I don't see ZFS as un-UNIXy though. It still does 'one thing', just at a higher level - file storage - as pointed out by the GP.
It looks to me that they've figured out the stuff that people wanted in numerous lower layers, and built a component that does one bigger thing. But it's still a nice contiguous block of functionality.
Well, in a conflict like Iraq, you're correct - the US government orders stuff from US industry, and some of it gets destroyed.
But in the world wars, the US was selling a lot of equipment to Western Europe, bringing money into the US and bankrupting Europe. The debt from the UK to the US was trillions of dollars.
I'd have said credit cards are great but some people are idiots.
You can choose to set up a direct debit to pay off the full card balance every month. Then you get to keep 1 to 2 months interest on money you've already spent, get protection on the things you've bought, maybe get cashback or airmiles or other rewards, and don't have to pay a penny for the privilege.
I put my work expenses on a 0% credit card and when my company pays the expenses, I put the money in a savings account. The interest over the year adds up to about £600 (over $1000).
Obviously, this takes some discipline. There's a 5-figure savings account with my name on it - but it's not my money.
Have you considered Firebird? I was recently introduced to it and it looks like a better option than MySQL / Drizzle.
The other obvious option is PostgresSQL, which looks fairly comparable to Firebird - the only reason I'm going with Firebird is that I can reliably remember how to pronounce it!
Because the ideas *are* obvious and the difficulty is in the implementation. Which is why people get so annoyed with the IP holding companies holding real innovators to ransom.
My Sky+ box can do record and play simultaneously but it makes mistakes. Once or twice I have been watching a few minutes behind the live broadcast, accidentally hit the Sky button (which returns to the live broadcast), and been unable to rewind back to where I was.
Logically it sounds simple, but once you get into all the different buttons the user can press, and how you undo things when the operator accidentally sits on the remote, it gets complicated very quickly.
I've experienced what you said once, driving way too fast and realising the next corner was much steeper than I thought. I'd locked the brakes and started turning into the corner, but with no effect. When I'd slowed down a bit I released the brakes a little, the tyres bit and I immediately got thrown through the dry stone wall on the opposite side of the road.
However, having one car with ABS, and one without, I do think ABS also reduces stopping distance. A dog ran out in front of my Ford Focus and I slammed on the brakes and stopped in an incredibly short distance. In my other car, I'd have skidded and I'm pretty sure I'd have hit the dog.
I don't think it's necessarily a criminal attempt to manipulate stock. Maybe someone posted a comment similar to yours elsewhere on the net and some foolish person believed it to be true, and reposted elsewhere without the context.
I'm amazed that completely unverified facts (and easily disprovable ones at that) could affect the share price so much. You'd think the people with the sense to buy and sell shares would have the sense not to believe this sort of rubbish.
IDTYDRC (I don't think you do remember correctly) - your own timeframe would continue as normal, but outside observers, free from the effects of the black hole's gravity, would see you slowing down and freezing at the event horizon - so they would never catch a glimpse of you experiencing the inside of a black hole.
My preference would be that you'd connect the device to a PC and search for and buy books on the PC. The wireless should just be for connecting up to a PC and syncing the books. Depending on the cost and othe rimpacts I'd be happy with a cable.
Plenty of people can't really handle setting up an internet service. It has to be done by the ISP support team, and most of them upon seeing a Linux netbook will likely say it's not supported.
The same goes when they want to connect most pieces of equipment. Although Linux will support far more devices straight out of the box, just about every device will come with easy to install Windows drivers. I've never seen an equally easy to install Linux driver.
I'd not be surprised there is a high return rate until these issues can be resolved.
Joel wrote a great article on these uptime measurements a while back. When you think of the 99.9% being 8 hours downtime per year, trying to add more nines doesn't make that much sense. Beyond that you're often looking at one off faults, where you're not too sure exactly what is going on. The faults are rare enough that the statistics stop making sense, and you can't be sure how long it will take to fix.
In those circumstances a fault can easily take a day to fix. A fully redundant cluster doesn't help if a software fault has put bad data into the system that has been copied all over the place. And completely eliminating software faults is close to impossible.
I think assuming 100% uptime is a major flaw. Most of your examples of 100% uptime are not 100% uptime. They are just reliably failsafe. This means they have assumed less than 100% uptime and put in place measures to avoid further problems from the downtime.
I've regularly been unable to pay by card due to network problems (Spain and Greece mainly - but once in the UK). The thing it must never do is complete just half the transaction. It needs to either do the whole thing or do nothing - and that's a lot more complicated than it sounds.
