Ahh... so it wasn't that Linux wasn't ready for the desktop, but that your desktop wasn't ready for Linux.
Why do people hold hardware compatibility against the operating system? Don't people realize that Linux actually has much better hardware support than any OS out there?
Windows hardware support is terrible, but the hardware manufacturers are more than happy to provide a driver for Windows users while they ignore Linux. Do not expect this to last forever.
I have been running Linux on the desktop for almost 10 years now (wow has it been that long already), and with the 2-3 year old hardware that I run, I rarely ever experienced hardware compatibility issues that are worth being frustrated about. Sure I have to use an applet to dim my laptop display, big deal, it's better than installing a bunch of SONY software so that the keyboard buttons work. In fact, with Windows they didn't work at all until I installed Sony's crap.
Linux is more than ready for the Desktop. Hardware manufacturers are getting on board far more rapidly than you might believe, it's reputation is already stellar in the enterprise server end of things, and more and more companies are exploring alternatives to Windows/Office and understanding the need for open data formats and centralizing data in the data center with client-server based solutions. For those reasons I encourage everyone to at least take the time to learn more about Linux, and familiarize yourself with how it fits into your future. I expect that eventually almost everyone will be using *NIX a derivative for at least part of their technology needs.
Here goes all the moderating I did on this thread, but I want to get one thing clear before it confuses anyone else.
I have never used LaTeX, but I understand it and know why it's important, I hope that I can help you and anyone else who might be interested.
TeX allows the content creators to create the content without knowledge of the finished formatting. If your a writer, you just write with everything left justified in a clean screen font without regard to how your creation will appear on the printed page. Sure, you might need to know a handful of basic formatting tags; a few written on an index card is enough unless your doing equations or some other complex work.
Ultimately, the content creator is freed from concerning themselves with anything but content. This alone is a huge productivity booster!
I think the worst thing LaTeX has going for it is that the examples provided on webpages try to show the power and not the ease of use. Below is some typical markup in LaTeX for normal text, certainly not overwhelming (from here )
\documentstyle[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
This is a sample document. I can just keep typing without regard to formatting, unless of course I want to ensure that something {\em important} is emphasized.
\begin{myspecialtag} I can, as the content creator, specify blocks of text, like this one, that will later have special formatting applied. I don't worry about what that formatting will be, I just create a new label on the fly, or reuse ones I have already used or were provided by my template developer. \end{myspecialtag}
The fact that I am free to just type, and only tag blocks of text for later formatting frees me from thought about what the final document will look like and keeps me focused on the content that I am creating.
Why is it societies burden to see that everyone lives as long as possible... what benefit does society gain as a whole.
I realize that where emotions are concerned, cost-benefit analysis is pointless, however imagine the "good" that could be done if we freed our tax dollars from caring for those who are only being kept alive because we, as a society, don't know how to say enough is enough. I would wager that that same money would improve far more lives.
I don't know how we could justify forcing the elderly out of our pockets, some day we will be old too and might want the expensive treatments, but something must be done.
Perhaps we could appeal to the aging and elderly, asking that they please write a living will that clearly states the point at which treatments will stop. Perhaps we could demand that the families of the aging cover the cost of extending the life of one so near death.
I am not talking about 60 or 70 year old patients who have a chance for 20 active years of life. I am talking about individuals who are entirely dependent upon health care for their survival... living in nursing facilities, dieing a slow horrible death, who are only alive because their families just won't let go. Those are the ones I feel we need to stop spending tax payer money on to keep alive.
Please realize that I am not heartless, it is more humane to let them die in dignity, and it is far more fair to the rest of society to spend that money caring for those who have decades left to live and need better care to see that those decades are healthy and productive.
so in that vein, I say, lets remove end of live coverage from medicare or medicaid.
Essentially, lets refuse to cover the cost of treatment to individuals who have ZERO realistic expectation of recovery (beyond pain management and keeping them clean and comfortable). I realize that there are limitations already in place, but it is still very common for the tax payers to fund a very expensive procedure that merely keeps someone alive for a week or two longer.
I don't know about you, but if I am dieing I wouldn't feel right taking $20,000 dollars from families that need it so that I can live another week!
Keep your meth rebate, I like my meth exactly as it is, untaxed.
