I shall answer this by invoking the usual "fixed it for ya" slashdot mantra, thus:
"I, for one, don't need to wonder how the hardcore Christians will react when they find out the devil created bisexual superconductivity in a vain attempt to tempt them away from the lord."
"There is still the option of fighting the patents"
I think this is the way forward (or should be). FAT... it's just a linked list, you can't really do it simpler than that! And truth is, people don't need file owner/permissions, high resolution time stamps and other more advanced (than FAT) FS features on their mp3 player. Why complicate things unnecessarily?
"however, competition is not always and does not have to be unilateral"
Absolutely, and often the great success stories are collaboritive projects. They just need a gentle little kick to get 'em started:-)
Yup, ideas are like organs; people will tend towards rejecting perfectly good ones because they're not their own. It's just plain silly, the games you can find that you have to play just to get anywhere with some people. For example, I should be able to tell someone that draining the cooking oil before adding the sauce leaves the meat nicer (less oily of course), but I discovered something that worked far better... cook a meal myself, don't drain the oil, and then say "oh crap I forgot to drain the oil first, grr, sorry, it's gonna be all oily now". The person in question would fight me on any suggestion I made, any ideas I voices, and cut off her nose to spite her face. But, give her a chance to do something that I screwed up on, and therefore "win"... well that was just fine.
I guess it shows a big difference in mentalities of people. Whilst I strive for success, there are so many people who strive to avoid failure. Even though they might appear to be forces of the same direction, the mindset of being focused on the desired result to attain, verses being focused on the undesired results to avoid, resonates through the entire mind and shapes everything, as you're more likely to find anything that you're looking for.
So, if you tell me how to complete a task, and I'm looking for success, I will see, "ah, if I do it like that, that's how I will succeed". But, if I'm looking to avoid failure, I'm more likely to see "I will have failed if I merely follow someone elses idea, as I haven't found the solution myself".
As you can tell I've had chance to give it much thought and study, it is interesting, but a f#%&!*! pain in the ass actually trying to work with it! You know, these aren't qualities enough in a person to leave you writing them off (and would often leave you writing off an awful lot of people!)... but at the same time, it's hard to be a friend to someone when they fight the very acts that make a friendship. In the end, you do find yourself pandering to their complexes 'n neurosis', which, my god, can be so tiring. It really shouldn't be this hard, know what I mean?
"Nobody else seems to appreciate this, for some reason"
I find it depends on the persons tendancy towards drawing personal comparisons or inferiority complex which taints the way they hear things. Whilst I do love collecting information and then sharing it as it was shared with me, others see it as a correction which can only happen if they are somewhat substandard. I try point out, "I didn't feel stupid when I was told this fact, so if you're feeling challenged on a personal level by this, then it is you who is making you feel like that, not me"... but damn it, some people just can't get past their insecurities to see that I just happen to enjoy sharing, and do so nonjudgementally. Idiots.
Of course. You can spell a local variable wrong if it's passed by reference/pointer/etc, or a struct element wrong if you've defined it in your header equally wrong. Of course in such situations you're basically redefining what 'wrong' is:-p
and that would be wha? Some kind of water powered rocket? Is that after the water powered rocket that in 1864 actually went to open the front door when someone told it a knock-knock joke? Because it missed the point of the joke? I've searched all of slashdot but can't find any reference to this 'woosh' thing so I can but guess. Next time ya post something so original, you might do better to explain what ya mean rather than expect us to understand these noises you've made up.
"Its best to avoid making assumptions as to what someone else may find far fetched"
Absolutely, hence the use of the word 'may', meaning that I am not asserting such a thing to be true, merely registering and working with a possibility.
"it seems its time to dump the dead weight baggage of Microsoft's FAT patent lunacy and bring an open format to ubiquity"
Ish, but more accurately, the other way round. Companies are stuck with using FAT because there is nothing else that comes close with ubiquitousness, that is just the way it is. Escaping that fact would mean developing the new open format, everyone agreeing to use it, formatting all new media in that format per default to try encourage its use, and then maybe in 5-10 years time when all but a few old devices support it, FAT can be dropped and the open format will be enough. I can't see it being able to happen any quicker than that, companies may just find it cheaper to pay MS until the patents expire than sink a load of cash into developing and pushing a new filesystem and hoping it pays off.
"I can see that its time for hardware manufacturers to show some back bone"
In an ideal world, unfortunately we live in a pretty invertebrate one, and pretty much all competition will be unilateral, from people like apple and sony, who're only interested in developing their own monopolies.
