While I suspect I disagree with Linus on this topic, I think the journalist did not do a good job of portraying Linus's views in a way that best brings out his argument and that argument's strongpoints. Though of course, if I know that Linus did not get a fair opportunity to project his arguments at their best, then maybe I know that I don't know whether I would agree with Linus.....
I predict that post-humans will have mostly the same social problems as humans, including social lockout, discrimination, theft of resources, greed, etc. There will be some new ones, but changing to post-human won't eliminate the root causes of most of them, and so they will still be around. Yes, clans will be able to genetically engineer for selflessness within the clan, but then clans will compete with clans like ant colonies compete with ant colonies.
Sigh.... so much for that singularity...;-)
Plan 9 deserves $30-$300 million in funding
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Driving Plan 9
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· Score: 1
So that it can achieve critical mass. We need more competition in the OS business, especially by folks who want more than to create yet another marketer driven hack. If we had serious funding for just a few research driven OS alternatives it would make such a difference to the economy. I'd also like to see Franz at MIT get some big funding too. Maybe our next president will invest into R&D....
It makes perfect sense that the best paid executives are the worst performers. The whole process of selecting people to be on the board that sets your salary is filled with conflicts of interest. Your salary as a CEO negatively correlates with your integrity. Your integrity positively correlates with your skill, and with how well those under you work for the good of the company with you as their example.
Those of you who discount this study, look around at the real world a bit before you do it. This study makes a lot of sense. Now how to fix it, that is the problem for us as a society....
Each approach has a place in the ecosystem. Reiser4 could only have been developed the slow way, but that was because we were going into a mature market with solutions that worked already in place. We needed to architect for maintainability because we knew it was a long hard road ahead, and we weren't going to be quitting soon, so we made a plugin architecture.
The problem we have is when the grasses dis the trees and the trees dis the grasses. The Linux Kernel Community, and the rest of society, have too much of that going on.
Respect those who are nothing like you, and see that they have value to society that you cannot match but might complement.
If you think WWII is the only interesting war, it just means you don't have it in you to be a writer, and don't have the imagination to be interested in non-europeans. Any serious writer will make something like the Korean war fascinating precisely because it was a different culture. And if you don't think the folks fighting in Korea had some excitement, you haven't learned your history. That was one tough war. And of course, all you have to do is give the player the follow MacArthur's advice option, and things get really "interesting".
Then their changing it from a purchase to a license has no validity. I buy a box, if that box has a note in it stating after I have paid for it that I did not buy it, the note means nothing.
Of course, this assumes rule by law not by social position, and I leave it to the reader to decide whether our courts rule by law or by social position.....
Network effects economics. It is a lot less useful to society if it is not used. Filesystems are important, but nobody will use an OS just because of the FS.
When the root filesystem is corrupt, you often have to fix it by rebooting using a DVD and running fsck. There is nothing unique to ReiserFS in this..... and if by chance you were playing with the partitioning or dd or.... then full effects of the corruption will often be seen by you when you reboot, because that is when it looks at the disk and not in the RAM cache. One of the most common things is for users to incorrectly repartition, and it all still works, and then they reboot and....
It was probably recoverable, if you had contacted support@namesys.com, and if it was not an extensive hardware error. Most ReiserFS V3 corruptions (and most ext3 and XFS corruptions) occur due to hardware errors. The ones that cause only a block or two to be bad are usually recoverable. The ones that lose the whole drive, well, no FS will save you from that....
After 10 years working to create a suitable storage layer for implementing semi-structured data queries in the FS for Linux, I gotta tell you, this stuff is harder than I ever thought it would be.:-/
5 years to do the first draft (ReiserFS V3), and then another 5 years to get it finally right (Reiser4).
To do enhanced semantics cleanly, you want keywords to be just another kind of file (see our Future Vision paper for why. That means you need to store files that contain phone number sized objects and keywords reasonably efficiently. Because of network effect economics creating a barrier to entry, you have to at the same time make traditional file system usage patterns at least as fast. That is hard. How hard? Oracle tried to do it without deeply changing their tree algorithms, amd implemented an FS on top of their database engine, and found that it was half the speed of a traditional filesystem. Others also found it hard. I tried to do it with V3, and found that for files in the 0-10k size range, I had many of the performance problems that FFS had when they created fragments. Thing was, I never knew they had performance problems, because it was not in their paper.... The problem was that when you combined fragments from multiple files, you add seeks, and one added seek is deadly to performance. The approach used in most databases, BLOBS, suffers from the same problem as FFS combining fragments, and yet more, because BLOBs unbalance the tree (see our website for details and nice diagrams). The usual transaction technology employed for databases, it is just wrong for filesystems, what you need in an FS is to fuse multiple transactions together into batches. And more....
