so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites
Until the spammers note that Bing's marketshare is big enough to set their sights on. It's the whole exploits are concentrated on the most popular software out there paradigm again.
I do like some aspects (video included) of this though. I find the shopping to be about as good as Google's, nothing special. Could definitely do without the noisy background, though. I crave simplicity!
You really think that little hand held GPS is transmitting signals all the way back through deep space to the GPS satellite !
You really think that little GPS satellite is in deep space !
Yeah, we all say stupid stuff, me especially. I apologized for my ignorance, get over it. I figured if the guy wanted to monitor his kid through it on the web, it would have to send back some sort of signal. Your post was very informative and helpful.
Was this supposed to be some sort of abstract attempt at humor?
Nope, not at all, merely just misinformed. I was under the impression that they worked by acquiring signals and then periodically requesting information. I had thought there was a limited number of receivers a single satellite could service at a time to update their data about how far they were from that satellite and triangulate their point on the map. Didn't know they were completely passive units. My mistake! Sure does take forever for my receiver to get signals in heavier traffic areas--must just be a poor receiver!
And what business is that? The child location system business? Because if so I would think you would call him something else: paycheck.
Judging by how long it takes my GPS time to find enough signals to situate itself, I'm kind of afraid this is going to be standard for middle to upper class families and it's only going to get harder for me to figure out where I am when I'm lost. Maybe because some helicopter parent is F5-ing the hell out of their browser on their child sitting in class? Oh well, just means more demand for more GPS satellites.
From David Lyle, Acting Executive Director of ACS Law
To ACS Law Staff
Team,
I'd like to talk to all of you today about a very important issue that is right now affecting our public image. So serious that major news outlets may even pick up on it. It is in regards to our publications on copyright and as members of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, we need to look after each other. We have learned an important lesson today and we must share it with everyone so we can't make the same time wasting mistakes in the future.
That lesson, friends and coworkers, is that violating copyright is totally fucking awesome.
I mean we used to spend how many man-hours on one of these reports? 120? 240? Wasted wasted time. The information is out there just waiting to be copied. At first I thought this brilliant new technology would be expensive. I mean, how much do we spend just on the software that turns our computers on? Nope, just two simple commands: ctrl-c ctrl-p. These are the shake-n-bake methods of success.
That shit we did on Democracy and Voting? Yeah, take note. I just discovered that using this thing called Google will pull up page upon page of data that is as good as if not better than the crap we've been slaving over! Ever heard of a site called blackboxvoting.org? Fire up the goddamn presses. Frank LoMonte, that piece you did on the First Amendment was good. But Wikipedia's article is better. Next time save yourself the trouble, they're practically giving the stuff away out there--work smarter and faster people. Don't work harder.
And if any of you pansies come up to me like our now ex-employee Jenkins did about credit and citations, you'll be getting a citation yourself. You'll be fired. Now that's a citation. I just wrote a five hundred page report on the Second Amendment in five minutes, I don't have time for citations. Hell, you're lucky I don't fire the team that figured this out months ago and didn't tell us! I mean, we're a team people. We need to work together.
And if you're worried about the media, don't be. I've already bragged to them about this and told them they should pull their heads out of their asses and use it. Maybe that's why they're all dying business models? Ever think of that? This shit's free and they're paying for it. Morons. And the real icing on the cake is that since this hit the news, page views has tripled. It's fucking win/win no matter how you look at it.
I'll bet you think I'm a chump typing all this out when I could have just ctrl-c ctrl-p from The Onion and if you caught that, good for you. I'm still learning here, let's grow together.
Wow, well, you know what can I say? I applaud Microsoft for their work in Vista & Windows 7 in separating userspace from kernelspace and then they just go and do something like this:
Microsoft.NET Framework Assistant 1.0
Adds ClickOnce support and the ability to report installed.NET framework versions to the web server.
I do not like the sound of that nor does Annoyances.org as the article notes. I don't like the idea of sending anything about software on my computer to a web server without me knowing about it. I really don't like the sound of ClickOnce either! Isn't this the mentality that has gotten IE users in trouble time and time again?!
I don't have a problem with the.NET framework... as long as we're not heading back to blurring the line between what the browser should have access to (certain user space files) and what the browser inadvertently has access to (.NET libraries right in the kernel).
Page must have been a Java programmer, because Java is slow as hell and it only gets slower.
Hey, it's no C or C++ but the story we discussed yesterday seemed to plot Java's average performance at a pretty desirable position. And I think you're wrong about the Java getting slower... I think most implementations of the byte code interpreter get faster as time progresses and that the language just gets misapplied in its quest to be the silver bullet. An example is massive allocations of strings instead of string buffers. There's just way better languages to handle strings in, in my opinion.
I think it gets broken all the time. At least in my world. Look at Firefox 3 vs 2. Seems to be a marked improvement in speed to me.
