Take ZFS out of the picture and you just need to use a hardware raid controller or a block level RAID
It's odd that so few posters have mentioned what, to me, is the #1 advantage of ZFS: end-to-end checksumming (combined with COW, redundancy, etc) guarantees your data in ways that no other RAID solution can.
It's a pity your summary fails to emphasise: Most of these are known bugs; some are likely already fixed; and a couple are simply wrong.
But it's all beside the point. ZFS still offers data integrity that no other hardware or software system does (some other systems do provide copy on write, pool-like manageability, and so on). One day we'll all be using it (or a clone).
Tom Leonard, a programmer from Valve, gave a fascinating talk about this
Game developers are getting excited about technology like Erlang. A link to Extreme Concurrency and Erlang, an entertaining presentation by André Pang, was posted to the erlang-questions list by Miguel Rodríguez Rubinos on 12 April.
The reliable Stanislaw Lem
on
Robotic Ecologies
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· Score: 3, Informative
Prefigured responsive buildings in his wonderful Return from the Stars. Highly recommended.
Amnesty International has a report on this situation.
US Threats to the International Criminal Court
The United States of America is the only state that is actively opposed to the new International Criminal Court. US opposition to the Court can be traced back to the adoption of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute) in 1998, where the USA was one of only 7 states to vote against adoption of the Statute. Reportedly a major reason for not supporting adoption of the Statute stems from the refusal of the international community to grant the United Nations Security Council (of which the USA is a veto holding permanent member) control over which cases the Court considered, instead favouring an independent Prosecutor who - subject to safeguards and fair trial guarantees - would make such decisions.
On 31 December 2000, however, President Clinton signed the Rome Statute, which was a positive step in favour of the Court. However, the US position has changed dramatically since the new administration under President Bush took office in 2001. On 6 May 2002, the US government took the unprecedented step of repudiating its signature of the Rome Statute and began a worldwide campaign to weaken the Court and to obtain impunity for all US nationals from the jurisdiction of the Court.
Amnesty International believes that the US concerns that the ICC will be used to bring politically motivated prosecutions against US nationals are wholly unfounded. The substantial safeguards and fair trial guarantees in the Rome Statute will ensure that such a situation would never arise.
The USA is currently approaching governments around the world and asking them to enter into illegal impunity agreements. These agreements provide that a government will not surrender or transfer US nationals accused of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes to the ICC, if requested by the Court. The agreements do not require the USA or the other state concerned to investigate and, if there is sufficient evidence, to prosecute such a person in US Courts. Indeed in many cases it would be impossible for US courts to do so, as US law does not include many of the crimes under the Rome Statute.
On 1 July 2003 the USA announced the withdrawal of military assistance to 35 states who are parties to the Rome Statute and have refused to sign an impunity agreement with the USA. On 8 December 2004, the USA went even further, withdrawing economic support from states that still refuse to sign impunity agreements. The withdrawal of this economic funding threatens to undermine counter-terrorism efforts, peace process programs, anti-drug trafficking initiatives, truth and reconciliation commissions and HIV/Aids education, and threatens states such as Jordan, Ireland, Cyprus, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and South Africa.
The USA claims that these agreements are legal and in conformity with Article 98 of the Statute. However, Amnesty International has conducted a legal analysis which demonstrates that US Impunity Agreements do not fall under Article 98, and states that enter into such agreements with the USA are in breach of their obligations under international law. This legal analysis (International Criminal Court: US efforts to obtain impunity for genocide, crimes against humanity and war
Apart from insane greed and militarism, the environmental catastrophe - where America is a major contributor - and US destabilisation of South America (which has been going on for decades) are also worth our time. That 9/11 was probably an inside job is not particularly surprising to non-Americans. The continued indifference of Americans to this, is somewhat more surprising.
By wrecking the planet we are destroying the greatest thing humankind has ever enjoyed; betraying everyone who ever lived, and everyone who comes after us.
Is aQuantive everyone else's leftover and a poor choice? No, it's an excellent company.... However, it was also a great company last year, the year before that, the year before that, and the year before that - when incidentally it was trading at a fraction of the current market price and already on the radar of investment forums including MSFT's own Moneycentral (not to mention being right under MS's nose in Seattle). But just like in '00/'01, when Ballmer could and should have been using MSFT's [then] legendary cash pile to make a ton of smart accretive acquisitions for pennies on the dollar, he was too distracted.... this expensive and rather desperate acquisition is proof positive that even Ballmer acknowledges it. So, once again, shareholders get to pick up the tab.... As Warren Buffett says, "The best side to be on in a bidding war is the losing side". So why did MSFT management do the unthinkable and not only engage in, but win, a bidding war? Because they once again failed to proactively understand the market and competitive forces and thereby position the company advantageously and cost-effectively.... Such is the collective brilliance that we paid $1B in bonuses for.
