[Discuss] [OT] Smart Phones
I think I was the last human being above the age of 16 to get a smart phone. Android, of course. I think the people who claim that they are life changing are using more than a bit of hyperbole. As I think about it, it really isn't a phone so much as a wireless personal computer that happens to have a telephone application. Still, its pretty useful. Thinking about it, it is a proper evolution from the phone. The phone has become obsolete. Teenage girls don't spend hours on the phone anymore. They spend hours texting. As more and more of our communications becomes written, the more these types of devices become the norm. I can text and email coworkers easier than I can speak with them. With all the various accents and nationalities, verbal communications can be quite difficult. I can think as I write much easier than when I speak. So, yes. As you walk through crowds of people, every single one of them looking at their phone, we have certainly rounded a corner in human communications. Any opinions? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] Free Mail Server
Does anyone know of a free SMTP server that isn't in a black hole? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] webmin
I am setting up a server for a fairly technical guy, not a admin level guy, but a smart kid that can do/figure out most tasks, and I also trust that he has the temperament to recognize and call me before he does anything *bad*. Generally speaking, of course. The webmin package seems to be a very powerful admin package and I've noticed similarities between it and the D-Link NAS I have. My question for the group Has anyone used it? Are there better options? How's the security? General opinions? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] webmin
On 01/24/2013 12:32 PM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote: From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org [mailto:discuss- bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org] On Behalf Of Mark Woodward Has anyone used it? Are there better options? How's the security? General opinions? Webmin is to linux as ASDM is to cisco. A powerful gui that dumbs down your admin tasks with all sorts of pitfalls and shortcomings that enable you to shoot yourself in the foot. That's true of all GUI's atop of complex paradigms. However, a reasonably intelligent person with a degree of understanding and restraint should be able to handle 90% of most admin tasks with it. Or at least that's what I am hoping. I have been playing around with it, and I am less skeptical. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] webmin
On 01/24/2013 01:17 PM, Jonathan M. Prigot wrote: Any GUI is going to abstract you from the underlying system. (For a good treatise on this, check out In the Beginning Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson.) I prefer the use of the CLI because it gets me close to the subsystems. The price is the system doing exactly what I say, for good or ill. GUI's take some of that intimate control away, but sometimes that's what you want. To amplify this point, and I think to clarify my objective. The GUI allows most of the common routine tasks to be done. They are well traveled and offer little or not chance of difficulty. Adding a user should be an easy task that can be bundled by a UI. Configuring an iSCSI target or firewall, should be easier and doable. Configuring Apache? Well, if you aren't doing anything interesting, then yes. It should be doable. If you want to finely tune your apache install? Well, then a GUI is probably in your way. That said, once the system is up and running... A GUI for this stuff should reduce the need for skilled admins to add/remove users, check logs, or check hard disk status. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Its not possible to make things easier for users
On 01/15/2013 09:08 AM, Kent Borg wrote: A trio of late-in-the-thread observations: - There is a trade-off between simple and powerful, but one can always make both worse by adding a serving of stupid, conversely, one can always make something both simpler *and* more powerful by removing some of the unnecessary stupid (eventually you might run low on stupidities to harvest, so there can be limits, but don't give up too soon using the trade-off argument as your excuse). Occasionally one can change the game with a hunk of clever that later makes the previous idea look stupid. Albert Einstein: Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. - There are some extremely powerful and easy to use technologies out there that are made possible by standardization, both in defining what the product does and by using powerful standard components. Good examples are indeed cars. And phone calls. Note that there sometimes needs to be a lot of education about the properties of the product for this to happen. Even morons know a lot about what cars are good for and what they are not good for, similarly the properties of a phone call are well defined, though the phone example has been in a lot of flux in recent years. GPS is an amazing set of physics and technologies, yet it can be packaged into extremely easy-to-use products once one defines the product and engineers it carefully. One of the hard to see aspects of this discussion is the variation of the goal set for the task. In the case of phones calls, GPS systems, and cars, there is very little variability in the goal set, therefore it is possible to engineer a simple solution because the number of legitimate options are quite small. Where we get in to trouble is when the goal set starts to vary. With music, we have formats, quality, size, and proprietary technologies. This complicates the viable