And as far as web application containers go, most of them seem to get faster and better at serving up pages. No, they may not be "twice as fast on twice as fast hardware" but I don't think they are twice as slow every three months.
I'm certain it happens all the time, you just don't notice that ancient products like VI, Emacs, Lisp interpreters, etc stay pretty damn nimble as hardware takes off into the next century. People just can't notice an increase in speed when you're waiting on I/O like the user.
"There is nothing wrong with his analogy" says a user with the name BadAnalogyGuy.
Too perfect.
Your argument is hilarious. What does the existence of Jews willing to slaughter other Jews have to do with anything--or even defend the analogy!
Your deflection of the errant analogy with some sort of pointless note of some Jews working for Nazis during the Holocaust is borderline antisemitic in my book.
Grow up. They can't edit an online encyclopedia! How do you compare that with stripping an innocent of their right to live?
The term 'killer app' gets tossed around quite liberally these days. Nearly every piece of software released seems to be pitched as having the potential to send shockwaves throughout the IT world. In reality, there have been precious few applications which have truly changed the computing industry over the years.
Gosh, all this time I thought the term "killer app" meant that it was on course to unseat the long disputed champion of that application realm--you know, kill something. Prime targets being those applications that rested on their laurels as king of the hill for far too long. I guess I was wrong. I suppose there's no point in continuing to complain that 'killer' is just a marketing word used exclusively to generate hype but, sure, let's throw it retroactively over the apps that historically impressed and 'wowed' us the most.
And finally, in the bottom left corner you would find probably nothing, since this is the space of the ideal language, the one which is at the same time fast and short and a joy to use.
I must ask why the author assumes that verbosity is bad and why lack thereof makes it a "joy to use."
I think verbosity in moderation is necessary. I have read many an article with developers arguing that they don't need to document their code when their code is self-documenting. Do you make all of your variables and class/function/methods a single character for the sake of verbosity? I hope not. And I would think that reading and maintaining that code would be far less than a joy.
I don't even need to argue this, according to his graphs we should all be using Regina, Mlton or Stalin (a scheme implementation). But instead languages like Java and Perl and C++ prevail. And I would guess that support and a mediocre range of verbosity are what causes that.
Great work in these graphs! But in my opinion, verbosity when used in moderation--like a lot things--is far better than either extreme.
You are asking the wrong question. Ext4 does not need fixing, the apps do.
Are your apps patched yet?
At the risk of revealing just how incredibly inept I am about file systems... shouldn't your "apps" (and by apps I am guessing you mean applications) be calling the operating system to do anything to the file system? I mean, isn't the point of operating systems to create or contain APIs and the like that allow you to interface with any file system type that the OS supports?
I guess what I'm asking is just the technicality that only his operating system need be patched and tested for it?
Again, I don't really do this type of coding and in all the C programming I've done, I've never seen a need or way even to get down and dirty with the file system. I can dream up cases (like Google's bigtable) where that may be desirable with benefits if well planned but I would imagine most of the time it would be unwise and unsafe and put you dependent on a type of file system.
I moved to ext4 as soon as it became available. I haven't had any problems thusfar (no data loss, etc), and the increased speed is noticable.
So - in the opinion of a very casual Linux user - I would say that yes, it's "okay." I'm not sure I'd trust it with anything super serious, though. I could be the only one without any problems, after all. As always, you should tip-toe around anything bleeding-edge.
Yeah, man, it's ok go ahead and flip your entire corporation's servers to ext4 over this weekend. A Slashdot user named buttfscking just said it is "safe enough."
Is there any incentive to move to ext4, other than sheer curiosity?
Ok so I'm gussing production = income = your ass? Let me turn your question back to you by asking, "What is driving this need to move to ext4?" Because so far, all you've told me is that you are considering risking your ass for sheer curiosity.
I may be grossly misinformed but that is how the question sounds to me. And by "your ass" I don't mean oh-no-we-had-a-service-outage-for-five-minutes... no, we could have a customer on the phone saying, "You mean to tell me that the modifications being made to my site for the past 24 hours are gone?!"
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
I don't know about you but I'm too busy dealing with shit like this than to ponder new potential problems I can put into play.
Look through this page for a rough comparison of ext4 with other file systems. There's a better list of features for ext4 here that will tell you why you might need to switch to it. It is backward compatible with ext3 and ext2 so moving to it may be trivial. If you're dealing with more than 32000 subdirectories or need to partition some major petabytes/exobytes then you might not have a choice. Some of these benefits are probably not risking your ass for but if there's a business need that cannot be overcome any easier way then back your shit up and do rigorous testing before you go live with it. If you're using Slashdot to feel out if the majority of users scream OMGNOES so you don't waste your time doing that, then that's fine. Just don't do this if you don't have to.
