Once again we've got a totally unelected, dictatorial government 'minister' who starts rattling his saber over file sharing, *conincidentally* after meeting with David Geffen and being wined and dined, and then lies barface to us - again - that this unprecendented personal poking of his nose in policy that has nothing to do with him wasn't connected to that in any way.
As there always is when you off-load some job on to a co-processor somewhere (even if it is on the same silicon) there are some unanswered questions:
How will current software interact with this chip and be transparent for current applications? Software support in things like IPSec libraries for this hardware is going to be important.
Is this a response to the Sparc's lack of CPU grunt compared with other processors? If it is then it's going to make Sparc even more expensive relative to the competition.
It's easier to update software than it is to update silicon or chips. How will this approach and this chip fare in a few years when technology and software has moved on? This history of co-processors for specific jobs has never been a very happy or long-lived one.
This doesn't look as if it's going to reduce encryption costs for most people as they say. It looks like a way of making up for the inherant lack of grunt on the Sparc platform, so maybe it will reduce encryption costs as far as that platform is concerned.
IPv4 is an absolutely fundamental part of virtually every network in existence today, and given that networks are a fundamental prerequisite in the modern computing world and see very, very, very, very heavy usage every minue of the day no one is going to take any time out and start tinkering because people think networks and the internet are broken. There's no financial incentive for ISPs or any companies to invest in IPv6 yet and there won't be no matter who is 'in charge' of the internet to 'force' it to happen. You can't mandate anything in an open market, and I just find the possible motivation for that statement bizarre.
Basically, it'll start to happen when we really do run out of IP addresses and things get desperate and it will happen when someone comes up with a sane and straightforward guide for making IPv6 co-exist happily with existing IPv4 networks and making sure everyone knows about it. Until those things happen there is zero incentive to rip out and replace or tinker with something so fundamental. Band aids are the order of the day and have been in every piece of fundamental infrastructure since time imemorial. We must leave this 'rip out and replace' culture in computing far behind otherwise no one can ever take us seriously.
On the other hand the cost of phone services in the UK has gone down hugely...
Wow. That's a revelation. I'd love to know what phone services. The only reason why land line calls might have become more attractive is because of the rise of mobiles, BT have been losing money hand over fist and the fact that people only generally have a land line for broadband - which they've been forced to screw people for even though they won't use the requisite land line call quota.
...since BT was forced to open up.
Open up what exactly? You still need to pay a stupidly pointless and expensive line rental just to get broadband in the majority of areas. I fail to see how that has been 'opening up'.
Re:Is really a bad, bad idea...
on
NASA May Outsource
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Sounds like your guys made the right decision.
Except it isn't. History has taught us that when you privatise previously public organisations then you end up with something even worse - a private company acting like a public sector organisation, generally with a monopoly milking away a cash cow. It's happened to BT and various other privatised organisations and it has hurt private enterprise because that monopoly at exchanges and elsewhere is still felt. It's far better to carefully look at how an industry can be privatised rather than a given organisation. There's also an argument for the public sector taking control of the core infrastructure of a country and giving it a clear remit so that a strong private sector can hang off it. The US and Britain are never in a million years going to have train travel or broadband like France or Japan and we'll always be left wondering why rural areas are left out in poverty when it comes to things like healthcare and a decent postal service.
I cannot believe that lazy bastard politicians still keep preaching Milton Friedman as some sort of answer. Public sector organisations aren't bad because they're not in the private sector, it's because they are just badly run organisations with no clear aims. Ill-thought out privatisations (mostly to raise cash) have done a great deal of harm to the UK's public and private sectors because it makes that even worse.
People who ask this have generally never hosted anything major before. The attraction is that it decouples your applications and server instances from real hardware and even from the specific virtualisation platform you would otherwise be sitting on. This means that a hardware failure will certainly not affect you in the same way and neither will a failure in a comparable virtualisation platform. It's on a completely different scale, and certainly with Amazon you can spread yourself across different geographic locations. I've seen many Xen VPS platforms have to be rebooted periodically for things like kernel updates and if you're dealing with real hardware then you start getting into failover and drdb, which is far too much of a pain for most development companies to worry about. You just want to host your applications somewhere. Trust me. You start worrying about this stuff very quickly otherwise.
Additionally, what makes it a 'cloud' and not just a vanilla virtualisation platform is that your storage itself is then decoupled from your machine instances themselves, as well as the hardware, in an easy way without having to faff about with clustered storage set ups yourself or through a hosting company. This makes your machine instances easily disposable and allows for pretty easy recreation of production environments as a failover or for testing and development.
