I don't know what they're talking about. NASA is military spending because most of NASA's contractors contract for the military. NASA is also a military organisation, believe it or not. It has been and continues to be a massive white elephant black hole for money. Whereas military contracts are for the military military contractors have also made tidy sums out of NASA's supposedly 'civilian' spending.
The focus on commercial spaceflight is right and proper because that's the only way things will move forward. Creating another Apollo craft forty to fifty years on to hop, skip and jump into space simply isn't going to work. We're at a stage in spaceflight right now where the Wright brothers were with flight, and we've been in that position for fifty years.
Spaceflight has not turned into the everyday occurence that everyone thought it would around the time of the moon landing. Hell, 2001 was nine fucking years ago. I still can't get over that. Frankly, progress has been a failure.
This is happening sooner than I thought. Maybe people are just getting pig sick of long fscks on large drives and partitions, which ext4 just doesn't solve to any degree of sastisfaction? I know I am.
Server-wise I run a lot of OpenVZ machines and snapshotting them through LVM and occasionally fscking the volume, which you have todo, is painful. ext3 has outlived its usefulness there. I could move to XFS but XFS just simply doesn't have the broad support from a lot of software out there unforutunately and you start getting into doing certain hacks for it. The xfs_freeze is one thing it has going for it though and it is very useful if you don't or can't run LVM. ext4 just doesn't give me confidence that anything will fundamentally improve over ext3 from what I've seen. The ext filesystem line, LVM and software RAID has served us well but it's time to start moving on.
It should be obvious that you need a NAS. Buffalo do devices called Linkstations that can house a single drive storing up to a terabyte (or put in your own disk), or they have Terestations I think they're called with network attached RAID storage. These are all extremely quiet and unobtrusive when compared to doing this with PC hardware. They can be accessed over SMB, NFS, FTP or with other file transfer protocols.
What you do after that depends on how geeky you want to be. I have Freelink running on my Linkstation (Debian for ARM basically) running a full Samba Windows domain with authentication, completely automatic printing support where you don't even have to do any manual printer driver installs and the kitchen sink.
I moved to Media Portal a while ago, and while integrating commercial skipping with it is a real pain I haven't missed MythTV. MythTV was great for several months, but I had to replace the system with an Asus Pundit and the level of hardware support for the graphics card was non-existent on a Linux system. In additon, I had problems with the Hauppauge dual tuner and the Linux drivers as it would quite often hang the card. I had no such problems with Windows and reception was far better.
MythTV is a nice piece of software, but it is still being let down by the level of Linux media hardware support and, on occasion, it's own media support. Playing DVDs reliably and playing things like MKVs still had me plugging in VLC as an external player. The only problem I have with Media Portal is that it doesn't play default subtitle and audios stream within MKVs - it insists on defaulting to English.
Somehow, content providers decide this is a great idea...
I had to laugh at that 'somehow' bit. Let's face it, if YouTube supports it and the raw video 'standard' is VP8 then support will spread. It's as simple as that. We all know that. Apple know that which is why they are most upset, but they don't know what to do about it hence these threats.
...and they all jump on the VP8 band wagon. How does this hurt Apple?
In exactly the same way that Apple won't support Flash because they want to be in total control of the delivery format, and how they've had to respond to uncomfortable questions as to why they don't support YouTube which is directly affecting the 'usefullness' of the iPhone and iPad for many people. They want a format that they can implement and control that is open but not 'too' open, and they don't want some unwashed riff-raff developer coming up with some cheap or even worse free application that eats their lunch, even if it is on the iPhone App Store.
You're just trying to blind people with FUD.
I suggest you ask Steve Jobs. If there is no problem as you say then he wouldn't be throwing out pure and unadulterated FUD e-mails such as this one. Seriously, that e-mail masks how desperate things have become. If YouTube makes the 'wrong' choice then Apple are fucked even more than they are now because there is no useful content for their oh-so cool products - and Google simply doesn't care. They've burned their bridges with Adobe in the expectation that they'll be able to move on and get more control themselves.