solution. This is why I think people get confused about computers. Computers are not DVD players. Yes, they *can* play DVDs, but they can also do almost anything else. You can't think of a general purpose computer as an appliance. You can think of a particular app, designed to handle a particular goal set, as an appliance. - People do want choice, but they are too busy and ignorant to really deal with all that choice. But they still want some choice: I overheard two young women in Target the other week, they talking about something unknown to me, and the second one didn't need whatever the first one suggested because she already had it and mine has ionic power. God maybe knows what that meant, I would be willing to bet a hell of a lot of money that she had no idea what that meant, but it gave her the impression that it was good, and maybe the term does correlate with some real feature. I was once impressed by the name Formula-409, but that was when it was new and I was a pretty little kid--I give myself a pass. I am weird because know a lot about how the things around me work (as does this BLU crowd), but I don't know how degreasers work beyond a basic understanding of soap. Formula-409 is still magic to me. I think I know of a better and improved competing product that we have at home and if only it had a catchier name I could tell you what it is. -kb, the once very young Kent who was attracted to technology specifically because of the superficial wiz-bang trappings that he now scorns. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Its not possible to make things easier for users
On 01/14/2013 11:47 AM, Rich Pieri wrote: On Mon, 14 Jan 2013 09:41:26 -0500 Matthew Gillen m...@mattgillen.net wrote: I don't think that's quite right. It's not that people don't want choices, it's that they don't want to make choices where they don't understand the options, and there is a high learning curve (esp. when options interact with each other in non-trivial ways). The problem with generalities is that they are always wrong to some degree. It's not that Joe doesn't understand the options. It's that Joe sees no point to them. That depends on the particular joe you are talking about. For some quantity of joe, you will have a range from don't know, don't care to knows, and cares. If you go too simple, then only the don't know, don't care joe will be happy. If you add too many options without making something easy by default you alienate DKDC joe, but make KC joe happy. When Joe goes to the gas pump he sees three numbers that don't mean anything beyond expensive shit, cheap swill, and the stuff in between. Joe pushes the button he can afford and fills the tank. Now, that isn't true. *at all*. Many high end car drivers have to buy premium because their cars knock. Performance cars typically need the extra octane. Many joes drive cars like mustangs and such. Joe sees the music ripper the same way: push the button that makes his music fit on his shiny thing and fill the tank. Offering him an array of codecs and quality settings and what-not is unnecessary. They just get in the way and make the computer hard to use when it should be as easy as pumping gas. Again, what about the joes that put in really really great audio systems in their cars? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Its not possible to make things easier for users
On 01/14/2013 03:09 PM, Rich Pieri wrote: On Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:47:24 -0600 Derek Martin inva...@pizzashack.org wrote: Only the base (V6) does. Every other model of Mustang (GT, Boss, Shelby) require premium gas. Even the Shelby will run fine with 87 octane. It won't knock if the engine sensors are working properly. You lose 10 HP at the high end with regular gasoline. That's the real reason Ford recommends premium gasoline for the V8s. It should be noted that knock sensors detect a gas detonation and cause the control system to retard the engine timing. Two things about this: The detonation damages the engine and the time retardation reduces engine performance and efficiency. The *real* reason why ford recommends premium gasoline is that the increased octane reduces the tendency to detonate at higher compression ratios (used by higher performance engines) by reducing the burn speed of the air/fuel mixture. If you want to use cheap gas in a performance car, a *good* mechanic can usually adjust the timing to be slightly retarded so that the spark is later. This is exactly why you can't help users. User's do not know what they do not know and somehow expect the world to take care of them. Even Apple is getting spanked for being too simple. More people use android than iPhone. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Its not possible to make things easier for users
On 01/14/2013 03:50 PM, Daniel C. wrote: On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 3:35 PM, Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: This is exactly why you can't help users. User's do not know what they do not know and somehow expect the world to take care of them. Even Apple is getting spanked for being too simple. More people use android than iPhone. The Android is just as simple to use as an iPhone, to be honest. Even my girlfriend (who is wonderful, but simply cannot use a computer to save her life) has had success with her Android. Your thesis (that you can't help users because the world is just too complicated) is confounded daily by the billions of people who spend their lives interacting successfully with phenomenally complex systems and devices despite not understanding their inner workings. Do you make allowances for that somehow? Is software fundamentally different from other things? If so, why? I