Essentially, that's what's attractive about it in layman's terms. It makes it far cheaper and far less hassle to get hardware and storage redundancy when you start having to worry about it, but large companies are not going to be outsourcing their critical stuff off site with it. That's just insane. It's just a pity the whole thing has become filled full of shit by people who don't know what they're talking about like that Services Engineering nutcase in the article who is probably being paid way too much money. The article doesn't even tell you what limitations they found in any detail.
No sane person runs a vanilla installation of windows.
Errrrr, yes they do. Organisations the world over do not install lots of individual Windows updates unless one or two are absolutely necessary. They always (if they're sane) create a build from the known vanilla install and then service pack increments as they become available so they always know exactly what is installed on all their systems at any given time.
However, since it will be many, many years before most organisations upgrade again then it's all academic really.
Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?
on
KDE 4.3 Released
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· Score: 1
They are hard at work at it, but no, Orca does not yet work with QT4. Something about a 'dbus' interface that has to be written.
Probably because Orca and GTK/Gnome support is behind in porting over to D-Bus. I really thought they would have made more progress by now. Qt 4 already has pretty ample support for AT-SPI, but Gnome/GTK apps use the older CORBA interfaces which makes interoperability difficult.
Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus
on
KDE 4.3 Released
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· Score: 1
Much of the KDE 3 functionality you would expect to be included in KDE 4 is gone. A good example is the KDE regular expression editor which comes as a standard KDE utility in KDE 3...There was no way to make KDE 4 work in a way which I want to use...I upgraded to Ibex in April, and tried out KDE 4.1; it is still not what I expect. I switched to Gnome for maybe a day, and couldn't get it to handle multiple desktops with Xinerama the way I want. Finally, I switched to xfce.
If KDE 3.5 did what you wanted then why didn't you stay on it until KDE 4 did? Why didn't you use the regular expression KDE 3 app? You can install KDE 3 apps under KDE 4. I have no clue whatsoever why some people get to something that works then mysteriously 'upgrade' for some reason and then bitch that something that they're getting entirely for free doesn't do what they want.
Finally, I switched to xfce. It works the way I want, I can change the behavior if I don't like it. I have been using xfce all summer.
Wow. Can you really? If you want a desktop that does nothing but the one or two things that you want then by all means use it. However, Xfce isn't venerated as the desktop that will answer all our prayers because it does just that. Nothing. It's a shell that launches applications and that's about it. Customisation is zilch, pretty much, and I can't fathom how you're satisfied with it in that department after KDE 3.
Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?
on
KDE 4.3 Released
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· Score: 1
Why don't you just use Orca with KDE then, since Qt 4 supports ATI-SPI as far as I know? However, you can always count on someone to troll with the accessibility card.
Move away to what, exactly? Open source projects fork, they have organisational trouble, they split into different organisations and they move on. The one constant is that the source stays around and they keep going.
Such is the power that one man was allowed to wield for far too long without it being made public.
Then they learn from that and move on. It's not going to stop CentOS systems as they are today working.
However, Linus is wrong to have taken him to task in such a public forum. If he had any sense, he'd have done it privately, and Alan Cox would probably still be the maintainer. There's more to managing people than simply "being right".
No. In an open, public project you must have what's going on out in the open for all to see, warts and all. Linus also does not 'manage' anyone. Once you start having private discussions and disagreements about what was a public bug and a public problem involving others in the name of political correctness then that whole process starts to break down.
And that's why you should run RH / OEL on mission critical systems. Not trolling, just facing the reality.
Not really. CentOS isn't going to stop working any time soon, the source code and repositories are still around and this will get sorted one way or the other even if it means new domains and changing the name of the project or something or learning from mistakes and setting up some non-profit organisation.
Quite right. In a few months' time they could all be out of a job with no prospects when Oracle has an inevitable cull and eventually realises they don't want them. However, they have the opportunity to jump ship to an expanding company now who will directly rely on and need the technology they are developing. They would be stupid not to jump ship to that in the current climate.
Mod me down now, but mark my words: within a year they'll be out of business or focusing primarily on php, perl, and python.
Python is OK because it's mature and you can build good infrastructure such as Zope with it, but talking about organisations using RoR being out of business in favour of PHP and Perl?! ROTFL.
"We're sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for/?p=6203 on this server.
