I really wish the Slashdot submitter had linked directly to the original blog post rather than the Gizmag article. It goes into a bit more detail on the configuration of the systems, which I think would interest Slashdotters in particular. (Though I still need to write a longer blog post about this.)
All the system netboot off the same disk image. Or rather, LVM snapshots of that image. Each machine gets its own snapshot, so guests can modify it to their heart's content. At the end of the night, I just delete the snapshot and make a new one. When I need to update the machines, I boot one machine against the master image and update that, then remake all the snapshots.
So, it doesn't matter what the guests do to the machines, because they aren't modifying the master image.
Everyone brings this up and I don't quite understand. Who cares where the server is located? We all have internet connections, don't we? What matters is where the players are located.
We've actually played quite a bit of Starcraft 2 in this house despite the supposed lack of LAN support.
People are facing their computers when playing, and then they can turn around to chat when done. Having everyone at a table would actually make them more separated. And anyway, the whole point is that having fold-out stations in the wall means they don't take space when not in use.
> 2) There's no table central to all players, where pizza resides.
Didn't you just say that the computer table should be central?:P There's actually space right behind that line of chairs for a table if that's what we wanted, and in the other room you could put a table in the middle of the room. In practice we just put the pizza on the dining table (in the background there) and that works fine.
> 3) A single-line of players means players on the ends have trouble communicating verbally.
In practice everyone's voice carries fine across the room.
> 4) There's uneven lighting across the gaming spots, and it looks like more lighting behind the players than in front of them
I think the lighting in the house is fantastic. There is never a need to turn on artificial lights during the day.
True, bright lights are not ideal for LAN parties, and at just the right time of day there may be some glare on one or two monitors, but it's brief, and once the sun goes down it's a non-issue.
Remember that I live in this house even when there aren't LAN parties.:)
> 5) Those chairs are not comfortable enough.
Actually, I'm very happy with the chairs. They are padded and quite comfortable. And, most importantly, they stack, so I can store them out-of-the way between parties.
Also, the United Arab Emirates is a single, relatively small country, located to the east of Saudi Arabia. You seem to be thinking of it as a group of countries; it's not. Maybe you were thinking of the Arab League? But yeah, Iran is not Arab.
Will they just track every packet you send over the net and sell that data?
Why would you expect Google to sell the data? Can you cite any examples of Google selling user data? What do you think would happen to Google's image if they actually did sell user data?
Who do you think is more likely to sell data on your browsing habits: Google, or your current ISP? Your current ISP could trivially be tracking every host you visit, and everything you do on non-HTTPS sites. That's probably a lot more information than Google has ever had. Do you trust that your current ISP is not misusing that information? What would happen to their image if they were discovered to be selling user data? Do the ISP duopolists even have images to uphold?
But what comes to TFA, the guy was ready to work with Google to put those patches in the main Linux kernel
I don't think the Android team would describe it that way. TFA doesn't really cover their side of the story. As is usually the case when two sides don't agree, the details are complicated. I'm not on Android so I'm not going to attempt to get into it, but they aren't particularly happy with the situation either.
Erm, no. While I don't consider Google to be a particularly charitable organization, they do regularly open source their products (though mostly minor ones, as you rightly pointed out) when there is no legal obligation on them to do so.
The reason for that is perfectly clear, too: it strengthens the image of Google as both "geeky" and "open" tech company, which are both important parts of Google's public image.
It's not just public image. There's also the fact that Google is a company full of geeks, many of whom are open source fans in their own right.
I was primarily responsible for Google releasing Protocol Buffers. I did it not for the sake of improving my employer's public image, but because I thought it was a useful tool that should be shared, and those around me agreed. Because of the bottom-up nature of decision making at Google -- and given that I was willing to do the work -- I had no trouble pushing this through.
So yeah, it's pretty upsetting to me to see people say things like "Google does only care about OSS when it suits them and drops out instantly when it doesn't.". This kind of statement completely misunderstands how Google even works. This just isn't the kind of company where orders comes down from executives on high with the only motive being profit -- anyone who thinks otherwise obviously doesn't work here.