I've been unable to book holidays because the Sabre back-end was down for maintenance. Had to return the next day to try again. If it had thought it was working and given me a confirmation but not done the booking I'd have been much more annoyed!
As you say, the cost of downtime itself is often not really that great. But the cost of screwing things up as the system goes down can be horrifyingly immense.
I'm not too keen on these latest announcements really. It looks like a lot of manufacturers are looking at the iPhone and getting worried that it can do a lot of stuff that their device can't.
I'm not really interested in that. I'd like a dedicated reading device. Why does the Kindle have a keyboard? Why is the new Reader getting a touch screen? I guess Sony / Amazon aren't making the screen tech themselves, so maybe just have to concentrate on other areas that they can change.
I'm happy with the features on the Sony Reader, I'd just like to see improvements to the screen. They should look at Apple's frequent strategy of focusing on what a device should be doing and not putting in unnecessary features. Some people will use an iPhone for reading documents, that doesn't mean the Kindle / Reader should compete with the iPhone.
In fact scientific papers are easier to deal with than many other PDF documents. The majority are formatted to be fairly easy to read - typically under 10 words per line, often using two columns of text, so this would easily fit on the reader.
I had a chance to look at the Sony Reader recently and it looked to do a good job with displaying PDFs. The screen is very nice and on par with paper - probably ahead of glossy magazine pages but not quite up there with a book yet. It's the first e-ink screen I've seen and it's far better than LCDs IMHO.
However, the page turns are very ugly and clunky - the screen clears and goes black before the next page is shown. It annoyed me more than I had thought it would, so I'm waiting to see if they can fix that bit before I consider purchasing one.
Hmm, I think if your job is working with photos or images, then learning Photoshop is probably one of the most valuable investments of time you could make.
However, if your job isn't working with photos I agree that the GIMP is likely to provide everything you want for free.
Much like I'd advise any programmer to invest time learning vim, but never any non-programmers. If you're going to spend a lot of time doing anything, it's probably a good idea to use the best tools to do it.
Absolutely. I think for a great number of people who occasionally have to work with images, and need to do more complex operations that MS Paint can handle, the GIMP usually has the tools to do it. Finding them can be another matter though!
I like that everything is scriptable / repeatable. For our company website, we need to make images in a set size / aspect, with rounded corners. The GIMP is brilliant for this sort of thing, because anyone who edits a page can just follow a few keystrokes in a guide and create a perfect matched image.
From this point of view, the ease of use isn't such an issue. An experienced user can write the guide, and following it to repeat effects on other images is trivial. I suspect this pattern of usage is actually pretty common for corporate use, and in my view, preferable in many ways to handing over to a graphic designer and waiting for the results.
With Sony having just announced a new method for measuring battery life - drastically cutting their own claims, it will be interesting to see how these laptops compare. And also interesting to see the effect on sales between claiming huge figures and much more reasonable figures.
Yes it was definitely there when I wanted to disconnect, but I don't remember it ever having been mentioned by anyone when I signed up, and wasn't written in any of the intro docs from when I signed up.
The terms and conditions did say that they could be changed, and new ones posted on the website, but I've never been sure that has any real legal standing.
I was a happy Be customer at one time. My Be modem broke around 6 months into the contract, but I had an old Linksys ASDL modem that worked perfectly fine. I spoke to technical support, who after a few weeks also decided my modem was broken, and I might as well use the Linksys one that worked.
Then it came time to move house. Apparently they have a £40 disconnection charge(!) That was never mentioned in any documents I had when I signed up. Although I disputed it, they direct debited the money from my account anyway.
Next came a letter asking for return of my Be modem. I referred them to my support emails where it was agreed the modem was broken, and was simply told that I would have to pay £100 if I didn't return their modem.
I put a block on the direct debit immediately so they couldn't get at my money, and basically told them to sod off. After a few more letters demanding the money, they gave up. But they've still got £40 of my money and I'm still not happy with their behaviour.
They will run the battery realistically but give the answer in crazy units - 5.7x10^-7 millennia. And in case you want to just check the capacity of the battery, that's 550 liter-atmospheres.
Hard disc manufacturers are in the right though - mega means million, giga means billion, tera means trillion. It's the world of computers with their binary-derived values that are wrong.
This has already been discussed in great detail, and the decision was that a binary gigabyte (2^30 bytes instead of the decimal 10^9) should be called a gibibyte (GiB).