I tell you what, there's a $288 desktop computer at Dell today that you can buy, put ext4 on and your OS of choice and your application(s) and whipping boy it into next century without risking anything. Where I work we have two servers in addition to our production servers. I don't think this is an uncommon scheme so if you have a development server, throw it on there and poke it with a stick. Then move it to the testing server and let your testers grape it for two weeks. Then you'll know.
I never had a subscription to EGM though I did borrow them from my friends and accept old copies to pour over as a kid. To me they were the first game magazine to really put an effort into the layout and design of the magazine... and also use very high quality paper. This was reflected in the price and I recall having a subscription of PC Gamer (at $20/year) which paled in comparison.
The one problem I had with EGM was the ads. There were so many of them. I grew up on a farm where I read my magazines cover to cover and sometimes more than once. Although the ads in EGM were very well done and artsy (usually) they did get to be a bit much. Sometimes it felt like I had a three pound advertisement of glossy photos in my hands. EGM sometimes felt like my older sister's Vogue magazines: 90% ads because the consumer actually liked them. Now, PC Gamer was by far worse (I suspected most of the articles being written by a worker for the company of the product being reviewed) and I'm not even sure that's around anymore.
I kept every single one of my Popular Mechanics magazines. You will not find a single PC Gamer though or any of the old EGMs.
I appluad EGM and hope they make it back. I often enjoyed their lists and articles, I must admit I wouldn't have noticed if they had gone under aside from the Slashdot articles.
I also assume this means more ads since that model is getting harder and harder to sustain... but at least they'll be nice looking ads and hopefully be kept out of the articles by a well defined line of self respect.
... but what's even more troubling is that the court somehow ruled that such an editor was worth $98 in the copies of Microsoft Word where it was used. An XML editor. $98. And people say patent awards aren't out of sync with reality?
Well--and I stress that I am not defending this ruling--you could look at it like raising the stakes involved since there are so many patent cases.
Example: You steal a piece of fruit. You are convicted in front of a jury and slapped on the wrist. So you and everyone else does it again tomorrow. To combat this they increase the penalty to a $70 fine and 4 days in jail. In an ideal world, people stop stealing fruit.
Of course, I'm told hands get chopped off for stealing in some countries (could be wrong on that one though). I do know in Texas they're not opposed to electrocutin' ya for certain offenses though... maybe they are just on their way to try to get all these patent cases prevented?
Doesn't make a lick of sense at all considering you can't throw a goddamn progress bar on your application without risking litigation.
Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday a Texas federal jury...
Texas? You mean the state of Marshall, TX where Microsoft (and everyone else who wants to win) holds all of its prosecuting patent cases? I do believe Microsoft may be getting a taste of its own medicine!
7,300 people voted this year, compared to 44,000 people the previous year, a drop of about 83 percent.
If all you're concerned about is number of votes, put each candidate on prime time television belting out the worst songs they can think of. Then instruct viewers to vote with their cell phones. Don't forget to charge them 99 cents a call and limit them to 10 votes... the populace seems to love that.
Granted, they might not be the best candidate for the position, there will be 10 million votes and you'll have a $9.9 million surplus to decide what to do with. On top of that, your elected official will be able to sing "Oops, I Did It Again" by Britney Spears whenever they screw anything up.
*ring ring* NY Times Editor: Marcus? Hi, it's Bill Keller from the New York Times and since we're all in agreement that today we put our paywalls, I just wanted to call you up and thank you again. Washington Post Editor: Oh yeah, Bill, we gotta do this--I mean, we just can't sustain without this revenue *snicker*. NY Times Editor: Alright well, I'm calling because it's 10am now EST and we had all agreed that at midnight EST our papers would switch over to paywalls. Washington Post Editor: Yep. That's right. *snort* NY Times Editor: Yeah, well, your paper is still accessible without a paywall. Washington Post Editor: What? Oh, man, hah, must be a bug. I'll get right on that! *click* Two hours later. *ring ring* NY Times Editor: Yeah, Marcus? It's Bill from the New York Times again, it's noon, still seeing a paywall on your site, what's up? Washington Post Editor: Oh yeah, it's a bad bug, we can't figure it out--might take weeks. *laughing in background* NY Times Editor: Really? Well, we haven't had a single person sign up for our paywall and I'm looking at an ad online right now that says, "Washington Post: Because Information Wants to be Free." And, uh, I also am reading some comments on blogs about only idiots will ever use the New York Times from this point on. Am I on speaker phone? Washington Post Editor: Bill, it's time I came clean. In the newspaper business, there are sheep and there are sharks...
The big deal is that Apple's not supporting iTunes interfacing with the Pre. The support is coming from Pre's side. Your post says:
iTunes currently supports about 20 non-iPod devices
The big deal is that it seems as if Apple decides what gets supported and what doesn't. It should be built so that any device maker can choose whether or not to build an adapter so that their hardware can interface with iTunes? Where does this leave iRiver, Archos, Sandisk, Microsoft, Centon, Nextar, etc?
