I dont really get why people are getting so up in arms google dropping h.264 from chrome. They're essentially coming out in support of things like mozilla and opera, but they market share for the browser is not astronomical.
It really is a non-event because if people wanted to be able to support tag on their servers and be able to support say IE and firefox (the majority of browsers i believe?), they'd already have to produce both formats. Irrelevant of what google do with chrome.
Now, if google came out and said "we'll only have webm on youtube for the tag in html5", that would be a very different story, and one worth talking about.
I think the article is written by a cretin personally (the ars article), but alot of people are getting up in arms about a non-event.
Consider how many people (accountants) and institutions exist solely for the purpose of doing other people income tax paper work. its a massive industry. We're all very very capable of doing our own tax, yet alot of us dont. Why? well for example, i used to do my own tax, then i married an accountant and she does it. She takes 30 minutes and gets it right first time. I take 4 hours and get it wrong. From a sheer opportunity cost perspective, its worth it to have someone who knows what they're doing do your tax (i get 4 extra hours to play COD). then theres the whole "get it wrong and you go to jail" thing im not overly fond of either. Sure, if i get a ps3 firmware wrong im not going to jail but for an end-user who really doesn't get anything more then "put disk in here, press this button" its a load off someones mind. Compared to a tax accountant, $30 is a cheap load of someones mind too.
The reality is, i cant imagine best buy get a huge demand for the service, but who knows really? But the kind of people who go for this kind of thing are also the kind of people who often used to click on those links that say they're from their bank and they need to login to confirm their details.
my point is that as nerds (as the vast majority of us here are), the thought of someone doing something as simple as a ps3 firmware update is for us may be mind boggling. Yet if you spoke to my wife, she doesn't understand why half the people she used to do income tax for paid her to do it cause it was just so simple to her.
If you can't be bothered to plug it in and create an account, you have no business buying it.
unfortunately that kind of attitude is born of pure ignorance. you can say many arrogant things about them from a nerd perspective but you cant say they have no business buying it.
The reality is i know plenty of people who own a ps3 and if i sat them down in front of it and said "connect this thing to the wifi router your isp gave you" they would be absolutely lost. yet it makes up the majority of people who own the platform, they are the reason the platform itself survives. they buy every game they own. they know how to shove the disk in the drive and click "multiplayer" on call of duty. But thats about it really.
the best part is they (without exception) have other very redeeming features. they know how to do my tax cause they're accounting geniuses or they know how to replace the oil line on my motorbike cause they are mechanical geniuses... whatever they're reason for existing is, they can afford a ps3 and they add market share to a platform i (personally) like. More power to them. The most amusing part is they think about me (when it comes to tax) the same way you think about them "why would someone pay me to do this thing that is so very simple".
If they're willing to shell out 30$ to have some pleb at best buy setup something for them, great, so long as they keep buying games for the ps3 then we (ps3 owners) ultimately end up being better off for it.
Best buy maybe doing something not-so-nice, but its the kind of thing i can live with. Now if they managed to modify the ps3's they sell so the only way you could do a firmware update was to take it to them and pay $30 then yeah, i'd go after their blood even though i didnt buy my console from them.
it seems a little weird that people would "GO TO SOMEONE" to get it done given how often it happens (the fw upgrade that is).
But from a services perspective, 30$ seems cheap to me?
I kinda feel a small rage from the perspective that someone out there owns a ps3 and ended up going "im going to go to best buy to upgrade the firmware on my ps3". It just doesnt sound believable. Maybe the first time it happens people do it? but seriously as an on-going thing it sounds hard to believe and you have to assume they have friends (who might even have a ps3 themselves) you'd assume someone would eventually go "seriously, you dont need to do that". What gets me though is how they find out it needs to be done? i mean my ps3 jumps and says "hey, here's a fw update, wanna install it?" and you click yes.
Mind you, go back not too long ago and in order to get firmware upgraded on many devices it was "go see the maker/service person" (nokia phone for example). So its not too hard to believe that people may still have that attitude in general.
However, if you READ THE ARTICLE, it seems like engadget are playing pretty fast and loose with facts here. In my world the ps3 goes for quite a decent range of prices depending on where you go, and best buy has it for $329 with the firmware update (and it says you have to buy it). So a rep said they'll do it for $29.98... whatever? is that $30 higher than average in the US? i have no idea.
But the whole article just seems kind of bitching and moaning about someone saying they'd do a firmware update for $30 for you. As someone who works in IT, it would not surprise me to have someone come up and say "can you update the software on my X" cause they just dont get how it works. They know they put a disk in here, or a cable in there and they press that button to make it go... thats all they know...
If they were going to go after another storage vendor, Compellent is the obvious choice. Not only does it complement their last storage acquisition (equalogic), it expands on it. Alot of the key features of the equalogic are expanded on in the compellent storage...
Whats more, compellent pride themselves on the fact their storage runs industry standard components rather then being custom-built. I.e. their controller heads are supermicro boxes (running a modified version of the ecos? FOSS RTOS) with standard PCIe HBA's in them (unlike 3pars totally-custom-built model). The backend storage is simply Switched fibre jbods or SAS jbods. All of which Dell actually manufacture themselves (though compellent use xyltec or something?). They would simply be buying the software component off compellent really. Hell, they could do a deal with compellent and just license the OS. Replace the components Compellent use with Dell's R710's (or whatever) and Dell's own storage boxes (SAS and SATA), and you have a serious storage story worth talking about (from a dell perspective).
To me, compellent is a much more sensible acquisition (or partnership) then 3par ever would be and so much easier to transition into with their own components... Add some framework for integrating it all into the Dell PAN software they license from egenera and you have a very interesting and compelling (no pun intended) story in terms of data center management...
The sad part of loosing 3par is probably that Dell perhaps put a huge dent in their emc relationship... whooops... so they may need another storage story and fast... on the plus side, with HP aquiring 3par, HP would probably not have the money to block a buyout of compellent if Dell tried (though hp probably do have the money to spare in reality)
That of course doesn't address any of the other area's Dell could expand into though, i.e. tables, phones, music or whatever. Maybe they should look at doing their own networking kit? im sure there are a few vendors out there ripe for buying in that space...
Running ext3 on raw partitions really gives you no latitude for snapshots... but why do you need them?
The conventional wisdom for snapshotting is to create a consistent point in time view of an FS. This is something thats often needed for things like db's. for example, if your running a db, you want all your db files snapshotted at the same point in time (ignoring logging for now) simply for consistency. This is where the rsync ideas fall on their bum, because rsync just wont happen fast enough to create a consistent point in time across the entire database and you end up with a corrupt db. As has been pointed out though, snapshots are NOT necessarily safe ways of backing up database data, the database should be aware of what your trying to do (see hot backup) and most can be made to do just that.
But then again, if you can rsync, you can backup (and typically thats a better idea anyways) - i.e. see bacula, etc. Rsync has its uses, but a backup tool it often is not.
There is one caveat, if you running on a SAN then there is no SAN (that i know of) that doesn't do snap-shotting in this day and age (though, in some cases it comes at a $ cost). Even just about every iscsi san does it.
Your only other option is to be migrating into LVM (see caveat below). IMHO, this is the best idea cause lvm doesnt just give you snap-shotting, it gives you much more besides in terms of flexibility.
Option 3 (and this ones a tough one) is to migrate into DRBD (or LVM is going to support dm-replication soon). But, you can migrate to DRBD now without too much effort (even in 2.4 iirc), and this would allow you to replicate ext3 data to another host running lvm where you CAN snapshot. But, as i said before i think your best choice is to migrate into lvm (drbd will cost you more in terms of sheer volume of work and drbd is not fun at the best of times).
