Of course there's long been a convention in Linux land that less stable development kernels have odd numbers like 2.1, 2.3 and 2.5, while even numbers denote the stable series meant for pedestrian users. [Although many could argue that the VM switch during 2.4 did not exactly belong to a stable series.]
Anyway, if we're going to have an odd number major version, then all I can say is
Gee someone wrote something they later regreted, there's nothing wrong with deleting the mail in that case.
I agree with you to the extent that the lowliest employee can petition the sysadmin to delete a regretable email to the boss and expect the same prompt service.
Otherwise, it looks rather asymmetric in terms of rights and privileges. If you're willing to go down that road, you may as well become a feudal or tribal society (which, admittedly, is how many corporations are structured).
You're quite right that the Navy could see some improvements in streamlining its bureaucracy by making over its IT infrastructure so that more business can be conducted electronically without the need to kill trees, have people get into the loop, etc.
OTOH, a very real danger of simply introducing a more efficient processing system into many bureaucracies is to thereby encourage and motivate a proliferation of more bureaucratic procedures!
I know. In my workplace I saw how the WWW
on our internal network transformed rapidly from something fun and informative to something that resembled the worse parts of the business. Heavy, sodden reams of regulations choked the nascent web. What was fun was no longer as I started to get automated emails reminding me of some trivial bureaucratic hurdle I must needs soon complete.
And, from what I hear, of all the federal bureaucracies, the DoD is unmatched, despite worthy competitors from other byzantine agencies.
The solution is obvious: simply release the film once in a great theater experience. Release the DVD , oh, maybe 5 years later.
If they announced their intentions in advance and forewent the extra revenue from the 2nd release on DVD they'd fare better in the long term.
Hollywood disappearing might not be as bad as all that, anyway.
In the long term, people are still willing to pay handsomely for their entertainment and so long as that market exists I think they just have to re-arrange their current business model. It's not the end of the world.
Technical issues could be solved fairly easily, I think. Make it convenient by requiring a testfire of each weapon prior to sale, at the factory, into the nearest dork at the gunshow, whatever, as long as you recover the slug and send it in.
My proposal for solving the political issues is to require all access to the database to be done through an elected citizens review board comprised not only of law enforcement officials, but also comprised of gun owners, NRA members, whatever, who will have the responsibility to ensure that government invasions of privacy, etc. do not get out of hand.
One of the biggest problems with gun ownership is the same as the biggest problem with parenting. The qualifications to become either one are far, far below what they should be considering the corresponding great responsibility.
American coffee is several orders of magnitude better than it was a generation ago.
Add me to the list backing up this assertion.
I've been drinking coffee in the U.S. since 1976, when all you could get typically were robusta bean variants. I remember drinking swill like dishwater that, well, at least it was hot and caffeinated...
Since the time of Starbucks it's been possible to get good, dark, fresh-roasted arabica bean coffee that makes the old stuff taste like chicory.
Recently I was in Europe, anticipating super excellent coffee everywhere. Guess what? Didn't happen! I got better coffee in the U.S.! (Guess I'll have to go to a coffee-growing nation to get something better than what I can find in the U.S. on every other street corner.)
I saw this article and was bugged by the fact that they're only interested in hearing about specific concrete examples of where the DMCA legislation has created a problem.
In my mind, that means that they've thrown in the towel on challenges based on fundamental principles, thinking either that the fundamental principles trod upon by the DMCA are negligible, and/or that the political battle to get it changed cannot be won on fundamental grounds. The latter meaning that the legislators who passed the bill thought the abridgement of peoples rights by the bill was negligible.
I find that sad.
Just as I found it sad reading a number of weeks ago that the much of the U.S. public was willing to give up most of the protections guaranteed under the 1st Amendment of the Constitution in the interests of "fighting terrorism".
"We're interested in specific concrete examples where the abridgement of freedom of the press has resulted in documentable harm. Please include receipts so we can calculate the relative harm."
Dammit, I should be able to do anything I want with the digital information I purchase, short of selling copies. Make a million copies for backup, play it backwards, put Arnold Schwarzenegger's head on top of Mickey Mouse when I view it, whatever, as long as I don't sell copies.