Be in no doubt that the threat against Theora is not a threat against Theora directly. He doesn't care about Theora. It is a threat against VP8, which is associated with Theora, and from there against YouTube and Google. It's a threat by proxy and association that is unlikely to be successful.
Microsoft conspicuously said today that IE9 will only support H.264 for HTML5 video. Add in Apple and you have the two largest consumer OS vendors backing the same codec.
Unfortunately for Microsoft and Apple they actually believe that they control something. Currently there is no h.264 content out there for HTML5 video and Microsoft and Apple have no means to create it.
Theora will just end up becoming collateral damage in the coming war all of the large vendors are about to wage with Google.
Unfortunately, Google controls YouTube and what YouTube chooses to use is what matters. Like it or lump it, they are the standard for internet video which is why Steve Jobs has had to answer some uncomfortable questions about why Apple is incompatible with YouTube, and not the other way around. Google have rather steered away from h.264 in recent weeks towards VP8 (the successor to Theora), largely because they know they'll be steering a car that could take any direction it likes in the coming years and it will be used by Apple at some point to try and shoot YouTube and Google down. Microsoft and Apple in particular have no content to be able to dictate what format people will use, so they have to resort to threats.
Perhaps because the vast majority of their users don't use it
Well, yes they do because if Canonical are expecting F-Spot of all things to be an adequate replacement for an image manipulation application then they're nuts. The GIMP was the only one in the Gnome/GTK world. If they're saying that the GIMP isn't good enough and they're dropping then, well, their application pool gets ever more laughable.
Linux is migrating to Pulseaudio because it is a superior design over ALSA and OSS.
Errrr, Pulseaudio doesn't replace ALSA - it uses it and wraps it in a way that creates nothing but trouble for applications. OSS has all of the features of Pulseaudio with all of the hardware support and more and none of the userspace brain damage that PA has caused problems with. To call the clusterfuck PA as having a superior design just isn't even funny.
Really? Can you tell us all what that business model is and how successful it is in generating the income they need to break Mark Shuttleworth's apron strings, which are down to the bare elastic now as it is?
If it's a commercial application, it's typically as simple as running the installer script or binary provided for the vendor (uh...just the same as Windows...)
Errrrr, no it fucking isn't.
and if the vendor has done their job right it should just work out of box with a wide range of Linux versions.
There are no development APIs for developing and installing third-party applications quickly and easily as there are on Mac OS and Windows, and as such, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions have no applications of note written for them. It's at this point that the market share bullshit is wheeled out, but we're talking about even the smallest of applications you find on Windows and OS X rather than the large well known ones. There is no effort whatsoever to create an application base of any kind. Ergo, no one but geeks living in a fantasy world (surely this is the release that will finally do it?!) ultimately finds Linux desktop distributions, especially when compared with the hype behind Ubuntu, useful. Beyond the stuff in the package repositories there is sod-all you can do with it, and if you want to update to a nice new version of an application that happens to be in the 'official' repository somwehere, sorry, but you'll have to upgrade. No one wants to put up with that shit.
It's not clear to me whether the bug was introduced by the backport (in which case there's nothing more to fix), or whether the bug also exists in the x.org trunk, and needs to be fixed there.
Perhaps they should have verified that before doing any form of backporting, and considered why they were backporting in the first place? All you're doing is creating a fork, and you have to be sure you're doing it for a very good reason.
Canonical's QA decision making leaves a lot to be desired.
He has his knickers in a twist over an obvious joke intended to lighten-up the mood of the original article.
No, it isn't. The original 'legend tells us' phrase is an obvious piece of pretentious bullshit full of its own self-importance. Nothing else. It is not a joke at all. It was designed to be sarcastic. If you had a decent grasp of using English in a practical manner then you'd know that.
Anyway, I stopped reading after the first few pages. He's too uptight and protective to effectively defend the format.