Personally, i think your dealing in very niche cases there. Relational mathematics is absolutely no requirement for being any kind of database guy. Logic, yes. But thats basic school maths.
games are a somewhat different story and there are quite alot of cases where you'll need some maths.
The rest your all talking about a re-invention of the wheel. AI, if your going to write an actually AI then yeah, maths is important, but the reality is its a niche realm. You also dont need probabilty to use random number generators, you just need to understand the differences between the types you can get (no maths required for that really), unless your IMPLEMENTING a random number generator - then maths is required, but again, thats niche.
String processing and regex require very very little math, unless your impelementing one, again niche.
But look to the real world for examples. Im a person who drives coders these days and i only code for fun. I do have a maths degree and excluding games, most math based theory is fundamentally useless in the real world. Just look at web coders for example (this is a massive chunk of the code-producing industry right there) and almost anyone could learn to code around 95% of the websites out there without any fundamental knowledge of maths past school level - and be very effective at it. The web browser itself is another example (and many applications fall into this same realm) where maths is just not a huge requirement, i.e. you could have 20 coders working on this and only 1 or 2 might need some maths for some parts.
A profound knowledge of math is only a requirement if your doing something profound WITH math in code, and this equates to less then 10% of the real world.
Basic math (i.e. 1+1 = 2) is obviously an absolute requirement.
Algebra too is mostly a requirement (though if you did programming first, you'd probably find algebra alot less difficult cause you'd dealt with representative values).
But thats where it ends for almost 99% of programmers. Programming is really about shuffling bits of data around and so you can get by with only those two skills. However, the rest are very useful depending on the field.
For example trig and calculus are infinitely handy in any kind of spatial programming, but knowing vectors and transformations are often essential if your getting into 3d coding (though u can get by without it, if your using a library).
The rest are usually straight forward and dependant on you already having the math skills. I.e. if your going to be coding something that deals with statisics, that you obviously need to know statistics.
Ultimately, any math you know is to your advantage, but not really essential unless you dealing as a coder in a pure math realm (i.e. trying to implement a math algorithm within code). There are indeed many things you could code that are based on math without having to understand the math behind it.
For example using rand() is easy, is based on math and you can use it without understanding it. You can also learn to understand the difference between random number generators without understand the theory of their operation, and indeed understand what the difference between strong and pseudo random number generators really is - again, without needing to know the maths of their operation and be a very effective coder.
Another example if neural nets - its easy to understand their operation in terms of a pure coding exercise if your using someone elses neural net library - their operation is quite simple. Writing the library would require a reasonable amount of math intelligence though.
There are huge numbers of example where these things are fundamentally true, things you may build on that are based entirely within the math realm but understanding their mathematical operation is fairly irrelevant (but useful).
What alot of people do think (and it annoys me no end) is that you should be able to reinvent the wheel constantly. This is a time waster. If your writing some program that uses a neural net, the only reason to know how to implement your own is if the several out there cant do exactly what you need. This is what most people do anyways, "gimme that library" and reuse peoples work - its the backbone of how we code and ultimately the world as we know it would be alot different if we didnt just use the library that does the thing we want rather then implementing our on constantly.
But as i said, it depends on what you want to be as a coder. I would say having high-school maths in your head is going to cover 90% of coding jobs easily (i.e. 1+1=2 and algebra). I really dont know too many coders who need more then that myself.
Having had this problem before... ILOM is great.. but it has one disadvantage... its network based. There are so many nuisance things that can go wrong here, mostly around loosing the network. Its also very hard to run down to the IDC with a laptop and just plugin (and hope for the best). If you loose a switch where your ilom is plugged in, you have to find another place to plug it in and pray its on the same network.
Personally, i think anyone who uses dhcp on a management network (where ilom's are usually plugged in) is moderately insane.
I used to wonder why people didnt start embedding usb to serial ports on their devices until i started using one on my laptop... there are several chipsets out there with various quirks, and the place they are most used will mean these kind of barriers are fairly insummountable.
I have a sheeva plug and it does use an embedded usb to serial converter, but that device is a good example of where it would work and most places it wont.
What im refering to is of course the data center, serial ports thrive here because so many devices have serial consoles and this is a VERY VERY GOOD THING. As I said before, its a standard. I can buy a cisco (or any brand really) serial concentrator and then manage ANYTHING that has a serial console. Can you imagine the nightmare that would erupt if we went to usb consoles? "I have a cisco usb console concentrator, and its not compatible with our HP procurves or our dell poweredge devices"... dear god I hope they never ever do that. Buying cheap usb to serial converters for the people out in the field that need to get on consoles is far easier and cheaper. The vendor lock-in insanity would be such a painful experience here. On top of that, you can route most serial consoles over standard cat6 cable (huge bonus in the DC).
While pinouts (for serial) on some devices may differ, they really aren't any where near the agony of what a usb console would be.
As for speed, what device on earth has a serial console for more then a command line? I cannot think of a single device that was build in the last 10 years (perhaps even 20) that would require you to (or even let you) upload a firmware over its serial console. Even when truely broken, devices can usually get to their network ports for tftp or something similar. I hope to god the OP gets a clue because its an appalling suggestion that I hope never reaches the light of day that could only come from someone who really had a rough day with one particularly strange device and decided to have a whine about it on slashdot and try to apply it to a more general set of circumstances.
Im going to assume a java course actually includes coding java... but if its a focussed-on-java type course your probably missing a few very important facets.. So what I would do, in this order is (while trying to avoid system coding as such):
- google java app engine (this is a good one cause it requires almost zero computing resources you own to actually host an application, its good for learning some servlet stuff and has the advantage of not having to learn how to deploy apps into things like tomcat). Its basically just a good place to start for java web stuff but keep in mind, its in the google way. - Web Apps, i.e. j2ee, java servlets, etc (look at a job ad site and tell me how many ad's you see looking for these - j2ee is no small fish by the way and there are as many ways to utilise it as there are people who code java) - Now learn some of the common frameworks used with java (struts, etc) - take a little tour of database and sql, this is pretty critical to alot of java work (mysql is a good, free place to start).
All that will lead you down a path of learning some html, etc, which is a good thing... then:
- Learn some stuff about soap and the various other server-to-server rpc type stuff (quite handy to know) - Learn some android coding (again from google and ya never know, you might come up with an app everyone wants and never have to find a job cause your rich!)
Next, take a tour of some other languages.... from java you could easily stroll into something like C#, but there are tonnes of languages out there that would give you experience worth having. Ultimately though, with java alot of the time you'll be heading towards web coding. There is some call for gui's and the like but its far less common (though android is making that less true).
As others have pointed out, i think it'll move to the optical. Glasses you wear that have a screen in them... and given where e-ink is going that may not be too far away. Thats not to say the wrist wouldnt be in use, after all if you no longer need a display, a mobile phone could take on a much different (wrist-wrapping) form factor.
But i also believe one area that mostly goes untouched is proximity type computing. I.e. I sit down at the "computer" at work and im in close enough proximity that the glasses display something related to that. Theres a whole range of things that could be done in the proximity range... for example removing those clumsy lcd/led displays on appliances at home and have a proximity thing in your mobile phone (hey, you carry it with you everywhere anyways). Similar to bluetooth but without all the authentication (though based more on mutual induction then actual radio waves as such), who cares if someone can walk up to your microwave and use it with their own mobile phone. Thats not to say auth wouldnt be required (a-lah work computer would require it), but pairing things is a pain when its just something simple.
It'd be nice to abstract information from everything into a format that suited myself, rather then the other way around... What I mean is that your microwave could send your phone the parameters it needs to operate it and your phone could display it for you in a way you like. From an informational perspective it would uniquely useful, i.e. stand at a bus stop and get an up-to-date timetable "bus 483 is running 10 minutes behind schedule".. Add a few standards to it all and it would really shape our lives in many ways.
