few months, but they're forced and unannounced, which gives me the willies a bit. (I don't know if the enterprise version has more control over that. BTW, the enterprise version is named "Pro Server", not to be confused with the home "Pro" version I bought, which of course has a server component as well..) Also, although your backups are encrypted, the logs (which are apparently either sent to, or retrievable by, their support team) have your filename and pathnames in them, which is a pretty big privacy leak that I've alerted them to.
That said, having once done a complete tour of EVERY Windows backup solution, from free to $10K, and finding them all pathetically lacking and buggy, and nonetheless having bought my own DDS-4 drive and, later, VXA-2 10-tape carousel, and nonetheless still having had to send drives off to OnTrack three or four times... CrashPlan is the best damn backup I've seen, and the only one that's been hands-free enough to use and rely on, and for under $100 it's crazy.
Take a look in the mirror. You have individual cells dying by the millions every minute. Your memory is fuzzy at best, your pattern-recognition in your brain frequently sees things that aren't there, and you make stupid mistakes every single day
For decades, we've seen the promise of "location agnostic" resources. RPC, CORBA, middleware, etc. etc. was all supposed to provide you with a unified way to Do Things, whether you were Doing Things on the same machine or in a different data center.
No, none of them were as seamless as VDC. But they didn't fail because they were clunky; they failed because they were too slow. For every "abstract out the data repository" groundswell, we've countered it with "stored procedures run inside the repository for speed". Heck, even Rails, the poster child for "hardware is cheaper than developers", has now discovered that the most performant solution is a non-threaded event loop.
In the end, every new abstraction layer is (a) a terrific way to make development easier, and (b) discarded with great sadness once you start worrying about Big Scaling. We have reliable message queues over reliable TCP, and you still end up building fast-fail and pooling logic into the apps.
But VDC is aimed at the big data center. So what's changed? Is it just that networks are now fast enough that we really don't need to optimize the resource distribution at the application level? If so, why haven't other, lesser abstractions been almost as useful?
Standardized libraries: Why do we need them now? Because so many programmers are control freaks stuck in the days of assembler and can't adjust their mindset? Virtualization is coming to every major OS in the next few years. Programs are runnable on everything from mobile phones to clouds. Identical results from kernels designed for everything from a low-power ARM to a self-contained data center and everything in between is an utterly, utterly stupid idea.
[Yeah, I know, I could have done better. The point: Programmers think that they should have completely deterministic tools, but that designers are crazy for wanting the same.]
I, personally, agree 100% with circletimessquare when he says:
there is no reason why they cannot do this. it is their website, their policy.
But some would beg to differ. For a counterpoint from a simpler era, let's turn to a user named "circletimessquare", back in early September, 2008, who wrote:
shun chrome. i don't care if its the best thing since sliced bread. the problem is what it represents in terms of power and dominance in the hands of one company. that's bad for everyone
Clearly, the debate over corporate dominance has bitterly divided friends, families, and even individuals.
Slashdot Mirror
That answers the questions I was about to ask: Did diamonds stimulate more than non-valuable shiny objects, was there a cultural bias, how did 100 years of "Diamonds are Forever" affect the results, etc...
I fail to see why that should take six months.
No. I tried to learn once, but my mentor got killed by a falling helicopter.
Not sure where you've read the countless defenses of lack-of-cut-and-paste, but Apple doesn't seem to agree. It's on their list; other things were higher on their list. I myself don't care about Exchange-server compatibility, and would MUCH rather have cut-and-paste. I'm sure others have their own personally-improved priority lists.
I think Apple's done pretty well for an OS that's only 18 months out of the gate. Anything that new is bound to have some of what I call "unconscionably absent" features. I'm looking forward to cut-and-paste.
Don't call it a thumbtack!
It's been here for years.
So... musicians whose songs have been determined by the armed forces to be military-grade weapons are going to protest. And they're going to protest with silence.
What's to complain about?
That's not even the worst of it! I saw a report this morning that a diet of fast food and candy may cause Alzheimer's.
If I read that right, the documentation for a free system - say, a library FAQ - can't include any mention of a commercially-published book, unless that book is also available under an appropriately free license online?
Yeesh.
It's a short hop and a jump from here to declaring that free browsers should not allow one to browse to sites on the web that mention the advantages of nonfree software.