Yay. Let's dismiss arguments because we think a person is to uptight, and worse, because we don't understand English meaning.
A lot of it is outdated, but stuff like the filesystem stuff is still true. That always makes me laugh as I had to do it many years ago: "You run to the store to buy the Mac version of Norton Utilities, you run back only for Norton to go 'You idiot! You own a Macintosh! The file is fucking gone!'"
The complainant in the article actually e-mailed and called Amazon several times, and got several less-than-satisfactory responses.
I'm a bit suspicious of the correspondence in the article for a number of reasons:
This is nothing new. PBXs have been hit from places like China, and the first port of call is to blacklist the relevant IPs. If you don't like that then don't run the service. You can be hit by anyone from anywhere on the internet, and that's the first rule of running a service that is publicly exposed. Whinging about how evil Amazon and cloud computing is won't help you and you need to be in control of your own destiny.
The author gets into some correspondence with Amazon where they ask for formatted logs with the relevant dates, times and IPs. He 'says' he's 'attached' it but not that he's formatted it and it reads more like an afterthought. They state quite clearly that they will not open attachments.
He then proceeds to ask for an 'interview'. There is nothing to interview about, the PR manager says that and why ask unless you want to make some kind of other issue out of it and unless he wants to increase traffic to his site?
He says he's filled out a form that fails with an 'error' (and he doesn't say what it is), so how has he managed to get into correspondence with their 'PR manager' further down about it? There are missing pieces in the sequence of events.
We don't know whether the attacks really are coming from Amazon or whether they're spoofed, although there's been a comment further back that Amazon confirmed it. Where is this confirmation?
He gets this reply -
Hello Fred. We believe that we've identified and shut down the illegal activity and are closing the loop with customers. We'd certainly be interested in hearing of the cases you refer to below so we can follow up.
- but he doesn't say what happened after that other than he tried to 'reach out' to her and didn't get a response. Also, what are the cases he refers to below?
All in all I just read this as someone who has a bee in his bonnet about cloud computing or something and wants to have an opportunity to have a rant about it in order to increase site traffic as well. There are too many holes in this story.
I'm so sick of this "Oh, Marky-mark said they're not a democracy" stuff. Seriously. Don't you think that people know that? What's important is that Ubuntu is open source.
This has got nothing to do with whether Ubuntu is open source or not. Canonical gets hard revenue from the search engine that they ship as a default in Ubuntu, and where those decisions are concerned Canonical is not going to look at things for the 'good of users' as is being claimed here. That's exactly what Mark Shuttleworth meant.
I wonder how the Ubuntu community will hold up after Shuttleworth is out of cash.
Such a cynical and presumptive point of view, unless you have evidence. What do you have to back up your claim?
Why would he need that? Canonical dug a hole by agreeing a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo. At a time when, by all accounts, they need to start raking in come cash you don't exactly need to be Mr. Cynicism to question that they are now dumping said revenue because of 'user familiarity'. As Mark Shuttleworth has already said, Ubuntu and Canonical are not democracies.
If "familiarity" was the issue, then why move the fsck'ing window buttons to the upper left? I don't buy that as an argument.
Heh. Hey, if we copy off the Mac and make it look like a Mac, but, you know, don't go the whole hog and clone the whole Mac UI, because that would be, you know, silly, then maybe something......will happen? Clearly, they've got bitten by the bug that if they clone Mac OS X then that will solve all of their problems. Also, why bother to change the search to Yahoo if familiarity was ever important to them?
Personally, I think Canonical have gone nuts right now with the sorts of things they're coming out with. Maybe they have to find ways in which they can make money because they've now burned through Mark's cash?
People with low IQ's are more likely to smoke? That's my experience. That's what I hate about these statistical analyses. Just because there is an apparent correlation people then assume that causation naturally follows.
This is one occasion where things are up in the air and it will be a long time since science will be able to explain it. Science cannot explain what life is yet, how it happens or how something is alive versus something that isn't, and what that 'something' is that makes us alive, so trying to explain this is well wide of the mark at the moment.