Honestly, I think the main reason we haven't released more stuff is because it's kind of a lot of work (as I have learned). Dumping code over a wall does not please the open source community -- you have to maintain it; document it; test it on a zillion platforms; answer e-mail from people who think they are not just entitled to your code, but are doing *you* a favor by using it; review patches from college kids who don't really know what they're doing; etc.
(Oblig. disclaimer: These are my own personal opinions; I am not authorized to speak for my employer.)
I havent noticed China and Russia illegally invading any countries recently, or propping up mass murderers like Israel.
Countries illegally invaded: Georgia
Mass murderers propped up: Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and probably others I'm not thinking of right now. China and Russia seem to think that if you are only murdering your own people, it doesn't really count.
The US has bombed 16 countries since WW2, an China and Russia are evil?
How many countries has Russia bombed since WW2? Think about it. You might want to change your timeframe to "since 1990".
Cute. I realize you're likely trolling, but I'll respond anyway.
The program running on the VM/jail/sandbox still has access to all the data you stream through it.
A system where malicious code only has access to some data is clearly more secure than one where it has access to all data. This is especially true if the "some" data is generally inconsequential stuff, but also true if it is not -- a narrow compromise is still better than a complete compromise.
Also, the argument I was making was that the sandbox would prevent a compromise of the plugin from spreading to the rest of the system. Separate plugin instances are isolated. So if you open a malicious PDF in one window and your tax return in another, you're fine. Plus, as soon as you close the malicious PDF, any infection there is wiped out. The worst that it can do is display goatse before you close it.
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
Flash works on a similar model (sandboxing individual Flash applets) and has been amazingly successful. Unfortunately no one that I know of has introduced a browser plugin system where plugins themselves are sandboxed.
No, what's broken is the model that by default gives all your authority to every piece of code you run. There is absolutely nothing wrong with running untrusted arbitrary code as long as you don't give it the ability to access any sensitive resources. The Adobe Reader plugin has *no* reason to be granted access to do anything except read the PDF you downloaded and render it to the screen -- no hard drive access (other than its own installed files), no network access, etc. But by default we assume that installed programs (like plugins) should be allowed to do everything the user herself can do, and grant that permission.
In short, run the Adobe Reader plugin in a separate process in a chroot jail as user "nobody" and only let it communicate to the browser through a socket and maybe some shared memory. Then security flaws in Reader are irrelevant.
BTW, Chrome runs plugins in separate processes so we're already part of the way there. Unfortunately those plugins are still written under the assumption that they can do whatever the hell they want, which means they often break when not given that ability. Sigh.
This is obviously not intentional. If it were intentional, Target would be providing decent landing pages. For instance, Target actually sells exercise bikes. If they were intentionally spamming the term "exercise bike", why on earth would they be doing it with an error page rather than provide an actual exercise bike page? That doesn't make any sense.
As for Google, I think it's a safe bet that they have zero interest in having these crappy results in their result list. There's probably some sort of bug affecting this. Perhaps Target recently changed their site and, in so doing, broke a ton of links that were perfectly valid before? If so then my guess is that these will disappear after a short time, once the ranking system catches up.
Never attribute to malice that which is better explained by incompetence.
You make it sound evil. Most people don't want to be nagged with constant update reminders. In fact, most people will ignore those reminders, leaving them vulnerable to security exploits. Hence, Google has built an updater which can automatically install updates in the background. Remarkably, it manages to do this without ever asking you to reboot or even to restart the program being updated, which cannot be said of any other software updater I've ever seen.
Did you actually read the article? SPDY seems to be *all about* loading multiple resources. It looks like SPDY reduces the number of round trips required by allowing the server to push files to the client which it knows the client will need, and allows transfers to be multiplexed rather than forcing everything into a FIFO pipeline as HTTP does. And the prioritization features presumably allow the client to get the resources required to start rendering the page (like the CSS) before things that can be filled in later (images).
Faster browser => more internet use => more Google use => Google profits Faster browser => web apps can do more => Google's business is web apps => Google profits Faster browser => competing browsers are forced to get faster too => see above => Google profits
The point is that, when it comes to the internet, serving the public's good is actually profitable to Google.