NASA, Government, Linux, Open Source
on
Ask Donald Becker
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Would you care to comment on your experience in NASA working on an Open Source project? (I understand you've left NASA for Scyld, maybe that partially answers my questions, but I still want to know...)
It seems as if your work on Beowulf clusters had a nice spin-off in terms of providing not only low cost supercomputing for academic, government and industrial users, but also in terms of Ethernet support for all sorts of Linux users.
Are further spin-offs in the works, be it for advanced network interfaces or anything else?
Are the program managers in government aware of the beneficial impact they have on a wider scale by funding work like yours?
The entire non-event of DAT in the United States is a testament to the power of the recording industry to control the introduction of new technology.
I have a feeling that we'll have analog connectors for a lot longer than is necessary or convenient from a technical perspective simply because of fears in some quarters that such connections endanger an existing revenue stream.
I appreciate the hardships that Gen X has undergone. Financial issues are certainly part of that, but I also feel sorry for many of my younger friends that endured anonymous childhoods filled with divorces, peer pressures and an MTV manufactured reality that never got fulfilling.
From my perspective, the downturn in the economy means that my 401k has lost almost half its value since early 2000 and I'll end up having to work a lot longer than before.
I think the thing that bothers me the most is the pay-as-you-go Social Security system in the U.S., where current beneficiaries get a lot more out of the system than they ever put in (hey, they vote!) and during my golden years the reality of this Ponzi scheme will start to set in.
I'm quite willing to pay my SS taxes and even to take reduced benefits in the future and at a later age than our current crop of retirees.
It's hard for me to believe my older friends don't feel at least a little bit guilty if they're drawing handsome SS benefits while their other sources of retirement income amount to many times as much.
But, sigh, that's the sad part of the American way- What can my government do for me?
I can recall some really screwy things happening to make if you muck around with date -s as root. Stale files being up to date, other files being created in the future. I'd imagine Daylight Savings would be similar in some ways.
Isn't there some standard we could all agree upon, such as dates and times will be translated at submission time into GMT and cron jobs be run at whatever local time maps to the corresponding GMT? Then, if you want make local time jump around, fine, it's your own responsibility if you like discontinuous time (kind of like heavy drinking).
There's still probably room for ambiguity with all these "leap seconds" I keep hearing about...
As a software engineer you should not have overlooked the importance of "cluestik" tools to deal with lusers of your software.
In particular, the baseball bat and the pen knife can be used to eliminate a lot of reported trouble tickets right at the source of the complaint.
In case those portable and multipurpose tools don't work, I recommend drinking a couple of pots of coffee and walking into the office that was the source of the complaint with nunchuks and whacking the desk real hard with some irritated expression like
Dammit! That was supposed to be fixed last month. Now I'm REALLY mad!
You'll substantially reduce the number of complaints and trouble tickets with not only the right tools, but also the right attitude.
Doncha just hate to see good sound products have to struggle slowly up the market acceptance curve while various cruddy products get to be a lot more ubiquitous than they deserve? I do.
I own 2 TiVo's that I've upgraded so combined they hold about one third of terabyte of disk space. I love `em. My wife loves `em. I didn't mind shelling out the $500 for 2 lifetime subscriptions. I find the interface simple and intuitive. There are only minor inconveniences, like the plus and minus few minute automatic buffers on the ends of shows colliding in an non-intelligent way when shows on the same channel and type (eg, marathon sessions of back to back episodes).
I think you find astounding satisfaction with TiVo's from their owners.
At the same time, people outside the geek community are generally unaware of the entire concept of digital PVR and have never heard of a TiVo.
Word of mouth advertising is precious, but slow. It will be really interesting to see if TiVo gets enough growth in its customer base to bring it into profitability or (more likely) to where it gets bought out by some M&A hungry firm and the techy founders can retire wealthy and stop worrying about important but boring business issues. They desperately lack a big general advertising push. OTOH, one of the big selling points, speeding through commercials at 20x or 60x seems like it might raise a few eyebrows in the same advertising community!
I'm curious if TiVo's growth rate is increasing, whether there is any acceleration in TiVo's market.
Reminds me of an old Linux Journal article where the authors told of using Linux to burn installed images of a fixed Win95 for something like 2000 client machines.