I was just thinking about the role MapReduce plays in all of this search malarky, and then I came across a telling Joel Spolsky post from a few years ago:
"The very fact that Google invented MapReduce, and Microsoft didn't, says something about why Microsoft is still playing catch up trying to get basic search features to work, while Google has moved on to the next problem: building Skynet^H^H^H^H^H^H the world's largest massively parallel supercomputer. I don't think Microsoft completely understands just how far behind they are on that wave."
Perhaps Microsoft just cannot think like that? To be clear, Microsoft saying that maybe Google and Bing can perhaps exist side-by-side is a clear admission of defeat. Microsoft never says that, so you know the situation is bad. I just can't understand why they got a bee in their bonnet and wanted to chase Google in the way that they have. It was clearly a knee-jerk thing and they hadn't clearly thought about it. The only major difference they did was change the name from the stale MSN Search name to something they thought was cooler - Bing. Nothing else changed.
To not take into account that people search for many random and obscure things put together that won't have been recorded before (language is a very broad thing and what people search for is also time-based i.e. NOW), and not to have some sort of logic to aid with that, is utterly unforgiveable. What the hell are Microsoft Research doing?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what they're talking about. NASA is military spending because most of NASA's contractors contract for the military. NASA is also a military organisation, believe it or not. It has been and continues to be a massive white elephant black hole for money. Whereas military contracts are for the military military contractors have also made tidy sums out of NASA's supposedly 'civilian' spending.
The focus on commercial spaceflight is right and proper because that's the only way things will move forward. Creating another Apollo craft forty to fifty years on to hop, skip and jump into space simply isn't going to work. We're at a stage in spaceflight right now where the Wright brothers were with flight, and we've been in that position for fifty years.
Spaceflight has not turned into the everyday occurence that everyone thought it would around the time of the moon landing. Hell, 2001 was nine fucking years ago. I still can't get over that. Frankly, progress has been a failure.
Meego is already switching:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODIzOA
This is happening sooner than I thought. Maybe people are just getting pig sick of long fscks on large drives and partitions, which ext4 just doesn't solve to any degree of sastisfaction? I know I am.
Server-wise I run a lot of OpenVZ machines and snapshotting them through LVM and occasionally fscking the volume, which you have todo, is painful. ext3 has outlived its usefulness there. I could move to XFS but XFS just simply doesn't have the broad support from a lot of software out there unforutunately and you start getting into doing certain hacks for it. The xfs_freeze is one thing it has going for it though and it is very useful if you don't or can't run LVM. ext4 just doesn't give me confidence that anything will fundamentally improve over ext3 from what I've seen. The ext filesystem line, LVM and software RAID has served us well but it's time to start moving on.
It should be obvious that you need a NAS. Buffalo do devices called Linkstations that can house a single drive storing up to a terabyte (or put in your own disk), or they have Terestations I think they're called with network attached RAID storage. These are all extremely quiet and unobtrusive when compared to doing this with PC hardware. They can be accessed over SMB, NFS, FTP or with other file transfer protocols.
What you do after that depends on how geeky you want to be. I have Freelink running on my Linkstation (Debian for ARM basically) running a full Samba Windows domain with authentication, completely automatic printing support where you don't even have to do any manual printer driver installs and the kitchen sink.
That won't be continuing for much longer, mark my words (no pun intended).
If you'd said Media Portal then I might give that some credence. Hardware support is better on Windows, but Windows Media Center is still crap.
I moved to Media Portal a while ago, and while integrating commercial skipping with it is a real pain I haven't missed MythTV. MythTV was great for several months, but I had to replace the system with an Asus Pundit and the level of hardware support for the graphics card was non-existent on a Linux system. In additon, I had problems with the Hauppauge dual tuner and the Linux drivers as it would quite often hang the card. I had no such problems with Windows and reception was far better.