This is a common mistake developers make -- they think "Do users really care if this page loads a tenth of a second faster? It's such a short time that it should make no difference". In reality, though, such performance improvements make things "feel" better. You will spend more time on a site or in an app that responds faster, because you will enjoy using it more, even if you don't realize why.
Also, the faster Javascript is, the more of it sites can use in the future -- hopefully for improving their user experience.
I know. Perhaps this is the real reason Chrome even exists. They can prevent people from blocking ads, and of course track peoples surfing habits.
Actually, Chrome 4.0 has extensions, and multiple ad blockers have already been written using the system, without being stopped by Google.
Quite sad actually. The browser is pretty nice overall. Its too bad they will most likely treat their users like most corporations do... like shit.
Actually, we're a little bit smarter than that. As it turns out, treating users "like shit" -- for example, by crippling our products just to drive away the small minority of users that run ad blockers -- is actually not profitable. On the other hand, making the internet better for users, in general, is profitable to us, since it directly leads to more usage of other Google products. Which is why Eric (the CEO) frequently tells employees, in plain terms, that we should be doing whatever we can think of to improve the internet for users, without worrying about how to monetize it -- in the long term, this approach is far more profitable than being dicks.
(This post is my personal opinion -- I am not authorized to speak for Google.)
Under what mathematical law does the fact that two graphs don't look the same mean that they are not related? This is really sad: Experts spend years analyzing the data, come to an extremely complicated conclusion based on mountains of evidence, and then someone who has not the slightest fucking clue about science or mathematics walks in and says "But those graphs look different!" and decides those experts are all wrong. And worse, other people who share this guy's lack of clue believe his argument because it's the only one simple enough for them to understand.
Roughly speaking, more CO2 in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise faster, and yearly CO2 emissions are adding to what is already there. So the CO2 emissions graph is something like the second derivative of the temperature graph. That means that if we keep emitting CO2 at a constant rate (flat graph) then temperatures will rise faster and faster over time (quadratic curve). Yeah, the graphs don't look the same, but they are related. (And in reality it's much more complicated than this.)
Slashdot Mirror
I really wish the Slashdot submitter had linked directly to the original blog post rather than the Gizmag article. It goes into a bit more detail on the configuration of the systems, which I think would interest Slashdotters in particular. (Though I still need to write a longer blog post about this.)
All the system netboot off the same disk image. Or rather, LVM snapshots of that image. Each machine gets its own snapshot, so guests can modify it to their heart's content. At the end of the night, I just delete the snapshot and make a new one. When I need to update the machines, I boot one machine against the master image and update that, then remake all the snapshots.
So, it doesn't matter what the guests do to the machines, because they aren't modifying the master image.
Everyone brings this up and I don't quite understand. Who cares where the server is located? We all have internet connections, don't we? What matters is where the players are located.
We've actually played quite a bit of Starcraft 2 in this house despite the supposed lack of LAN support.
Hi. This is my house.
> 1) People are facing a wall, not each other.
People are facing their computers when playing, and then they can turn around to chat when done. Having everyone at a table would actually make them more separated. And anyway, the whole point is that having fold-out stations in the wall means they don't take space when not in use.
> 2) There's no table central to all players, where pizza resides.
Didn't you just say that the computer table should be central? :P There's actually space right behind that line of chairs for a table if that's what we wanted, and in the other room you could put a table in the middle of the room. In practice we just put the pizza on the dining table (in the background there) and that works fine.
> 3) A single-line of players means players on the ends have trouble communicating verbally.
In practice everyone's voice carries fine across the room.
> 4) There's uneven lighting across the gaming spots, and it looks like more lighting behind the players than in front of them
I think the lighting in the house is fantastic. There is never a need to turn on artificial lights during the day.
True, bright lights are not ideal for LAN parties, and at just the right time of day there may be some glare on one or two monitors, but it's brief, and once the sun goes down it's a non-issue.
Remember that I live in this house even when there aren't LAN parties. :)
> 5) Those chairs are not comfortable enough.
Actually, I'm very happy with the chairs. They are padded and quite comfortable. And, most importantly, they stack, so I can store them out-of-the way between parties.