Your Moral of the Story is right on. Learning Linux can help you understand and admin not just Linux but also to understand Windows better.
If it's working with Windows, why not use Windows?
That's a very good question, one that another poster hit on as well. If it works, stick with it.
That's all fine and good if you want to stick safely with the status quo. If you think the status quo is perfect, can't be improved upon, and can be relied upon to serve your needs satisfactorily forever more, then, by all means, stick with status quo.
To my mind, a genuine educational experience includes constant probing at the limits of knowledge, questioning the status quo, looking for other ways of doing things, trying different things, and digging into the fundamentals of how things work in ways that "black box" approaches can not satisfy completely.
Having teachers with such attitudes is important in fostering the same kind of enthusiasm for new ideas in their students. When I'm 80 years old, I'll appreciate having students with questioning minds and broad problem-solving skills, not willing to capitulate to the status quo too easily. My medical care will depend upon researchers with that same kind of attitude making discoveries over the next several decades. I don't want them to be satisfied with the status quo.
As an aside, in the long term there's evidence that schools will end up paying substantial money to maintain the status of their Microsoft License Agreements. If there's anything true about most high schools, it's that there is never enough money to go around to achieve all the goals that people would like. Given a choice between spending money on Licensing 6 and spending money on teachers for drama, art, physics, foreign languages, I think many schools would love to be able to choose the latter if they thought they had a choice.
I commend this H.S. physics teacher for looking into open alternatives. Not just because it will introduce his students to a broadening experience (Macs would be good here, too), but because it helps open the door a little further in allowing his school to at least have a choice in the future, rather than be summarily locked into a all-MS "solution".
For a while in all the anti-terrorist rhetoric it may be possible for these kinds of DRM (I still prefer to call it CUR, Content Use Restriction) to be introduced without much noticeable resistance from the masses, but there's a significant market segment that will resist.
Can you picture the average pr0n user happily letting his/her/its computer hook up with the Microsoft DRM server every time they want to watch their favorite titles?
XML represents a great hope for higher level communication between automated agents
encryption is a necessary ingredient for protected electronic commerce
But I have some reasons to be pessimistic about XML.
If the underlying DTDs and Schemas are not well distributed, as in free, open, unrestricted, the premise of XML as a lingua franca is severely undermined.
Second, it will be too easy to decide that a business logic system based on XML is "too good to reveal to potential competitors and can make us money" and to therefore encrypt many more things that ought not to be encrypted if the objective is to make XML widespread and useful.
I couldn't agree with RedHat's statement any more. I definately feel that a unified look and feel is something that Linux has always needed.
Yes, I think so, too.
For far too long I've watched two extremely talented and desktop teams produce excellent software and haven't seen as much cooperation and collaboration as I would like. Being open source projects, both teams have the advantage of being able to more easily "steal" good ideas from the other team. I think that's great.
I'm really glad not only that Red Hat, whose market size in Linux matters, is taking the initiative to draw the two desktops closer together, but also that the two desktops are open source and that Red Hat even has the ability to do this kind of unification.
That is, while they don't perhaps realize or care much about it, I, for one, am happy that both Gnome and KDE are unifiable.
That's a great thing.
I wouldn't even care to speculate how much needless user pain there has been between proprietary desktops (win32 and Mac) that absolutely positively would never be merged simply because they're closed source and used as marketing weapons.
Well, my TiVo has recordings of copyrighted media inside of it, and it's likewise pretty hard, though not impossible, to get it out in perfect digital fidelity for archiving on other devices or to play on different players.
I expect to see more of this in the future as hardware prices continue to slide. Media will become more and more locked into a particular device one way or another. Your next CD player could well require an Access card in it to enable it to play the latest CDs.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course there's long been a convention in Linux land that less stable development kernels have odd numbers like 2.1, 2.3 and 2.5, while even numbers denote the stable series meant for pedestrian users. [Although many could argue that the VM switch during 2.4 did not exactly belong to a stable series.]
Anyway, if we're going to have an odd number major version, then all I can say is
Gee someone wrote something they later regreted, there's nothing wrong with deleting the mail in that case.
I agree with you to the extent that the lowliest employee can petition the sysadmin to delete a regretable email to the boss and expect the same prompt service.