Seriously, NY is one of the few states I could see actually envision legalizing something like Marijuana. I would be willing to bet that the combination of increased tax revenue and decreased arrest/prosecution/imprisonment costs would positively impact their budget by an order of magnitude more than any "fat" tax.
Lots of lines of code CAN mean exactly what you say, bloat. However it appears that in this case many of the line changes were fixing issues and adding needed features.
For example, they significantly reduced some bottlenecks in Calc... they made Base more like access in that you can actually create an "application"... and they added some very nice contextual help in places where non-power users will find it very handy, like when they are trying to use a Calc function and can't remember the order of its arguements.
I would say that this is a decent point release for the OOorg team, evolutionary but not revolutionary. My only complaint is how much it is beginning to resemble MS Office; nice for adoption rates, bad for innovation.
With PXE network boot, remote desktop, virtualization ect. There is little reason that any information higher than "sensitive" would ever need to be stored on a disk that is outside a secure data center. I would like to see the governemnt do away with desktop computers completely in favor of thin clients or something similar.
Now just imagine what that $100 Million would accomplish if spent contributing to a free platform to which they could "own" the code.
Let's see, they saved ~$100M on 5 years on JUST MICROSOFT LICENSES; so lets estimate its a savings of 10% (probably less) so they were spending about $1B for COTS software over 5 years, now they are only spending $750M.
$750M would pay 1500 employees $100K/Yr for that same 5 years. At the end of 5 years, a 1500 person development team (with help from the public) would have turned out one hell of a secure linux/BSD distro. After that they could eliminate most of those positions, and stick with auditing community contributions for security reasons.
Why the hell any agency with the resources of the US Government (or many large corporations) don't contribute to and use free software makes no sense to me. It seems like only a handful of major companies and governments are pushing for open operating systems and desktop software... but they all spend millions on web development and keep pumping money to Microsoft year after year.
I would imagine if 5 of the top 10 governments were to get together and pool 50% of their software licensing budgets over the next 5 years, they could replace 90% of their commercial software with open alternatives that meet their needs; nearly eliminating the cost of software licensing forever. The financial benefits are nothing compared to the security and flexibility gained by owning the OS.
It's sad that what MS did for the USAF is being touted as a "good thing"... For the amount of money that MS is making off our government I think anyone who has ever put their life on the line for our country should be entitled to Free BJ's from MS execs in Redmond. And now MS is being made to look good.
I think the bigger story here is that the USAF was being charged over $100M in excess licensing fees because it had multiple contracts with Microsoft. And that Microsoft has been giving their largest customers a generic, bug ridden, POS OS and not been willing to respond to their largest customer's needs until now.
What do you bet this is just a tactic to prevent the USAF from deploying their own OS as described above.
So far the only thing I've heard Cameron talk about this movie is about how this movie is going to be ultra realistic 3D rendering. At which point it begs the question why not just use live actors from the get go?
I hate to say it, but some of the ultra realistic 3d renderings I have seen recently have been more realistic than live actors... sort of.
Why? because it's difficult to make the impossible look like it really happened with just filming techniques. So you end up with a good live action dialog followed by a CG or special effect scene that tries but just doesn't quite look real.
If you don't try to recreate something "real" and instead go for a consistent almost-real look, you don't have those periods of distraction where the director switches to special effects or CG. Overall the movie feels more realistic because your not reminded that it isn't real.
Of course, there are always those people who can't get past the slight differences between CG and real.
Oh, and until you see the movie, don't judge. The "ultra realistic 3d" might just be that good. I know I have seen some amazing renderings lately.
Why would you think that Btrfs is unstable and slow...
There have been other Btrfs benchmarks. The main page of the Btrfs wiki says:
Btrfs is under heavy development, and is not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review. The Btrfs disk format is not yet finalized, but it will only be changed if a critical bug is found and no workarounds are possible.
The Wiki doesn't say it's unstable or slow at all... only that its not complete so they don't recommend it for production. It could be the fastest and most stable file system on the planet and still have that warning if the developers were not 100% confident that the disk format won't change.
If anything, one could hope that Oracle pulls some folks from ZFS to btrfs and actually speeds development, why develop two competing open file systems?
If they were going to pick just one, why would they favor the one that is not done over the one that has been in production for years? Especially considering that more people deploy Oracle on Solaris/SPARC than on Linux?