agree with you that making slick user interfaces for software is a serious problem. Howerver, you seem to be saying that the problem is fundamentally intractable which I think is overstating your case. The problem is that the world and all the things in it are complex. Almost anyone with OK health can climb a small mountain, everest, on the other hand, not so much. I alluded to the notion that things are as simple as they can be without changing the nature of what the thing is that you wish to do. Images, songs, videos, etc. each embody a knowledge set. For a very limited range of options, simple defaults may suffice. For anything out of the ordinary, the drive for simplicity makes tasks more difficult. You do not need to know how a car works to know that you need premium gas, just read the owners manual. If, however, you do not wish to buy premium gas, it becomes an expert level option. -Dan ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Its not possible to make things easier for users
On 01/14/2013 04:00 PM, Rich Pieri wrote: On Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:35:02 -0500 Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: It should be noted that knock sensors detect a gas detonation and cause the control system to retard the engine timing. Two things about this: The detonation damages the engine A single detonation won't damage the engine. A single detonation won't damage an engine much. The timing retard that happens after a know is temporary. You will get repeated knocking even with sensors. You just won't notice it except for the lack of power and fuel efficiency. Repeated detonations will. It won't knock if the engine sensors are working properly. You won't hear it know, but it will knock. and the time retardation reduces engine performance and efficiency. You lose 10 HP at the high end. Less octane equals less engine performance. Octane is interesting, it reduces gasoline's ability to ignite causing it to burn more slowly. Because of this, high performance engines need to advance the timing to the point where it is likely still compressing the air/fuel mixture when the spark kicks off. It is paradoxical, but lower octane fuel is more combustible. Certainly, higher octane gasoline makes high performance engines work better but it isn't necessary That's not true. If your engine is tuned for high octane gas, that's what you should use. If you don't want to use it, you can have a mechanic de-tune your engine for lower grade gas. Just putting low octane in your system will harm it. (with some exceptions which won't work *at all* without very high octane content). No, the *real* real reason is Ford advertises 650HP @ 6,250RPM for the Shelby. Yes, and the power plant is tuned for the higher octane gas. The 10 HP reduction from regular gasoline would lead to a false advertising lawsuit. No doubt that people would be upset if their car failed to live up to the hype. Mazda had just such an issue. I'm sure it is probably a serious concern, but not the sole reason. Or Ford would have to down-rate the performance to 640HP @ 6,250RPM which looks less impressive on the spec sheets. It's all marketing. It is not all marketing. There is some serious science here that should not be ignored. Even Apple is getting spanked for being too simple. More people use android than iPhone. On the other hand, more people buy Apple than buy Samsung or HTC or Motorola. The three combined might beat Apple but Apple still beats each of them separately. Actually, Samsung has 23% of the phone market and Apple has 9% http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/05/samsung-apple-continue-smartphone-marketshare-tug-of-war/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Its not possible to make things easier for users
On 01/14/2013 05:39 PM, Shirley Márquez Dúlcey wrote: On modern cars there is no timing that a mechanic can adjust; that's a throwback to the days of carburetors and camshafts. Nowadays cars have electronic fuel injection and electronically controlled valves and the timing is all done by the engine computer. If the computer is programmed competently, when it notices repeated knocking it will change the engine timing to make it stop; it's already making changes to deal with engine temperature, altitude, and mechanical wear. The catch is that this may cause a severe performance drop in an engine designed for high octane fuel, not the mere 10HP that somebody alluded to. You are mostly correct. The only difference is that the chip (It's really/usually just a [EE]PROM) contains the tuning parameters for the engine. If you want to run on economical fuel you need to modify/change this chip. Most modern cars can use a programmer like this: http://www.jegs.com/i/Superchips/848/1950/10002/-1 Like I said, knock sensors only detect knocks after the fact. They do reduce knock damage, but do not eliminate it. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] Its not possible to make things easier for users