2^10 bytes (1024) is a Kibibyte (KiB) 2^20 bytes is a Mibibyte (MiB) 2^40 bytes is a Tibibyte (TiB)
There are even a few people who took notice of the decision and switched usage.
The place I work is in a fairly expensive area of the country - a house similar to the one I've got, in a similarly nice area in south Manchester would be close to £500,000 ($1m), and I still wouldn't have a fantastic view from the living room and a lake 200m away. I made the move knowing the costs, so I can't really complain - I've gone from a 2 bed terrace to a 4 bed detached house.
The trains are already fine, it's just the walking to the train station, between stations in Manchester, and station to office that take time. When all the consultation stuff about road pricing has been round I keep mentioning the problem that we can't take bikes on the trains - if we could it would be about 45 minutes by train compared to 50 minutes by car.
But the public transport networks are getting worse every year - if there's no choice but travelling by car at huge expense, that brings in even more money for the government!
Wow sucks to be American, I hadn't imagined how different the situation there could be compared to the UK. I don't really know the American banking system, but I see Flagstar bank offer 4.25% on a certificate of deposit, which looks like a similar product to my fixed rate bond.
I hadn't realised there was a carbon tax on cars at all, but then I've never bought a new one.
Here in the UK, we're screwed out of every possible penny when we get in our cars. The tax on petrol or diesel is equivalent of over $5/gallon i.e. substantially more than the cost of the fuel itself.
Then there's road tax. We do have a Band A of efficient cars that don't have to pay road tax, but there are no cars in existence that get into that band. Typical medium sized cars pay about £180 / year.
And now they're bringing in road pricing - supposedly to ease congestion, but in reality it's charging people for the journeys they absolutely can't avoid doing i.e. to work and back at peak times. Seems like a better way would be to persude more companies that back office employees don't need to work 9 to 5. But that wouldn't bring in any extra money.
Once road tax comes in, it will be costing me the equivalent of $18 a day to travel to work, of which slightly more than $12 will be taxes. By then I'm sure anyone in a regular low-medium paid office job will decide they're better off on the dole.
Slashdot Mirror
D'oh, they're going to have to rethink the designation of race 'cars' as well.
I don't see ZFS as un-UNIXy though. It still does 'one thing', just at a higher level - file storage - as pointed out by the GP.
It looks to me that they've figured out the stuff that people wanted in numerous lower layers, and built a component that does one bigger thing. But it's still a nice contiguous block of functionality.
Well, in a conflict like Iraq, you're correct - the US government orders stuff from US industry, and some of it gets destroyed.
But in the world wars, the US was selling a lot of equipment to Western Europe, bringing money into the US and bankrupting Europe. The debt from the UK to the US was trillions of dollars.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2002-02-28.38424.h
Never have I wanted mod points as much as now ...
I'd have said credit cards are great but some people are idiots.
You can choose to set up a direct debit to pay off the full card balance every month. Then you get to keep 1 to 2 months interest on money you've already spent, get protection on the things you've bought, maybe get cashback or airmiles or other rewards, and don't have to pay a penny for the privilege.
I put my work expenses on a 0% credit card and when my company pays the expenses, I put the money in a savings account. The interest over the year adds up to about £600 (over $1000).
Obviously, this takes some discipline. There's a 5-figure savings account with my name on it - but it's not my money.
Have you considered Firebird? I was recently introduced to it and it looks like a better option than MySQL / Drizzle.
The other obvious option is PostgresSQL, which looks fairly comparable to Firebird - the only reason I'm going with Firebird is that I can reliably remember how to pronounce it!
Because the ideas *are* obvious and the difficulty is in the implementation. Which is why people get so annoyed with the IP holding companies holding real innovators to ransom.
My Sky+ box can do record and play simultaneously but it makes mistakes. Once or twice I have been watching a few minutes behind the live broadcast, accidentally hit the Sky button (which returns to the live broadcast), and been unable to rewind back to where I was.
Logically it sounds simple, but once you get into all the different buttons the user can press, and how you undo things when the operator accidentally sits on the remote, it gets complicated very quickly.
I've experienced what you said once, driving way too fast and realising the next corner was much steeper than I thought. I'd locked the brakes and started turning into the corner, but with no effect. When I'd slowed down a bit I released the brakes a little, the tyres bit and I immediately got thrown through the dry stone wall on the opposite side of the road.
However, having one car with ABS, and one without, I do think ABS also reduces stopping distance. A dog ran out in front of my Ford Focus and I slammed on the brakes and stopped in an incredibly short distance. In my other car, I'd have skidded and I'm pretty sure I'd have hit the dog.