The one that is done is not compatible with the linux kernel. Why do you think that Oracle started the btrfs project to begin with, they wanted something as feature rich as ZFS but would run on linux.
It's possible that they will drop BTRFS in favor of pushing Solaris/ZFS, but I doubt it.
Why would you think that Btrfs is unstable and slow... because of one article where they tested an unfinished, un-optimized file system on a single computer with a simple single SATA drive.
No filesystem performs the same on every device you use it on. Some very basic file systems do quite well on most drive/controller configurations, but anything truly advanced needs to be tuned for the configuration.
Honestly, with all that btrfs has to offer, I could care less that it's marginally slower than EXT 3/4. Especially if I can spread data over multiple disks, with redundancy, and no need for software raid to add to the overhead.
Your question is very poorly worded. Better would be, "Should we expect the Oracle and Sun merger to slow or halt development on btrfs in favor of the proven ZFS." To which I would say no... BTRFS is already in the kernel, ZFS stands little chance.
If anything, one could hope that Oracle pulls some folks from ZFS to btrfs and actually speeds development, why develop two competing open file systems?
How can one say that Btrfs is slower when they only tested on a single configuration.
I wouldn't be surprised if Btrfs would outperform the others on systems with multiple disks, especially if it has some ZFS style capabilities.
Also, I didn't see anywhere that they were running a 64bit install... I would hope that the devs for Btrfs are optimizing for 64bit systems.
Reguardless, a single configuration test does not qualify them to say that one filesystem is faster than another... unless they qualify it by saying that "on the only system we benchmarked, btrfs not the performance king." A much less meaningful comment.
Way to go Bolivia, be stingy until everyone else runs low then lease the mineral rights for massive profit. Just hope that an alternative for Lithium isn't found in the mean time.
Oh... and don't you love our new energy independance?
...except the censoring of sufficiently alarming or distressing things?
I don't think it's a matter of censorship. There is a huge difference between censorship and punishing those who use information to harm another person. For example, much of my personal information is publicly available if you know where to look... that doesn't give you a right to make a phone call and remind me of all of the painful events in my life.
No one wants censorship... but I believe that an attack on someone's emotions can be every bit as brutal as a physical attack and there needs to be a method to punish those who commit non-physical attacks.
Had the ass in all of this sent that email to a ton of his friends, a mailing list, or whatever it could be considered social commentary and be protected by free speech. He sent it to her family with the intent to do emotional harm... that is, or at least should be, a crime.
Not to rain on your tirade, but this policy was UNANIMOUSLY approved by the same faculty it would effect. Perhaps the, very bright, faculty of MIT actually liked the policy and felt it was fair to everyone. Perhaps they considered what you have said, and found that the policy was fair or that your issues were unfounded. Somehow, I think that the faculty of MIT understand the ramifications of this policy and feel that it is 'good'.
Not a whole lot can be said against any restrictive policy that has the unanimous support of all of those the policy restricts.
... this is clearly a privacy issue, not a pornography issue. If it were common for me to read in public places, like at work on my lunch break, a e-book would be far better than a typical paperback. Why, because then no one could learn what I am reading unless I tell them.
I don't read anything to be embarrassed about, but I can imagine it is awkward for women into those trash romance novels to hold a lewd covered book when sitting across the aisle from their boss.
Or what about people reading the Bible, Koran, or other religious manuscript. I have seen the way people look at folks reading such material on subways.
E-Books are great for everyone concerned about others judging them by what they read. Hell, in some cities you can be judged by which news paper you read... god forbid your conservative boss sees you reading the New York Times. I know I would hate to have a perfectly good working relationship ruined because I think homosexuals should be allowed to marry and raise children.
I am all for personal privacy in all things personal. I am not a conspiracy theorist that thinks the government or big business is spying and gonna use information against me... but I don't want my reading material, music tastes, or social/political beliefs to be an issue with those I wouldn't readily discuss such things with. A good ebook reader and some head phones allow me to consume media privately, if for no other reason than that.
The last thing you want is in house development. The government is capable, but on something of this scale it would be best left to someone who has a financial interest in developing a product that people WANT to use. Government systems are typically very capable systems, but you have to HAVE to use them as no one in their right mind would WANT to use them if there were alternatives.