Otherwise, it looks rather asymmetric in terms of rights and privileges. If you're willing to go down that road, you may as well become a feudal or tribal society (which, admittedly, is how many corporations are structured).
I always like the people who were kind enough to be precise, where
so that Gbps and GBps are different.And while we're on the subject, of course, where
where it's even more helpful to put a "2" subscript on the G to indicate 2**30 instead of 10**9.It's usually too much to hope for from most news sources. Usually only academic papers care enough to be precise with their nomenclature.
Draft legislators from the pool of registered voters.
I don't suppose you'd let me avoid service by offering to pay a proxy to take my place?
So, you did get that memo about your TPS reports, then?
Ummm, yeah, I'm expecting it as soon as the paper jam clears....
You're quite right that the Navy could see some improvements in streamlining its bureaucracy by making over its IT infrastructure so that more business can be conducted electronically without the need to kill trees, have people get into the loop, etc.
OTOH, a very real danger of simply introducing a more efficient processing system into many bureaucracies is to thereby encourage and motivate a proliferation of more bureaucratic procedures!
I know. In my workplace I saw how the WWW on our internal network transformed rapidly from something fun and informative to something that resembled the worse parts of the business. Heavy, sodden reams of regulations choked the nascent web. What was fun was no longer as I started to get automated emails reminding me of some trivial bureaucratic hurdle I must needs soon complete.
And, from what I hear, of all the federal bureaucracies, the DoD is unmatched, despite worthy competitors from other byzantine agencies.
The solution is obvious: simply release the film once in a great theater experience. Release the DVD , oh, maybe 5 years later.
If they announced their intentions in advance and forewent the extra revenue from the 2nd release on DVD they'd fare better in the long term.
Hollywood disappearing might not be as bad as all that, anyway.
In the long term, people are still willing to pay handsomely for their entertainment and so long as that market exists I think they just have to re-arrange their current business model. It's not the end of the world.
Technical issues could be solved fairly easily, I think. Make it convenient by requiring a testfire of each weapon prior to sale, at the factory, into the nearest dork at the gunshow, whatever, as long as you recover the slug and send it in.
My proposal for solving the political issues is to require all access to the database to be done through an elected citizens review board comprised not only of law enforcement officials, but also comprised of gun owners, NRA members, whatever, who will have the responsibility to ensure that government invasions of privacy, etc. do not get out of hand.
One of the biggest problems with gun ownership is the same as the biggest problem with parenting. The qualifications to become either one are far, far below what they should be considering the corresponding great responsibility.
Let me turn it around - how many procent do you need before it matters? 12? 15?
Reminds me of the criterion I heard for how much of a pay increase is needed to induce people to leave their existing job for a new one.
IIRC, 10% wasn't enough. People need 15-20% increases to motivate the trouble of switching.
Not that computer speed and pay are really comparable...I think Bill G. is the only one whose pay has kept up with Moore's Law. Mine hasn't.
American coffee is several orders of magnitude better than it was a generation ago.
Add me to the list backing up this assertion.
I've been drinking coffee in the U.S. since 1976, when all you could get typically were robusta bean variants. I remember drinking swill like dishwater that, well, at least it was hot and caffeinated...
Since the time of Starbucks it's been possible to get good, dark, fresh-roasted arabica bean coffee that makes the old stuff taste like chicory.
Recently I was in Europe, anticipating super excellent coffee everywhere. Guess what? Didn't happen! I got better coffee in the U.S.! (Guess I'll have to go to a coffee-growing nation to get something better than what I can find in the U.S. on every other street corner.)
I saw this article and was bugged by the fact that they're only interested in hearing about specific concrete examples of where the DMCA legislation has created a problem.
In my mind, that means that they've thrown in the towel on challenges based on fundamental principles, thinking either that the fundamental principles trod upon by the DMCA are negligible, and/or that the political battle to get it changed cannot be won on fundamental grounds. The latter meaning that the legislators who passed the bill thought the abridgement of peoples rights by the bill was negligible.
I find that sad.
Just as I found it sad reading a number of weeks ago that the much of the U.S. public was willing to give up most of the protections guaranteed under the 1st Amendment of the Constitution in the interests of "fighting terrorism".
