Maybe it's just that the majority of/.ers wish that the U.S. really was a government "of the People, by the People and for the People" as opposed to "for the Special Interest Groups and Lobbyists" and so we rail at the moon and howl at the lobbyists and wish we could bitchslap Sen. Orrin Hatch.
While you make some excellent points, and I won't disagree with you, I have to point out that at this point in time, the PC world is down to pretty much a half dozen "open" systems vendors, AMD, Intel, VIA, and a few other chipset manufacturers, and two, perhaps 3, viable CPU manufacturers. When nearly 80% of all motherboards coming out are based on either an Intel or VIA chipset, you don't have vendor independence.
Let's face it, at this point, that's all that really differentiates motherboards these days. The chipset (which defines everything else on the board) and the CPU.
Has it always been that way? As far as I can tell. The only difference is that you can get 10000 companies making tiny variations of the SAME COMPUTER, or Apple, who does the same. The only difference right now is volume (it used to be peripherals and accessories, but USB, FW, and AGP/PCI changed all that).
You know, it makes me wonder. Now that you've said that, I never really thought: Why didn't France, if they were so opposed to the war, patrol Iraq with their Mirage's and protect it with their Navy? Why didn't Germany kick the U.S. out of Rammstein AFB?
I don't think it's a simple answer but enough questions come to mind: * What would the citizens who depend on U.S. goods and services say and do to their lawmakers?? * What would the citizens who depend on access to U.S. markets say or do to their lawmakers?? * What would the U.S. do? I seriously doubt it would have come to open war with France or Germany if they did these actions, but it might have triggered the government to oust BMW or Dassault or other companies out of the U.S. in retaliation, which you could have expected reciprocation from the EU as well. * Balkanized the UK with the U.S., or against? Who is the "motherland" more loyal to?
In the end, France and Germany decided that the overwhelming fact of the matter "Saddam was breaking INTERNATIONAL LAW SET DOWN IN 1991" overrode the political need to stop the U.S. at all costs.
<sarcasm>I mean, the U.S. may suck, and France may have despised our War with Iraq, but do they really want to lose their overseas market for their overpriced wines and cheeses?;-) </sarcasm>
Have you TRIED shopping for an Athlon XP or P4 motherboard these days with more than 512MB of RAM and PCI and ISA onboard? I have, because I'm one of these guys who has legacy hardware he can't dump, and let me tell you, PCI/ISA mobos no longer exist for top of the line processors. I'll gladly eat my words if you can find me a motherboard comparable to the ABit MAX7 with a single ISA slot on it.
Some other gentlemen politely reminded me about the great MFT crufting that occasionally happens on NTFS that I've never really encountered, but have heard about over the years...:-/ Possible.
That is because all your NTFS metadata is constrained to one disk. Now use a striped set, and how the metadata is spread across multiple disks. Hope that the same is NOT true of WinFS, because if you lose one disk, or the master, you lose *ALL* the metadata you've constructed.
My response to you then, is don't use Explorer.:-) Explorer is definitely nowhere near as fast as the filesystem allows (go and do a recursive directory listing from the command line one day: dir/s > file.listing, and time it. Do the same in Explorer). This performance problem in explorer comes from the particularly sluggish design of MFC, and Explorer's heavy reliance on it.
Granted, I'm not sure anything could be better, I've only dabbled in building my own versions of list controls, but my rough and tumble foray was a bit faster, if less refined, leading me to believe that Microsoft has indeed a decent job with MFC.
Who really cares then? Open Source is doing it's job, and the copyright holder of ReiserFS can do what he wants... If he makes a million dollars, and that allows him to work full-time on his baby, then it betters everything for all of us, including Microsoft. Who loses here?
You would have to assume that something that fails in a "working condition" vs. something that fails in a "working but needs rewiring before returning to full function" is an inherently better design in the first place.
Given that I don't know what I'm doing (I know plenty of theory, I have lots of database transaction logging background), a journalling filesystem should NEVER need a fsck to restore to a usable state, only to reclaim journal nodes that have yet to be reclaimed. Barring disk failures, a journalling filesystem should ALWAYS be in a consistent state.
I'm not sure I understand softupdates yet... so I'll be back someday to comment on those.:-)
With them buying RAV, how long you want to be before McAfee and Symantec and all the rest get marginalized to nothing?
Granted, in my humble opinion, they picked one the best of the virus protection tools... RAV and AVG are perhaps the only two AV tools I've ever used that have caught EVERY virus I've been infected with...