There are so many different areas where if you take a wrong step, performance goes through the floor. You cannot imagine how depressing it is to work on a project where the performance is terrible until the very end, after 5% to rarely 20% at a time you've dragged it into something decent over years of time. I look back on it, and I see that we were incredibly lucky, because all the mistakes I made, were mistakes that took days or weeks to fix, and except for one thing (BLOBs), all the major things that would take years to fix, I got right. There is no reason for this other than luck. And BLOBS cost us years.
So we have for Linux the storage layer that MS could not develop because they quit before 10 years had passed, and perhaps weren't lucky enough at. Now, with technology working, and balance trees that can emulate file system semantics at twice the speed of the real thing (see our benchmarks ), sigh, if only we can overcome the politics. Yup, the WinFS team had to deal with corporate managers that quit before 10 years are past, but we have to deal with..... better unfinished as a sentence.
The only consolation in this field is that everyone else seems to find it just as hard. Probably that includes even the politics.
I mean think about it. It was the "good war", and their existing users liked it, so why add risk by doing a war you don't know everyone will like? That's the way real marketers think guys, sigh.
I personally, would have done speculative storylines involving wars with Iran, China, Sudan, Russia, North Korea, and maybe just for laughs, France, etc. Doing an India vs. Pakistan nuclear aftermath war could be fascinating as a storyline. I mean, if we are to have firefights, let the architecture and background sound be interesting.... These guys need real writers is the problem.... If someone wants a real game storyline written, let me know.;-)
As for vegetation being too dense in Vietnam, I don't buy it, hiding in the grass was the best part of Battlefield Vietnam.
I hated the damage model for Battlefield though. I mean, when you know it takes two hits to kill someone, it is just so fake. I would really love it if we had to hit just the right part of the tank to get the maximal effect, etc.
The problem we have though is that as the money for these games gets bigger, the suits move in, and the respect for the consumer and the artist developer go down. EA coats all of their games with a layer of slime somehow. What can I say. Go buy games like hearts of iron, jagged alliance, and perimeter, where the developers obviously really care and no suits were in control. I do like playing CoD 2 though. It is the best multiplayer FPS that I know of at the moment.
Do you understand that every kid needs, what, a man year to learn how to spell? Maybe more? What a complete waste of time! How can you be so incredibly egocentric that you will put them through it so that you don't have to recompile your decrepit aging brain. It's not like it would take you more than a week or two to get used to it.
So many kids are discouraged from being able to write as well as the middle class, because spelling is too hard for them. Don't give me any nonsense about dumbing the language down, because I ain't no dumber than you are. Let the kids learn how to structure their essays instead of spending that time learning how to spell.
Phonetic spelling is a good idea because it is the clean way to engineer the language. As for how to deal with accents, well, let written speech convey accents, hallelujah, fiction writers will rejoice.
Eliminate burdensome memorization of spelling, and more programmers will write documentation (err, ok, maybe that is a bit optimistic.....;-) ).
Andrew Carnegie proposed this a long time ago, and Teddy Roosevelt favored it, and then some twit of a journalist at the New York Times laughed at it, and thank you twit for wasting a big chunk of my childhood on spelling. Oh, and I was naturally gifted at spelling as a child, but I think it is stupid that so many of my friends won't be writers because they could not spell they could just talk and think.
When the twits laugh at it, what they are really doing is saying, look at how different this logical and coherent spelling is from what I am used to, it must be wrong. Shallow brains rule the world. Sigh.
As for the transition, well, let any person over 12 today spell the old way if they want for as long as they live, and only require that all government/school documents written by persons younger than 12 today be phonetic. Further, allow anyone who likes phonetic to use it without complaint from school/government officials. You'll soon find that all the people who don't like spelling start to use it, as well as the people who just like clean logical design in languages.
This is an area where American culture is just inferior to other countries. Yup, I was born in the USA.
