The mafia forces local businesses to pay money to protect them, mainly from the mafia itself. The AdBlock company forces ad firms to pay money to protect them, mainly from the AdBlock company itself.
If you cannot see "any" similarity than I give up here.
I am sure that morally and ethically ad blocking is wrong. On the other hand I am free to not visit a page. And I do this, I abandoned several sites where I was a regular visitor for years. It is not fair to enjoy the content but do not pay the price.
I am not sure that you are legally free to block ads. If - similarly to the EU consent cookies - web pages would start with a popup saying "you agree that read the page without ad blocking LEAVE/STAY" and you choose STAY, then I guess you legally accepted ads.
There is some truth in what you say, but in my experience ads as an attack vector are overrated. In my company there were four virus infections from which only one came from a web page (and not from an ad!). If you can be attacked by an ad, than you can be attacked by any random link on any random page.
Yet these websites choose not to for two reasons. The first is laziness.
No. Until now the percentage of ad blocker users were low. Web sites accepted that, saying that a non-paying user also has some benefit, namely he brings paying users. Today ad-blockers become so popular that the loss affects the bottom line. Moreover an ad-blocking user likely brings only other non-paying user, therefore he is a pure loss. I predict that within a year there will be serious changes and polite requests for ad-blockers to either subscribe or turn off ad-blockers become usual.
This is a good idea, which should be implemented on every OS, but is is only useful for rarely typed accents. I do not know French, but in my language there are 4 different accented variant of O. Even if the order of the accents are customized to the language so that it reflects the real life frequency of those accents, it would be unacceptable to type 5 keys to get a single character. Another issue in the example is that on the usual standalone and laptop keyboards the function keys cannot be touch typed. On a standard keyboard there is no easily accessible keys which is free or which can be replaced, there is no place for dedicated accent keys and there is also no place for a symmetric (both left and right) third level shift keys. Only a new type of keyboard hardware can help, with more accessible keys. (Or older type of hardware: on some pre-PC era keyboards this problem was solved.)
At the very first sight it must have been obvious that this layout was useless. Like all modern Latin layouts. Among other reasons, these layouts have only one third level shift key, the AltGr, on the right side. There is no AltGr on the left side. Conversely, there is no Alt key on the right side. So you cannot touch type text on this if you are a user, and you cannot touch type commands if you are a developer.
The progress of keyboard layouts stalled after the Space-cadet keyboard from the 1970s. After that the dark age of keyboards began. Nowdays the ErgoDox keyboard is the most useful for typing accented characters, it has less keys than the usual keyboard in total, but more keys which are accessible for a touch typist. But ErgoDox is only the hardware, there are no standardized international layouts for it.
We tested asm.js a year ago, it is not particularly fast even within the JavaScript universe (i.e. it was much slower than other JavaScript solutions we have found). And of course browser variants/versions (even small versions!) seriously differ - but that would not be a showstopper, as that can be said about anything in JavaScipt.
Of course they can slowly fix everything in JavaScript, make it more performant, and eventually reach the current level of the Java virtual machine - in about 10-15 years. This is what I expect.
The security model is more related to the class library, not to the virtual machine. Like Android uses Java byte code, but an entirely different security model.
Lawsuits would be a problem, but I guess Oracle would agree on the terms of standardization.
What is the difference between bytecode and obfuscated or simply just complex JavaScript? Do you verify all or even 1% of JavaScript your browser runs? Bytecode can be disassembled into its source language if it is not obfuscated. But JavaScript can be obfuscated as well. Not to mention automatically generated JavaScript, cross compiled from another language. I do not see a difference.
Why do you want to verify either bytecode or JavaScript? Bytecode runners wouldn't have more permissions then the JavaScript just in time compilers already have. We rely on the sandboxing in both cases.
We are using JavaScript for performance critical code and I can confirm that it is the most buggiest, immature technology by far that I have ever seen in my 30 years old carrier. Every second month there is a new browser version for each browser, each with a different set of new critical bugs. We even find JIT compiler bugs regularly!
I simply do not understand why they do not take the free, open source, mature, very fast Java virtual machine, and let the browsers run Java bytecode directly, and let software engineers chose any programming language which best suits their task.
That is correct, I measured double precision (64 bit) floating point performance on AMD Opterons, and the FPU is not a bottleneck, even in an artificial extreme FPU loading benchmark.