Dammit, I should be able to do anything I want with the digital information I purchase, short of selling copies. Make a million copies for backup, play it backwards, put Arnold Schwarzenegger's head on top of Mickey Mouse when I view it, whatever, as long as I don't sell copies.
Would you care to comment on your experience in NASA working on an Open Source project? (I understand you've left NASA for Scyld, maybe that partially answers my questions, but I still want to know...)
It seems as if your work on Beowulf clusters had a nice spin-off in terms of providing not only low cost supercomputing for academic, government and industrial users, but also in terms of Ethernet support for all sorts of Linux users.
Uphill is right.
The entire non-event of DAT in the United States is a testament to the power of the recording industry to control the introduction of new technology.
I have a feeling that we'll have analog connectors for a lot longer than is necessary or convenient from a technical perspective simply because of fears in some quarters that such connections endanger an existing revenue stream.
I've heard that humans share something like 97% of the same genetic code with a mouse and like 99% of the same code with a chimpanzee.
If that's true, then you could save a substantial amount of space by just burning the diffs between yourself and a standard chimp.
Well, in some cases around here you might not need a whole CD.
A floppy would probably suffice for all the diffs between some of us and the chimp.
in this forum for pity for the boomers.
I appreciate the hardships that Gen X has undergone. Financial issues are certainly part of that, but I also feel sorry for many of my younger friends that endured anonymous childhoods filled with divorces, peer pressures and an MTV manufactured reality that never got fulfilling.
From my perspective, the downturn in the economy means that my 401k has lost almost half its value since early 2000 and I'll end up having to work a lot longer than before.
I think the thing that bothers me the most is the pay-as-you-go Social Security system in the U.S., where current beneficiaries get a lot more out of the system than they ever put in (hey, they vote!) and during my golden years the reality of this Ponzi scheme will start to set in.
I'm quite willing to pay my SS taxes and even to take reduced benefits in the future and at a later age than our current crop of retirees.
It's hard for me to believe my older friends don't feel at least a little bit guilty if they're drawing handsome SS benefits while their other sources of retirement income amount to many times as much.
But, sigh, that's the sad part of the American way- What can my government do for me?
I can recall some really screwy things happening to make if you muck around with date -s as root. Stale files being up to date, other files being created in the future. I'd imagine Daylight Savings would be similar in some ways.
Isn't there some standard we could all agree upon, such as dates and times will be translated at submission time into GMT and cron jobs be run at whatever local time maps to the corresponding GMT? Then, if you want make local time jump around, fine, it's your own responsibility if you like discontinuous time (kind of like heavy drinking).
There's still probably room for ambiguity with all these "leap seconds" I keep hearing about...
As a software engineer you should not have overlooked the importance of "cluestik" tools to deal with lusers of your software.
In particular, the baseball bat and the pen knife can be used to eliminate a lot of reported trouble tickets right at the source of the complaint.
In case those portable and multipurpose tools don't work, I recommend drinking a couple of pots of coffee and walking into the office that was the source of the complaint with nunchuks and whacking the desk real hard with some irritated expression like
You'll substantially reduce the number of complaints and trouble tickets with not only the right tools, but also the right attitude.Doncha just hate to see good sound products have to struggle slowly up the market acceptance curve while various cruddy products get to be a lot more ubiquitous than they deserve? I do.
I own 2 TiVo's that I've upgraded so combined they hold about one third of terabyte of disk space. I love `em. My wife loves `em. I didn't mind shelling out the $500 for 2 lifetime subscriptions. I find the interface simple and intuitive. There are only minor inconveniences, like the plus and minus few minute automatic buffers on the ends of shows colliding in an non-intelligent way when shows on the same channel and type (eg, marathon sessions of back to back episodes).
I think you find astounding satisfaction with TiVo's from their owners.
At the same time, people outside the geek community are generally unaware of the entire concept of digital PVR and have never heard of a TiVo.
Word of mouth advertising is precious, but slow. It will be really interesting to see if TiVo gets enough growth in its customer base to bring it into profitability or (more likely) to where it gets bought out by some M&A hungry firm and the techy founders can retire wealthy and stop worrying about important but boring business issues. They desperately lack a big general advertising push. OTOH, one of the big selling points, speeding through commercials at 20x or 60x seems like it might raise a few eyebrows in the same advertising community!