As long as Bush is in office, there is no chance of the anti-trust laws being enforced. Yes, Google, you are absolutely right about what the law says, but that don't matter if the courts are packed with persons opposed to those laws. Any anti-trust lawsuit with Bush in office for anything other than naked price fixing is just doomed.
How exactly do you shut down or prohibit a company from operating when they have that type of a market share?
Use Linux and MacOS X and Solaris. Oh dear, I am going to be moderated as obvious.....
Re:fsck quality
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EXT4 Is Coming
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· Score: 2, Interesting
ext2fsck has a history of plenty of problems, just like everyone. I get reports from users swearing they will never again use ext*. Ted Tso goes walking around FUD'ing everyone else's fsck. He does this because ext* performance is poor, so there is not much else to do but FUD. Some users suspect that high performance is a little sinful, so this works on some.
All of the major filesystems have a decent fsck, and all of them are by now stable to the point that you should worry about your hardware and backups failing, not your FS. The only qualifier on that is that ZFS is new, and I hope no one will view that as my FUDing.
Re:Sounds like a good idea.
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EXT4 Is Coming
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· Score: 4, Informative
What are you talking about? I said I didn't like the coding standards. I then had us change the code to conform to them.
Re:Sounds like a good idea.
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EXT4 Is Coming
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· Score: 1
Reiser4 was fairly stable 1-2 years ago. We need more users to find bugs.
I mean, come on, I know most of you are college educated.....
You all know nothing more after reading this article than you knew before reading it. If the sample size was > 30 it would start to mean something, and greater than 300 it would mean something.
As for anecdotes, all I can tell you is that if I have a passenger that I want to talk to my driving decays dramatically. Oh, and screaming kids.....
With practice, however, I am sure it would improve for all of those..... None of them are as dangerous as me on snow....
I am just pondering the technical requirements for an open standard for DRM that allows interoperability and transferability, and I find myself wondering if it just cannot be done. I mean, I suppose you could have secret keys that only those vendors that are licensed are allowed to have, but if any of the keys leak.....
Of course, I have doubts at times that DRM can work....;-)
The technical term for what Apple wants to be able to do is called market leveraging, and it is illegal (except under the Bush administration, which simply does not accept anti-trust laws as being in the interests of their political contributors.) Ever since the Mellon family started spending big money lobbying the judiciary enforcement against market leveraging has been undermined. Since then the EU has started picking up the anti-trust ball that the US dropped. I wish they would start to run with it.:-/
Hans
Hard Problems and Large Corporations
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WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This announcement makes more sense than I think people recognize, particularly if you posit that they ran into performance difficulties.
Remember that they were going to put it all into the filesystem? Then they put it into a layer above the FS. Bet you a bitflip that they found performance problems resulting from mixing large files and small files in the same filesystem. It is very easy to have such problems, you have to get quite clever to avoid them, and expend a lot of effort on it. Rather than take the extra time, they pulled the enhanced semantics out of the filesystem. That was the wrong thing. Then, look at the descriptions of how some of the queries they supported took too long. It is really easy to design things in that area wrong, and get unacceptable performance impacts. Rather than solving the deeply challenging problems, they punted and put the stuff into SQL server. Why? Because people who don't want things to be slow can just not use the feature until they figure out how to make it not cost performance. Of course, that means no OS integration but..... it is so nice to not be designing Reiser4 by committee.
I see Microsoft responding to difficult technical problems not by solving them, but by running from them, and that explains the entire trajectory of WinFS.
Another consideration you can see between the lines is that they don't want to lose the revenue from SQL Server by doing everything that it does in the OS and doing it better. Marketers will do things like make the first release of something only available at a higher price. They do that a lot. They'll do it even if it robs Vista of most of its excitement to do it.
Large corporations often have real problems handling tough research projects.
Reiser4 took 5 years to get into working at all (v3), and 10 years of sustained development to get right (reiser4), and it is just the storage layer. You can't do that in a large corporation.
In a large corporation you are thinking that you need 3 years to do a project that is a paradigm change, and you go talk to management, and you sense that they have patience for 9-18 months, and you really want to do the project, so you tell them you can do it in 9-18 months.
18 months go by, and you are 1/2 of the way through the first version (you think you are 90% of the way through), and the first version is going to suck badly and take years to be well optimized. Now, if your product is the first in its market, you can make it even though it sucks, and get the money for the version 2. If you are going into a mature market, well, things are tough. Very tough. WinFS is going into a mature market.