I do agree with him when he talks about the "dull pc roadmap" (4 to 8 to 16 cores, etc), and i think ARM (heh, theres a pun there somewhere - get an arm on your wrist or something) may in the future have a fair bit to say about it.
But then again, im longing for the Peter F Hamilton experience... I want my affinity gene (and all this wonderful other ideas in the commonwealth/confederation books)!
Seriously, years ago I started working on a c++ version of j2ee (not just servlets, the whole kit) and i mean providing similar functions not identical methods of execution obviously. It wasnt terribly hard actually. But it all falls apart really quickly cause of several reasons:
1) platform architecture - the dependence here, even between different versions of the same distribution was a pain and essentially spelt the end of my work. So I was stuck with "do i make web apps c++ soruce, or shared library binaries?" to which there is only one real answer for portability - source. 2) its a systems langauge - dear god that makes it painful for so many reasons.
There are caveats to both those, but the reality is that php exists because it fulfils a need and it does it quite well. To compare the two (c++ and php) is a little ridiculous and ultimately this article just reeks of "please everyone advertise my c++ web tool kit for me!". Sure, facebook (and trillions of others) MIGHT move to c++ web tool kit, but find me a dev that knows how to code an app it, now find me 2, now find me 200 cause thats how many i'd need to write and maintain faceboot apps in c++.
Even taking the OP's assumtion c++ is 10 times more efficient at what php does and that you could actually code facebook in it as actually acurate and that php vs c++ is a one-to-one relationship for things like code maintenance, your still stuck with "how many API's am i going to have to re-write and how many php api's do i use that dont even exist in c++". Its ludicrous to assume that you could drop-in replace php with witty without ending up coding tonnes of c++ code just to do things that PHP already provided. Not to mention the zillions of little extensions that revolve around php to accelerate its web-abilities (memcached for example). The number of things that can be used along side php for web-related things and the number of api's in-built to php just mean witty is never even going to be viable as an alternative. Lets also not forget there are millions of people round the globe using php for web stuff - which ultimately leads to php being a good web language (i.e. security problems being found, optimizations, etc etc).
Of course, wouldn't facebook be using something like zend to compile php pages? I mean seriously, if the 25000 servers are running php and not running zend the waste here just in cost of servers would be unbelievable - shear idiocy on facebooks part (if it were true, and i'd very much doubt it) and I imagine zend would have almost given it away for free just so facebook could say "we got a x% improvement using the zend compiler".
So, I wonder how many people are now learning about witty for the first time (which seems like the only real reason for the article to begin with). Better advertising than adwords!
I have two thin clients from either 1990 or 1991 sitting in my roof, and generally speaking that was the last time they were actually useful.
The reality is that dropping a cheap desktop pc on peoples desk, having a data policy, and having file servers is alot cheaper than thin clients. The simple fact is that the market is mostly driven by joe blogs with his home pc and he has no use for thin clients (despite many attempts to make thin clients relevant in the home). When you talk about thin clients its always business and enterprise which instantly adds a 1000% mark up of any hardware. Joe blogs buys so many home pc's in fact that their prices are so competitive, unlike thin clients.
Want to pxe boot some atoms? your not going to beat that price, but be prepared for some pain, because licensing thin clients (even your own) is ridiculously expensive at the backend.
There has also been alot of hot air released into the IT world about "centralising data into the datacenter" which sound great until you actually do it. WAN optimisation does help, but only so much.
On top of this, thin clients are a perpetual network nuisance. They seem like a good idea until you get 50 or more clients on the same network segment continuously sending tiny little video updates and realise "holy god my network is being flogged to death". It sounds great but the truth is that sporadic write from clients to a shared file server consume much less bandwidth (people will scoff, but you'd be surprised how much different the network profile is for x number of desktops vs x number of thin clients, even with the rather thin rdp protocol).
There are places where thin clients are used however and heres why: 1) Compliance - i know one place that uses them exclusively because they just cant afford for their data to sit on desktops. I.e. the data itself has to be in some central secure location 2) POS/Kiosk type work - i.e. people at windows servicing clients 3) people who bought into the concept and now regret it... I know too many of these.
There are advantages to them, but when viewed with an eye to what people are trying to achieve they mostly become irrelevant when people realise policy (cheap) can easily dictate fixing the problems they are trying to fix with a technical solution. One great one i love hearing is how user X can login to any terminal (or even remotely) to the exact same desktop. How many of your users ACTUALLY need that? Can you seriously say that a terminal server for vpn with access to the same file shares and mail server cant give you what you need? Are your users running around random desks every day they come into the office? The truth is (assuming your on windows at work) that profiles will give your users pretty much all they need - a pre-configured outlook and the network shares they're used to seeing.
The second one is data, stopping users from saving data locally where it might be lost. Well, this is were policy can save your bum. It'll cause some pain now and then (though rarely) when a user looses a bit of documentation cause it was saved on his desktop (Despite the bleedingly obvious file server sitting next to them on the network) and his drive failed but the reality is this is so very rare the cost of a thin client solution becomes rediculous in comparison.
Thats my $0.02 anyways. Thin clients i find quite interesting, but they are rarely useful at solving any real problems except in niche and very specific scenarios.
I dont like drbd (though i've used it for a while)... its a massive convoluted and complex mess and fairly inflexible.
Personally, im hoping dm-replicator gets near completion sometime soon though details of it are rather scarce (i do have a kernel built with the dm-replicator patches, but trying to do anything with it seems near impossible)...
I do a fair amount of work inside the storage world and drbd is just such a mess in so many ways.
I sounds very critical and so forth to drbd and thats not the way i mean to come across. What I really am trying to say is that its bloated for the small amount of functionality it does and with a couple of minor tweeks could do much MUCH more. Its a kewl piece of software, but like many FOSS projects has a hideous, weighty config prone to confusion (something you just dont need with DR).
actually, i just decided to have a look at patchwerk and as luck would have it, there was a patch posted that included doco.. Very worth reading... Cant wait till this makes it into mainstream.
Theres not alot of info around about it, but i'm dying to see the new dm-replicator module. Theres not huge amounts of information available about it and bits and pieces have been floating around for a while... it basically looks like something that could replace drbd as a more sensible mechanism of doing replication...
Personally I hope they let it do local replication as well cause the one thing i've always wanted is to replicate my laptops hd onto an occasionally-pluged-in usb disk with the ability to snapshot just the usb disk now and then... That would be fantasic.
"I've had three from young people saying they were contemplating committing suicide" - seriously, if you believe 2012 (or any movie really) enough to even say something like that, the world is probably better off without you. Thats really just plain stupidity. "A movie said the world might end in a little over 2 years, i better kill myself now" honest to god, your just wasting valuable air useful people could be breathing. But to read this, "I've had two from women contemplating killing their children" is really sad and somewhat supprising that people this dumb actually figured out how to breed (perhaps im assuming too much?).
Is the world really getting as stupid as it appears to be?
De dupe has been around for a while and has some advantages and quite a few negatives... First off, i'd be interested to see how many patent trolls this might stumble over. But de-dup has always gone hand in hand with backups and golden images. EMC, HDS and co never did a good job supporting golden images, but other storage have done well with it (3par, compellent, equalogic).
For the uninitiated, golden images usually consist of building a machine on a SAN, and then using that one image to power many machines (i.e. the same blocks on disk). It then usually just stores deltas from the golden image for each machine... its got its advantages and disadvantages much like de-dup.