Also, the United Arab Emirates is a single, relatively small country, located to the east of Saudi Arabia. You seem to be thinking of it as a group of countries; it's not. Maybe you were thinking of the Arab League? But yeah, Iran is not Arab.
Why would you expect Google to sell the data? Can you cite any examples of Google selling user data? What do you think would happen to Google's image if they actually did sell user data?
Who do you think is more likely to sell data on your browsing habits: Google, or your current ISP? Your current ISP could trivially be tracking every host you visit, and everything you do on non-HTTPS sites. That's probably a lot more information than Google has ever had. Do you trust that your current ISP is not misusing that information? What would happen to their image if they were discovered to be selling user data? Do the ISP duopolists even have images to uphold?
Just trying to put things in perspective.
I don't think the Android team would describe it that way. TFA doesn't really cover their side of the story. As is usually the case when two sides don't agree, the details are complicated. I'm not on Android so I'm not going to attempt to get into it, but they aren't particularly happy with the situation either.
It's not just public image. There's also the fact that Google is a company full of geeks, many of whom are open source fans in their own right.
I was primarily responsible for Google releasing Protocol Buffers. I did it not for the sake of improving my employer's public image, but because I thought it was a useful tool that should be shared, and those around me agreed. Because of the bottom-up nature of decision making at Google -- and given that I was willing to do the work -- I had no trouble pushing this through.
So yeah, it's pretty upsetting to me to see people say things like "Google does only care about OSS when it suits them and drops out instantly when it doesn't.". This kind of statement completely misunderstands how Google even works. This just isn't the kind of company where orders comes down from executives on high with the only motive being profit -- anyone who thinks otherwise obviously doesn't work here.
Honestly, I think the main reason we haven't released more stuff is because it's kind of a lot of work (as I have learned). Dumping code over a wall does not please the open source community -- you have to maintain it; document it; test it on a zillion platforms; answer e-mail from people who think they are not just entitled to your code, but are doing *you* a favor by using it; review patches from college kids who don't really know what they're doing; etc.
(Oblig. disclaimer: These are my own personal opinions; I am not authorized to speak for my employer.)
Countries illegally invaded: Georgia
Mass murderers propped up: Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and probably others I'm not thinking of right now. China and Russia seem to think that if you are only murdering your own people, it doesn't really count.
How many countries has Russia bombed since WW2? Think about it. You might want to change your timeframe to "since 1990".
Cute. I realize you're likely trolling, but I'll respond anyway.
A system where malicious code only has access to some data is clearly more secure than one where it has access to all data. This is especially true if the "some" data is generally inconsequential stuff, but also true if it is not -- a narrow compromise is still better than a complete compromise.
Also, the argument I was making was that the sandbox would prevent a compromise of the plugin from spreading to the rest of the system. Separate plugin instances are isolated. So if you open a malicious PDF in one window and your tax return in another, you're fine. Plus, as soon as you close the malicious PDF, any infection there is wiped out. The worst that it can do is display goatse before you close it.
Flash works on a similar model (sandboxing individual Flash applets) and has been amazingly successful. Unfortunately no one that I know of has introduced a browser plugin system where plugins themselves are sandboxed.
No, what's broken is the model that by default gives all your authority to every piece of code you run. There is absolutely nothing wrong with running untrusted arbitrary code as long as you don't give it the ability to access any sensitive resources. The Adobe Reader plugin has *no* reason to be granted access to do anything except read the PDF you downloaded and render it to the screen -- no hard drive access (other than its own installed files), no network access, etc. But by default we assume that installed programs (like plugins) should be allowed to do everything the user herself can do, and grant that permission.
In short, run the Adobe Reader plugin in a separate process in a chroot jail as user "nobody" and only let it communicate to the browser through a socket and maybe some shared memory. Then security flaws in Reader are irrelevant.
BTW, Chrome runs plugins in separate processes so we're already part of the way there. Unfortunately those plugins are still written under the assumption that they can do whatever the hell they want, which means they often break when not given that ability. Sigh.
Unless the user only looked at their inbox without opening any particular message.