Apple decides who lives and who dies. That's the big deal.
Plug the Pre into a PC and you're offered the option of using the device as a USB drive, charging it or beginning a "media sync." Interesting, using media sync the Pre does indeed sync with iTunes, though it's hamstrung by Apple's DRM protected songs. Can't imagine Apple's too happy about that. Presumably, Apple legal is already drafting a letter. Pre appears to make iTunes think it's an iPod.
How is Apple going to feel about that, asks Walt. Rubinstein dodges a bit noting that there are a variety of ways of getting music out of iTunes. Walt pushes back pointing out that this is the first non-Apple device that is recognized as an Apple device by a Mac. Rubinstein dodges again. Seems he's pretty obviously using his Apple knowledge here. McNamee jumps in. Apple is "practically a monopolist," he says, adding that people should be able to use music that they purchase in what ever way they see fit.
Such a letter would be the stupidest move Apple has made in a long time. I already view them as monopolistic bastards with their iTunes website & iTunes application & iTunes DRM & iPod/iPhone lock-in scheme. I am sick and tired of explaining to my friends and family how to burn a DRM'd song from their computer to a CD and then rip that CD to an MP3 and then put that MP3 on their player of choice.
I am begging Palm to sue the hell out of Apple if Apple comes after them. Palm should sue Apple to release an API to interface with iTunes music store and utilize iTunes DRM (I'm not against DRM if the artist wants it just so long as anyone can use it in their applications) and also an API for hardware manufacturers to plug into iTunes! Am I the only person on earth that sees the necessity in this? Am I the only person on earth that sees this as a direct affront to a free market system?! How is this any different from Microsoft packaging IE with Windows?! In my book it's worse since it transcends so many different industries--not just software!
Apple's evilest move would be to just watch this happen and throw a wrench into the works every time they do an update to iTunes. Let Palm spend hours trying to figure it out so the Pre still interfaces with it. That way the consumers will experience bumps, be more prone to buying iPhones and if anyone sues them for monopolistic practices they can throw their hands up in defense and say, "What!? The Pre works fine with iTunes! I don't know why you can't figure it out!"
I'm so sick of this whole mess that I personally buy CDs or Amazon MP3s, rip the CDs with CDex to a format of my choice and then move said songs to my MP3 player of choice. Hell, I can play my music on my DVD player if I put it on the correct media.
As Hulu's popularity has skyrocketed over the past year, users have been clamoring for a way to get it out of the browser and into the living room. Hulu Desktop looks like quite a major effort towards answering this call, so we'll have to see how users respond.
Hulu Desktop is a free download and requires a Mac with a 2.4GHz Intel Core Duo or comparable processor, 2GB of RAM, and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or later. You'll also need Adobe Flash 9.0.124 and a 2Mbps Internet connection.
Great, something about to explode in the consumer market passing up on open source and instead locking everyone and all their hardware in to the requirement of Adobe Flash. You want to discuss why you need a core duo to run this!?
*massages his forehead* I see in the future... people having to pay again... for their hardware and... software and... codecs and... media licenses and... internet connection and... no one will have enough money to afford it anyway.
There's free (and I mean actually free) alternatives out there that could make it so that hardware manufacturers and mobile companies don't have to get Adobe Flash on their devices. I'm not sure why Hulu isn't beefing up other open source software, containers and codecs to meet these needs. It would certainly make it easier for them to satisfy the media licenses with ad revenue. Oh well, enjoy your setback.
The question I have, is what is the oldest working piece of equipment fellow Slashdotters have out there?
I have an Atari 400 or 800 (I can't remember which one but it looks just like the 800 picture on Wikipedia but my buttons are different) from about 1979 in my parent's house in my old closet. And the only cartridge I had for it was something called "Left Hand BASIC" or maybe it was just "Left BASIC" which--unless I'm mistaken--was Atari's BASIC. Considering I was born in the early 80s, I bought it for $5 at a garage sale in 1996 and did a few procedures of Michael Crichton's Electronic Life (I used to be a big fan) on it and used a black and white TV as the monitor (I remember connecting it to the UHF posts on the back of the TV?). I did some of my first home computing on that thing. The really sad thing was that the large disc reader that came with it through a serial port didn't work so I had to punch everything in by hand over many hours to get back to where I was. Last time I was home, it still worked!
If you're talking about things I purchased new and underwent serious use, I have a Dell Pentium III Optiplex from 2000 that still works great as a router to my network. It's hard drive (a deathstar no less) has been replaced once but aside from that, the huge PCI expansion bay make it great for that particular need.
My name is Junis, I am posting this from a Commodore64 and my 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem in Afghanistan after years of oppression underneath the Taliban...</meme>
And I suppose the instant I show any signs of lag in World of Warcraft I'll have to listen to my guildmates crack jokes about me using a 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem ruining the raid.