Now, the reasons for its use are simple "pay less for storage" which sounds dumb in this day and age (with 1tb drives costing virtually nothing), but the reality is in the SAN world 1tb drives cost a fortune and wherever you use de-dup or golden images, you usually use the fastest (and smallest) disk you can get your hands on. (if you dont understand why this is, see the backblaze article from a little while ago - ultimately, putting more space in a bit of SAN storage kit is freeking expensive). In the enterprise world, its almost impossible to step away from SAN storage (unless your google or backblaze).
The big problem with de-dup (and why its primarily used for backups, and primarily only disk-based backups) is how it effects the storage. If you suddenly have one hot spot, even on fast disk, the storage starts grinding to a halt (even when considering caching) because lots of things start accessing the same blocks on the disk. This is not a problem for backups because its usually a once-written, rarely-read scenario. On file servers and databases, its a performance killer (something akin to raid5/6 in software). But de-dup is fantastic for archival storage!... De-dup and performance often tend to be a self-fulfilling prophecy though, simply because data that is duplicated is often duplicated cause its heavily accessed. Take email as a good example. Joe sends out an email with an attachment of some form (perhaps its a document template, but it really doesn't matter so long as he's sending it to a large number of people), all those people save the attachment and probably make some edits. This introduces the next load of pain, fragmentation. All those delta's from the original now need to be saved "somewhere else" and meanwhile all these people are accessing not just the de-dup'ed blocks but the fragmented changes (consider the kernel source for linux as well, tonnes of branches of code that would possible get de-duped and fragmented). Databases are another great example. Often in tablespaces there is quite a load of block-alligned duplicate data, often this is the nature of how databases store data. Sometimes this data can be quite critical to their function and to have a database slamming the same blocks (again with small fragmented changes) is pain personified.
Still, i wonder how many patents sun are likely to trip up on... I see this being non-fun as there are many people who make serious cash from de-dup at various levels....
as a loves-to-hack-around-in-linux type, both the platforms are intriquing and the nokia's more-like-linux abilities make it something i'd buy to play with (i.e. a secondary phone that im not reliant on). The android based ones also have a similar attraction, but ultimately if you wanted to do something more-like-linux on them you'd be doing alot more work.
Personally, i've always had in the back of my mind the idea of writing a text-based (ncurses) interface to a phone just to see how functional it could actually be and see how fast you could actually make it.
Maybe someone will (or already has) port maemo back to the android devices...
well, drupal (so far) has been quite good at patching its own problems...
Modules on the other hand are a different beast (and in some ways the can be a pain with drupal) - some are coded by drupal them selves, some are not so your miliage can vary.
But this is where open source can actually benifit, cause if you do have access to coders (im sure the whitehouse does right?) you can fix it yourself (or at least get a work-around going for a short time).
theres alot of good reasons people use cms... and let me try and use your own words... say you wanted a website that looked like cisco's.
In a CMS, (such as drupal)... heres who does what: 1) designer writes a theme for the website (to give it the look) 2) content producers write the pages 3) codes do the bits the cms doesn't already do.
The point is, the CMS gives you alot to begin with without limiting you, sure you could code a website from scratch but something as powerfull as drupal is going to take a long time. You may not need everything drupal does so you can cut that down a bit. But ultimately you'll end up with something that allows people to do their jobs (i.e. content producers to write pages). Drupal CMS is also especially good at being extended (and there are virtually no limits that I can think of). So rather then writing a whole heap of code to do your website, your coders just write what they need to extend the CMS - "dang, drupal doesnt do rsa based two factor auth, we're going to have to code it in" as apposed to "ok, lets get started on coding a website - quick grab 15 people who know architecture".
It took me some time to formulate an opinion on this, and so what I say is not a knee-jerk reaction. I personally kept hoping that google were pushed into this because of either the alliance they are in or because of something less obvious (like pushing around some proprietary rubbish from htc) - but so far it appears not to be the case. My position will flip utterly though if that does occur.
First of all, let me compare google android to windows mobile - go to xda-developers.com and have a look at all the roms floating around (all require licensing and of course none of them do). Yet MS dont touch them... Why not? cause its good for MS. Not only does it not impact their business model it helps them. People get to play with the new roms and they already had a license for Windows mobile anyways. No harm done. Ultimately it gives windows mobile a thriving hacker community which is only helping MS.
Apple have done virtually nothing to stop hackintosh's (generic pc's running macos) or jailbreaking iphones. More or less for the same reason. Yet Apple did go after someone trying to sell hardware with MacOS - and thats the fine line that google should not of crossed. Its a line apple and MS (surprisingly) realise is ultimately in their best interests.
When google just let fly with a bunch of urine over a thriving hacking community. Are google within their rights? absolutely. But they achieve nothing. The people who were getting the firmware already had the market place (thanks to the fact their phones ran LICENSED android in the first place). Take me for an example of where it could be contrived to "hurt" them.. I have a tytn2 (which i've stuck with simply because of the xda-dev's site and the interesting things done with it), but I hate windows mobile (For the most part). So I got the android (and later hero) ports that actually work on my phone. Ultimately I got hold of a copy of marketplace on my mobile and google didn't get their licensing margins... OH NOES!!!! I CAN SPEND MONEY NOW IN THE GOOGLE MARKET PLACE AND THEY GET A CUT - IM A CRIMINAL!!!
Or course, the ports to the tytn2 aren't entirely all that useable, but they did give me a really good idea that I wanted a Hero.
But now I dont. Why? simply because of the fact google did this and the way they did it. They did not have to go in with a c&d, they could have easily gotten a hold of their hacking community (such as that which is cyanogen) with an open letter/blog post saying "please stop doing this - and these are the reasons why".
Google has everything to gain from something like cyanogen cause it makes their software more useable - but instead they took a view no other maker has. Much to their detriment. I was so keen to get my hands on an android phone and now the interest has completely left me. Sure, im only one person, but to see someone like google take an axe to their own hacking community for no good or useful reason is very disappointing. At first I thought they were pushed into this via the open handset alliance, but I've been told by reliable sources this is not the case and it was solely instigate by google. Ultimately, the only real mobiles worth running android on are actually android phones with the licensed software anyway.
But there are exceptions... There are places where google didnt send the android close apps, but you can bet it was for reasons they weren't happy with. After all, marketplace is something google gets a cut on and they'd want that on every mobile they can get it into. I cant say I really care much if he does find a way around it, truth is that he shouldn't have to.
And thats the 2 main points 1) Google had nothing to lose and everything to gain by following MS's example of turning a blind eye 2) They didnt have to do it this way.
Lately, an appropriate quote from the "Yes, Minister" series on the bbc: Sir Humphrey: May I say just one more thing? Jim: Only if it's in plain English. Sir Humphrey: Very well Minister. If you are going to do this damn silly thing, don't do it in this damn silly way.
I was VERY VERY keen to get a Hero (still am), but its complicated by the fact that the Hero available (UK) has one band missing that's used in Australia (though not by my mobile provider). Work is currently renegotiating its contracts for phones and so until they do (and either stay with the same provider or switch to the provider that uses the band) I really dont know what to do. Im keen as mustard to get one.
However, in the interum i've found solace in the fact that people have hacked android to run on the tytn2 and lately, hacked the Hero firmware to work on it. This is great for me cause it gives me a feel of whether I want the phone or not, and I still do.
Curious that Google would chase someone that way really, its not the typical google way and perhaps its the beginning of google turning evil? or maybe they're being forced to do it from one of their licensee's? Will be interesting to see how this turns out.
But, there seems to be one simple way around it. Rather then distributing a ROM, distribute a build tool. Something that sucks a rom off the owners phone, does the cynogen mods and creates a new rom for the user to upload... Would this ont solve the problem?
Slashdot Mirror
I dont really get why people are getting so up in arms google dropping h.264 from chrome. They're essentially coming out in support of things like mozilla and opera, but they market share for the browser is not astronomical.