Flash was actually the first thing that came to my mind... something that gets installed onto the system early, while it's clean, before loads of other software has been installed/removed/updated. If the filesystem had different modes (such as variable number of address bits) it could have a compatible low-overhead+compression version useful for packaging up all images, sound/movie clips 'n other resources within the flash image but also handle random access media (just to create a reason for it to be included with flash)
Of course, it could be a few years before it's known stable enough to trust using it, and then a few years before widescale adoption has time to take place... but those clocks don't start ticking until it gets started
Memory's fine, the problem coincided directly with having ext2ifs installed. Has worked fine since removing it. Buggy interactions in ring0 code will also easily cause blue screenage, which would make more sense in this case, as it wasn't happening randomly, rather every time I did the specific thing I was doing. I may if I get some time reinstall it to get exact details to file bug report, but is a bit hard to tell where the problem is, could really be anywhere, was the interaction (doing something unrelated in one piece of software while e2ifs is loaded) that caused the fault.
"Question : Don't you have to show that you've been harmed in order to bring a lawsuit?"
No. You can sue someone for infringing on legally granted rights of yours also. For example, if someone has a patent covering a technology that you use, they have a legally protected right to require you to pay a royalty if that is what they desire. If you distribute the technology without paying the royalties that would amount to x, then they are x worse off than they are entitled to be under law, therefore can sue you for x.
If you do this knowingly and willingly, you're intentionally breaking the law, and can also have punitive damages brought against you, ie, your punishment for intentionally doing something wrong (under law, I'm not debating the moral in's and out's here).
The low end of the scale of course is just the "cease 'n desist", where the arm of the law is being called upon to get you to stop using the tech where licensing of it cannot be agreed upon yet use of the protected tech continues anyway.
...first machine to ever become conscious... wow this could be an amazing step forwards fo&#!%*!!BLAM!!! Oh well, good job we didn't also program it to feel pain....someone take that hammer off him. *sigh* right here we go again
"I don't even believe it's possible to use FAT as a root filesystem for Linux"
I think you can... not in earlier days for sure, because you can't make special files needed to populate/dev on a fat filesystem, but these days/dev is often mounted as a ram filesystem and populated based on info gathered from sysfs, the root filesystem can be a simple, (optionally) readonly thing and have stuff mounted in. It won't be able to do everything a full filesystem makes handy (such as using symblinks+libraries for version control) and you'll need to make use of things like tmpfs for anywhere you need to stick named pipes/sockets etc, and yes you lose security, but I can't think of any reason why you couldn't have a basic linux system using just vfat and boot time created tmpfs
What about where you'd just be downloading update's and sticking it on the memory card, say, on a computer that isn't yours to be able to be installing system level drivers on? Maybe a work machine, a friends laptop who isn't comfortable with having extra bits of software installed on the system their livelyhood depends on, or, a machine that's used to run something that the new driver code crashes? (The latter one is the reason I've had to uninstall ext2 driver support on my windows machine).
What if someone has a large memory card that they want to use for their tomtom updates, but also wants to backup their phone's addressbook 'n messages onto? Then their phone has to support the same FS too.
What if someone's out and they wanna take some photos, and for one reason or another, the one memory stick with space available on it they have to hand is the tomtom one... their camera would also now have to support the same filesystem.
These may seem far fetched to you, but they are possibilities that become unpossibilities one you start switching devices to non-ubiquitous filesystem. So, here's the bigger question: why close those doors?
I concur, I kept getting blue screens all of a sudden doing something with vmware I think it was under server 2003 (my memory fails me somewhat)... removing ext2ifs stopped this from happening.
FAT's just very simple, easy to program, easy to understand, very widely supported, metadata has a small footprint (as a % of total filesystem size) and, especially in cases of mostly WORM like access patterns, is very much sufficient for a wide range of needs.
"When did virtual machines start getting referred to as "Appliances"?"
When vmware player was launched I do believe... and it's not just any virtual machine, it's the use of a virtual machine to distribute a ready working self contained machine that does what it says on the tin (yes, virtual machines come in tins these days) rather than lengthy install procedures or live cds. It's an appliance because it's ready to plug in and go. But, as vmware say, "hate the game, not the player'
Oi, as a broke kid I feel I have to paint my face and say... you may take away our code! But you'll never take away my... server 2003 torrent! yaahhhhHHH!!!! *rides off on a horse*
Slashdot Mirror
hehe, troll made me laugh...
He obviously likes kittens.
Why's a lightbulb better than a pregnant stripper? You can unscrew a lightbulb!
Surely they're super hermaphroductors?