Slashdot Mirror
www.BingIsNotGoogle.com
I also found Asus' http://itsbetterwithgoogle.com/ to be very convincing.
so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites
Until the spammers note that Bing's marketshare is big enough to set their sights on. It's the whole exploits are concentrated on the most popular software out there paradigm again.
I do like some aspects (video included) of this though. I find the shopping to be about as good as Google's, nothing special. Could definitely do without the noisy background, though. I crave simplicity!
You really think that little hand held GPS is transmitting signals all the way back through deep space to the GPS satellite !
You really think that little GPS satellite is in deep space !
Yeah, we all say stupid stuff, me especially. I apologized for my ignorance, get over it. I figured if the guy wanted to monitor his kid through it on the web, it would have to send back some sort of signal. Your post was very informative and helpful.
Was this supposed to be some sort of abstract attempt at humor?
Nope, not at all, merely just misinformed. I was under the impression that they worked by acquiring signals and then periodically requesting information. I had thought there was a limited number of receivers a single satellite could service at a time to update their data about how far they were from that satellite and triangulate their point on the map. Didn't know they were completely passive units. My mistake! Sure does take forever for my receiver to get signals in heavier traffic areas--must just be a poor receiver!
you are, what we in the biz call
And what business is that? The child location system business? Because if so I would think you would call him something else: paycheck.
Judging by how long it takes my GPS time to find enough signals to situate itself, I'm kind of afraid this is going to be standard for middle to upper class families and it's only going to get harder for me to figure out where I am when I'm lost. Maybe because some helicopter parent is F5-ing the hell out of their browser on their child sitting in class? Oh well, just means more demand for more GPS satellites.
From David Lyle, Acting Executive Director of ACS Law
To ACS Law Staff
Team,
I'd like to talk to all of you today about a very important issue that is right now affecting our public image. So serious that major news outlets may even pick up on it. It is in regards to our publications on copyright and as members of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, we need to look after each other. We have learned an important lesson today and we must share it with everyone so we can't make the same time wasting mistakes in the future.
That lesson, friends and coworkers, is that violating copyright is totally fucking awesome.
I mean we used to spend how many man-hours on one of these reports? 120? 240? Wasted wasted time. The information is out there just waiting to be copied. At first I thought this brilliant new technology would be expensive. I mean, how much do we spend just on the software that turns our computers on? Nope, just two simple commands: ctrl-c ctrl-p. These are the shake-n-bake methods of success.
That shit we did on Democracy and Voting? Yeah, take note. I just discovered that using this thing called Google will pull up page upon page of data that is as good as if not better than the crap we've been slaving over! Ever heard of a site called blackboxvoting.org? Fire up the goddamn presses. Frank LoMonte, that piece you did on the First Amendment was good. But Wikipedia's article is better. Next time save yourself the trouble, they're practically giving the stuff away out there--work smarter and faster people. Don't work harder.
And if any of you pansies come up to me like our now ex-employee Jenkins did about credit and citations, you'll be getting a citation yourself. You'll be fired. Now that's a citation. I just wrote a five hundred page report on the Second Amendment in five minutes, I don't have time for citations. Hell, you're lucky I don't fire the team that figured this out months ago and didn't tell us! I mean, we're a team people. We need to work together.
And if you're worried about the media, don't be. I've already bragged to them about this and told them they should pull their heads out of their asses and use it. Maybe that's why they're all dying business models? Ever think of that? This shit's free and they're paying for it. Morons. And the real icing on the cake is that since this hit the news, page views has tripled. It's fucking win/win no matter how you look at it.
I'll bet you think I'm a chump typing all this out when I could have just ctrl-c ctrl-p from The Onion and if you caught that, good for you. I'm still learning here, let's grow together.
Your friend and boss,
David Lyle, Acting Executive Director of ACS Law
Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.0 .NET framework versions to the web server.
Adds ClickOnce support and the ability to report installed
I do not like the sound of that nor does Annoyances.org as the article notes. I don't like the idea of sending anything about software on my computer to a web server without me knowing about it. I really don't like the sound of ClickOnce either! Isn't this the mentality that has gotten IE users in trouble time and time again?!
.NET framework ... as long as we're not heading back to blurring the line between what the browser should have access to (certain user space files) and what the browser inadvertently has access to (.NET libraries right in the kernel).
I don't have a problem with the
Page must have been a Java programmer, because Java is slow as hell and it only gets slower.
Hey, it's no C or C++ but the story we discussed yesterday seemed to plot Java's average performance at a pretty desirable position. And I think you're wrong about the Java getting slower ... I think most implementations of the byte code interpreter get faster as time progresses and that the language just gets misapplied in its quest to be the silver bullet. An example is massive allocations of strings instead of string buffers. There's just way better languages to handle strings in, in my opinion.
Can "Page's Law" Be Broken?