MythTV is a nice piece of software, but it is still being let down by the level of Linux media hardware support and, on occasion, it's own media support. Playing DVDs reliably and playing things like MKVs still had me plugging in VLC as an external player. The only problem I have with Media Portal is that it doesn't play default subtitle and audios stream within MKVs - it insists on defaulting to English.
All-in-all, I just haven't missed MythTV.
I had to laugh at that 'somehow' bit. Let's face it, if YouTube supports it and the raw video 'standard' is VP8 then support will spread. It's as simple as that. We all know that. Apple know that which is why they are most upset, but they don't know what to do about it hence these threats.
In exactly the same way that Apple won't support Flash because they want to be in total control of the delivery format, and how they've had to respond to uncomfortable questions as to why they don't support YouTube which is directly affecting the 'usefullness' of the iPhone and iPad for many people. They want a format that they can implement and control that is open but not 'too' open, and they don't want some unwashed riff-raff developer coming up with some cheap or even worse free application that eats their lunch, even if it is on the iPhone App Store.
I suggest you ask Steve Jobs. If there is no problem as you say then he wouldn't be throwing out pure and unadulterated FUD e-mails such as this one. Seriously, that e-mail masks how desperate things have become. If YouTube makes the 'wrong' choice then Apple are fucked even more than they are now because there is no useful content for their oh-so cool products - and Google simply doesn't care. They've burned their bridges with Adobe in the expectation that they'll be able to move on and get more control themselves.
Be in no doubt that the threat against Theora is not a threat against Theora directly. He doesn't care about Theora. It is a threat against VP8, which is associated with Theora, and from there against YouTube and Google. It's a threat by proxy and association that is unlikely to be successful.
Unfortunately for Microsoft and Apple they actually believe that they control something. Currently there is no h.264 content out there for HTML5 video and Microsoft and Apple have no means to create it.
Unfortunately, Google controls YouTube and what YouTube chooses to use is what matters. Like it or lump it, they are the standard for internet video which is why Steve Jobs has had to answer some uncomfortable questions about why Apple is incompatible with YouTube, and not the other way around. Google have rather steered away from h.264 in recent weeks towards VP8 (the successor to Theora), largely because they know they'll be steering a car that could take any direction it likes in the coming years and it will be used by Apple at some point to try and shoot YouTube and Google down. Microsoft and Apple in particular have no content to be able to dictate what format people will use, so they have to resort to threats.
It *isn't*', and those who think it is have never tried manipulating photos with it in the way that people do.
You might think that people want it but I couldn't possibly comment. Cropping, resizing and retouching is simply impossible with it.
Well, yes they do because if Canonical are expecting F-Spot of all things to be an adequate replacement for an image manipulation application then they're nuts. The GIMP was the only one in the Gnome/GTK world. If they're saying that the GIMP isn't good enough and they're dropping then, well, their application pool gets ever more laughable.
Errrr, Pulseaudio doesn't replace ALSA - it uses it and wraps it in a way that creates nothing but trouble for applications. OSS has all of the features of Pulseaudio with all of the hardware support and more and none of the userspace brain damage that PA has caused problems with. To call the clusterfuck PA as having a superior design just isn't even funny.
PA is a steaming pile of dog turd.
When you see someone wheel out the infamous 'rock solid' comment then there is something wrong.
Really? Can you tell us all what that business model is and how successful it is in generating the income they need to break Mark Shuttleworth's apron strings, which are down to the bare elastic now as it is?
Errrrr, no it fucking isn't.
There are no development APIs for developing and installing third-party applications quickly and easily as there are on Mac OS and Windows, and as such, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions have no applications of note written for them. It's at this point that the market share bullshit is wheeled out, but we're talking about even the smallest of applications you find on Windows and OS X rather than the large well known ones. There is no effort whatsoever to create an application base of any kind. Ergo, no one but geeks living in a fantasy world (surely this is the release that will finally do it?!) ultimately finds Linux desktop distributions, especially when compared with the hype behind Ubuntu, useful. Beyond the stuff in the package repositories there is sod-all you can do with it, and if you want to update to a nice new version of an application that happens to be in the 'official' repository somwehere, sorry, but you'll have to upgrade. No one wants to put up with that shit.