If the Government could work out a deal with Google to license a private copy of the Google Apps infrastructure for the entire US Government, I would would wager that the actual licensing costs we spend on mail infrastructure would drop substantially, and the cost of maintenance, increased reliability, and increase in productivity, would more than pay for the system.
Remember, Google has already created the product, they are already making their profit off of it, and they don't need the sale... but imagine what it would do for their stock prices if the Government standardized on Google... even if Google gave it away in exchange for actual man-hour costs for support they would win. The Government is our largest employer, and if the average GS9 secretary used Google mail at work, how long till she became a Google user at home?
I could argue that it's irrelevance is, at least in part, due to its lack of public attention. If the public were more interested in what NASA did, it would do more or lose funding. Instead it has lost funding, simply because people don't care enough to encourage them to take risks.
If you look at all of the large funding projects NASA has ever done, they have always been highly risky and had high public interest (not necessarily support). I can think of few things that NASA has done in my memory that have been all that exciting. I remember the challenger explosion, and several other mishaps making the news, but otherwise they have always seemed like just another boring government agency that can't do anything exciting... not the NASA my parents remember.
NASA of the 50's and 60's was a very aggressive organization, mostly because the public demanded it of them. The people wanted to see, and would pay for, some very risky and exciting projects. Lets go to space, lets land on the moon, lets create a reusable launch vehicle, and so on. Hell, NASA today can't even build a replacement for the space shuttle because the public doesn't care enough and they don't know how to take chances anymore.
I think that a leaner, meaner NASA is better than leaving it to public industry. The public space industry is about to die a painful death with the collapse of the "money on trees" economy that we are recovering from. The only reason any of these companies got off the ground (pun intended) is that there was an extremely loose investing environment. Everything was making money, and no investment was bad. Now that people have been reminded that investing should be done with some caution, I expect that many of these space startups will have a hard time funding themselves until they can create a new market for their product.
NASA simply needs to be greatly changed to make it more adventurous and aggressive and far less burdened with bureaucracy.
How is this a bad idea, and how does it show a lack of pride.
Essentially, the entire process was created to generate media attention, otherwise the module would be given a sterile name, or just a number. In an age where NASA seems positively boring they must actively compete with reality TV and myspace/facebook for the attention of the public.
I would be all for naming the module "FUCK" if it would make the public more interested in our space program; and I think Colbert encouraging the public to participate in an entertaining way can do nothing but good things for NASA. It helps make space fun again.
Most societies have used entertainment to help keep important issues in the public interest. Even Rome had it's gladiators to help remind it's citizens that the country was still at war, without them the citizens would have lost interest and stopped backing the expansion.
Seriously? Yes, and why should we be so serious all the time... let history reflect that our generation was both highly productive and capable of good spirited fun.
It seems every third comment is along the lines of... "do we really want our data on a private companies servers?"
Get a clue, what this guy might do is switch the government to government owned servers running google software. Right now, my email, on the DHS network, is pulled from an exchange server... MS does not own the server. The great thing about google's code is that it would scale much better than anyone else's, eliminate the need for client software on individual workstations, and prevent users from storing mail locally on their machines (archive pst's) as is so commonly done now with the tiny mailboxes and huge attachments that inexperienced users are so fond of sending around here. Because each exchange server has it's own mail store, an attachment could exist on every mail server in our organization... while on google, an attachment is stored very efficiently and only on multiple servers for redundancy purposes.
My vote is for google code on government owned equipment... it would be by far the most efficient and cost effective solution.
The intent of my post was more to point out how unfortunate it would be if the stimulus bill restricted investment to "batteries" and ignored other technologies that may come to supplant batteries in the near future if the research funding is there.
I am not suggesting that battery research is wasted, only that equal research into other methods of energy storage might yield even larger gains once the technology matures.
I don't want another battery, I want something completely new. I hope that the text of the bill doesn't actually use the words "battery" or even "electro-chemical".
I would so much rather a ultra-capacitor or some similar storage device that could conceivably be free of rare metals, and have extremely fast charge times (were the current available)
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Ahh... so it wasn't that Linux wasn't ready for the desktop, but that your desktop wasn't ready for Linux.
Why do people hold hardware compatibility against the operating system? Don't people realize that Linux actually has much better hardware support than any OS out there?