I think it gets broken all the time. At least in my world. Look at Firefox 3 vs 2. Seems to be a marked improvement in speed to me.
And as far as web application containers go, most of them seem to get faster and better at serving up pages. No, they may not be "twice as fast on twice as fast hardware" but I don't think they are twice as slow every three months.
I'm certain it happens all the time, you just don't notice that ancient products like VI, Emacs, Lisp interpreters, etc stay pretty damn nimble as hardware takes off into the next century. People just can't notice an increase in speed when you're waiting on I/O like the user.
"There is nothing wrong with his analogy" says a user with the name BadAnalogyGuy.
Too perfect.
Your argument is hilarious. What does the existence of Jews willing to slaughter other Jews have to do with anything--or even defend the analogy!
Your deflection of the errant analogy with some sort of pointless note of some Jews working for Nazis during the Holocaust is borderline antisemitic in my book.
Grow up. They can't edit an online encyclopedia! How do you compare that with stripping an innocent of their right to live?
The term 'killer app' gets tossed around quite liberally these days. Nearly every piece of software released seems to be pitched as having the potential to send shockwaves throughout the IT world. In reality, there have been precious few applications which have truly changed the computing industry over the years.
Gosh, all this time I thought the term "killer app" meant that it was on course to unseat the long disputed champion of that application realm--you know, kill something. Prime targets being those applications that rested on their laurels as king of the hill for far too long. I guess I was wrong. I suppose there's no point in continuing to complain that 'killer' is just a marketing word used exclusively to generate hype but, sure, let's throw it retroactively over the apps that historically impressed and 'wowed' us the most.
And finally, in the bottom left corner you would find probably nothing, since this is the space of the ideal language, the one which is at the same time fast and short and a joy to use.
I must ask why the author assumes that verbosity is bad and why lack thereof makes it a "joy to use."
I think verbosity in moderation is necessary. I have read many an article with developers arguing that they don't need to document their code when their code is self-documenting. Do you make all of your variables and class/function/methods a single character for the sake of verbosity? I hope not. And I would think that reading and maintaining that code would be far less than a joy.
I don't even need to argue this, according to his graphs we should all be using Regina, Mlton or Stalin (a scheme implementation). But instead languages like Java and Perl and C++ prevail. And I would guess that support and a mediocre range of verbosity are what causes that.
Great work in these graphs! But in my opinion, verbosity when used in moderation--like a lot things--is far better than either extreme.
You are asking the wrong question. Ext4 does not need fixing, the apps do.
Are your apps patched yet?
At the risk of revealing just how incredibly inept I am about file systems ... shouldn't your "apps" (and by apps I am guessing you mean applications) be calling the operating system to do anything to the file system? I mean, isn't the point of operating systems to create or contain APIs and the like that allow you to interface with any file system type that the OS supports?
I guess what I'm asking is just the technicality that only his operating system need be patched and tested for it?
Again, I don't really do this type of coding and in all the C programming I've done, I've never seen a need or way even to get down and dirty with the file system. I can dream up cases (like Google's bigtable) where that may be desirable with benefits if well planned but I would imagine most of the time it would be unwise and unsafe and put you dependent on a type of file system.
I moved to ext4 as soon as it became available. I haven't had any problems thusfar (no data loss, etc), and the increased speed is noticable. So - in the opinion of a very casual Linux user - I would say that yes, it's "okay." I'm not sure I'd trust it with anything super serious, though. I could be the only one without any problems, after all. As always, you should tip-toe around anything bleeding-edge.
Yeah, man, it's ok go ahead and flip your entire corporation's servers to ext4 over this weekend. A Slashdot user named buttfscking just said it is "safe enough."
Is ext4 Stable For Production Systems?
Probably.
Is there any incentive to move to ext4, other than sheer curiosity?
Ok so I'm gussing production = income = your ass? Let me turn your question back to you by asking, "What is driving this need to move to ext4?" Because so far, all you've told me is that you are considering risking your ass for sheer curiosity.
... no, we could have a customer on the phone saying, "You mean to tell me that the modifications being made to my site for the past 24 hours are gone?!"
I may be grossly misinformed but that is how the question sounds to me. And by "your ass" I don't mean oh-no-we-had-a-service-outage-for-five-minutes
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
I don't know about you but I'm too busy dealing with shit like this than to ponder new potential problems I can put into play.
Look through this page for a rough comparison of ext4 with other file systems. There's a better list of features for ext4 here that will tell you why you might need to switch to it. It is backward compatible with ext3 and ext2 so moving to it may be trivial. If you're dealing with more than 32000 subdirectories or need to partition some major petabytes/exobytes then you might not have a choice. Some of these benefits are probably not risking your ass for but if there's a business need that cannot be overcome any easier way then back your shit up and do rigorous testing before you go live with it. If you're using Slashdot to feel out if the majority of users scream OMGNOES so you don't waste your time doing that, then that's fine. Just don't do this if you don't have to.