I'm curious if TiVo's growth rate is increasing, whether there is any acceleration in TiVo's market.
Reminds me of an old Linux Journal article where the authors told of using Linux to burn installed images of a fixed Win95 for something like 2000 client machines.
Your Moral of the Story is right on. Learning Linux can help you understand and admin not just Linux but also to understand Windows better.
xfs:
* tweaked for streaming large files to/from disk
-- probably best at sequential reads/writes.
Hm...would that imply that XFS would be say a really good candidate FS for building video streaming devices?
Seems like it might fit well from the perspective of:
If it's working with Windows, why not use Windows?
That's a very good question, one that another poster hit on as well. If it works, stick with it.
That's all fine and good if you want to stick safely with the status quo. If you think the status quo is perfect, can't be improved upon, and can be relied upon to serve your needs satisfactorily forever more, then, by all means, stick with status quo.
To my mind, a genuine educational experience includes constant probing at the limits of knowledge, questioning the status quo, looking for other ways of doing things, trying different things, and digging into the fundamentals of how things work in ways that "black box" approaches can not satisfy completely.
Having teachers with such attitudes is important in fostering the same kind of enthusiasm for new ideas in their students. When I'm 80 years old, I'll appreciate having students with questioning minds and broad problem-solving skills, not willing to capitulate to the status quo too easily. My medical care will depend upon researchers with that same kind of attitude making discoveries over the next several decades. I don't want them to be satisfied with the status quo.
As an aside, in the long term there's evidence that schools will end up paying substantial money to maintain the status of their Microsoft License Agreements. If there's anything true about most high schools, it's that there is never enough money to go around to achieve all the goals that people would like. Given a choice between spending money on Licensing 6 and spending money on teachers for drama, art, physics, foreign languages, I think many schools would love to be able to choose the latter if they thought they had a choice.
I commend this H.S. physics teacher for looking into open alternatives. Not just because it will introduce his students to a broadening experience (Macs would be good here, too), but because it helps open the door a little further in allowing his school to at least have a choice in the future, rather than be summarily locked into a all-MS "solution".
For a while in all the anti-terrorist rhetoric it may be possible for these kinds of DRM (I still prefer to call it CUR, Content Use Restriction) to be introduced without much noticeable resistance from the masses, but there's a significant market segment that will resist.
Can you picture the average pr0n user happily letting his/her/its computer hook up with the Microsoft DRM server every time they want to watch their favorite titles?
Everyone agrees on two things:
But I have some reasons to be pessimistic about XML.
If the underlying DTDs and Schemas are not well distributed, as in free, open, unrestricted, the premise of XML as a lingua franca is severely undermined.
Second, it will be too easy to decide that a business logic system based on XML is "too good to reveal to potential competitors and can make us money" and to therefore encrypt many more things that ought not to be encrypted if the objective is to make XML widespread and useful.
I couldn't agree with RedHat's statement any more. I definately feel that a unified look and feel is something that Linux has always needed.
Yes, I think so, too.
For far too long I've watched two extremely talented and desktop teams produce excellent software and haven't seen as much cooperation and collaboration as I would like. Being open source projects, both teams have the advantage of being able to more easily "steal" good ideas from the other team. I think that's great.
I'm really glad not only that Red Hat, whose market size in Linux matters, is taking the initiative to draw the two desktops closer together, but also that the two desktops are open source and that Red Hat even has the ability to do this kind of unification.
That is, while they don't perhaps realize or care much about it, I, for one, am happy that both Gnome and KDE are unifiable.
That's a great thing.
I wouldn't even care to speculate how much needless user pain there has been between proprietary desktops (win32 and Mac) that absolutely positively would never be merged simply because they're closed source and used as marketing weapons.
Well, my TiVo has recordings of copyrighted media inside of it, and it's likewise pretty hard, though not impossible, to get it out in perfect digital fidelity for archiving on other devices or to play on different players.
I expect to see more of this in the future as hardware prices continue to slide. Media will become more and more locked into a particular device one way or another. Your next CD player could well require an Access card in it to enable it to play the latest CDs.