I've thought about this a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that until files come with EA as a publicly defined (Standard) 512byte header at the beginning of each of them, then EA's and metadata aren't really going to take off.
You only GAIN from using metadata if you can share it with your colleagues via email, floppy-net, file sharing, etc. If I lose my metadata because I put it on a floppy and fed-ex it to japan, it's less useful, particularly if I go extension-less. Now with a standardized header in front of it, it's more useful.
File.meta would be constructed like so: 512 byte header 0-infinity byte payload
And we really just pass around ONE file-type, a meta-file. But at that point, you might as well just pass around XML documents.:-/
I think you're confusing the issues. Interoperability at the API/Network/Standards level is one thing. Reverse engineering something and claiming it to be interoperable is something completely different. NTFS has never been a public standard, and so interoperability will ALWAYS be a moving target.
At this point, I think it would behoove the Linux community to one-up microsoft, and take this opportunity to add MVCC characteristics to the VFS layer, to add metadata, to break outside the traditional Unix model, improve LVM, make upgrading to LVM easy.
You forget that no one goes out on day and decides they want Windows. It's what they've already been programmed to expect. Anyone who's dual booting will continue to use NTFS or FAT32.
Excuse me while I go wash this troll smell off of me...
There are database products available out in the world that take a snapshot of a filesystem based on a time interval. All changes after this time do not get added to the backup, even if it's the last file to be backed up, and it's brand new.
This is standard fare in the database universe, where a change to a record after the backup has started can break tables already stored to tape, therefore destroying referential integrity. Many of the problems we have with backups and system restores today could be alleviated if our filesystems had this functionality built into them naturally. In many systems it goes by the acronym MVCC (multi-version concurrency control).
It would allow me to kick off a backup, and make changes to system settings, and yet the backup system wouldn't pick up any new settings, the filesystem would queue the changes until the backup "transaction" had ended, and then commit the new changes permanently.
Windows has a product available for it now that does this, I'm not sure of the name for it though. I have to tell you, the ability of linux to do this at the VFS layer would be killer. Of ANY OS really. And it's come to the point where software is so complex, and so interdependant on the OS (Windows particularly) that it SHOULD be a standard feature.
What, do you think that just because you make amazing music|software that if you stick it up on a website (or better yet, put it on Kazaa) you'll be making millions in sales?
Worked for Linus Torvalds...
It's not sales, it's exposure. If some band, for example Whiskey Chapel (Blatant whore), managed to get 10 million downloads of their tunes, played on internet radio stations galore, some concert outfit is going to want to put them on a stage to make millions with. Period. Promoters will promote successful acts. Acts which have a following, traditional or not, can get promoted.
It's just a matter of time before more internet only acts start opening up with big names like Metallica and Ozzy.
And once that happens, it's just a matter of time before headliners start coming from internet radio playlists.
Don't presume to think you know me and my thoughts based on a simple question about how a CEO can raid a 401K. For the record, I don't dislike unions, but I am on the fence regarding their proliferation in the tech industry.
Not to burst your bubble, but your pension isn't 100% safe either. Plenty of CEO and boardmember fraud could leave your pension penniless, (as one Massachusetts pension program discovered last year).
A startup I was working for about 4, 5 years ago was doing fairly good business, but ended up having some pretty bad cashflow problems (collection sucked). When some of the sales guys and one of the IT guys wanted to know what the plan was for commissions compensation (understanding that there was no cash on hand, but having a plan in place), and management gave us nothing in the way of a plan, and in the case of the IT guy absolved themselves of their debt, we staged a walkout.
The IT guy (my best friend) quit immediately. One of the other programmers had quit the day before. I quit but offered to stay onboard and transition a few projects (out of the goodness of my heart - assholes be damned). I got walked out the door. Two of my friends who were in marketing but were not seriously considering a walk-out were bounced out the door a week later with a month's severance and leftover vacation time. Definite house-cleaning.
The company deserved to lose us. They are doing fantastic 4 years later, so I know we didn't hurt them (not that I cared), but I hope at least they got the fucking point.
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Maybe it's just that the majority of /.ers wish that the U.S. really was a government "of the People, by the People and for the People" as opposed to "for the Special Interest Groups and Lobbyists" and so we rail at the moon and howl at the lobbyists and wish we could bitchslap Sen. Orrin Hatch.
And we never will be. :-)
As the defences get better, so do the weapons.