I tell you what, there's a $288 desktop computer at Dell today that you can buy, put ext4 on and your OS of choice and your application(s) and whipping boy it into next century without risking anything. Where I work we have two servers in addition to our production servers. I don't think this is an uncommon scheme so if you have a development server, throw it on there and poke it with a stick. Then move it to the testing server and let your testers grape it for two weeks. Then you'll know.
I never had a subscription to EGM though I did borrow them from my friends and accept old copies to pour over as a kid. To me they were the first game magazine to really put an effort into the layout and design of the magazine ... and also use very high quality paper. This was reflected in the price and I recall having a subscription of PC Gamer (at $20/year) which paled in comparison.
... but at least they'll be nice looking ads and hopefully be kept out of the articles by a well defined line of self respect.
The one problem I had with EGM was the ads. There were so many of them. I grew up on a farm where I read my magazines cover to cover and sometimes more than once. Although the ads in EGM were very well done and artsy (usually) they did get to be a bit much. Sometimes it felt like I had a three pound advertisement of glossy photos in my hands. EGM sometimes felt like my older sister's Vogue magazines: 90% ads because the consumer actually liked them. Now, PC Gamer was by far worse (I suspected most of the articles being written by a worker for the company of the product being reviewed) and I'm not even sure that's around anymore.
I kept every single one of my Popular Mechanics magazines. You will not find a single PC Gamer though or any of the old EGMs.
I appluad EGM and hope they make it back. I often enjoyed their lists and articles, I must admit I wouldn't have noticed if they had gone under aside from the Slashdot articles.
I also assume this means more ads since that model is getting harder and harder to sustain
Well--and I stress that I am not defending this ruling--you could look at it like raising the stakes involved since there are so many patent cases.
... maybe they are just on their way to try to get all these patent cases prevented?
Example: You steal a piece of fruit. You are convicted in front of a jury and slapped on the wrist. So you and everyone else does it again tomorrow. To combat this they increase the penalty to a $70 fine and 4 days in jail. In an ideal world, people stop stealing fruit.
Of course, I'm told hands get chopped off for stealing in some countries (could be wrong on that one though). I do know in Texas they're not opposed to electrocutin' ya for certain offenses though
Doesn't make a lick of sense at all considering you can't throw a goddamn progress bar on your application without risking litigation.
Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday a Texas federal jury ...
Texas? You mean the state of Marshall, TX where Microsoft (and everyone else who wants to win) holds all of its prosecuting patent cases? I do believe Microsoft may be getting a taste of its own medicine!
7,300 people voted this year, compared to 44,000 people the previous year, a drop of about 83 percent.
If all you're concerned about is number of votes, put each candidate on prime time television belting out the worst songs they can think of. Then instruct viewers to vote with their cell phones. Don't forget to charge them 99 cents a call and limit them to 10 votes ... the populace seems to love that.
Granted, they might not be the best candidate for the position, there will be 10 million votes and you'll have a $9.9 million surplus to decide what to do with. On top of that, your elected official will be able to sing "Oops, I Did It Again" by Britney Spears whenever they screw anything up.
*ring ring* ...
NY Times Editor: Marcus? Hi, it's Bill Keller from the New York Times and since we're all in agreement that today we put our paywalls, I just wanted to call you up and thank you again.
Washington Post Editor: Oh yeah, Bill, we gotta do this--I mean, we just can't sustain without this revenue *snicker*.
NY Times Editor: Alright well, I'm calling because it's 10am now EST and we had all agreed that at midnight EST our papers would switch over to paywalls.
Washington Post Editor: Yep. That's right. *snort*
NY Times Editor: Yeah, well, your paper is still accessible without a paywall.
Washington Post Editor: What? Oh, man, hah, must be a bug. I'll get right on that!
*click*
Two hours later.
*ring ring*
NY Times Editor: Yeah, Marcus? It's Bill from the New York Times again, it's noon, still seeing a paywall on your site, what's up?
Washington Post Editor: Oh yeah, it's a bad bug, we can't figure it out--might take weeks. *laughing in background*
NY Times Editor: Really? Well, we haven't had a single person sign up for our paywall and I'm looking at an ad online right now that says, "Washington Post: Because Information Wants to be Free." And, uh, I also am reading some comments on blogs about only idiots will ever use the New York Times from this point on. Am I on speaker phone?
Washington Post Editor: Bill, it's time I came clean. In the newspaper business, there are sheep and there are sharks
iTunes currently supports about 20 non-iPod devices
The big deal is that it seems as if Apple decides what gets supported and what doesn't. It should be built so that any device maker can choose whether or not to build an adapter so that their hardware can interface with iTunes? Where does this leave iRiver, Archos, Sandisk, Microsoft, Centon, Nextar, etc?