Now, into this reality throw corporate managers. They think that if they intimidate the programmers a lot, products ship sooner. So, technical shortcuts get taken. Only problem is, in a product like WinFS, going into a mature market, taking technical shortcuts kills things. Especially since for a product like WinFS the technical shortcuts affect DEEP decisions that you will never be able to reverse out of. Like, whether the enhanced semantics are in the FS layer. Or whether the whole OS is designed around using the enhanced semantics in every component. Then, managers feel the need to prove they are tough about schedules, and they cancel for being late projects that everyone should have known were going to take a long long time because they were hard. There is some very interesting recent research suggesting that if you want an accurate project length forecast, you don't ask for an estimate, you create a betting pool.
The sad thing is, since everyone copies Microsoft, now there will be more people saying that Reiser4 shouldn't do what WinFS backed away from. We can do it. We solved the hard storage layer design problems, our stuff works. Now we can finally go after the enhanced semantics. It took 10 years, but we got the storage layer into the shape we want it in, and one plugin at a time the enha
If the worst you can say about a company is....
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Google's Insular Nature
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· Score: 3, Insightful
that it is secretive, it seems to me that company is pretty saintly.
Now I myself can say worse things about Google, namely that I read through their defense of their collusion with China on censorship, and the more they defend it the clearer it is that their motivation is greed. I myself never got as aggressive as I would have in pursuing Chinese business opportunities because of being ill at ease about their government, and Google could have survived losing that market.
However, on the whole they are a good and generous company, possessed of the same amount of greed and other flaws as most generally good corporations or people have.
This could, of course, change.;-)
Really, most of us have a lot more flaws than being secretive.... I do (but I keep them secret;-) ).
The question presupposes that at a certain point there existed something that was suddenly entirely a chicken. We know this to be false. One feature at a time, one generation at a time, lizards gradually became more and more chicken. Both Taoism and evolution contribute to better understanding this question. From Taoism, understand that categories and names are arbitrary and inherently inaccurate. From evolution understand that chickens have gradually shaded into being over millions of years. From this, understand that within the span of one generation, there was no single change that gave the label chicken sudden meaning. The name chicken does not have meaning when distinguishing between two adjacent generations of things with chicken characteristics. It is like using a magnifying glass to look at an atom. The name "chicken" is inappropriate for single generation distinctions, and lacks usable meaning. Similarly, it is likely that eggs came into existence in a single generation, and so egg lacks meaning. Since both egg and chicken lack the semantic power to distinguish generations, the question is wrong as it is intended.
Of course, if you want to interpret the question not as it was meant, then you can say that lizards and their eggs came before chickens and their eggs, therefor eggs came millions of years before chickens.
Kevin and Michael are both incredibly nice guys who have a particular angle of insight that no other distro has. That is, that users want something that just works in ways that leave ordinary people knowing what to do, or better, not needing to do anything except the task that interests them. Linspire gets it that most people don't want to do things more complicated than click and run. It takes an enormous effort to make software be just click and it works. That deserves our respect.
All of us are contributing, each in the ways we most understand. This sniping at each other, it is simply harmful.
I think I am going to go install Linspire. Let's face it, I don't have the time to hassle with making mp3s and dvd players and voip work on the big distros either, and I am a Linux developer, I can't imagine what ordinary users do when they want to use Linux on one of these distros that requires you to get libraries that don't just compile and work and somehow install them before your dvds can play. Or have they finally gotten it together recently, someone tell me....
If it is not written by me, it should just click and run.;-) Or at least, make and run.
Oh, and pissing on nvidia is not reasonable. At least they port to Linux, ATI just ignores us.
Charity is something to be thankful for, not to demand. Free software is charity. I like to do it myself, but that gives me no right to demand it of other more sensible persons.
Just once lose custody of your kids because your wife claimed traumatic stress disorder due to violent computer games, and lesbian feminists performed the custody evaluations (no, not an exaggeration or a joke, we are talking about Alameda County), and it will become the focal point of your political activity.
This stuff really happens. Do not underestimate how much lesbian feminists who lack the brains for scientific thought hate geeks and enjoy power tripping over them. The top psychologists went into their field because it was harder than CS, and they wanted the challenge. The remaining 90+% went into it because it is filled with paying customers who cannot tell that they have no ability to think, who can only tell that they use big words and sound authoritative. The 90% are the ones who form the social networks that control our courts.