I don't think it's necessarily a criminal attempt to manipulate stock. Maybe someone posted a comment similar to yours elsewhere on the net and some foolish person believed it to be true, and reposted elsewhere without the context.
I'm amazed that completely unverified facts (and easily disprovable ones at that) could affect the share price so much. You'd think the people with the sense to buy and sell shares would have the sense not to believe this sort of rubbish.
IDTYDRC (I don't think you do remember correctly) - your own timeframe would continue as normal, but outside observers, free from the effects of the black hole's gravity, would see you slowing down and freezing at the event horizon - so they would never catch a glimpse of you experiencing the inside of a black hole.
My preference would be that you'd connect the device to a PC and search for and buy books on the PC. The wireless should just be for connecting up to a PC and syncing the books. Depending on the cost and othe rimpacts I'd be happy with a cable.
Plenty of people can't really handle setting up an internet service. It has to be done by the ISP support team, and most of them upon seeing a Linux netbook will likely say it's not supported.
The same goes when they want to connect most pieces of equipment. Although Linux will support far more devices straight out of the box, just about every device will come with easy to install Windows drivers. I've never seen an equally easy to install Linux driver.
I'd not be surprised there is a high return rate until these issues can be resolved.
Joel wrote a great article on these uptime measurements a while back. When you think of the 99.9% being 8 hours downtime per year, trying to add more nines doesn't make that much sense. Beyond that you're often looking at one off faults, where you're not too sure exactly what is going on. The faults are rare enough that the statistics stop making sense, and you can't be sure how long it will take to fix.
In those circumstances a fault can easily take a day to fix. A fully redundant cluster doesn't help if a software fault has put bad data into the system that has been copied all over the place. And completely eliminating software faults is close to impossible.
I think assuming 100% uptime is a major flaw. Most of your examples of 100% uptime are not 100% uptime. They are just reliably failsafe. This means they have assumed less than 100% uptime and put in place measures to avoid further problems from the downtime.
I've regularly been unable to pay by card due to network problems (Spain and Greece mainly - but once in the UK). The thing it must never do is complete just half the transaction. It needs to either do the whole thing or do nothing - and that's a lot more complicated than it sounds.
I've been unable to book holidays because the Sabre back-end was down for maintenance. Had to return the next day to try again. If it had thought it was working and given me a confirmation but not done the booking I'd have been much more annoyed!
As you say, the cost of downtime itself is often not really that great. But the cost of screwing things up as the system goes down can be horrifyingly immense.
PS: here's Joel's article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/01/22.html
I'm not too keen on these latest announcements really. It looks like a lot of manufacturers are looking at the iPhone and getting worried that it can do a lot of stuff that their device can't.
I'm not really interested in that. I'd like a dedicated reading device. Why does the Kindle have a keyboard? Why is the new Reader getting a touch screen? I guess Sony / Amazon aren't making the screen tech themselves, so maybe just have to concentrate on other areas that they can change.
I'm happy with the features on the Sony Reader, I'd just like to see improvements to the screen. They should look at Apple's frequent strategy of focusing on what a device should be doing and not putting in unnecessary features. Some people will use an iPhone for reading documents, that doesn't mean the Kindle / Reader should compete with the iPhone.
In fact scientific papers are easier to deal with than many other PDF documents. The majority are formatted to be fairly easy to read - typically under 10 words per line, often using two columns of text, so this would easily fit on the reader.
I had a chance to look at the Sony Reader recently and it looked to do a good job with displaying PDFs. The screen is very nice and on par with paper - probably ahead of glossy magazine pages but not quite up there with a book yet. It's the first e-ink screen I've seen and it's far better than LCDs IMHO.
However, the page turns are very ugly and clunky - the screen clears and goes black before the next page is shown. It annoyed me more than I had thought it would, so I'm waiting to see if they can fix that bit before I consider purchasing one.
Hmm, I think if your job is working with photos or images, then learning Photoshop is probably one of the most valuable investments of time you could make.
However, if your job isn't working with photos I agree that the GIMP is likely to provide everything you want for free.
Much like I'd advise any programmer to invest time learning vim, but never any non-programmers. If you're going to spend a lot of time doing anything, it's probably a good idea to use the best tools to do it.
Absolutely. I think for a great number of people who occasionally have to work with images, and need to do more complex operations that MS Paint can handle, the GIMP usually has the tools to do it. Finding them can be another matter though!