As far as I know the shared FPU can be divided not only into two 128 but parts, but it can be further divided into four 64 bit parts, therefore a single Bulldozer core can execute two 64 bit floating point calculation at once. This suit is complete bullshit.
They can as well sue Intel because their CPU has shared third level cache, and they have only a single, shared memory controller.
That is no problem, but they must not be allowed to advertise it as an unlimited plan. It also indicates that the government must work on strengthening free competition.
You may be right in case of other equipment, but enterprise grade drives are really better. For example I do not know any consumer SSD which has power loss capacitors (Intel 320 is not produced anymore). Most consumer drives don't contain even those capacitors which would be necessary to prevent the loss of - not the freshly written but the - old(!) data in case of a power loss. Consumer HDDs lied (or lying?) about sync, they confirm sync before they actually save the data to disk. And I am sure that consumer SSDs do something similar, because consumer SSD are usually faster (although their speed frequently fluctuates to extreme extents) than their corresponding enterprise variants, which is impossible in a safe way without power loss protection capacitors.
In short: if you use the SSD in a cold environment AND store it in hot environment than you may lose data quite quickly. Quicker than two weeks.
Client drives are also affected, but the data loss occurs slighly later. I guess reason of the difference is that enerprise drives assume a higher work temperature.
So the advice is that if you use the SSD in your air conditioned basement in a good case then do not store your SSD on the sun for extended periods.
And no, I do not use spinning media as a backup. I use tapes. Using spinning media for proper backups is almost impossible. See http://www.taobackup.com/
It has no power loss protection, so now it could lose data much faster. It should be good for worthless data but that is all. I am not sure if it has at least small capacitors, the half-assed power loss mitigation technique which does not protect new flushed data, but at least prevents the loss of old, unrelated data.
What are you talking about? All AMD server boards support ECC. In contrast to Intel, AMD always puts every feature into every processor of the same generation. AMD does not dumb down artificially even its cheapest processor. That is one of the thing I like in AMD processors. I do not have to check which random feature is disabled in a particular processor.
Even some desktop AMD motherboards have ECC support, like the SABERTOOTH 990FX.
At this moment I would be satisfied with a usable QWERTY keyboard sized QWERTY keyboard. As far as I know the last serious attempt was the Space Cadet keyboard in the 1970s.
I thought that our tape backup system is luxury, for such a small company. Quite the contrary, it seems that tape is very cheap. Back of the envelope calculation:
Our daily full backup is about 600 gigabytes. We are using 6 pieces of LTO-3 tapes for the last days and 1 for each month, plus 1 for each year. That is about 23 tapes in use. Total of 23Ã--600GB is 13800GB, 138 dollar each month on Google Nearline, which is 1700$ per year.
The total cost of the tape drive, the tapes and the SCSI adapter was less than 1700$. And I expect that to work for at least 5 years, not 1. That means that for backup tape is 80% cheaper.
Of course deduplication would reduce the data amount to a few percentage of its current size. But then we would lose the plenty of redundancy we have with tapes. Google Nearline is offsite, that is good, or actually, that is required for backup. Offline copies are required too, and that is where the entire thing fails for this purpose. Google nearline is online storage from a backup point of view. In other words it cannot be used for backup. It can be part of a backup strategy, though. It could be good for saving backup copies of family photos, if the account password is managed very cautiously. Otherwise I do not see the use cases for this service, but I am sure there are some.
I moved to the opposite direction, from disks to tapes.
We are a small IT company with less than 10 employees, mostly developers, no dedicated sysadmin, but quite a few servers. We had no previous experiences, so our backup "methodolody" is only slowly improving in ad-hoc ways.
First we had backups of critical data stored on online disks. Source code and a very few other things. No configuration files, no database. There were only ad-hoc copies of the latters.
After a while I started to backup more data, and started to use a centralized backup software (namely Bacula). Backups were still written to online disks. Everything was online, and we are reguralry attacked by hackers. Not a good combination.
In the next step I tried to occassionally copy the online backups to offline disks. That did not really worked. Copyying all backups were time consuming, and I usually forgot it or do not have time for it. Large hard disks are still not that cheap, and they cannot be simply taken out the server and put back. The drives must be mounted on a tray, which require additional costs and work.
Most people forget that if I have a 300 GB dataset, then I need about 30 * 300 GB backup space. There are tricks to reduce that, but that makes everything more difficult, more time consuming, less safe.