It really is a non-event because if people wanted to be able to support tag on their servers and be able to support say IE and firefox (the majority of browsers i believe?), they'd already have to produce both formats. Irrelevant of what google do with chrome.
Now, if google came out and said "we'll only have webm on youtube for the tag in html5", that would be a very different story, and one worth talking about.
I think the article is written by a cretin personally (the ars article), but alot of people are getting up in arms about a non-event.
I dont mean "stupidity tax" either.
Consider how many people (accountants) and institutions exist solely for the purpose of doing other people income tax paper work. its a massive industry. We're all very very capable of doing our own tax, yet alot of us dont. Why? well for example, i used to do my own tax, then i married an accountant and she does it. She takes 30 minutes and gets it right first time. I take 4 hours and get it wrong. From a sheer opportunity cost perspective, its worth it to have someone who knows what they're doing do your tax (i get 4 extra hours to play COD). then theres the whole "get it wrong and you go to jail" thing im not overly fond of either. Sure, if i get a ps3 firmware wrong im not going to jail but for an end-user who really doesn't get anything more then "put disk in here, press this button" its a load off someones mind. Compared to a tax accountant, $30 is a cheap load of someones mind too.
The reality is, i cant imagine best buy get a huge demand for the service, but who knows really? But the kind of people who go for this kind of thing are also the kind of people who often used to click on those links that say they're from their bank and they need to login to confirm their details.
my point is that as nerds (as the vast majority of us here are), the thought of someone doing something as simple as a ps3 firmware update is for us may be mind boggling. Yet if you spoke to my wife, she doesn't understand why half the people she used to do income tax for paid her to do it cause it was just so simple to her.
If you can't be bothered to plug it in and create an account, you have no business buying it.
unfortunately that kind of attitude is born of pure ignorance. you can say many arrogant things about them from a nerd perspective but you cant say they have no business buying it.
The reality is i know plenty of people who own a ps3 and if i sat them down in front of it and said "connect this thing to the wifi router your isp gave you" they would be absolutely lost. yet it makes up the majority of people who own the platform, they are the reason the platform itself survives. they buy every game they own. they know how to shove the disk in the drive and click "multiplayer" on call of duty. But thats about it really.
the best part is they (without exception) have other very redeeming features. they know how to do my tax cause they're accounting geniuses or they know how to replace the oil line on my motorbike cause they are mechanical geniuses... whatever they're reason for existing is, they can afford a ps3 and they add market share to a platform i (personally) like. More power to them. The most amusing part is they think about me (when it comes to tax) the same way you think about them "why would someone pay me to do this thing that is so very simple".
If they're willing to shell out 30$ to have some pleb at best buy setup something for them, great, so long as they keep buying games for the ps3 then we (ps3 owners) ultimately end up being better off for it.
Best buy maybe doing something not-so-nice, but its the kind of thing i can live with. Now if they managed to modify the ps3's they sell so the only way you could do a firmware update was to take it to them and pay $30 then yeah, i'd go after their blood even though i didnt buy my console from them.
it seems a little weird that people would "GO TO SOMEONE" to get it done given how often it happens (the fw upgrade that is).
But from a services perspective, 30$ seems cheap to me?
I kinda feel a small rage from the perspective that someone out there owns a ps3 and ended up going "im going to go to best buy to upgrade the firmware on my ps3". It just doesnt sound believable. Maybe the first time it happens people do it? but seriously as an on-going thing it sounds hard to believe and you have to assume they have friends (who might even have a ps3 themselves) you'd assume someone would eventually go "seriously, you dont need to do that". What gets me though is how they find out it needs to be done? i mean my ps3 jumps and says "hey, here's a fw update, wanna install it?" and you click yes.
Mind you, go back not too long ago and in order to get firmware upgraded on many devices it was "go see the maker/service person" (nokia phone for example). So its not too hard to believe that people may still have that attitude in general.
However, if you READ THE ARTICLE, it seems like engadget are playing pretty fast and loose with facts here. In my world the ps3 goes for quite a decent range of prices depending on where you go, and best buy has it for $329 with the firmware update (and it says you have to buy it). So a rep said they'll do it for $29.98... whatever? is that $30 higher than average in the US? i have no idea.
But the whole article just seems kind of bitching and moaning about someone saying they'd do a firmware update for $30 for you. As someone who works in IT, it would not surprise me to have someone come up and say "can you update the software on my X" cause they just dont get how it works. They know they put a disk in here, or a cable in there and they press that button to make it go... thats all they know...
If they were going to go after another storage vendor, Compellent is the obvious choice. Not only does it complement their last storage acquisition (equalogic), it expands on it. Alot of the key features of the equalogic are expanded on in the compellent storage...
Equalogic was... iscsi + thin provisioning + snapshotting + replication.... ... equalogic + fibre + scalability
Compellent is
Whats more, compellent pride themselves on the fact their storage runs industry standard components rather then being custom-built. I.e. their controller heads are supermicro boxes (running a modified version of the ecos? FOSS RTOS) with standard PCIe HBA's in them (unlike 3pars totally-custom-built model). The backend storage is simply Switched fibre jbods or SAS jbods. All of which Dell actually manufacture themselves (though compellent use xyltec or something?). They would simply be buying the software component off compellent really. Hell, they could do a deal with compellent and just license the OS. Replace the components Compellent use with Dell's R710's (or whatever) and Dell's own storage boxes (SAS and SATA), and you have a serious storage story worth talking about (from a dell perspective).
To me, compellent is a much more sensible acquisition (or partnership) then 3par ever would be and so much easier to transition into with their own components... Add some framework for integrating it all into the Dell PAN software they license from egenera and you have a very interesting and compelling (no pun intended) story in terms of data center management...
The sad part of loosing 3par is probably that Dell perhaps put a huge dent in their emc relationship... whooops... so they may need another storage story and fast... on the plus side, with HP aquiring 3par, HP would probably not have the money to block a buyout of compellent if Dell tried (though hp probably do have the money to spare in reality)
That of course doesn't address any of the other area's Dell could expand into though, i.e. tables, phones, music or whatever. Maybe they should look at doing their own networking kit? im sure there are a few vendors out there ripe for buying in that space...
just my 0.02c
Running ext3 on raw partitions really gives you no latitude for snapshots... but why do you need them?
The conventional wisdom for snapshotting is to create a consistent point in time view of an FS. This is something thats often needed for things like db's. for example, if your running a db, you want all your db files snapshotted at the same point in time (ignoring logging for now) simply for consistency. This is where the rsync ideas fall on their bum, because rsync just wont happen fast enough to create a consistent point in time across the entire database and you end up with a corrupt db. As has been pointed out though, snapshots are NOT necessarily safe ways of backing up database data, the database should be aware of what your trying to do (see hot backup) and most can be made to do just that.
But then again, if you can rsync, you can backup (and typically thats a better idea anyways) - i.e. see bacula, etc. Rsync has its uses, but a backup tool it often is not.
There is one caveat, if you running on a SAN then there is no SAN (that i know of) that doesn't do snap-shotting in this day and age (though, in some cases it comes at a $ cost). Even just about every iscsi san does it.
Your only other option is to be migrating into LVM (see caveat below). IMHO, this is the best idea cause lvm doesnt just give you snap-shotting, it gives you much more besides in terms of flexibility.
Option 3 (and this ones a tough one) is to migrate into DRBD (or LVM is going to support dm-replication soon). But, you can migrate to DRBD now without too much effort (even in 2.4 iirc), and this would allow you to replicate ext3 data to another host running lvm where you CAN snapshot. But, as i said before i think your best choice is to migrate into lvm (drbd will cost you more in terms of sheer volume of work and drbd is not fun at the best of times).