You are a geek. They see their reflection in your eyes, and they hate you for what their reflection looks like.
Do not forget how much geeks are hated. Organize, and fight back, or be prey for these social predators.
Slashdot Mirror
While I suspect I disagree with Linus on this topic, I think the journalist did not do a good job of portraying Linus's views in a way that best brings out his argument and that argument's strongpoints. Though of course, if I know that Linus did not get a fair opportunity to project his arguments at their best, then maybe I know that I don't know whether I would agree with Linus.....
I predict that post-humans will have mostly the same social problems as humans, including social lockout, discrimination, theft of resources, greed, etc. There will be some new ones, but changing to post-human won't eliminate the root causes of most of them, and so they will still be around. Yes, clans will be able to genetically engineer for selflessness within the clan, but then clans will compete with clans like ant colonies compete with ant colonies.
Sigh.... so much for that singularity...;-)
So that it can achieve critical mass. We need more competition in the OS business, especially by folks who want more than to create yet another marketer driven hack. If we had serious funding for just a few research driven OS alternatives it would make such a difference to the economy. I'd also like to see Franz at MIT get some big funding too. Maybe our next president will invest into R&D....
It makes perfect sense that the best paid executives are the worst performers. The whole process of selecting people to be on the board that sets your salary is filled with conflicts of interest. Your salary as a CEO negatively correlates with your integrity. Your integrity positively correlates with your skill, and with how well those under you work for the good of the company with you as their example.
Those of you who discount this study, look around at the real world a bit before you do it. This study makes a lot of sense. Now how to fix it, that is the problem for us as a society....
Each approach has a place in the ecosystem. Reiser4 could only have been developed the slow way, but that was because we were going into a mature market with solutions that worked already in place. We needed to architect for maintainability because we knew it was a long hard road ahead, and we weren't going to be quitting soon, so we made a plugin architecture.
The problem we have is when the grasses dis the trees and the trees dis the grasses. The Linux Kernel Community, and the rest of society, have too much of that going on.
Respect those who are nothing like you, and see that they have value to society that you cannot match but might complement.
If you think WWII is the only interesting war, it just means you don't have it in you to be a writer, and don't have the imagination to be interested in non-europeans. Any serious writer will make something like the Korean war fascinating precisely because it was a different culture. And if you don't think the folks fighting in Korea had some excitement, you haven't learned your history. That was one tough war. And of course, all you have to do is give the player the follow MacArthur's advice option, and things get really "interesting".
Then their changing it from a purchase to a license has no validity. I buy a box, if that box has a note in it stating after I have paid for it that I did not buy it, the note means nothing.
Of course, this assumes rule by law not by social position, and I leave it to the reader to decide whether our courts rule by law or by social position.....
Network effects economics. It is a lot less useful to society if it is not used. Filesystems are important, but nobody will use an OS just because of the FS.
When the root filesystem is corrupt, you often have to fix it by rebooting using a DVD and running fsck. There is nothing unique to ReiserFS in this..... and if by chance you were playing with the partitioning or dd or.... then full effects of the corruption will often be seen by you when you reboot, because that is when it looks at the disk and not in the RAM cache. One of the most common things is for users to incorrectly repartition, and it all still works, and then they reboot and....
It was probably recoverable, if you had contacted support@namesys.com, and if it was not an extensive hardware error. Most ReiserFS V3 corruptions (and most ext3 and XFS corruptions) occur due to hardware errors. The ones that cause only a block or two to be bad are usually recoverable. The ones that lose the whole drive, well, no FS will save you from that....
After 10 years working to create a suitable storage layer for implementing semi-structured data queries in the FS for Linux, I gotta tell you, this stuff is harder than I ever thought it would be. :-/
(See Reiser4 for our storage layer, and our Future Vision paper for what semantics we are going to add.)
5 years to do the first draft (ReiserFS V3), and then another 5 years to get it finally right (Reiser4).