I started to use tapes 2 years ago, after I recognized that our backup software supports that better. I thought that tape for us will always be a luxury, but it makes things much simpler. Equipment cost was definitely not a motivation.
And indeed that is what happened, now everything is super simple. Bacula tells me what tape should I put into the drive, or if I need to buy a new tape. We have offline copies and multiples copies recorded at different dates. We can retrieve and compare data from 1 day ago, 2 days, one week, one month one yeat, whaterver I want. That is a nice safety, much-much better than we had previously.
Bacause tapes are cheaper, I do not mind adding new data to backup and new tapes, just to make things simple. The funny thing is that I believe we shortly reach the point when our very simple, very safe, tape based backup system will be actually cheaper than the equal hard disk based, even if I do not count labour, only equipment.
I am sure that a larger organization with real sysadmins can do it better, but I am quite happy with our current state.
The submitter does NOT complain about Google's ability to catch spam! He asks why Gmail does not REJECT obvious spam. Rejecting an email means that - in this case the Gmail - server does not even accept it. In such cases the sender gets back a Delivery Status Notification from his own server, telling him that his email did not go through because of such and such error. An important point here is that the email is not lost without any notification. The sender can try to contact the recipient in another way. Actually this may be better than putting the email into a spam folder if that is not monitored regularly, or at all. Yes, this is a valid question, but almost none have undersood it.
I do not understand this complaint about unix configuration either. I am a relatively new Linux user (about 5 years, compared to 20 years on Windows), and I find the Unix configuration system is far-far better than the mess in Windows. Everything is in the/etc/ directory. In the rare cases when I install a tarball instead of a package, the configuration files are in/opt//conf. I manage about about 50 virtual servers, it really works well.
Text configuration files are easily managed by standard command line tools, including diffing and merging changes during upgrade, and non-interactive modifications.
Can you read at all? He is saying among others that frequently some data (NoSQL tuned in one way) is better than no data at all (ACID). Is it better if my doctor knows only half of my previous illnesses, or if none at all in emergency?
Slashdot Mirror
If you cannot see "any" similarity than I give up here.
I am sure that morally and ethically ad blocking is wrong. On the other hand I am free to not visit a page. And I do this, I abandoned several sites where I was a regular visitor for years. It is not fair to enjoy the content but do not pay the price.
I am not sure that you are legally free to block ads. If - similarly to the EU consent cookies - web pages would start with a popup saying "you agree that read the page without ad blocking LEAVE/STAY" and you choose STAY, then I guess you legally accepted ads.
Similarly, it is not your problem that the mafia receives protection money from local businesses. What is the difference?
There is some truth in what you say, but in my experience ads as an attack vector are overrated. In my company there were four virus infections from which only one came from a web page (and not from an ad!). If you can be attacked by an ad, than you can be attacked by any random link on any random page.
RTFA. Adblock asks for and gets a serious sum of money to not block part of web pages, namely ads, the sole or almost sole income source of web pages.
Yet these websites choose not to for two reasons. The first is laziness.
No. Until now the percentage of ad blocker users were low. Web sites accepted that, saying that a non-paying user also has some benefit, namely he brings paying users. Today ad-blockers become so popular that the loss affects the bottom line. Moreover an ad-blocking user likely brings only other non-paying user, therefore he is a pure loss. I predict that within a year there will be serious changes and polite requests for ad-blockers to either subscribe or turn off ad-blockers become usual.
False analogy. You visit the web page, and not the web page visits you.
This is a good idea, which should be implemented on every OS, but is is only useful for rarely typed accents. I do not know French, but in my language there are 4 different accented variant of O. Even if the order of the accents are customized to the language so that it reflects the real life frequency of those accents, it would be unacceptable to type 5 keys to get a single character. Another issue in the example is that on the usual standalone and laptop keyboards the function keys cannot be touch typed. On a standard keyboard there is no easily accessible keys which is free or which can be replaced, there is no place for dedicated accent keys and there is also no place for a symmetric (both left and right) third level shift keys. Only a new type of keyboard hardware can help, with more accessible keys. (Or older type of hardware: on some pre-PC era keyboards this problem was solved.)
At the very first sight it must have been obvious that this layout was useless. Like all modern Latin layouts. Among other reasons, these layouts have only one third level shift key, the AltGr, on the right side. There is no AltGr on the left side. Conversely, there is no Alt key on the right side. So you cannot touch type text on this if you are a user, and you cannot touch type commands if you are a developer.