Windows hardware support is terrible, but the hardware manufacturers are more than happy to provide a driver for Windows users while they ignore Linux. Do not expect this to last forever.
I have been running Linux on the desktop for almost 10 years now (wow has it been that long already), and with the 2-3 year old hardware that I run, I rarely ever experienced hardware compatibility issues that are worth being frustrated about. Sure I have to use an applet to dim my laptop display, big deal, it's better than installing a bunch of SONY software so that the keyboard buttons work. In fact, with Windows they didn't work at all until I installed Sony's crap.
Linux is more than ready for the Desktop. Hardware manufacturers are getting on board far more rapidly than you might believe, it's reputation is already stellar in the enterprise server end of things, and more and more companies are exploring alternatives to Windows/Office and understanding the need for open data formats and centralizing data in the data center with client-server based solutions. For those reasons I encourage everyone to at least take the time to learn more about Linux, and familiarize yourself with how it fits into your future. I expect that eventually almost everyone will be using *NIX a derivative for at least part of their technology needs.
Here goes all the moderating I did on this thread, but I want to get one thing clear before it confuses anyone else.
I have never used LaTeX, but I understand it and know why it's important, I hope that I can help you and anyone else who might be interested.
TeX allows the content creators to create the content without knowledge of the finished formatting. If your a writer, you just write with everything left justified in a clean screen font without regard to how your creation will appear on the printed page. Sure, you might need to know a handful of basic formatting tags; a few written on an index card is enough unless your doing equations or some other complex work.
Ultimately, the content creator is freed from concerning themselves with anything but content. This alone is a huge productivity booster!
I think the worst thing LaTeX has going for it is that the examples provided on webpages try to show the power and not the ease of use. Below is some typical markup in LaTeX for normal text, certainly not overwhelming (from here )
\documentstyle[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
This is a sample document. I can just keep typing without regard to formatting, unless of course I want to ensure that something {\em important} is emphasized.
\begin{myspecialtag}
I can, as the content creator, specify blocks of text, like this one, that will later have special formatting applied. I don't worry about what that formatting will be, I just create a new label on the fly, or reuse ones I have already used or were provided by my template developer.
\end{myspecialtag}
The fact that I am free to just type, and only tag blocks of text for later formatting frees me from thought about what the final document will look like and keeps me focused on the content that I am creating.
\end{document}
I would agree completely, however...
Why is it societies burden to see that everyone lives as long as possible... what benefit does society gain as a whole.
I realize that where emotions are concerned, cost-benefit analysis is pointless, however imagine the "good" that could be done if we freed our tax dollars from caring for those who are only being kept alive because we, as a society, don't know how to say enough is enough. I would wager that that same money would improve far more lives.
I don't know how we could justify forcing the elderly out of our pockets, some day we will be old too and might want the expensive treatments, but something must be done.
Perhaps we could appeal to the aging and elderly, asking that they please write a living will that clearly states the point at which treatments will stop. Perhaps we could demand that the families of the aging cover the cost of extending the life of one so near death.
I am not talking about 60 or 70 year old patients who have a chance for 20 active years of life. I am talking about individuals who are entirely dependent upon health care for their survival... living in nursing facilities, dieing a slow horrible death, who are only alive because their families just won't let go. Those are the ones I feel we need to stop spending tax payer money on to keep alive.
Please realize that I am not heartless, it is more humane to let them die in dignity, and it is far more fair to the rest of society to spend that money caring for those who have decades left to live and need better care to see that those decades are healthy and productive.
so in that vein, I say, lets remove end of live coverage from medicare or medicaid.
Essentially, lets refuse to cover the cost of treatment to individuals who have ZERO realistic expectation of recovery (beyond pain management and keeping them clean and comfortable). I realize that there are limitations already in place, but it is still very common for the tax payers to fund a very expensive procedure that merely keeps someone alive for a week or two longer.
I don't know about you, but if I am dieing I wouldn't feel right taking $20,000 dollars from families that need it so that I can live another week!
Keep your meth rebate, I like my meth exactly as it is, untaxed.
Seriously, NY is one of the few states I could see actually envision legalizing something like Marijuana. I would be willing to bet that the combination of increased tax revenue and decreased arrest/prosecution/imprisonment costs would positively impact their budget by an order of magnitude more than any "fat" tax.