Personally, i think your dealing in very niche cases there. Relational mathematics is absolutely no requirement for being any kind of database guy. Logic, yes. But thats basic school maths.
games are a somewhat different story and there are quite alot of cases where you'll need some maths.
The rest your all talking about a re-invention of the wheel. AI, if your going to write an actually AI then yeah, maths is important, but the reality is its a niche realm. You also dont need probabilty to use random number generators, you just need to understand the differences between the types you can get (no maths required for that really), unless your IMPLEMENTING a random number generator - then maths is required, but again, thats niche.
String processing and regex require very very little math, unless your impelementing one, again niche.
But look to the real world for examples. Im a person who drives coders these days and i only code for fun. I do have a maths degree and excluding games, most math based theory is fundamentally useless in the real world. Just look at web coders for example (this is a massive chunk of the code-producing industry right there) and almost anyone could learn to code around 95% of the websites out there without any fundamental knowledge of maths past school level - and be very effective at it. The web browser itself is another example (and many applications fall into this same realm) where maths is just not a huge requirement, i.e. you could have 20 coders working on this and only 1 or 2 might need some maths for some parts.
A profound knowledge of math is only a requirement if your doing something profound WITH math in code, and this equates to less then 10% of the real world.
Basic math (i.e. 1+1 = 2) is obviously an absolute requirement.
Algebra too is mostly a requirement (though if you did programming first, you'd probably find algebra alot less difficult cause you'd dealt with representative values).
But thats where it ends for almost 99% of programmers. Programming is really about shuffling bits of data around and so you can get by with only those two skills. However, the rest are very useful depending on the field.
For example trig and calculus are infinitely handy in any kind of spatial programming, but knowing vectors and transformations are often essential if your getting into 3d coding (though u can get by without it, if your using a library).
The rest are usually straight forward and dependant on you already having the math skills. I.e. if your going to be coding something that deals with statisics, that you obviously need to know statistics.
Ultimately, any math you know is to your advantage, but not really essential unless you dealing as a coder in a pure math realm (i.e. trying to implement a math algorithm within code). There are indeed many things you could code that are based on math without having to understand the math behind it.
For example using rand() is easy, is based on math and you can use it without understanding it. You can also learn to understand the difference between random number generators without understand the theory of their operation, and indeed understand what the difference between strong and pseudo random number generators really is - again, without needing to know the maths of their operation and be a very effective coder.
Another example if neural nets - its easy to understand their operation in terms of a pure coding exercise if your using someone elses neural net library - their operation is quite simple. Writing the library would require a reasonable amount of math intelligence though.
There are huge numbers of example where these things are fundamentally true, things you may build on that are based entirely within the math realm but understanding their mathematical operation is fairly irrelevant (but useful).
What alot of people do think (and it annoys me no end) is that you should be able to reinvent the wheel constantly. This is a time waster. If your writing some program that uses a neural net, the only reason to know how to implement your own is if the several out there cant do exactly what you need. This is what most people do anyways, "gimme that library" and reuse peoples work - its the backbone of how we code and ultimately the world as we know it would be alot different if we didnt just use the library that does the thing we want rather then implementing our on constantly.
But as i said, it depends on what you want to be as a coder. I would say having high-school maths in your head is going to cover 90% of coding jobs easily (i.e. 1+1=2 and algebra). I really dont know too many coders who need more then that myself.
Having had this problem before... ILOM is great.. but it has one disadvantage... its network based. There are so many nuisance things that can go wrong here, mostly around loosing the network. Its also very hard to run down to the IDC with a laptop and just plugin (and hope for the best). If you loose a switch where your ilom is plugged in, you have to find another place to plug it in and pray its on the same network.
Personally, i think anyone who uses dhcp on a management network (where ilom's are usually plugged in) is moderately insane.
Serial has one huge advantage... its a standard..
I used to wonder why people didnt start embedding usb to serial ports on their devices until i started using one on my laptop... there are several chipsets out there with various quirks, and the place they are most used will mean these kind of barriers are fairly insummountable.
I have a sheeva plug and it does use an embedded usb to serial converter, but that device is a good example of where it would work and most places it wont.
What im refering to is of course the data center, serial ports thrive here because so many devices have serial consoles and this is a VERY VERY GOOD THING. As I said before, its a standard. I can buy a cisco (or any brand really) serial concentrator and then manage ANYTHING that has a serial console. Can you imagine the nightmare that would erupt if we went to usb consoles? "I have a cisco usb console concentrator, and its not compatible with our HP procurves or our dell poweredge devices"... dear god I hope they never ever do that. Buying cheap usb to serial converters for the people out in the field that need to get on consoles is far easier and cheaper. The vendor lock-in insanity would be such a painful experience here. On top of that, you can route most serial consoles over standard cat6 cable (huge bonus in the DC).
While pinouts (for serial) on some devices may differ, they really aren't any where near the agony of what a usb console would be.
As for speed, what device on earth has a serial console for more then a command line? I cannot think of a single device that was build in the last 10 years (perhaps even 20) that would require you to (or even let you) upload a firmware over its serial console. Even when truely broken, devices can usually get to their network ports for tftp or something similar. I hope to god the OP gets a clue because its an appalling suggestion that I hope never reaches the light of day that could only come from someone who really had a rough day with one particularly strange device and decided to have a whine about it on slashdot and try to apply it to a more general set of circumstances.
Im going to assume a java course actually includes coding java... but if its a focussed-on-java type course your probably missing a few very important facets.. So what I would do, in this order is (while trying to avoid system coding as such):
- google java app engine (this is a good one cause it requires almost zero computing resources you own to actually host an application, its good for learning some servlet stuff and has the advantage of not having to learn how to deploy apps into things like tomcat). Its basically just a good place to start for java web stuff but keep in mind, its in the google way.
- Web Apps, i.e. j2ee, java servlets, etc (look at a job ad site and tell me how many ad's you see looking for these - j2ee is no small fish by the way and there are as many ways to utilise it as there are people who code java)
- Now learn some of the common frameworks used with java (struts, etc)
- take a little tour of database and sql, this is pretty critical to alot of java work (mysql is a good, free place to start).
All that will lead you down a path of learning some html, etc, which is a good thing... then:
- Learn some stuff about soap and the various other server-to-server rpc type stuff (quite handy to know)
- Learn some android coding (again from google and ya never know, you might come up with an app everyone wants and never have to find a job cause your rich!)
Next, take a tour of some other languages.... from java you could easily stroll into something like C#, but there are tonnes of languages out there that would give you experience worth having. Ultimately though, with java alot of the time you'll be heading towards web coding. There is some call for gui's and the like but its far less common (though android is making that less true).
As others have pointed out, i think it'll move to the optical. Glasses you wear that have a screen in them... and given where e-ink is going that may not be too far away. Thats not to say the wrist wouldnt be in use, after all if you no longer need a display, a mobile phone could take on a much different (wrist-wrapping) form factor.
But i also believe one area that mostly goes untouched is proximity type computing. I.e. I sit down at the "computer" at work and im in close enough proximity that the glasses display something related to that. Theres a whole range of things that could be done in the proximity range... for example removing those clumsy lcd/led displays on appliances at home and have a proximity thing in your mobile phone (hey, you carry it with you everywhere anyways). Similar to bluetooth but without all the authentication (though based more on mutual induction then actual radio waves as such), who cares if someone can walk up to your microwave and use it with their own mobile phone. Thats not to say auth wouldnt be required (a-lah work computer would require it), but pairing things is a pain when its just something simple.
It'd be nice to abstract information from everything into a format that suited myself, rather then the other way around... What I mean is that your microwave could send your phone the parameters it needs to operate it and your phone could display it for you in a way you like. From an informational perspective it would uniquely useful, i.e. stand at a bus stop and get an up-to-date timetable "bus 483 is running 10 minutes behind schedule".. Add a few standards to it all and it would really shape our lives in many ways.