The proxy server you are using is not permitted to access this server. Please bypass the proxy server, or contact your proxy server administrator."
No, I'm not changing my working network settings as a result of some bullshit assumption by some bullshit piece of software he's using. Does't inspire much confidence.
KDE4 has already become far too bloated and unresponsive for my liking and it looks like GNOME will be next, maybe XFCE after that but other minimalist window managers will be created to fill the niche left behind by those who fell victim to the awful disease that is feature creep.
Ares is simply a disaster and rehashing old designs to shoddily heavy lift payloads into space is plain wrong if you expect to try and get into space on a regular basis. Don't get me started on how stupid solid rocket boosters are. You need something that you can control. It's yet another disaster waiting to happen after the Shuttle. There is no way in this day and age after fifty years that getting in space should involve a completely irreversible, one way process of lighting a solid rocket booster.
I believe others have pointed to the lack of scientific talent and and lack of merit within NASA these days and we're seeing the results.
It's sorta like how the makers of word-processor software would love to eliminate the use of plain text, so we all have to pay them to use formatting features even when we don't need them.
As a former partner with Sun, I strongly believe that Sun's insistence on using an Oracle out of the box solution to for its company wide sales to service system is what caused its demise. This software never worked and increased case handling times in the call center.
That's pretty interesting. They certainly wouldn't be the first company to have it's left hand not know what it's right hand was doing as a result of bullshit CRM and sales software. Ironic that it's Oracle.
I also believe Sun should have never gotten into the x86 server/workstation market.
They already tried that along with every other big Unix hardware vendor trying to protect their own hardware that went bust. The message was clear even in the 90s which is why no one wanted to port their Unix to x86 and why no one has trusted Solaris on x86. Either SGI, Digital and Sun kept up and kept surpassing raw x86 performance to justify their high costs or they were in real trouble when the inevitable x86 based 'Unix' came along. They all went into denial when Linux came along and made that happen.
Instead they should have focused their energies behind their flagship SPARC lines and actually produced a processor of their own rather than buying Fujitu's technology.
But how do you put in the research and development to make sure that SPARC keeps up with x86 performance and justifies its added cost? Sun farmed it out to Fujitsu because they could no longer put the development effort in and even Fujitsu cannot manage the costs of keeping up.
Sun focused far too much on hardware and Solaris without creating any firm advantages in either, apart from a magical pixie and arrogant belief that people would come back to Sun 'enterprise' hardware and software, and the leadership allowed deeply entrenched politics at the company to get in the way. I doubt whether Oracle will allow that to happen. They're a company that looks at returns and precious little else.
MySQL doesn't hurt Microsoft's database ambitions at all. MySQL has basically become the dominant database for web applications simply because it's licensing is cheap and it's cheerful and fast (at one time anyway). However, there is no way at all that MySQL will be allowed to acquire features that will let it compete with Oracle. That is now the sole domain of PostgreSQL.
Because there is no GTK 3.0 anywhere one the horizon anywhere. There is nothing to underping Gnome 3 other than a few existing projects added on to Gnome 2.2.
The KDE 4.0 release was a total management cock up from start to finish...
Hmmmm, it wasn't from KDE's perspective. It's the way things have always worked. The KDE developers set themselves some goals for KDE 4.0 and they achieved them - mainly API and ABI stability. What happened was that distributors then blindly started compiling and packaging it and then whinging when they found out that their users weren't too happy with it. Virtually all distributors are braindead when it comes to putting together a whole system and looking intelligently at the software they want to use. It's why we have PulseAudio being thrown into desktop systems today. That thing isn't stable at all, let alone feature complete.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again we've got a totally unelected, dictatorial government 'minister' who starts rattling his saber over file sharing, *conincidentally* after meeting with David Geffen and being wined and dined, and then lies barface to us - again - that this unprecendented personal poking of his nose in policy that has nothing to do with him wasn't connected to that in any way.
This doesn't look as if it's going to reduce encryption costs for most people as they say. It looks like a way of making up for the inherant lack of grunt on the Sparc platform, so maybe it will reduce encryption costs as far as that platform is concerned.
IPv4 is an absolutely fundamental part of virtually every network in existence today, and given that networks are a fundamental prerequisite in the modern computing world and see very, very, very, very heavy usage every minue of the day no one is going to take any time out and start tinkering because people think networks and the internet are broken. There's no financial incentive for ISPs or any companies to invest in IPv6 yet and there won't be no matter who is 'in charge' of the internet to 'force' it to happen. You can't mandate anything in an open market, and I just find the possible motivation for that statement bizarre.