Perhaps they should have verified that before doing any form of backporting, and considered why they were backporting in the first place? All you're doing is creating a fork, and you have to be sure you're doing it for a very good reason.
Canonical's QA decision making leaves a lot to be desired.
No, it isn't. The original 'legend tells us' phrase is an obvious piece of pretentious bullshit full of its own self-importance. Nothing else. It is not a joke at all. It was designed to be sarcastic. If you had a decent grasp of using English in a practical manner then you'd know that.
Yay. Let's dismiss arguments because we think a person is to uptight, and worse, because we don't understand English meaning.
For anyone who doesn't know what is meant by a boat anchor then watch Hunter Cressell's highly amusing (and still the best) Mac parody:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg7Xh0m_Oco
A lot of it is outdated, but stuff like the filesystem stuff is still true. That always makes me laugh as I had to do it many years ago: "You run to the store to buy the Mac version of Norton Utilities, you run back only for Norton to go 'You idiot! You own a Macintosh! The file is fucking gone!'"
I'm a bit suspicious of the correspondence in the article for a number of reasons:
- but he doesn't say what happened after that other than he tried to 'reach out' to her and didn't get a response. Also, what are the cases he refers to below?
All in all I just read this as someone who has a bee in his bonnet about cloud computing or something and wants to have an opportunity to have a rant about it in order to increase site traffic as well. There are too many holes in this story.
This has got nothing to do with whether Ubuntu is open source or not. Canonical gets hard revenue from the search engine that they ship as a default in Ubuntu, and where those decisions are concerned Canonical is not going to look at things for the 'good of users' as is being claimed here. That's exactly what Mark Shuttleworth meant.
Well quite, because that's what this is bout.
Why would he need that? Canonical dug a hole by agreeing a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo. At a time when, by all accounts, they need to start raking in come cash you don't exactly need to be Mr. Cynicism to question that they are now dumping said revenue because of 'user familiarity'. As Mark Shuttleworth has already said, Ubuntu and Canonical are not democracies.
Heh. Hey, if we copy off the Mac and make it look like a Mac, but, you know, don't go the whole hog and clone the whole Mac UI, because that would be, you know, silly, then maybe something......will happen? Clearly, they've got bitten by the bug that if they clone Mac OS X then that will solve all of their problems. Also, why bother to change the search to Yahoo if familiarity was ever important to them?
Personally, I think Canonical have gone nuts right now with the sorts of things they're coming out with. Maybe they have to find ways in which they can make money because they've now burned through Mark's cash?
Sady for Murdoch, the BBC don't seem to have cut back enough.
People with low IQ's are more likely to smoke? That's my experience. That's what I hate about these statistical analyses. Just because there is an apparent correlation people then assume that causation naturally follows.
This is one occasion where things are up in the air and it will be a long time since science will be able to explain it. Science cannot explain what life is yet, how it happens or how something is alive versus something that isn't, and what that 'something' is that makes us alive, so trying to explain this is well wide of the mark at the moment.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html
Perhaps Microsoft just cannot think like that? To be clear, Microsoft saying that maybe Google and Bing can perhaps exist side-by-side is a clear admission of defeat. Microsoft never says that, so you know the situation is bad. I just can't understand why they got a bee in their bonnet and wanted to chase Google in the way that they have. It was clearly a knee-jerk thing and they hadn't clearly thought about it. The only major difference they did was change the name from the stale MSN Search name to something they thought was cooler - Bing. Nothing else changed.
To not take into account that people search for many random and obscure things put together that won't have been recorded before (language is a very broad thing and what people search for is also time-based i.e. NOW), and not to have some sort of logic to aid with that, is utterly unforgiveable. What the hell are Microsoft Research doing?