I do agree with him when he talks about the "dull pc roadmap" (4 to 8 to 16 cores, etc), and i think ARM (heh, theres a pun there somewhere - get an arm on your wrist or something) may in the future have a fair bit to say about it.
But then again, im longing for the Peter F Hamilton experience... I want my affinity gene (and all this wonderful other ideas in the commonwealth/confederation books)!
Seriously, years ago I started working on a c++ version of j2ee (not just servlets, the whole kit) and i mean providing similar functions not identical methods of execution obviously. It wasnt terribly hard actually. But it all falls apart really quickly cause of several reasons:
1) platform architecture - the dependence here, even between different versions of the same distribution was a pain and essentially spelt the end of my work. So I was stuck with "do i make web apps c++ soruce, or shared library binaries?" to which there is only one real answer for portability - source.
2) its a systems langauge - dear god that makes it painful for so many reasons.
There are caveats to both those, but the reality is that php exists because it fulfils a need and it does it quite well. To compare the two (c++ and php) is a little ridiculous and ultimately this article just reeks of "please everyone advertise my c++ web tool kit for me!". Sure, facebook (and trillions of others) MIGHT move to c++ web tool kit, but find me a dev that knows how to code an app it, now find me 2, now find me 200 cause thats how many i'd need to write and maintain faceboot apps in c++.
Even taking the OP's assumtion c++ is 10 times more efficient at what php does and that you could actually code facebook in it as actually acurate and that php vs c++ is a one-to-one relationship for things like code maintenance, your still stuck with "how many API's am i going to have to re-write and how many php api's do i use that dont even exist in c++". Its ludicrous to assume that you could drop-in replace php with witty without ending up coding tonnes of c++ code just to do things that PHP already provided. Not to mention the zillions of little extensions that revolve around php to accelerate its web-abilities (memcached for example). The number of things that can be used along side php for web-related things and the number of api's in-built to php just mean witty is never even going to be viable as an alternative. Lets also not forget there are millions of people round the globe using php for web stuff - which ultimately leads to php being a good web language (i.e. security problems being found, optimizations, etc etc).
Of course, wouldn't facebook be using something like zend to compile php pages? I mean seriously, if the 25000 servers are running php and not running zend the waste here just in cost of servers would be unbelievable - shear idiocy on facebooks part (if it were true, and i'd very much doubt it) and I imagine zend would have almost given it away for free just so facebook could say "we got a x% improvement using the zend compiler".
So, I wonder how many people are now learning about witty for the first time (which seems like the only real reason for the article to begin with). Better advertising than adwords!
I have two thin clients from either 1990 or 1991 sitting in my roof, and generally speaking that was the last time they were actually useful.
The reality is that dropping a cheap desktop pc on peoples desk, having a data policy, and having file servers is alot cheaper than thin clients. The simple fact is that the market is mostly driven by joe blogs with his home pc and he has no use for thin clients (despite many attempts to make thin clients relevant in the home). When you talk about thin clients its always business and enterprise which instantly adds a 1000% mark up of any hardware. Joe blogs buys so many home pc's in fact that their prices are so competitive, unlike thin clients.
Want to pxe boot some atoms? your not going to beat that price, but be prepared for some pain, because licensing thin clients (even your own) is ridiculously expensive at the backend.
There has also been alot of hot air released into the IT world about "centralising data into the datacenter" which sound great until you actually do it. WAN optimisation does help, but only so much.
On top of this, thin clients are a perpetual network nuisance. They seem like a good idea until you get 50 or more clients on the same network segment continuously sending tiny little video updates and realise "holy god my network is being flogged to death". It sounds great but the truth is that sporadic write from clients to a shared file server consume much less bandwidth (people will scoff, but you'd be surprised how much different the network profile is for x number of desktops vs x number of thin clients, even with the rather thin rdp protocol).
There are places where thin clients are used however and heres why:
1) Compliance - i know one place that uses them exclusively because they just cant afford for their data to sit on desktops. I.e. the data itself has to be in some central secure location
2) POS/Kiosk type work - i.e. people at windows servicing clients
3) people who bought into the concept and now regret it... I know too many of these.
There are advantages to them, but when viewed with an eye to what people are trying to achieve they mostly become irrelevant when people realise policy (cheap) can easily dictate fixing the problems they are trying to fix with a technical solution. One great one i love hearing is how user X can login to any terminal (or even remotely) to the exact same desktop. How many of your users ACTUALLY need that? Can you seriously say that a terminal server for vpn with access to the same file shares and mail server cant give you what you need? Are your users running around random desks every day they come into the office? The truth is (assuming your on windows at work) that profiles will give your users pretty much all they need - a pre-configured outlook and the network shares they're used to seeing.
The second one is data, stopping users from saving data locally where it might be lost. Well, this is were policy can save your bum. It'll cause some pain now and then (though rarely) when a user looses a bit of documentation cause it was saved on his desktop (Despite the bleedingly obvious file server sitting next to them on the network) and his drive failed but the reality is this is so very rare the cost of a thin client solution becomes rediculous in comparison.
Thats my $0.02 anyways. Thin clients i find quite interesting, but they are rarely useful at solving any real problems except in niche and very specific scenarios.
I dont like drbd (though i've used it for a while)... its a massive convoluted and complex mess and fairly inflexible.
Personally, im hoping dm-replicator gets near completion sometime soon though details of it are rather scarce (i do have a kernel built with the dm-replicator patches, but trying to do anything with it seems near impossible)...
I do a fair amount of work inside the storage world and drbd is just such a mess in so many ways.
I sounds very critical and so forth to drbd and thats not the way i mean to come across. What I really am trying to say is that its bloated for the small amount of functionality it does and with a couple of minor tweeks could do much MUCH more. Its a kewl piece of software, but like many FOSS projects has a hideous, weighty config prone to confusion (something you just dont need with DR).
Still, that is the way it is!
actually, i just decided to have a look at patchwerk and as luck would have it, there was a patch posted that included doco.. Very worth reading... Cant wait till this makes it into mainstream.
http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/63991/
Theres not alot of info around about it, but i'm dying to see the new dm-replicator module. Theres not huge amounts of information available about it and bits and pieces have been floating around for a while... it basically looks like something that could replace drbd as a more sensible mechanism of doing replication...
Personally I hope they let it do local replication as well cause the one thing i've always wanted is to replicate my laptops hd onto an occasionally-pluged-in usb disk with the ability to snapshot just the usb disk now and then... That would be fantasic.
"I've had three from young people saying they were contemplating committing suicide" - seriously, if you believe 2012 (or any movie really) enough to even say something like that, the world is probably better off without you. Thats really just plain stupidity. "A movie said the world might end in a little over 2 years, i better kill myself now" honest to god, your just wasting valuable air useful people could be breathing. But to read this, "I've had two from women contemplating killing their children" is really sad and somewhat supprising that people this dumb actually figured out how to breed (perhaps im assuming too much?).
Is the world really getting as stupid as it appears to be?
De dupe has been around for a while and has some advantages and quite a few negatives... First off, i'd be interested to see how many patent trolls this might stumble over. But de-dup has always gone hand in hand with backups and golden images. EMC, HDS and co never did a good job supporting golden images, but other storage have done well with it (3par, compellent, equalogic).
For the uninitiated, golden images usually consist of building a machine on a SAN, and then using that one image to power many machines (i.e. the same blocks on disk). It then usually just stores deltas from the golden image for each machine... its got its advantages and disadvantages much like de-dup.