Basically, it'll start to happen when we really do run out of IP addresses and things get desperate and it will happen when someone comes up with a sane and straightforward guide for making IPv6 co-exist happily with existing IPv4 networks and making sure everyone knows about it. Until those things happen there is zero incentive to rip out and replace or tinker with something so fundamental. Band aids are the order of the day and have been in every piece of fundamental infrastructure since time imemorial. We must leave this 'rip out and replace' culture in computing far behind otherwise no one can ever take us seriously.
Wow. That's a revelation. I'd love to know what phone services. The only reason why land line calls might have become more attractive is because of the rise of mobiles, BT have been losing money hand over fist and the fact that people only generally have a land line for broadband - which they've been forced to screw people for even though they won't use the requisite land line call quota.
Open up what exactly? You still need to pay a stupidly pointless and expensive line rental just to get broadband in the majority of areas. I fail to see how that has been 'opening up'.
Except it isn't. History has taught us that when you privatise previously public organisations then you end up with something even worse - a private company acting like a public sector organisation, generally with a monopoly milking away a cash cow. It's happened to BT and various other privatised organisations and it has hurt private enterprise because that monopoly at exchanges and elsewhere is still felt. It's far better to carefully look at how an industry can be privatised rather than a given organisation. There's also an argument for the public sector taking control of the core infrastructure of a country and giving it a clear remit so that a strong private sector can hang off it. The US and Britain are never in a million years going to have train travel or broadband like France or Japan and we'll always be left wondering why rural areas are left out in poverty when it comes to things like healthcare and a decent postal service.
I cannot believe that lazy bastard politicians still keep preaching Milton Friedman as some sort of answer. Public sector organisations aren't bad because they're not in the private sector, it's because they are just badly run organisations with no clear aims. Ill-thought out privatisations (mostly to raise cash) have done a great deal of harm to the UK's public and private sectors because it makes that even worse.
People who ask this have generally never hosted anything major before. The attraction is that it decouples your applications and server instances from real hardware and even from the specific virtualisation platform you would otherwise be sitting on. This means that a hardware failure will certainly not affect you in the same way and neither will a failure in a comparable virtualisation platform. It's on a completely different scale, and certainly with Amazon you can spread yourself across different geographic locations. I've seen many Xen VPS platforms have to be rebooted periodically for things like kernel updates and if you're dealing with real hardware then you start getting into failover and drdb, which is far too much of a pain for most development companies to worry about. You just want to host your applications somewhere. Trust me. You start worrying about this stuff very quickly otherwise.
Additionally, what makes it a 'cloud' and not just a vanilla virtualisation platform is that your storage itself is then decoupled from your machine instances themselves, as well as the hardware, in an easy way without having to faff about with clustered storage set ups yourself or through a hosting company. This makes your machine instances easily disposable and allows for pretty easy recreation of production environments as a failover or for testing and development.
Essentially, that's what's attractive about it in layman's terms. It makes it far cheaper and far less hassle to get hardware and storage redundancy when you start having to worry about it, but large companies are not going to be outsourcing their critical stuff off site with it. That's just insane. It's just a pity the whole thing has become filled full of shit by people who don't know what they're talking about like that Services Engineering nutcase in the article who is probably being paid way too much money. The article doesn't even tell you what limitations they found in any detail.
Errrrr, yes they do. Organisations the world over do not install lots of individual Windows updates unless one or two are absolutely necessary. They always (if they're sane) create a build from the known vanilla install and then service pack increments as they become available so they always know exactly what is installed on all their systems at any given time.
However, since it will be many, many years before most organisations upgrade again then it's all academic really.
Probably because Orca and GTK/Gnome support is behind in porting over to D-Bus. I really thought they would have made more progress by now. Qt 4 already has pretty ample support for AT-SPI, but Gnome/GTK apps use the older CORBA interfaces which makes interoperability difficult.
If KDE 3.5 did what you wanted then why didn't you stay on it until KDE 4 did? Why didn't you use the regular expression KDE 3 app? You can install KDE 3 apps under KDE 4. I have no clue whatsoever why some people get to something that works then mysteriously 'upgrade' for some reason and then bitch that something that they're getting entirely for free doesn't do what they want.
Wow. Can you really? If you want a desktop that does nothing but the one or two things that you want then by all means use it. However, Xfce isn't venerated as the desktop that will answer all our prayers because it does just that. Nothing. It's a shell that launches applications and that's about it. Customisation is zilch, pretty much, and I can't fathom how you're satisfied with it in that department after KDE 3.