The progress of keyboard layouts stalled after the Space-cadet keyboard from the 1970s. After that the dark age of keyboards began. Nowdays the ErgoDox keyboard is the most useful for typing accented characters, it has less keys than the usual keyboard in total, but more keys which are accessible for a touch typist. But ErgoDox is only the hardware, there are no standardized international layouts for it.
We tested asm.js a year ago, it is not particularly fast even within the JavaScript universe (i.e. it was much slower than other JavaScript solutions we have found). And of course browser variants/versions (even small versions!) seriously differ - but that would not be a showstopper, as that can be said about anything in JavaScipt.
Of course they can slowly fix everything in JavaScript, make it more performant, and eventually reach the current level of the Java virtual machine - in about 10-15 years. This is what I expect.
The security model is more related to the class library, not to the virtual machine. Like Android uses Java byte code, but an entirely different security model.
Lawsuits would be a problem, but I guess Oracle would agree on the terms of standardization.
What is the difference between bytecode and obfuscated or simply just complex JavaScript? Do you verify all or even 1% of JavaScript your browser runs? Bytecode can be disassembled into its source language if it is not obfuscated. But JavaScript can be obfuscated as well. Not to mention automatically generated JavaScript, cross compiled from another language. I do not see a difference. Why do you want to verify either bytecode or JavaScript? Bytecode runners wouldn't have more permissions then the JavaScript just in time compilers already have. We rely on the sandboxing in both cases.
We are using JavaScript for performance critical code and I can confirm that it is the most buggiest, immature technology by far that I have ever seen in my 30 years old carrier. Every second month there is a new browser version for each browser, each with a different set of new critical bugs. We even find JIT compiler bugs regularly!
I simply do not understand why they do not take the free, open source, mature, very fast Java virtual machine, and let the browsers run Java bytecode directly, and let software engineers chose any programming language which best suits their task.
Sadly, yes. Since AMD does not put any pressure on Intel on the CPU front, 5-10% CPU performance increase per year become the norm.
That is correct, I measured double precision (64 bit) floating point performance on AMD Opterons, and the FPU is not a bottleneck, even in an artificial extreme FPU loading benchmark.
As far as I know the shared FPU can be divided not only into two 128 but parts, but it can be further divided into four 64 bit parts, therefore a single Bulldozer core can execute two 64 bit floating point calculation at once. This suit is complete bullshit.
They can as well sue Intel because their CPU has shared third level cache, and they have only a single, shared memory controller.
That is no problem, but they must not be allowed to advertise it as an unlimited plan. It also indicates that the government must work on strengthening free competition.
You may be right in case of other equipment, but enterprise grade drives are really better. For example I do not know any consumer SSD which has power loss capacitors (Intel 320 is not produced anymore). Most consumer drives don't contain even those capacitors which would be necessary to prevent the loss of - not the freshly written but the - old(!) data in case of a power loss. Consumer HDDs lied (or lying?) about sync, they confirm sync before they actually save the data to disk. And I am sure that consumer SSDs do something similar, because consumer SSD are usually faster (although their speed frequently fluctuates to extreme extents) than their corresponding enterprise variants, which is impossible in a safe way without power loss protection capacitors.
The relevant table is on 27. page.
In short: if you use the SSD in a cold environment AND store it in hot environment than you may lose data quite quickly. Quicker than two weeks.
Client drives are also affected, but the data loss occurs slighly later. I guess reason of the difference is that enerprise drives assume a higher work temperature.
So the advice is that if you use the SSD in your air conditioned basement in a good case then do not store your SSD on the sun for extended periods.
And no, I do not use spinning media as a backup. I use tapes. Using spinning media for proper backups is almost impossible. See http://www.taobackup.com/
It has no power loss protection, so now it could lose data much faster. It should be good for worthless data but that is all. I am not sure if it has at least small capacitors, the half-assed power loss mitigation technique which does not protect new flushed data, but at least prevents the loss of old, unrelated data.
What are you talking about? All AMD server boards support ECC. In contrast to Intel, AMD always puts every feature into every processor of the same generation. AMD does not dumb down artificially even its cheapest processor. That is one of the thing I like in AMD processors. I do not have to check which random feature is disabled in a particular processor. Even some desktop AMD motherboards have ECC support, like the SABERTOOTH 990FX.