I like that everything is scriptable / repeatable. For our company website, we need to make images in a set size / aspect, with rounded corners. The GIMP is brilliant for this sort of thing, because anyone who edits a page can just follow a few keystrokes in a guide and create a perfect matched image.
From this point of view, the ease of use isn't such an issue. An experienced user can write the guide, and following it to repeat effects on other images is trivial. I suspect this pattern of usage is actually pretty common for corporate use, and in my view, preferable in many ways to handing over to a graphic designer and waiting for the results.
With Sony having just announced a new method for measuring battery life - drastically cutting their own claims, it will be interesting to see how these laptops compare. And also interesting to see the effect on sales between claiming huge figures and much more reasonable figures.
Yes it was definitely there when I wanted to disconnect, but I don't remember it ever having been mentioned by anyone when I signed up, and wasn't written in any of the intro docs from when I signed up.
The terms and conditions did say that they could be changed, and new ones posted on the website, but I've never been sure that has any real legal standing.
I was a happy Be customer at one time. My Be modem broke around 6 months into the contract, but I had an old Linksys ASDL modem that worked perfectly fine. I spoke to technical support, who after a few weeks also decided my modem was broken, and I might as well use the Linksys one that worked.
Then it came time to move house. Apparently they have a £40 disconnection charge(!) That was never mentioned in any documents I had when I signed up. Although I disputed it, they direct debited the money from my account anyway.
Next came a letter asking for return of my Be modem. I referred them to my support emails where it was agreed the modem was broken, and was simply told that I would have to pay £100 if I didn't return their modem.
I put a block on the direct debit immediately so they couldn't get at my money, and basically told them to sod off. After a few more letters demanding the money, they gave up. But they've still got £40 of my money and I'm still not happy with their behaviour.
They will run the battery realistically but give the answer in crazy units - 5.7x10^-7 millennia. And in case you want to just check the capacity of the battery, that's 550 liter-atmospheres.
Hard disc manufacturers are in the right though - mega means million, giga means billion, tera means trillion. It's the world of computers with their binary-derived values that are wrong.
This has already been discussed in great detail, and the decision was that a binary gigabyte (2^30 bytes instead of the decimal 10^9) should be called a gibibyte (GiB).
2^10 bytes (1024) is a Kibibyte (KiB)
2^20 bytes is a Mibibyte (MiB)
2^40 bytes is a Tibibyte (TiB)
There are even a few people who took notice of the decision and switched usage.
The place I work is in a fairly expensive area of the country - a house similar to the one I've got, in a similarly nice area in south Manchester would be close to £500,000 ($1m), and I still wouldn't have a fantastic view from the living room and a lake 200m away. I made the move knowing the costs, so I can't really complain - I've gone from a 2 bed terrace to a 4 bed detached house.
The trains are already fine, it's just the walking to the train station, between stations in Manchester, and station to office that take time. When all the consultation stuff about road pricing has been round I keep mentioning the problem that we can't take bikes on the trains - if we could it would be about 45 minutes by train compared to 50 minutes by car.
But the public transport networks are getting worse every year - if there's no choice but travelling by car at huge expense, that brings in even more money for the government!
Wow sucks to be American, I hadn't imagined how different the situation there could be compared to the UK. I don't really know the American banking system, but I see Flagstar bank offer 4.25% on a certificate of deposit, which looks like a similar product to my fixed rate bond.
Here's a link to HSBC's now reduced offer of 8% interest on a regular savings account (rate is fixed for a year):
http://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/personal/savings/regular-saver;jsessionid=0000kUtVF-Zky4M9b6WTzQfIA_j:11j74lc1v
I hadn't realised there was a carbon tax on cars at all, but then I've never bought a new one.
Here in the UK, we're screwed out of every possible penny when we get in our cars. The tax on petrol or diesel is equivalent of over $5/gallon i.e. substantially more than the cost of the fuel itself.
Then there's road tax. We do have a Band A of efficient cars that don't have to pay road tax, but there are no cars in existence that get into that band. Typical medium sized cars pay about £180 / year.
And now they're bringing in road pricing - supposedly to ease congestion, but in reality it's charging people for the journeys they absolutely can't avoid doing i.e. to work and back at peak times. Seems like a better way would be to persude more companies that back office employees don't need to work 9 to 5. But that wouldn't bring in any extra money.
Once road tax comes in, it will be costing me the equivalent of $18 a day to travel to work, of which slightly more than $12 will be taxes. By then I'm sure anyone in a regular low-medium paid office job will decide they're better off on the dole.