Apple decides who lives and who dies. That's the big deal.
Plug the Pre into a PC and you're offered the option of using the device as a USB drive, charging it or beginning a "media sync." Interesting, using media sync the Pre does indeed sync with iTunes, though it's hamstrung by Apple's DRM protected songs. Can't imagine Apple's too happy about that. Presumably, Apple legal is already drafting a letter. Pre appears to make iTunes think it's an iPod.
How is Apple going to feel about that, asks Walt. Rubinstein dodges a bit noting that there are a variety of ways of getting music out of iTunes. Walt pushes back pointing out that this is the first non-Apple device that is recognized as an Apple device by a Mac. Rubinstein dodges again. Seems he's pretty obviously using his Apple knowledge here. McNamee jumps in. Apple is "practically a monopolist," he says, adding that people should be able to use music that they purchase in what ever way they see fit.
Such a letter would be the stupidest move Apple has made in a long time. I already view them as monopolistic bastards with their iTunes website & iTunes application & iTunes DRM & iPod/iPhone lock-in scheme. I am sick and tired of explaining to my friends and family how to burn a DRM'd song from their computer to a CD and then rip that CD to an MP3 and then put that MP3 on their player of choice.
I am begging Palm to sue the hell out of Apple if Apple comes after them. Palm should sue Apple to release an API to interface with iTunes music store and utilize iTunes DRM (I'm not against DRM if the artist wants it just so long as anyone can use it in their applications) and also an API for hardware manufacturers to plug into iTunes! Am I the only person on earth that sees the necessity in this? Am I the only person on earth that sees this as a direct affront to a free market system?! How is this any different from Microsoft packaging IE with Windows?! In my book it's worse since it transcends so many different industries--not just software!
Apple's evilest move would be to just watch this happen and throw a wrench into the works every time they do an update to iTunes. Let Palm spend hours trying to figure it out so the Pre still interfaces with it. That way the consumers will experience bumps, be more prone to buying iPhones and if anyone sues them for monopolistic practices they can throw their hands up in defense and say, "What!? The Pre works fine with iTunes! I don't know why you can't figure it out!"
I'm so sick of this whole mess that I personally buy CDs or Amazon MP3s, rip the CDs with CDex to a format of my choice and then move said songs to my MP3 player of choice. Hell, I can play my music on my DVD player if I put it on the correct media.
As Hulu's popularity has skyrocketed over the past year, users have been clamoring for a way to get it out of the browser and into the living room. Hulu Desktop looks like quite a major effort towards answering this call, so we'll have to see how users respond.
Hulu Desktop is a free download and requires a Mac with a 2.4GHz Intel Core Duo or comparable processor, 2GB of RAM, and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or later. You'll also need Adobe Flash 9.0.124 and a 2Mbps Internet connection.
Great, something about to explode in the consumer market passing up on open source and instead locking everyone and all their hardware in to the requirement of Adobe Flash. You want to discuss why you need a core duo to run this!?
... people having to pay again ... for their hardware and ... software and ... codecs and ... media licenses and ... internet connection and ... no one will have enough money to afford it anyway.
*massages his forehead* I see in the future
There's free (and I mean actually free) alternatives out there that could make it so that hardware manufacturers and mobile companies don't have to get Adobe Flash on their devices. I'm not sure why Hulu isn't beefing up other open source software, containers and codecs to meet these needs. It would certainly make it easier for them to satisfy the media licenses with ad revenue. Oh well, enjoy your setback.
The question I have, is what is the oldest working piece of equipment fellow Slashdotters have out there?
I have an Atari 400 or 800 (I can't remember which one but it looks just like the 800 picture on Wikipedia but my buttons are different) from about 1979 in my parent's house in my old closet. And the only cartridge I had for it was something called "Left Hand BASIC" or maybe it was just "Left BASIC" which--unless I'm mistaken--was Atari's BASIC. Considering I was born in the early 80s, I bought it for $5 at a garage sale in 1996 and did a few procedures of Michael Crichton's Electronic Life (I used to be a big fan) on it and used a black and white TV as the monitor (I remember connecting it to the UHF posts on the back of the TV?). I did some of my first home computing on that thing. The really sad thing was that the large disc reader that came with it through a serial port didn't work so I had to punch everything in by hand over many hours to get back to where I was. Last time I was home, it still worked!
If you're talking about things I purchased new and underwent serious use, I have a Dell Pentium III Optiplex from 2000 that still works great as a router to my network. It's hard drive (a deathstar no less) has been replaced once but aside from that, the huge PCI expansion bay make it great for that particular need.
My name is Junis, I am posting this from a Commodore64 and my 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem in Afghanistan after years of oppression underneath the Taliban ...</meme>
And I suppose the instant I show any signs of lag in World of Warcraft I'll have to listen to my guildmates crack jokes about me using a 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem ruining the raid.