Now, the reasons for its use are simple "pay less for storage" which sounds dumb in this day and age (with 1tb drives costing virtually nothing), but the reality is in the SAN world 1tb drives cost a fortune and wherever you use de-dup or golden images, you usually use the fastest (and smallest) disk you can get your hands on. (if you dont understand why this is, see the backblaze article from a little while ago - ultimately, putting more space in a bit of SAN storage kit is freeking expensive). In the enterprise world, its almost impossible to step away from SAN storage (unless your google or backblaze).
The big problem with de-dup (and why its primarily used for backups, and primarily only disk-based backups) is how it effects the storage. If you suddenly have one hot spot, even on fast disk, the storage starts grinding to a halt (even when considering caching) because lots of things start accessing the same blocks on the disk. This is not a problem for backups because its usually a once-written, rarely-read scenario. On file servers and databases, its a performance killer (something akin to raid5/6 in software). But de-dup is fantastic for archival storage!... De-dup and performance often tend to be a self-fulfilling prophecy though, simply because data that is duplicated is often duplicated cause its heavily accessed. Take email as a good example. Joe sends out an email with an attachment of some form (perhaps its a document template, but it really doesn't matter so long as he's sending it to a large number of people), all those people save the attachment and probably make some edits. This introduces the next load of pain, fragmentation. All those delta's from the original now need to be saved "somewhere else" and meanwhile all these people are accessing not just the de-dup'ed blocks but the fragmented changes (consider the kernel source for linux as well, tonnes of branches of code that would possible get de-duped and fragmented). Databases are another great example. Often in tablespaces there is quite a load of block-alligned duplicate data, often this is the nature of how databases store data. Sometimes this data can be quite critical to their function and to have a database slamming the same blocks (again with small fragmented changes) is pain personified.
Still, i wonder how many patents sun are likely to trip up on... I see this being non-fun as there are many people who make serious cash from de-dup at various levels....
I couldn't agree more...
as a loves-to-hack-around-in-linux type, both the platforms are intriquing and the nokia's more-like-linux abilities make it something i'd buy to play with (i.e. a secondary phone that im not reliant on). The android based ones also have a similar attraction, but ultimately if you wanted to do something more-like-linux on them you'd be doing alot more work.
Personally, i've always had in the back of my mind the idea of writing a text-based (ncurses) interface to a phone just to see how functional it could actually be and see how fast you could actually make it.
Maybe someone will (or already has) port maemo back to the android devices...
Still, its an interesting read.
well, drupal (so far) has been quite good at patching its own problems...
Modules on the other hand are a different beast (and in some ways the can be a pain with drupal) - some are coded by drupal them selves, some are not so your miliage can vary.
But this is where open source can actually benifit, cause if you do have access to coders (im sure the whitehouse does right?) you can fix it yourself (or at least get a work-around going for a short time).
theres alot of good reasons people use cms... and let me try and use your own words... say you wanted a website that looked like cisco's.
In a CMS, (such as drupal)... heres who does what:
1) designer writes a theme for the website (to give it the look)
2) content producers write the pages
3) codes do the bits the cms doesn't already do.
The point is, the CMS gives you alot to begin with without limiting you, sure you could code a website from scratch but something as powerfull as drupal is going to take a long time. You may not need everything drupal does so you can cut that down a bit. But ultimately you'll end up with something that allows people to do their jobs (i.e. content producers to write pages). Drupal CMS is also especially good at being extended (and there are virtually no limits that I can think of). So rather then writing a whole heap of code to do your website, your coders just write what they need to extend the CMS - "dang, drupal doesnt do rsa based two factor auth, we're going to have to code it in" as apposed to "ok, lets get started on coding a website - quick grab 15 people who know architecture".
"a small one"....
It took me some time to formulate an opinion on this, and so what I say is not a knee-jerk reaction. I personally kept hoping that google were pushed into this because of either the alliance they are in or because of something less obvious (like pushing around some proprietary rubbish from htc) - but so far it appears not to be the case. My position will flip utterly though if that does occur.
First of all, let me compare google android to windows mobile - go to xda-developers.com and have a look at all the roms floating around (all require licensing and of course none of them do). Yet MS dont touch them... Why not? cause its good for MS. Not only does it not impact their business model it helps them. People get to play with the new roms and they already had a license for Windows mobile anyways. No harm done. Ultimately it gives windows mobile a thriving hacker community which is only helping MS.
Apple have done virtually nothing to stop hackintosh's (generic pc's running macos) or jailbreaking iphones. More or less for the same reason. Yet Apple did go after someone trying to sell hardware with MacOS - and thats the fine line that google should not of crossed. Its a line apple and MS (surprisingly) realise is ultimately in their best interests.
When google just let fly with a bunch of urine over a thriving hacking community. Are google within their rights? absolutely. But they achieve nothing. The people who were getting the firmware already had the market place (thanks to the fact their phones ran LICENSED android in the first place). Take me for an example of where it could be contrived to "hurt" them.. I have a tytn2 (which i've stuck with simply because of the xda-dev's site and the interesting things done with it), but I hate windows mobile (For the most part). So I got the android (and later hero) ports that actually work on my phone. Ultimately I got hold of a copy of marketplace on my mobile and google didn't get their licensing margins... OH NOES!!!! I CAN SPEND MONEY NOW IN THE GOOGLE MARKET PLACE AND THEY GET A CUT - IM A CRIMINAL!!!
Or course, the ports to the tytn2 aren't entirely all that useable, but they did give me a really good idea that I wanted a Hero.
But now I dont. Why? simply because of the fact google did this and the way they did it. They did not have to go in with a c&d, they could have easily gotten a hold of their hacking community (such as that which is cyanogen) with an open letter/blog post saying "please stop doing this - and these are the reasons why".
Google has everything to gain from something like cyanogen cause it makes their software more useable - but instead they took a view no other maker has. Much to their detriment. I was so keen to get my hands on an android phone and now the interest has completely left me. Sure, im only one person, but to see someone like google take an axe to their own hacking community for no good or useful reason is very disappointing. At first I thought they were pushed into this via the open handset alliance, but I've been told by reliable sources this is not the case and it was solely instigate by google. Ultimately, the only real mobiles worth running android on are actually android phones with the licensed software anyway.
But there are exceptions... There are places where google didnt send the android close apps, but you can bet it was for reasons they weren't happy with. After all, marketplace is something google gets a cut on and they'd want that on every mobile they can get it into. I cant say I really care much if he does find a way around it, truth is that he shouldn't have to.
And thats the 2 main points
1) Google had nothing to lose and everything to gain by following MS's example of turning a blind eye
2) They didnt have to do it this way.
Lately, an appropriate quote from the "Yes, Minister" series on the bbc:
Sir Humphrey: May I say just one more thing?
Jim: Only if it's in plain English.
Sir Humphrey: Very well Minister. If you are going to do this damn silly thing, don't do it in this damn silly way.
The tytn2 and the HTC Hero android hacks.
I was VERY VERY keen to get a Hero (still am), but its complicated by the fact that the Hero available (UK) has one band missing that's used in Australia (though not by my mobile provider). Work is currently renegotiating its contracts for phones and so until they do (and either stay with the same provider or switch to the provider that uses the band) I really dont know what to do. Im keen as mustard to get one.
However, in the interum i've found solace in the fact that people have hacked android to run on the tytn2 and lately, hacked the Hero firmware to work on it. This is great for me cause it gives me a feel of whether I want the phone or not, and I still do.
Curious that Google would chase someone that way really, its not the typical google way and perhaps its the beginning of google turning evil? or maybe they're being forced to do it from one of their licensee's? Will be interesting to see how this turns out.
But, there seems to be one simple way around it. Rather then distributing a ROM, distribute a build tool. Something that sucks a rom off the owners phone, does the cynogen mods and creates a new rom for the user to upload... Would this ont solve the problem?