*shudder*
I shall answer this by invoking the usual "fixed it for ya" slashdot mantra, thus:
"I, for one, don't need to wonder how the hardcore Christians will react when they find out the devil created bisexual superconductivity in a vain attempt to tempt them away from the lord."
"There is still the option of fighting the patents"
I think this is the way forward (or should be). FAT... it's just a linked list, you can't really do it simpler than that! And truth is, people don't need file owner/permissions, high resolution time stamps and other more advanced (than FAT) FS features on their mp3 player. Why complicate things unnecessarily?
"however, competition is not always and does not have to be unilateral"
Absolutely, and often the great success stories are collaboritive projects. They just need a gentle little kick to get 'em started :-)
Yup, ideas are like organs; people will tend towards rejecting perfectly good ones because they're not their own. It's just plain silly, the games you can find that you have to play just to get anywhere with some people. For example, I should be able to tell someone that draining the cooking oil before adding the sauce leaves the meat nicer (less oily of course), but I discovered something that worked far better... cook a meal myself, don't drain the oil, and then say "oh crap I forgot to drain the oil first, grr, sorry, it's gonna be all oily now". The person in question would fight me on any suggestion I made, any ideas I voices, and cut off her nose to spite her face. But, give her a chance to do something that I screwed up on, and therefore "win"... well that was just fine.
I guess it shows a big difference in mentalities of people. Whilst I strive for success, there are so many people who strive to avoid failure. Even though they might appear to be forces of the same direction, the mindset of being focused on the desired result to attain, verses being focused on the undesired results to avoid, resonates through the entire mind and shapes everything, as you're more likely to find anything that you're looking for.
So, if you tell me how to complete a task, and I'm looking for success, I will see, "ah, if I do it like that, that's how I will succeed". But, if I'm looking to avoid failure, I'm more likely to see "I will have failed if I merely follow someone elses idea, as I haven't found the solution myself".
As you can tell I've had chance to give it much thought and study, it is interesting, but a ... but at the same time, it's hard to be a friend to someone when they fight the very acts that make a friendship. In the end, you do find yourself pandering to their complexes 'n neurosis', which, my god, can be so tiring. It really shouldn't be this hard, know what I mean?
f#%&!*! pain in the ass actually trying to work with it! You know, these aren't qualities enough in a person to leave you writing them off (and would often leave you writing off an awful lot of people!)
"Nobody else seems to appreciate this, for some reason"
I find it depends on the persons tendancy towards drawing personal comparisons or inferiority complex which taints the way they hear things. Whilst I do love collecting information and then sharing it as it was shared with me, others see it as a correction which can only happen if they are somewhat substandard. I try point out, "I didn't feel stupid when I was told this fact, so if you're feeling challenged on a personal level by this, then it is you who is making you feel like that, not me"... but damn it, some people just can't get past their insecurities to see that I just happen to enjoy sharing, and do so nonjudgementally. Idiots.
"Usually?"
Of course. You can spell a local variable wrong if it's passed by reference/pointer/etc, or a struct element wrong if you've defined it in your header equally wrong. Of course in such situations you're basically redefining what 'wrong' is :-p
"whoosh!"
and that would be wha? Some kind of water powered rocket? Is that after the water powered rocket that in 1864 actually went to open the front door when someone told it a knock-knock joke? Because it missed the point of the joke? I've searched all of slashdot but can't find any reference to this 'woosh' thing so I can but guess. Next time ya post something so original, you might do better to explain what ya mean rather than expect us to understand these noises you've made up.
hehe that's what I get for going on slashdot last thing in the day as i'm falling asleep :-p
"Its best to avoid making assumptions as to what someone else may find far fetched"
Absolutely, hence the use of the word 'may', meaning that I am not asserting such a thing to be true, merely registering and working with a possibility.
"it seems its time to dump the dead weight baggage of Microsoft's FAT patent lunacy and bring an open format to ubiquity"
Ish, but more accurately, the other way round. Companies are stuck with using FAT because there is nothing else that comes close with ubiquitousness, that is just the way it is. Escaping that fact would mean developing the new open format, everyone agreeing to use it, formatting all new media in that format per default to try encourage its use, and then maybe in 5-10 years time when all but a few old devices support it, FAT can be dropped and the open format will be enough. I can't see it being able to happen any quicker than that, companies may just find it cheaper to pay MS until the patents expire than sink a load of cash into developing and pushing a new filesystem and hoping it pays off.