I wonder what the free software movement would be like if Sony v. Universal had gone the other way. The VCR could pirate movies, but it also had "significant noninfringing uses". Without that, computers (which surely have some infringing uses) would never have developed most of their capabilities, would not have become popular, and would not have made the Internet a commercially viable medium.. which would prevent the FSF from being more than an academic curiosity. Yet now, they seem determined to all but ban any "infringing information" from the free-software universe.
Well, then that's what we mean when we say FC10 here, too! So there.
You know you can turn off the personalized search results by logging out of Google (or launching another browser without that cookie), right? Although, if you still want Web History to work, that'd be annoying.
I can confirm this.
Are there any "alternative firmware" choices for 802.11n? I looked about a year ago, and after trudging through a bazillion long-outdated forum posts and firmware-author flamewars, it seemed there wasn't any. So I bought a D-Link to replace my buggy Netgear.
Now I'm wondering what's next...
I haven't read this book yet, but visualization tools ARE a significant part of pattern detection that we've mostly overlooked.
Much as we try to create smarter algorithms that can do feature extraction, clustering, etc., the best pattern-detection engine we have is still the human brain. There are very few systems that can detect patterns when we have NO idea what we're looking for; the brain comes pre-installed. Have you ever tried to do logfile analysis on a few thousand machines? Playing "management by exception" doesn't work at scale; even the rare errors show up a few times a second.
I saw a presentation a few weeks ago by Deb Roy, who's heading the Speechome project at MIT. He's set up a bunch of cameras recording continuous audio and video in his house, in an attempt to map the language development of his son. That's a LOT of data to sift through - some 90,000 hours. Way too much for standard audio scrubbing/speedup, which would be the equivalent of our grep-a-log-file.
So they've had to develop some incredible visualization techniques that let you view higher-level patterns across multiple "rich data" streams - things like frequent patterns of motion (there's baby playing with his toy car with Daddy), eye-gaze focal points (there's baby looking at the car before saying "KA"), etc. that just pop out at you as you view the full data stream. It's truly jaw-dropping stuff, and it's applicable to far more than speech.
Anyone here ever defragged a hard drive (yeah, I know, ext3/HFS/etc.)? Would you get a better feel for the operation if you saw a list of sector numbers that were being relocated, or the usual 2D colored-block graph?
Anyone ever seen TreeMaps for finding large files on your drive?
Anyone ever known when a process is about to crash because the patterns of UI hesitation and hard-drive head-movement sounds change as the core files get written out?
That's all that info-vis is. It's presenting data in a way that lets you use intuition and subconscious cues to find what you're looking for - even if you don't KNOW what you're looking for.
Here's Deb Roy showing how you turn motion patterns from multiple video cameras into a two-dimensional, printable chart:
Visualization generation
Awesome. One down, two to go...
I guess someone had the same (lame, Friday-afternoon) reaction I did to the headline:
"Nice lookin' satellite you got there! Shame if something should happen to it! Ain't that right, Vinny?"
When the first mass-transit-quality teleporter is installed in a major city, there will be a commenter on Slashdot, sneering at it: "This isn't news. They've been doing that at the quantum level for years."
(Sorry to bust the patent bubble, but..)
I have an Alpine head unit (IVA-300? Something like that) that drops the volume a few notches when it's powered off. That way, when you start the car up again, and your ears aren't yet desensitized, the music doesn't blow your head off.
It's great, and I think all music players should have it.
Do you really believe that?
I've owned Palms since the Palm Pilot Professional, and I've been through a few Pocket PCs and PPC Phones as well. I ditched my Verizon XV-6800 (HTC) for an iPhone 3G. The HTC had many "cool toys" that Apple either doesn't provide for, or explicitly forbids: tethering, video, MMS, copy/paste, etc.
But you know what? It didn't WORK. Even when it was functioning as designed (which was rare), it was too slow and cumbersome. The camera took 30-40 seconds to load, and scrolling was painfully slow. And after 12 years with a fairly precise stylus and a FITALY tap keyboard, I would never have guessed that I'd be raving about a finger-touch interface, but I am.
The iPhone just WORKS. It's not about the feature set. I don't miss the things my iPhone can't do, because I couldn't do them anyway, for any useful value of "do".
We already have that in the analog world. My first car, a 1979 Pinto with a big dent on the side, would engage the backup lights if you moved the stick shift toward reverse - even while you were still in neutral. F'rinstance, if you happened to be driving on the highway.
Combine that false alarm with the Pinto's well-known tendency to blow up - reenforced by my "I XPLODE" vanity plate - and, let me tell you, I had very, very few tailgaters.