Why don't you just use Orca with KDE then, since Qt 4 supports ATI-SPI as far as I know? However, you can always count on someone to troll with the accessibility card.
Move away to what, exactly? Open source projects fork, they have organisational trouble, they split into different organisations and they move on. The one constant is that the source stays around and they keep going.
Then they learn from that and move on. It's not going to stop CentOS systems as they are today working.
No. In an open, public project you must have what's going on out in the open for all to see, warts and all. Linus also does not 'manage' anyone. Once you start having private discussions and disagreements about what was a public bug and a public problem involving others in the name of political correctness then that whole process starts to break down.
Not really. CentOS isn't going to stop working any time soon, the source code and repositories are still around and this will get sorted one way or the other even if it means new domains and changing the name of the project or something or learning from mistakes and setting up some non-profit organisation.
Quite right. In a few months' time they could all be out of a job with no prospects when Oracle has an inevitable cull and eventually realises they don't want them. However, they have the opportunity to jump ship to an expanding company now who will directly rely on and need the technology they are developing. They would be stupid not to jump ship to that in the current climate.
Python is OK because it's mature and you can build good infrastructure such as Zope with it, but talking about organisations using RoR being out of business in favour of PHP and Perl?! ROTFL.
No, I'm not changing my working network settings as a result of some bullshit assumption by some bullshit piece of software he's using. Does't inspire much confidence.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
If you want a desktop that does nothing then that's fine by the rest of us.
Ares is simply a disaster and rehashing old designs to shoddily heavy lift payloads into space is plain wrong if you expect to try and get into space on a regular basis. Don't get me started on how stupid solid rocket boosters are. You need something that you can control. It's yet another disaster waiting to happen after the Shuttle. There is no way in this day and age after fifty years that getting in space should involve a completely irreversible, one way process of lighting a solid rocket booster.
I believe others have pointed to the lack of scientific talent and and lack of merit within NASA these days and we're seeing the results.
Who makes money out of text editors?
That's pretty interesting. They certainly wouldn't be the first company to have it's left hand not know what it's right hand was doing as a result of bullshit CRM and sales software. Ironic that it's Oracle.
They already tried that along with every other big Unix hardware vendor trying to protect their own hardware that went bust. The message was clear even in the 90s which is why no one wanted to port their Unix to x86 and why no one has trusted Solaris on x86. Either SGI, Digital and Sun kept up and kept surpassing raw x86 performance to justify their high costs or they were in real trouble when the inevitable x86 based 'Unix' came along. They all went into denial when Linux came along and made that happen.
But how do you put in the research and development to make sure that SPARC keeps up with x86 performance and justifies its added cost? Sun farmed it out to Fujitsu because they could no longer put the development effort in and even Fujitsu cannot manage the costs of keeping up.
Sun focused far too much on hardware and Solaris without creating any firm advantages in either, apart from a magical pixie and arrogant belief that people would come back to Sun 'enterprise' hardware and software, and the leadership allowed deeply entrenched politics at the company to get in the way. I doubt whether Oracle will allow that to happen. They're a company that looks at returns and precious little else.
MySQL doesn't hurt Microsoft's database ambitions at all. MySQL has basically become the dominant database for web applications simply because it's licensing is cheap and it's cheerful and fast (at one time anyway). However, there is no way at all that MySQL will be allowed to acquire features that will let it compete with Oracle. That is now the sole domain of PostgreSQL.
Because there is no GTK 3.0 anywhere one the horizon anywhere. There is nothing to underping Gnome 3 other than a few existing projects added on to Gnome 2.2.
Dude......... There is no Gnome 3.0 or GTK 3.0. What you have is Gnome 2.2 with some plasticine bits stuck on.
As far as I know Gnome 3.x, and GTK3.x that it should be built on, are complete vapourware. I don't know why Shuttleworth is being asked about them.
Hmmmm, it wasn't from KDE's perspective. It's the way things have always worked. The KDE developers set themselves some goals for KDE 4.0 and they achieved them - mainly API and ABI stability. What happened was that distributors then blindly started compiling and packaging it and then whinging when they found out that their users weren't too happy with it. Virtually all distributors are braindead when it comes to putting together a whole system and looking intelligently at the software they want to use. It's why we have PulseAudio being thrown into desktop systems today. That thing isn't stable at all, let alone feature complete.