"I can see that its time for hardware manufacturers to show some back bone"
In an ideal world, unfortunately we live in a pretty invertebrate one, and pretty much all competition will be unilateral, from people like apple and sony, who're only interested in developing their own monopolies.
or a thousand of those water head tipping birdy thingies that homer uses to press Y (tripling his productivity)
Flash was actually the first thing that came to my mind... something that gets installed onto the system early, while it's clean, before loads of other software has been installed/removed/updated. If the filesystem had different modes (such as variable number of address bits) it could have a compatible low-overhead+compression version useful for packaging up all images, sound/movie clips 'n other resources within the flash image but also handle random access media (just to create a reason for it to be included with flash)
Of course, it could be a few years before it's known stable enough to trust using it, and then a few years before widescale adoption has time to take place... but those clocks don't start ticking until it gets started
Memory's fine, the problem coincided directly with having ext2ifs installed. Has worked fine since removing it. Buggy interactions in ring0 code will also easily cause blue screenage, which would make more sense in this case, as it wasn't happening randomly, rather every time I did the specific thing I was doing. I may if I get some time reinstall it to get exact details to file bug report, but is a bit hard to tell where the problem is, could really be anywhere, was the interaction (doing something unrelated in one piece of software while e2ifs is loaded) that caused the fault.
"Question : Don't you have to show that you've been harmed in order to bring a lawsuit?"
No. You can sue someone for infringing on legally granted rights of yours also. For example, if someone has a patent covering a technology that you use, they have a legally protected right to require you to pay a royalty if that is what they desire. If you distribute the technology without paying the royalties that would amount to x, then they are x worse off than they are entitled to be under law, therefore can sue you for x.
If you do this knowingly and willingly, you're intentionally breaking the law, and can also have punitive damages brought against you, ie, your punishment for intentionally doing something wrong (under law, I'm not debating the moral in's and out's here).
The low end of the scale of course is just the "cease 'n desist", where the arm of the law is being called upon to get you to stop using the tech where licensing of it cannot be agreed upon yet use of the protected tech continues anyway.
"a blender that stores data in memory in FAT format"
I'm stealing that idea *runs off to 'innovate'*
...first machine to ever become conscious... wow this could be an amazing step forwards fo&#!%*!!BLAM!!! Oh well, good job we didn't also program it to feel pain. ...someone take that hammer off him. *sigh* right here we go again
"I don't even believe it's possible to use FAT as a root filesystem for Linux"
I think you can... not in earlier days for sure, because you can't make special files needed to populate /dev on a fat filesystem, but these days /dev is often mounted as a ram filesystem and populated based on info gathered from sysfs, the root filesystem can be a simple, (optionally) readonly thing and have stuff mounted in. It won't be able to do everything a full filesystem makes handy (such as using symblinks+libraries for version control) and you'll need to make use of things like tmpfs for anywhere you need to stick named pipes/sockets etc, and yes you lose security, but I can't think of any reason why you couldn't have a basic linux system using just vfat and boot time created tmpfs
What about where you'd just be downloading update's and sticking it on the memory card, say, on a computer that isn't yours to be able to be installing system level drivers on? Maybe a work machine, a friends laptop who isn't comfortable with having extra bits of software installed on the system their livelyhood depends on, or, a machine that's used to run something that the new driver code crashes? (The latter one is the reason I've had to uninstall ext2 driver support on my windows machine).
What if someone has a large memory card that they want to use for their tomtom updates, but also wants to backup their phone's addressbook 'n messages onto? Then their phone has to support the same FS too.
What if someone's out and they wanna take some photos, and for one reason or another, the one memory stick with space available on it they have to hand is the tomtom one... their camera would also now have to support the same filesystem.
These may seem far fetched to you, but they are possibilities that become unpossibilities one you start switching devices to non-ubiquitous filesystem. So, here's the bigger question: why close those doors?
I concur, I kept getting blue screens all of a sudden doing something with vmware I think it was under server 2003 (my memory fails me somewhat)... removing ext2ifs stopped this from happening.
FAT's just very simple, easy to program, easy to understand, very widely supported, metadata has a small footprint (as a % of total filesystem size) and, especially in cases of mostly WORM like access patterns, is very much sufficient for a wide range of needs.
"When did virtual machines start getting referred to as "Appliances"?"
When vmware player was launched I do believe... and it's not just any virtual machine, it's the use of a virtual machine to distribute a ready working self contained machine that does what it says on the tin (yes, virtual machines come in tins these days) rather than lengthy install procedures or live cds. It's an appliance because it's ready to plug in and go. But, as vmware say, "hate the game, not the player'
Maybe you can run cooperative linux under wine?
Oi, as a broke kid I feel I have to paint my face and say... you may take away our code! But you'll never take away my... server 2003 torrent! yaahhhhHHH!!!! *rides off on a horse*
Giving up is for quitters