Really? Who are the former artists that are having their money "pulled in for them" by the record labels, and how much money?
(Repurposing a post I made to the VMWare Fusion forum...)
I've found CrashPlan ($25/seat) to do a pretty good job of cross-platform, Time-Machine-like, peer-to-peer backup between Mac, Windows, and Linux servers - with the added advantage of off-site backups (for a fee, from them, or for free, from your own machines and your friends - who don't have to buy CrashPlan, either).
On the Mac, like Time Machine, it appears to use the FSEvents system to back up only the changed files. (On Linux, it uses inotify, but that has some bugs; on Windows, I think it may use Shadow Volume Copy or something like that.) It stores only the portions of the files that have changed, in an xdelta-like format, so it's highly compressed and deduplicated (kinda like git). I sprang for the Pro version, which at $60 can keep any number of previous versions for any number of days, so you've really got point-in-time restore as far back as you want it. Best: It regularly checks the integrity of the backups. Anyone who's tried to do tape backups has discovered the joy of a corrupted backup file.
Downsides: It's a CPU hog, even on Apple's 64-bit Java 6 VM. You can set it to limit its own CPU when you're at the keyboard, but obviously, that slows down your backups, and it doesn't seem entirely accurate; on an 8-core Mac Pro, I've seen it use up 100% of a core even when it was theoretically limited to less than that. There's an upgrade coming in the next few weeks that's supposed to offer 400% faster backups with 30% CPU, so that may get better.
Also, the UI for restoring is a bit clunky, and forces you to go date-first, rather than tree-first; if you know you need an older version of a file, but don't know what the last "known good" version was, you're in for a lot of mousing. It has had a number of bugs (fewer lately) that cause it to lose track of which files have actually changed. This doesn't cause any problems, since your backup peer will store only the changed bytes (=0 bytes), but it does make the CPU problems worse, and waste a lot of disk and network bandwidth.
There are free automatic updates every few months, but they're forced and unannounced, which gives me the willies a bit. (I don't know if the enterprise version has more control over that. BTW, the enterprise version is named "Pro Server", not to be confused with the home "Pro" version I bought, which of course has a server component as well..) Also, although your backups are encrypted, the logs (which are apparently either sent to, or retrievable by, their support team) have your filename and pathnames in them, which is a pretty big privacy leak that I've alerted them to.
That said, having once done a complete tour of EVERY Windows backup solution, from free to $10K, and finding them all pathetically lacking and buggy, and nonetheless having bought my own DDS-4 drive and, later, VXA-2 10-tape carousel, and nonetheless still having had to send drives off to OnTrack three or four times... CrashPlan is the best damn backup I've seen, and the only one that's been hands-free enough to use and rely on, and for under $100 it's crazy.
I see you've been reading my JDate profile.
Here's the thing I don't get:
For decades, we've seen the promise of "location agnostic" resources. RPC, CORBA, middleware, etc. etc. was all supposed to provide you with a unified way to Do Things, whether you were Doing Things on the same machine or in a different data center.
No, none of them were as seamless as VDC. But they didn't fail because they were clunky; they failed because they were too slow. For every "abstract out the data repository" groundswell, we've countered it with "stored procedures run inside the repository for speed". Heck, even Rails, the poster child for "hardware is cheaper than developers", has now discovered that the most performant solution is a non-threaded event loop.
In the end, every new abstraction layer is (a) a terrific way to make development easier, and (b) discarded with great sadness once you start worrying about Big Scaling. We have reliable message queues over reliable TCP, and you still end up building fast-fail and pooling logic into the apps.
But VDC is aimed at the big data center. So what's changed? Is it just that networks are now fast enough that we really don't need to optimize the resource distribution at the application level? If so, why haven't other, lesser abstractions been almost as useful?
Standardized libraries: Why do we need them now? Because so many programmers are control freaks stuck in the days of assembler and can't adjust their mindset? Virtualization is coming to every major OS in the next few years. Programs are runnable on everything from mobile phones to clouds. Identical results from kernels designed for everything from a low-power ARM to a self-contained data center and everything in between is an utterly, utterly stupid idea.
[Yeah, I know, I could have done better. The point: Programmers think that they should have completely deterministic tools, but that designers are crazy for wanting the same.]
I, personally, agree 100% with circletimessquare when he says:
But some would beg to differ. For a counterpoint from a simpler era, let's turn to a user named "circletimessquare", back in early September, 2008, who wrote:
Clearly, the debate over corporate dominance has bitterly divided friends, families, and even individuals.