To do enhanced semantics cleanly, you want keywords to be just another kind of file (see our Future Vision paper for why. That means you need to store files that contain phone number sized objects and keywords reasonably efficiently. Because of network effect economics creating a barrier to entry, you have to at the same time make traditional file system usage patterns at least as fast. That is hard. How hard? Oracle tried to do it without deeply changing their tree algorithms, amd implemented an FS on top of their database engine, and found that it was half the speed of a traditional filesystem. Others also found it hard. I tried to do it with V3, and found that for files in the 0-10k size range, I had many of the performance problems that FFS had when they created fragments. Thing was, I never knew they had performance problems, because it was not in their paper.... The problem was that when you combined fragments from multiple files, you add seeks, and one added seek is deadly to performance. The approach used in most databases, BLOBS, suffers from the same problem as FFS combining fragments, and yet more, because BLOBs unbalance the tree (see our website for details and nice diagrams). The usual transaction technology employed for databases, it is just wrong for filesystems, what you need in an FS is to fuse multiple transactions together into batches. And more....
There are so many different areas where if you take a wrong step, performance goes through the floor. You cannot imagine how depressing it is to work on a project where the performance is terrible until the very end, after 5% to rarely 20% at a time you've dragged it into something decent over years of time. I look back on it, and I see that we were incredibly lucky, because all the mistakes I made, were mistakes that took days or weeks to fix, and except for one thing (BLOBs), all the major things that would take years to fix, I got right. There is no reason for this other than luck. And BLOBS cost us years.
So we have for Linux the storage layer that MS could not develop because they quit before 10 years had passed, and perhaps weren't lucky enough at. Now, with technology working, and balance trees that can emulate file system semantics at twice the speed of the real thing (see our benchmarks ), sigh, if only we can overcome the politics. Yup, the WinFS team had to deal with corporate managers that quit before 10 years are past, but we have to deal with..... better unfinished as a sentence.
The only consolation in this field is that everyone else seems to find it just as hard. Probably that includes even the politics.
I mean think about it. It was the "good war", and their existing users liked it, so why add risk by doing a war you don't know everyone will like? That's the way real marketers think guys, sigh.
I personally, would have done speculative storylines involving wars with Iran, China, Sudan, Russia, North Korea, and maybe just for laughs, France, etc. Doing an India vs. Pakistan nuclear aftermath war could be fascinating as a storyline. I mean, if we are to have firefights, let the architecture and background sound be interesting.... These guys need real writers is the problem.... If someone wants a real game storyline written, let me know.;-)
As for vegetation being too dense in Vietnam, I don't buy it, hiding in the grass was the best part of Battlefield Vietnam.
I hated the damage model for Battlefield though. I mean, when you know it takes two hits to kill someone, it is just so fake. I would really love it if we had to hit just the right part of the tank to get the maximal effect, etc.
The problem we have though is that as the money for these games gets bigger, the suits move in, and the respect for the consumer and the artist developer go down. EA coats all of their games with a layer of slime somehow. What can I say. Go buy games like hearts of iron, jagged alliance, and perimeter, where the developers obviously really care and no suits were in control. I do like playing CoD 2 though. It is the best multiplayer FPS that I know of at the moment.
Do you understand that every kid needs, what, a man year to learn how to spell? Maybe more? What a complete waste of time! How can you be so incredibly egocentric that you will put them through it so that you don't have to recompile your decrepit aging brain. It's not like it would take you more than a week or two to get used to it.
;-) ).
So many kids are discouraged from being able to write as well as the middle class, because spelling is too hard for them. Don't give me any nonsense about dumbing the language down, because I ain't no dumber than you are. Let the kids learn how to structure their essays instead of spending that time learning how to spell.
Phonetic spelling is a good idea because it is the clean way to engineer the language. As for how to deal with accents, well, let written speech convey accents, hallelujah, fiction writers will rejoice.
Eliminate burdensome memorization of spelling, and more programmers will write documentation (err, ok, maybe that is a bit optimistic.....
Andrew Carnegie proposed this a long time ago, and Teddy Roosevelt favored it, and then some twit of a journalist at the New York Times laughed at it, and thank you twit for wasting a big chunk of my childhood on spelling. Oh, and I was naturally gifted at spelling as a child, but I think it is stupid that so many of my friends won't be writers because they could not spell they could just talk and think.
When the twits laugh at it, what they are really doing is saying, look at how different this logical and coherent spelling is from what I am used to, it must be wrong. Shallow brains rule the world. Sigh.
As for the transition, well, let any person over 12 today spell the old way if they want for as long as they live, and only require that all government/school documents written by persons younger than 12 today be phonetic. Further, allow anyone who likes phonetic to use it without complaint from school/government officials. You'll soon find that all the people who don't like spelling start to use it, as well as the people who just like clean logical design in languages.