In my opinion, this is a huge demonstration of fear, desperation, and dim-dog market tail-light chasing greed on our part. Every acquisition represents our failure to use our 70,000+ employee base to solve a solution or create a new market. Rather than buying back stock or pushing out a dividend, shareholder money got mis-invested in a hugely overpriced acquisition. And you're a shareholder why?
George Monbiot wrote about this 2 months ago in the UK Guardian:
If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuels
Oil produced from plants sets up competition for food between cars and people. People - and the environment - will lose
George Monbiot
Tuesday March 27, 2007
The Guardian
It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless. In theory, fuels made from plants can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cars and trucks. Plants absorb carbon as they grow - it is released again when the fuel is burned. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil plants to living ones, governments on both sides of the Atlantic claim to be "decarbonising" our transport networks.
In the budget last week, Gordon Brown announced that he would extend the tax rebate for biofuels until 2010. From next year all suppliers in the UK will have to ensure that 2.5% of the fuel they sell is made from plants - if not, they must pay a penalty of 15p a litre. The obligation rises to 5% in 2010. By 2050, the government hopes that 33% of our fuel will come from crops. Last month George Bush announced that he would quintuple the US target for biofuels: by 2017 they should be supplying 24% of the nation's transport fuel.
So what's wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster. In 2004 I warned, on these pages, that biofuels would set up a competition for food between cars and people. The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are richer than those who are in danger of starvation. It would also lead to the destruction of rainforests and other important habitats. I received more abuse than I've had for any other column - except for when I attacked the 9/11 conspiracists. I was told my claims were ridiculous, laughable, impossible. Well in one respect I was wrong. I thought these effects wouldn't materialise for many years. They are happening already.
Since the beginning of last year, the price of maize has doubled. The price of wheat has also reached a 10-year high, while global stockpiles of both grains have reached 25-year lows. Already there have been food riots in Mexico and reports that the poor are feeling the strain all over the world. The US department of agriculture warns that "if we have a drought or a very poor harvest, we could see the sort of volatility we saw in the 1970s, and if it does not happen this year, we are also forecasting lower stockpiles next year". According to the UN food and agriculture organisation, the main reason is the demand for ethanol: the alcohol used for motor fuel, which can be made from maize and wheat.
Farmers will respond to better prices by planting more, but it is not clear that they can overtake the booming demand for biofuel. Even if they do, they will catch up only by ploughing virgin habitat.
Already we know that biofuel is worse for the planet than petroleum. The UN has just published a report suggesting that 98% of the natural rainforest in Indonesia will be degraded or gone by 2022. Just five years ago, the same agencies predicted that this wouldn't happen until 2032. But they reckoned without the planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel for the European market. This is now the main cause of deforestation there and it is likely soon to become responsible for the extinction of the orang-utan in the wild.
But it gets worse. As the forests are burned, both the trees and the peat they sit on are turned into carbon dioxide. A report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that every tonne of palm oil results in 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or 10 times as much as petroleum produces. I feel I need to say that again. Biodiesel from palm o
Not only listening: MS relies on it. (Duh)
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Piracy Economics
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· Score: 1
Gates shed some light on his own hard-nosed business philosophy. "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer, has been documenting China's industrialisation for more than a decade.
This has led him to photograph e-waste processing, assembly line and process work, shipbreaking, large scale extraction, urbanisation, and the Three Gorges dam project.
The Goethe Institute of Toronto recently screened the documentary Manufactured Landscapes, (also here) which followed Burtynsky in his Chinese travels, and reveals more of the backstory behind his photographs (which are published in the book Manufactured Landscapes).
An arresting portrait of the effects of globalization as seen through the eyes of highly acclaimed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky on his travels through China. In his photography Burtynsky not only captures the astonishing transformations in the landscape through industrial production but also shows us the social repercussions of these changes. Both the photographs and the film present us with the large-scale complexity of a global situation, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions.
Short of multiple users who want to swap between QWERTY, Dvorak and other languages
There are rather a lot of those. The market among expatriate Russians alone (it's no coincidence that this is a Russian development) would be in the tens of millions. Then add bilingual Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian subcontinent languages - gosh, we're into the billions of potential users already (bilingualism is practically universal in the information industry).
Taking a standard keyboard and pencilling Cyrillic/whatever next to the Roman letters is a PITA. $1500 - obviously a short run - is a pricey cure, but there is a market of millions when the unit cost comes down.
Back in November 2004, Dan Ravicher complained to Steven Vaughan-Nichols that Ballmer had misread his patent study, so I'm not sure that this is 'new' news.
SCO's big downfall was having the patents outed. Once that happened, the community went to work on it and has destroyed SCO.