While you make some excellent points, and I won't disagree with you, I have to point out that at this point in time, the PC world is down to pretty much a half dozen "open" systems vendors, AMD, Intel, VIA, and a few other chipset manufacturers, and two, perhaps 3, viable CPU manufacturers. When nearly 80% of all motherboards coming out are based on either an Intel or VIA chipset, you don't have vendor independence.
Let's face it, at this point, that's all that really differentiates motherboards these days. The chipset (which defines everything else on the board) and the CPU.
Has it always been that way? As far as I can tell. The only difference is that you can get 10000 companies making tiny variations of the SAME COMPUTER, or Apple, who does the same. The only difference right now is volume (it used to be peripherals and accessories, but USB, FW, and AGP/PCI changed all that).
You just made my day! :-)
You know, it makes me wonder. Now that you've said that, I never really thought: Why didn't France, if they were so opposed to the war, patrol Iraq with their Mirage's and protect it with their Navy? Why didn't Germany kick the U.S. out of Rammstein AFB?
;-) </sarcasm>
I don't think it's a simple answer but enough questions come to mind:
* What would the citizens who depend on U.S. goods and services say and do to their lawmakers??
* What would the citizens who depend on access to U.S. markets say or do to their lawmakers??
* What would the U.S. do? I seriously doubt it would have come to open war with France or Germany if they did these actions, but it might have triggered the government to oust BMW or Dassault or other companies out of the U.S. in retaliation, which you could have expected reciprocation from the EU as well.
* Balkanized the UK with the U.S., or against? Who is the "motherland" more loyal to?
In the end, France and Germany decided that the overwhelming fact of the matter "Saddam was breaking INTERNATIONAL LAW SET DOWN IN 1991" overrode the political need to stop the U.S. at all costs.
<sarcasm>I mean, the U.S. may suck, and France may have despised our War with Iraq, but do they really want to lose their overseas market for their overpriced wines and cheeses?
Wow. That was funny. Insightful even. Sorry, no mod points. :-)
But first you have to get through my two firewalls and non-IE based browser with Javascript disabled.
Good fucking luck.
Methinks you forgot your tags. :-)
Have you TRIED shopping for an Athlon XP or P4 motherboard these days with more than 512MB of RAM and PCI and ISA onboard? I have, because I'm one of these guys who has legacy hardware he can't dump, and let me tell you, PCI/ISA mobos no longer exist for top of the line processors. I'll gladly eat my words if you can find me a motherboard comparable to the ABit MAX7 with a single ISA slot on it.
Some other gentlemen politely reminded me about the great MFT crufting that occasionally happens on NTFS that I've never really encountered, but have heard about over the years... :-/ Possible.
That is because all your NTFS metadata is constrained to one disk. Now use a striped set, and how the metadata is spread across multiple disks. Hope that the same is NOT true of WinFS, because if you lose one disk, or the master, you lose *ALL* the metadata you've constructed.
My response to you then, is don't use Explorer. :-) Explorer is definitely nowhere near as fast as the filesystem allows (go and do a recursive directory listing from the command line one day: dir /s > file.listing, and time it. Do the same in Explorer). This performance problem in explorer comes from the particularly sluggish design of MFC, and Explorer's heavy reliance on it.
Granted, I'm not sure anything could be better, I've only dabbled in building my own versions of list controls, but my rough and tumble foray was a bit faster, if less refined, leading me to believe that Microsoft has indeed a decent job with MFC.
You're telling me that 200MB of files over 2megs apiece are consuming 1GB of disk space?
Then I'm contending you are NOT running NTFS. Either that, or you screwed up and set your cluster size to 5MB.
-Chris
Who really cares then? Open Source is doing it's job, and the copyright holder of ReiserFS can do what he wants... If he makes a million dollars, and that allows him to work full-time on his baby, then it betters everything for all of us, including Microsoft. Who loses here?
-Chris
You would have to assume that something that fails in a "working condition" vs. something that fails in a "working but needs rewiring before returning to full function" is an inherently better design in the first place.
:-)
Given that I don't know what I'm doing (I know plenty of theory, I have lots of database transaction logging background), a journalling filesystem should NEVER need a fsck to restore to a usable state, only to reclaim journal nodes that have yet to be reclaimed. Barring disk failures, a journalling filesystem should ALWAYS be in a consistent state.
I'm not sure I understand softupdates yet... so I'll be back someday to comment on those.