This is an area where American culture is just inferior to other countries. Yup, I was born in the USA.
As long as Bush is in office, there is no chance of the anti-trust laws being enforced. Yes, Google, you are absolutely right about what the law says, but that don't matter if the courts are packed with persons opposed to those laws. Any anti-trust lawsuit with Bush in office for anything other than naked price fixing is just doomed.
Use Linux and MacOS X and Solaris. Oh dear, I am going to be moderated as obvious.....
ext2fsck has a history of plenty of problems, just like everyone. I get reports from users swearing they will never again use ext*. Ted Tso goes walking around FUD'ing everyone else's fsck. He does this because ext* performance is poor, so there is not much else to do but FUD. Some users suspect that high performance is a little sinful, so this works on some.
All of the major filesystems have a decent fsck, and all of them are by now stable to the point that you should worry about your hardware and backups failing, not your FS. The only qualifier on that is that ZFS is new, and I hope no one will view that as my FUDing.
What are you talking about? I said I didn't like the coding standards. I then had us change the code to conform to them.
Reiser4 was fairly stable 1-2 years ago. We need more users to find bugs.
I mean, come on, I know most of you are college educated.....
You all know nothing more after reading this article than you knew before reading it. If the sample size was > 30 it would start to mean something, and greater than 300 it would mean something.
As for anecdotes, all I can tell you is that if I have a passenger that I want to talk to my driving decays dramatically. Oh, and screaming kids.....
With practice, however, I am sure it would improve for all of those..... None of them are as dangerous as me on snow....
Hans
I am just pondering the technical requirements for an open standard for DRM that allows interoperability and transferability, and I find myself wondering if it just cannot be done. I mean, I suppose you could have secret keys that only those vendors that are licensed are allowed to have, but if any of the keys leak.....
Of course, I have doubts at times that DRM can work....;-)
The technical term for what Apple wants to be able to do is called market leveraging, and it is illegal (except under the Bush administration, which simply does not accept anti-trust laws as being in the interests of their political contributors.) Ever since the Mellon family started spending big money lobbying the judiciary enforcement against market leveraging has been undermined. Since then the EU has started picking up the anti-trust ball that the US dropped. I wish they would start to run with it.:-/
Hans
This announcement makes more sense than I think people recognize, particularly if you posit that they ran into performance difficulties.
Remember that they were going to put it all into the filesystem? Then they put it into a layer above the FS. Bet you a bitflip that they found performance problems resulting from mixing large files and small files in the same filesystem. It is very easy to have such problems, you have to get quite clever to avoid them, and expend a lot of effort on it. Rather than take the extra time, they pulled the enhanced semantics out of the filesystem. That was the wrong thing. Then, look at the descriptions of how some of the queries they supported took too long. It is really easy to design things in that area wrong, and get unacceptable performance impacts. Rather than solving the deeply challenging problems, they punted and put the stuff into SQL server. Why? Because people who don't want things to be slow can just not use the feature until they figure out how to make it not cost performance. Of course, that means no OS integration but..... it is so nice to not be designing Reiser4 by committee.
I see Microsoft responding to difficult technical problems not by solving them, but by running from them, and that explains the entire trajectory of WinFS.
Another consideration you can see between the lines is that they don't want to lose the revenue from SQL Server by doing everything that it does in the OS and doing it better. Marketers will do things like make the first release of something only available at a higher price. They do that a lot. They'll do it even if it robs Vista of most of its excitement to do it.
Large corporations often have real problems handling tough research projects.
Reiser4 took 5 years to get into working at all (v3), and 10 years of sustained development to get right (reiser4), and it is just the storage layer. You can't do that in a large corporation.
In a large corporation you are thinking that you need 3 years to do a project that is a paradigm change, and you go talk to management, and you sense that they have patience for 9-18 months, and you really want to do the project, so you tell them you can do it in 9-18 months.
18 months go by, and you are 1/2 of the way through the first version (you think you are 90% of the way through), and the first version is going to suck badly and take years to be well optimized. Now, if your product is the first in its market, you can make it even though it sucks, and get the money for the version 2. If you are going into a mature market, well, things are tough. Very tough. WinFS is going into a mature market.