Lots of lines of code CAN mean exactly what you say, bloat. However it appears that in this case many of the line changes were fixing issues and adding needed features.
For example, they significantly reduced some bottlenecks in Calc... they made Base more like access in that you can actually create an "application"... and they added some very nice contextual help in places where non-power users will find it very handy, like when they are trying to use a Calc function and can't remember the order of its arguements.
I would say that this is a decent point release for the OOorg team, evolutionary but not revolutionary. My only complaint is how much it is beginning to resemble MS Office; nice for adoption rates, bad for innovation.
With PXE network boot, remote desktop, virtualization ect. There is little reason that any information higher than "sensitive" would ever need to be stored on a disk that is outside a secure data center. I would like to see the governemnt do away with desktop computers completely in favor of thin clients or something similar.
Now just imagine what that $100 Million would accomplish if spent contributing to a free platform to which they could "own" the code.
Let's see, they saved ~$100M on 5 years on JUST MICROSOFT LICENSES; so lets estimate its a savings of 10% (probably less) so they were spending about $1B for COTS software over 5 years, now they are only spending $750M.
$750M would pay 1500 employees $100K/Yr for that same 5 years. At the end of 5 years, a 1500 person development team (with help from the public) would have turned out one hell of a secure linux/BSD distro. After that they could eliminate most of those positions, and stick with auditing community contributions for security reasons.
Why the hell any agency with the resources of the US Government (or many large corporations) don't contribute to and use free software makes no sense to me. It seems like only a handful of major companies and governments are pushing for open operating systems and desktop software... but they all spend millions on web development and keep pumping money to Microsoft year after year.
I would imagine if 5 of the top 10 governments were to get together and pool 50% of their software licensing budgets over the next 5 years, they could replace 90% of their commercial software with open alternatives that meet their needs; nearly eliminating the cost of software licensing forever. The financial benefits are nothing compared to the security and flexibility gained by owning the OS.
It's sad that what MS did for the USAF is being touted as a "good thing"... For the amount of money that MS is making off our government I think anyone who has ever put their life on the line for our country should be entitled to Free BJ's from MS execs in Redmond. And now MS is being made to look good.
I think the bigger story here is that the USAF was being charged over $100M in excess licensing fees because it had multiple contracts with Microsoft. And that Microsoft has been giving their largest customers a generic, bug ridden, POS OS and not been willing to respond to their largest customer's needs until now.
What do you bet this is just a tactic to prevent the USAF from deploying their own OS as described above.
you got the first post and it more or less completely failed to say anything remotely.
So far the only thing I've heard Cameron talk about this movie is about how this movie is going to be ultra realistic 3D rendering. At which point it begs the question why not just use live actors from the get go?
I hate to say it, but some of the ultra realistic 3d renderings I have seen recently have been more realistic than live actors... sort of.
Why? because it's difficult to make the impossible look like it really happened with just filming techniques. So you end up with a good live action dialog followed by a CG or special effect scene that tries but just doesn't quite look real.
If you don't try to recreate something "real" and instead go for a consistent almost-real look, you don't have those periods of distraction where the director switches to special effects or CG. Overall the movie feels more realistic because your not reminded that it isn't real.
Of course, there are always those people who can't get past the slight differences between CG and real.
Oh, and until you see the movie, don't judge. The "ultra realistic 3d" might just be that good. I know I have seen some amazing renderings lately.
Why would you think that Btrfs is unstable and slow...
There have been other Btrfs benchmarks. The main page of the Btrfs wiki says:
Btrfs is under heavy development, and is not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review. The Btrfs disk format is not yet finalized, but it will only be changed if a critical bug is found and no workarounds are possible.
The Wiki doesn't say it's unstable or slow at all... only that its not complete so they don't recommend it for production. It could be the fastest and most stable file system on the planet and still have that warning if the developers were not 100% confident that the disk format won't change.
If anything, one could hope that Oracle pulls some folks from ZFS to btrfs and actually speeds development, why develop two competing open file systems?
If they were going to pick just one, why would they favor the one that is not done over the one that has been in production for years? Especially considering that more people deploy Oracle on Solaris/SPARC than on Linux?
The one that is done is not compatible with the linux kernel. Why do you think that Oracle started the btrfs project to begin with, they wanted something as feature rich as ZFS but would run on linux.