Actually nothing was ever "outed". SCO made wild claims about appropriation of "IP" they claimed to "own" but - as most of us expected - failed to substantiate them. The case is just an excruciating charade, plodding on to this fatal conclusion despite a catalogue of delay tactics.
Slashdot Mirror
a screen 512x368 in size (from memory - might have botched the Y coord limit)
You did. 512x384.
(Mac Plus was the first computer I personally owned.)
Read "1984".
Google "end to end checksumming zfs" and READ ON.
Take ZFS out of the picture and you just need to use a hardware raid controller or a block level RAID
It's odd that so few posters have mentioned what, to me, is the #1 advantage of ZFS: end-to-end checksumming (combined with COW, redundancy, etc) guarantees your data in ways that no other RAID solution can.
It's a pity your summary fails to emphasise: Most of these are known bugs; some are likely already fixed; and a couple are simply wrong.
But it's all beside the point. ZFS still offers data integrity that no other hardware or software system does (some other systems do provide copy on write, pool-like manageability, and so on). One day we'll all be using it (or a clone).
Tom Leonard, a programmer from Valve, gave a fascinating talk about this
Game developers are getting excited about technology like Erlang. A link to Extreme Concurrency and Erlang, an entertaining presentation by André Pang, was posted to the erlang-questions list by Miguel Rodríguez Rubinos on 12 April.
Prefigured responsive buildings in his wonderful Return from the Stars. Highly recommended.
My guess is the Pacific Ocean bought about 750,000.
Apart from insane greed and militarism, the environmental catastrophe - where America is a major contributor - and US destabilisation of South America (which has been going on for decades) are also worth our time. That 9/11 was probably an inside job is not particularly surprising to non-Americans. The continued indifference of Americans to this, is somewhat more surprising.
By wrecking the planet we are destroying the greatest thing humankind has ever enjoyed; betraying everyone who ever lived, and everyone who comes after us.
"Bush/Cheney/The US/Halliburton is evil" or "OMG panic the environment is in trouble."
So which of these do you disagree with?
"It's a great place for children who are in public school and haven't really decided what to believe yet."
Who ya gonna believe! GOD or some hairy liberal professor!
Welcome to the 21st Century, America!
It's Official: Ballmer has lost it:
Quoth Who da'Punk:
George Monbiot wrote about this 2 months ago in the UK Guardian:
Hard to believe the summariser is not aware of the thoughts of Chairman Gates:
(article).
This has been accurately compared to "drug dealer tactics" by an astute Brazilian (another market at great risk of Microslop exploitation).
Ya know what? Fuck you Gates and the demon you rode in on.
This has led him to photograph e-waste processing, assembly line and process work, shipbreaking, large scale extraction, urbanisation, and the Three Gorges dam project.
The Goethe Institute of Toronto recently screened the documentary Manufactured Landscapes, (also here) which followed Burtynsky in his Chinese travels, and reveals more of the backstory behind his photographs (which are published in the book Manufactured Landscapes).
Short of multiple users who want to swap between QWERTY, Dvorak and other languages
There are rather a lot of those. The market among expatriate Russians alone (it's no coincidence that this is a Russian development) would be in the tens of millions. Then add bilingual Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian subcontinent languages - gosh, we're into the billions of potential users already (bilingualism is practically universal in the information industry).
Taking a standard keyboard and pencilling Cyrillic/whatever next to the Roman letters is a PITA. $1500 - obviously a short run - is a pricey cure, but there is a market of millions when the unit cost comes down.
Damn you long-haired smellies! Why can't you get with the program and just passively CONSUME!
With domestic approval in 20s and 30s, exactly how popular does he think he is outside?
Even in puppet states like Australia: The government may fawn all over him, but the public does not.
Back in November 2004, Dan Ravicher complained to Steven Vaughan-Nichols that Ballmer had misread his patent study, so I'm not sure that this is 'new' news.
That Register link is dead (although even Google News indexed the article. wtf?) But many articles are repeating Ravicher's old remarks: Ravicher says his report proves the opposite of Microsoft's claims, The author of that report disowned Ballmer's remarks, etc.
SCO's big downfall was having the patents outed. Once that happened, the community went to work on it and has destroyed SCO.
Actually nothing was ever "outed". SCO made wild claims about appropriation of "IP" they claimed to "own" but - as most of us expected - failed to substantiate them. The case is just an excruciating charade, plodding on to this fatal conclusion despite a catalogue of delay tactics.
Mono was officially dead the moment the Novell deal was signed.
When the patent story broke, the line was (paraphrasing),
...um. Yeah, that would be it.
"Microsoft says open source software is of high quality because they're using 200 of our patents."
[Head explodes.]
But never thought I'd get modded up.
Actually my plan B was a mock headline: "Open Source Hacker Claims Microsoft Dead."
Oh wait. We claim that every week...