At this moment I would be satisfied with a usable QWERTY keyboard sized QWERTY keyboard. As far as I know the last serious attempt was the Space Cadet keyboard in the 1970s.
I thought that our tape backup system is luxury, for such a small company. Quite the contrary, it seems that tape is very cheap. Back of the envelope calculation: Our daily full backup is about 600 gigabytes. We are using 6 pieces of LTO-3 tapes for the last days and 1 for each month, plus 1 for each year. That is about 23 tapes in use. Total of 23Ã--600GB is 13800GB, 138 dollar each month on Google Nearline, which is 1700$ per year. The total cost of the tape drive, the tapes and the SCSI adapter was less than 1700$. And I expect that to work for at least 5 years, not 1. That means that for backup tape is 80% cheaper. Of course deduplication would reduce the data amount to a few percentage of its current size. But then we would lose the plenty of redundancy we have with tapes. Google Nearline is offsite, that is good, or actually, that is required for backup. Offline copies are required too, and that is where the entire thing fails for this purpose. Google nearline is online storage from a backup point of view. In other words it cannot be used for backup. It can be part of a backup strategy, though. It could be good for saving backup copies of family photos, if the account password is managed very cautiously. Otherwise I do not see the use cases for this service, but I am sure there are some.
I moved to the opposite direction, from disks to tapes. We are a small IT company with less than 10 employees, mostly developers, no dedicated sysadmin, but quite a few servers. We had no previous experiences, so our backup "methodolody" is only slowly improving in ad-hoc ways. First we had backups of critical data stored on online disks. Source code and a very few other things. No configuration files, no database. There were only ad-hoc copies of the latters. After a while I started to backup more data, and started to use a centralized backup software (namely Bacula). Backups were still written to online disks. Everything was online, and we are reguralry attacked by hackers. Not a good combination. In the next step I tried to occassionally copy the online backups to offline disks. That did not really worked. Copyying all backups were time consuming, and I usually forgot it or do not have time for it. Large hard disks are still not that cheap, and they cannot be simply taken out the server and put back. The drives must be mounted on a tray, which require additional costs and work. Most people forget that if I have a 300 GB dataset, then I need about 30 * 300 GB backup space. There are tricks to reduce that, but that makes everything more difficult, more time consuming, less safe. I started to use tapes 2 years ago, after I recognized that our backup software supports that better. I thought that tape for us will always be a luxury, but it makes things much simpler. Equipment cost was definitely not a motivation. And indeed that is what happened, now everything is super simple. Bacula tells me what tape should I put into the drive, or if I need to buy a new tape. We have offline copies and multiples copies recorded at different dates. We can retrieve and compare data from 1 day ago, 2 days, one week, one month one yeat, whaterver I want. That is a nice safety, much-much better than we had previously. Bacause tapes are cheaper, I do not mind adding new data to backup and new tapes, just to make things simple. The funny thing is that I believe we shortly reach the point when our very simple, very safe, tape based backup system will be actually cheaper than the equal hard disk based, even if I do not count labour, only equipment. I am sure that a larger organization with real sysadmins can do it better, but I am quite happy with our current state.
The submitter does NOT complain about Google's ability to catch spam! He asks why Gmail does not REJECT obvious spam. Rejecting an email means that - in this case the Gmail - server does not even accept it. In such cases the sender gets back a Delivery Status Notification from his own server, telling him that his email did not go through because of such and such error. An important point here is that the email is not lost without any notification. The sender can try to contact the recipient in another way. Actually this may be better than putting the email into a spam folder if that is not monitored regularly, or at all. Yes, this is a valid question, but almost none have undersood it.
I do not understand this complaint about unix configuration either. I am a relatively new Linux user (about 5 years, compared to 20 years on Windows), and I find the Unix configuration system is far-far better than the mess in Windows. Everything is in the /etc/ directory. In the rare cases when I install a tarball instead of a package, the configuration files are in /opt//conf. I manage about about 50 virtual servers, it really works well.
Text configuration files are easily managed by standard command line tools, including diffing and merging changes during upgrade, and non-interactive modifications.
Can you read at all? He is saying among others that frequently some data (NoSQL tuned in one way) is better than no data at all (ACID). Is it better if my doctor knows only half of my previous illnesses, or if none at all in emergency?