This is obviously not intentional. If it were intentional, Target would be providing decent landing pages. For instance, Target actually sells exercise bikes. If they were intentionally spamming the term "exercise bike", why on earth would they be doing it with an error page rather than provide an actual exercise bike page? That doesn't make any sense.
As for Google, I think it's a safe bet that they have zero interest in having these crappy results in their result list. There's probably some sort of bug affecting this. Perhaps Target recently changed their site and, in so doing, broke a ton of links that were perfectly valid before? If so then my guess is that these will disappear after a short time, once the ranking system catches up.
Never attribute to malice that which is better explained by incompetence.
You make it sound evil. Most people don't want to be nagged with constant update reminders. In fact, most people will ignore those reminders, leaving them vulnerable to security exploits. Hence, Google has built an updater which can automatically install updates in the background. Remarkably, it manages to do this without ever asking you to reboot or even to restart the program being updated, which cannot be said of any other software updater I've ever seen.
Chrome on Linux does not use WINE. Have you tried it? None of the things you complain about are true of it.
There are multiple ad-blocking extensions available for Chrome.
Chrome's v8 javascript implementation actually compiles to native code.
Did you actually read the article? SPDY seems to be *all about* loading multiple resources. It looks like SPDY reduces the number of round trips required by allowing the server to push files to the client which it knows the client will need, and allows transfers to be multiplexed rather than forcing everything into a FIFO pipeline as HTTP does. And the prioritization features presumably allow the client to get the resources required to start rendering the page (like the CSS) before things that can be filled in later (images).
Loves Unix? Ken Thompson invented Unix. Along with Dennis Ritchie. In 1969.
So yeah. It would be kind of silly if he created something Windows-only...
Chrome is faster.
Faster browser => more internet use => more Google use => Google profits
Faster browser => web apps can do more => Google's business is web apps => Google profits
Faster browser => competing browsers are forced to get faster too => see above => Google profits
The point is that, when it comes to the internet, serving the public's good is actually profitable to Google.
The dev channel may be more stable than the nightly builds.
This is a common mistake developers make -- they think "Do users really care if this page loads a tenth of a second faster? It's such a short time that it should make no difference". In reality, though, such performance improvements make things "feel" better. You will spend more time on a site or in an app that responds faster, because you will enjoy using it more, even if you don't realize why.
Also, the faster Javascript is, the more of it sites can use in the future -- hopefully for improving their user experience.
Actually, Chrome 4.0 has extensions, and multiple ad blockers have already been written using the system, without being stopped by Google.
Actually, we're a little bit smarter than that. As it turns out, treating users "like shit" -- for example, by crippling our products just to drive away the small minority of users that run ad blockers -- is actually not profitable. On the other hand, making the internet better for users, in general, is profitable to us, since it directly leads to more usage of other Google products. Which is why Eric (the CEO) frequently tells employees, in plain terms, that we should be doing whatever we can think of to improve the internet for users, without worrying about how to monetize it -- in the long term, this approach is far more profitable than being dicks.
(This post is my personal opinion -- I am not authorized to speak for Google.)
You mean this?
(It's dev channel, meaning it's still a little finicky, but it is good enough to be my primary browser on Mac.)
So run the dev channel. It has extensions today. Yes, including ad blockers. Dev channel is actually perfectly usable if you don't mind the occasional disembodied head taking the place of a button. Dev channel Chrome has been my primary browser for over a year now.
Under what mathematical law does the fact that two graphs don't look the same mean that they are not related? This is really sad: Experts spend years analyzing the data, come to an extremely complicated conclusion based on mountains of evidence, and then someone who has not the slightest fucking clue about science or mathematics walks in and says "But those graphs look different!" and decides those experts are all wrong. And worse, other people who share this guy's lack of clue believe his argument because it's the only one simple enough for them to understand.
Roughly speaking, more CO2 in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise faster, and yearly CO2 emissions are adding to what is already there. So the CO2 emissions graph is something like the second derivative of the temperature graph. That means that if we keep emitting CO2 at a constant rate (flat graph) then temperatures will rise faster and faster over time (quadratic curve). Yeah, the graphs don't look the same, but they are related. (And in reality it's much more complicated than this.)