It's possible that they will drop BTRFS in favor of pushing Solaris/ZFS, but I doubt it.
Why would you think that Btrfs is unstable and slow... because of one article where they tested an unfinished, un-optimized file system on a single computer with a simple single SATA drive.
No filesystem performs the same on every device you use it on. Some very basic file systems do quite well on most drive/controller configurations, but anything truly advanced needs to be tuned for the configuration.
Honestly, with all that btrfs has to offer, I could care less that it's marginally slower than EXT 3/4. Especially if I can spread data over multiple disks, with redundancy, and no need for software raid to add to the overhead.
Your question is very poorly worded. Better would be, "Should we expect the Oracle and Sun merger to slow or halt development on btrfs in favor of the proven ZFS." To which I would say no... BTRFS is already in the kernel, ZFS stands little chance.
If anything, one could hope that Oracle pulls some folks from ZFS to btrfs and actually speeds development, why develop two competing open file systems?
How can one say that Btrfs is slower when they only tested on a single configuration.
I wouldn't be surprised if Btrfs would outperform the others on systems with multiple disks, especially if it has some ZFS style capabilities.
Also, I didn't see anywhere that they were running a 64bit install... I would hope that the devs for Btrfs are optimizing for 64bit systems.
Reguardless, a single configuration test does not qualify them to say that one filesystem is faster than another... unless they qualify it by saying that "on the only system we benchmarked, btrfs not the performance king." A much less meaningful comment.
I for one welcome our...
That is getting so old.
Way to go Bolivia, be stingy until everyone else runs low then lease the mineral rights for massive profit. Just hope that an alternative for Lithium isn't found in the mean time.
Oh... and don't you love our new energy independance?
Surely a good reason to oppose censorship.
...except the censoring of sufficiently alarming or distressing things?
I don't think it's a matter of censorship. There is a huge difference between censorship and punishing those who use information to harm another person. For example, much of my personal information is publicly available if you know where to look... that doesn't give you a right to make a phone call and remind me of all of the painful events in my life.
No one wants censorship... but I believe that an attack on someone's emotions can be every bit as brutal as a physical attack and there needs to be a method to punish those who commit non-physical attacks.
Had the ass in all of this sent that email to a ton of his friends, a mailing list, or whatever it could be considered social commentary and be protected by free speech. He sent it to her family with the intent to do emotional harm... that is, or at least should be, a crime.
What about scanning the UV laser. I can't imagine that the material needs 30ms of constant high intensity UV light to change.
It may take 30ms to react to the light, but not require 30ms exposure.
Not to rain on your tirade, but this policy was UNANIMOUSLY approved by the same faculty it would effect. Perhaps the, very bright, faculty of MIT actually liked the policy and felt it was fair to everyone. Perhaps they considered what you have said, and found that the policy was fair or that your issues were unfounded. Somehow, I think that the faculty of MIT understand the ramifications of this policy and feel that it is 'good'.
Not a whole lot can be said against any restrictive policy that has the unanimous support of all of those the policy restricts.
... this is clearly a privacy issue, not a pornography issue. If it were common for me to read in public places, like at work on my lunch break, a e-book would be far better than a typical paperback. Why, because then no one could learn what I am reading unless I tell them.
I don't read anything to be embarrassed about, but I can imagine it is awkward for women into those trash romance novels to hold a lewd covered book when sitting across the aisle from their boss.
Or what about people reading the Bible, Koran, or other religious manuscript. I have seen the way people look at folks reading such material on subways.
E-Books are great for everyone concerned about others judging them by what they read. Hell, in some cities you can be judged by which news paper you read... god forbid your conservative boss sees you reading the New York Times. I know I would hate to have a perfectly good working relationship ruined because I think homosexuals should be allowed to marry and raise children.
I am all for personal privacy in all things personal. I am not a conspiracy theorist that thinks the government or big business is spying and gonna use information against me... but I don't want my reading material, music tastes, or social/political beliefs to be an issue with those I wouldn't readily discuss such things with. A good ebook reader and some head phones allow me to consume media privately, if for no other reason than that.
The last thing you want is in house development. The government is capable, but on something of this scale it would be best left to someone who has a financial interest in developing a product that people WANT to use. Government systems are typically very capable systems, but you have to HAVE to use them as no one in their right mind would WANT to use them if there were alternatives.