With them buying RAV, how long you want to be before McAfee and Symantec and all the rest get marginalized to nothing?
Granted, in my humble opinion, they picked one the best of the virus protection tools... RAV and AVG are perhaps the only two AV tools I've ever used that have caught EVERY virus I've been infected with...
I've thought about this a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that until files come with EA as a publicly defined (Standard) 512byte header at the beginning of each of them, then EA's and metadata aren't really going to take off.
:-/
You only GAIN from using metadata if you can share it with your colleagues via email, floppy-net, file sharing, etc. If I lose my metadata because I put it on a floppy and fed-ex it to japan, it's less useful, particularly if I go extension-less. Now with a standardized header in front of it, it's more useful.
File.meta would be constructed like so:
512 byte header
0-infinity byte payload
And we really just pass around ONE file-type, a meta-file. But at that point, you might as well just pass around XML documents.
I think you're confusing the issues. Interoperability at the API/Network/Standards level is one thing. Reverse engineering something and claiming it to be interoperable is something completely different. NTFS has never been a public standard, and so interoperability will ALWAYS be a moving target.
At this point, I think it would behoove the Linux community to one-up microsoft, and take this opportunity to add MVCC characteristics to the VFS layer, to add metadata, to break outside the traditional Unix model, improve LVM, make upgrading to LVM easy.
You forget that no one goes out on day and decides they want Windows. It's what they've already been programmed to expect. Anyone who's dual booting will continue to use NTFS or FAT32.
Excuse me while I go wash this troll smell off of me...
There are database products available out in the world that take a snapshot of a filesystem based on a time interval. All changes after this time do not get added to the backup, even if it's the last file to be backed up, and it's brand new.
This is standard fare in the database universe, where a change to a record after the backup has started can break tables already stored to tape, therefore destroying referential integrity. Many of the problems we have with backups and system restores today could be alleviated if our filesystems had this functionality built into them naturally. In many systems it goes by the acronym MVCC (multi-version concurrency control).
It would allow me to kick off a backup, and make changes to system settings, and yet the backup system wouldn't pick up any new settings, the filesystem would queue the changes until the backup "transaction" had ended, and then commit the new changes permanently.
Windows has a product available for it now that does this, I'm not sure of the name for it though. I have to tell you, the ability of linux to do this at the VFS layer would be killer. Of ANY OS really. And it's come to the point where software is so complex, and so interdependant on the OS (Windows particularly) that it SHOULD be a standard feature.
I do believe the GNU Project created the GPL.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
Copyright 1989, predating Linux by a significant time period.
Worked for Linus Torvalds...
It's not sales, it's exposure. If some band, for example Whiskey Chapel (Blatant whore), managed to get 10 million downloads of their tunes, played on internet radio stations galore, some concert outfit is going to want to put them on a stage to make millions with. Period. Promoters will promote successful acts. Acts which have a following, traditional or not, can get promoted.
It's just a matter of time before more internet only acts start opening up with big names like Metallica and Ozzy.
And once that happens, it's just a matter of time before headliners start coming from internet radio playlists.
Don't presume to think you know me and my thoughts based on a simple question about how a CEO can raid a 401K. For the record, I don't dislike unions, but I am on the fence regarding their proliferation in the tech industry.
Not to burst your bubble, but your pension isn't 100% safe either. Plenty of CEO and boardmember fraud could leave your pension penniless, (as one Massachusetts pension program discovered last year).
As if anyone actually READS the linked stories anyway...
And exactly HOW does a CEO plunder a 401K?? Is this sorta like Congress plundering Social Security??
A startup I was working for about 4, 5 years ago was doing fairly good business, but ended up having some pretty bad cashflow problems (collection sucked). When some of the sales guys and one of the IT guys wanted to know what the plan was for commissions compensation (understanding that there was no cash on hand, but having a plan in place), and management gave us nothing in the way of a plan, and in the case of the IT guy absolved themselves of their debt, we staged a walkout.
The IT guy (my best friend) quit immediately. One of the other programmers had quit the day before. I quit but offered to stay onboard and transition a few projects (out of the goodness of my heart - assholes be damned). I got walked out the door. Two of my friends who were in marketing but were not seriously considering a walk-out were bounced out the door a week later with a month's severance and leftover vacation time. Definite house-cleaning.
The company deserved to lose us. They are doing fantastic 4 years later, so I know we didn't hurt them (not that I cared), but I hope at least they got the fucking point.
-Chris