Now, into this reality throw corporate managers. They think that if they intimidate the programmers a lot, products ship sooner. So, technical shortcuts get taken. Only problem is, in a product like WinFS, going into a mature market, taking technical shortcuts kills things. Especially since for a product like WinFS the technical shortcuts affect DEEP decisions that you will never be able to reverse out of. Like, whether the enhanced semantics are in the FS layer. Or whether the whole OS is designed around using the enhanced semantics in every component. Then, managers feel the need to prove they are tough about schedules, and they cancel for being late projects that everyone should have known were going to take a long long time because they were hard. There is some very interesting recent research suggesting that if you want an accurate project length forecast, you don't ask for an estimate, you create a betting pool.
The sad thing is, since everyone copies Microsoft, now there will be more people saying that Reiser4 shouldn't do what WinFS backed away from. We can do it. We solved the hard storage layer design problems, our stuff works. Now we can finally go after the enhanced semantics. It took 10 years, but we got the storage layer into the shape we want it in, and one plugin at a time the enha
that it is secretive, it seems to me that company is pretty saintly.
Now I myself can say worse things about Google, namely that I read through their defense of their collusion with China on censorship, and the more they defend it the clearer it is that their motivation is greed. I myself never got as aggressive as I would have in pursuing Chinese business opportunities because of being ill at ease about their government, and Google could have survived losing that market.
However, on the whole they are a good and generous company, possessed of the same amount of greed and other flaws as most generally good corporations or people have.
This could, of course, change.;-)
Really, most of us have a lot more flaws than being secretive.... I do (but I keep them secret;-) ).
The question presupposes that at a certain point there existed something that was suddenly entirely a chicken. We know this to be false. One feature at a time, one generation at a time, lizards gradually became more and more chicken. Both Taoism and evolution contribute to better understanding this question. From Taoism, understand that categories and names are arbitrary and inherently inaccurate. From evolution understand that chickens have gradually shaded into being over millions of years. From this, understand that within the span of one generation, there was no single change that gave the label chicken sudden meaning. The name chicken does not have meaning when distinguishing between two adjacent generations of things with chicken characteristics. It is like using a magnifying glass to look at an atom. The name "chicken" is inappropriate for single generation distinctions, and lacks usable meaning. Similarly, it is likely that eggs came into existence in a single generation, and so egg lacks meaning. Since both egg and chicken lack the semantic power to distinguish generations, the question is wrong as it is intended.
Of course, if you want to interpret the question not as it was meant, then you can say that lizards and their eggs came before chickens and their eggs, therefor eggs came millions of years before chickens.
Kevin and Michael are both incredibly nice guys who have a particular angle of insight that no other distro has. That is, that users want something that just works in ways that leave ordinary people knowing what to do, or better, not needing to do anything except the task that interests them. Linspire gets it that most people don't want to do things more complicated than click and run. It takes an enormous effort to make software be just click and it works. That deserves our respect.
All of us are contributing, each in the ways we most understand. This sniping at each other, it is simply harmful.
I think I am going to go install Linspire. Let's face it, I don't have the time to hassle with making mp3s and dvd players and voip work on the big distros either, and I am a Linux developer, I can't imagine what ordinary users do when they want to use Linux on one of these distros that requires you to get libraries that don't just compile and work and somehow install them before your dvds can play. Or have they finally gotten it together recently, someone tell me....
If it is not written by me, it should just click and run.;-) Or at least, make and run.
Oh, and pissing on nvidia is not reasonable. At least they port to Linux, ATI just ignores us.
Charity is something to be thankful for, not to demand. Free software is charity. I like to do it myself, but that gives me no right to demand it of other more sensible persons.
Just once lose custody of your kids because your wife claimed traumatic stress disorder due to violent computer games, and lesbian feminists performed the custody evaluations (no, not an exaggeration or a joke, we are talking about Alameda County), and it will become the focal point of your political activity.
This stuff really happens. Do not underestimate how much lesbian feminists who lack the brains for scientific thought hate geeks and enjoy power tripping over them. The top psychologists went into their field because it was harder than CS, and they wanted the challenge. The remaining 90+% went into it because it is filled with paying customers who cannot tell that they have no ability to think, who can only tell that they use big words and sound authoritative. The 90% are the ones who form the social networks that control our courts.
You are a geek. They see their reflection in your eyes, and they hate you for what their reflection looks like.
Do not forget how much geeks are hated. Organize, and fight back, or be prey for these social predators.