If the Government could work out a deal with Google to license a private copy of the Google Apps infrastructure for the entire US Government, I would would wager that the actual licensing costs we spend on mail infrastructure would drop substantially, and the cost of maintenance, increased reliability, and increase in productivity, would more than pay for the system.
Remember, Google has already created the product, they are already making their profit off of it, and they don't need the sale... but imagine what it would do for their stock prices if the Government standardized on Google... even if Google gave it away in exchange for actual man-hour costs for support they would win. The Government is our largest employer, and if the average GS9 secretary used Google mail at work, how long till she became a Google user at home?
I could argue that it's irrelevance is, at least in part, due to its lack of public attention. If the public were more interested in what NASA did, it would do more or lose funding. Instead it has lost funding, simply because people don't care enough to encourage them to take risks.
If you look at all of the large funding projects NASA has ever done, they have always been highly risky and had high public interest (not necessarily support). I can think of few things that NASA has done in my memory that have been all that exciting. I remember the challenger explosion, and several other mishaps making the news, but otherwise they have always seemed like just another boring government agency that can't do anything exciting... not the NASA my parents remember.
NASA of the 50's and 60's was a very aggressive organization, mostly because the public demanded it of them. The people wanted to see, and would pay for, some very risky and exciting projects. Lets go to space, lets land on the moon, lets create a reusable launch vehicle, and so on. Hell, NASA today can't even build a replacement for the space shuttle because the public doesn't care enough and they don't know how to take chances anymore.
I think that a leaner, meaner NASA is better than leaving it to public industry. The public space industry is about to die a painful death with the collapse of the "money on trees" economy that we are recovering from. The only reason any of these companies got off the ground (pun intended) is that there was an extremely loose investing environment. Everything was making money, and no investment was bad. Now that people have been reminded that investing should be done with some caution, I expect that many of these space startups will have a hard time funding themselves until they can create a new market for their product.
NASA simply needs to be greatly changed to make it more adventurous and aggressive and far less burdened with bureaucracy.
How is this a bad idea, and how does it show a lack of pride.
Essentially, the entire process was created to generate media attention, otherwise the module would be given a sterile name, or just a number. In an age where NASA seems positively boring they must actively compete with reality TV and myspace/facebook for the attention of the public.
I would be all for naming the module "FUCK" if it would make the public more interested in our space program; and I think Colbert encouraging the public to participate in an entertaining way can do nothing but good things for NASA. It helps make space fun again.
Most societies have used entertainment to help keep important issues in the public interest. Even Rome had it's gladiators to help remind it's citizens that the country was still at war, without them the citizens would have lost interest and stopped backing the expansion.
Seriously? Yes, and why should we be so serious all the time... let history reflect that our generation was both highly productive and capable of good spirited fun.
It seems every third comment is along the lines of... "do we really want our data on a private companies servers?"
Get a clue, what this guy might do is switch the government to government owned servers running google software. Right now, my email, on the DHS network, is pulled from an exchange server... MS does not own the server. The great thing about google's code is that it would scale much better than anyone else's, eliminate the need for client software on individual workstations, and prevent users from storing mail locally on their machines (archive pst's) as is so commonly done now with the tiny mailboxes and huge attachments that inexperienced users are so fond of sending around here. Because each exchange server has it's own mail store, an attachment could exist on every mail server in our organization... while on google, an attachment is stored very efficiently and only on multiple servers for redundancy purposes.
My vote is for google code on government owned equipment... it would be by far the most efficient and cost effective solution.
...you could deploy these things as camera servers anywhere you had power. Locker rooms, hotel rooms, etc!... awesome!
Actually I do think these things have a place, though I am not sure exactly how I would use one, except maybe as described above.
Thank you for backing my position.
The intent of my post was more to point out how unfortunate it would be if the stimulus bill restricted investment to "batteries" and ignored other technologies that may come to supplant batteries in the near future if the research funding is there.
I am not suggesting that battery research is wasted, only that equal research into other methods of energy storage might yield even larger gains once the technology matures.
I don't want another battery, I want something completely new. I hope that the text of the bill doesn't actually use the words "battery" or even "electro-chemical".
I would so much rather a ultra-capacitor or some similar storage device that could conceivably be free of rare metals, and have extremely fast charge times (were the current available)