I have always been the tech guru. Running the film projector in the early 1970s in school because the teachers never understood how. Many of us have an innate ability to understand mechanisms. We see things and they make sense to us. So, I have used Windows, Macintosh, Linux, FreeBSD, SunOS, CP/M, and so on. I have come to the conclusion that there is NOTHING that can make a user's life easier or a computer more usable in any significant way. Sure, you can help with some incremental aids, icons, menus, and such, but not much more than that. Here's the problem (q) How do I get my pictures on my computer. (a) Run a program to download them to your computer. (q) Why can't I just use them on the camera? (a) You might be able to, but it depends on the application or the camera (q) what? (a) Some cameras look like disks to the computer and some don't (q) What? (a) The people that make the cameras decide how the cameras work And this goes on for a while (q) I want to upload some pictures to the internet. or I want to email some pictures but it always stops (a) The pictures are too big, you need to reduce their size (q) Why are they too big/ (a) The camera creates really big pictures in case you want to print them like a photo (q) what do you mean, pictures are small (a) sigh and this can go on for a while (q) How do I get music on my computer/music player (a) rip a CD or download music you can convert to something your music player can use This too will go on and on I don't believe the problem is that people can't use the computer, because computers, especially today, are fairly trivially easy to use. In fact, I think we are more or less at the limit of the current paradigms and anything done to improve them will actually make them harder to use. No the real problem isn't the computer, the real problem is the user's understanding of the task they wish to accomplish. Copying music from a CD to an [MP3,OGG,FLAAC] is an operation with choices. These choices have pros and cons, benefits and drawbacks. There often times is no best choice. The same goes for pictures, email, word processing, printing, etc. User's don't want to know how to do what they want to do and blame the computer for not being easy enough. If we stepped back to the 1970s, we'd have the same problem with recording music off the radio. You'd use a cassette or a reel to reel tape recorder. Most people wouldn't understand how to do that either. It wasn't because of a computer, it was because you had a process that had a few steps and to perform the operation you had to have some background knowledge on how things worked so you would know what to do. Problems with computers are mostly over at this point. It isn't about computers at all. It is about the tasks the users want to accomplish. You can't make them easier without changing the nature of the task. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] OSS licenses (was Home NAS redux)
On 01/09/2013 12:09 PM, Rich Pieri wrote: On Wed, 09 Jan 2013 11:57:37 -0500 Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: That largely depends on your view of society as a whole. Totally unrestrained freedom is not possible in populations greater than 1. Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr quipped The right to swing my fists ends where the other man's nose begins. You are conflating rights with freedoms. Still. Please stop it. There is no conflation, the two are very much related. Please explain how rights are different than freedoms in a way that describing freedoms as rights is improper. A freedom is typically a right. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] OSS licenses (was Home NAS redux)
On 01/09/2013 07:39 PM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote: From: Mark Woodward [mailto:ma...@mohawksoft.com] The freedom to deny freedom is NOT a freedom. By combining the FREE software with NON-FREE software you can create NON-FREE software. This does not protect FREE software. This is not a freedom of denying freedom. It does not deny any freedom - Any 3rd party recipient of the non-free software can still obtain the free software. Think about what happened to Kerberos under the MIT license. You always ignore this point in your replies and this is a fundamental point in the debate. It is your right to create non-free software. It is your time and effort i.e. personal capital. No one who supports freedom would deny you that, and I myself make my living doing so. However, taking someone else's personal capital which you acquired exercising your freedoms, modifying it it and then denying anyone the same freedoms for the whole It is impossible for anybody to download free software, modify it, distribute it, and in doing so, prevent me from obtaining the original free software. They can only prevent recipients from obtaining the parts that they themselves contributed. Ahh, and here is where ethics, rights, and freedom come into play. You keep missing the point, I'm pretty sure you are doing it intentionally at this juncture. You acquired free software. You have the freedom to do so. You modify the free software. You have the freedom to do so. What gives you the moral or ethical right to create a non-free product with that free software you got for free? Freedom to deny freedom is not a freedom. If you wish to create non-free software, you have the right to do so, but to corrupt free software with non-free components is counter to the notion of freedom. The GPL protects the freedom of the software as a whole from this practice. the freedom to deny freedom is not a freedom. Quit saying that, because there has not yet been any situation described where anybody has the power to deny anybody else's freedom. It sounds like an extremist chest-thumping rhetoric. It is an important concept and it is an ideal that is at the core of real freedom. Real freedom is not free. There are rules and costs associated with it. It is vital to understand that the freedom to deny freedom is not a freedom. If everyone applied that simple rule to daily life, the world would be a better place. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] OSS licenses (was Home NAS redux)
On 01/09/2013 07:13 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote: From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org [mailto:discuss- bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org] On Behalf Of John Abreau Under democracy, citizens are prohibited from seizing power by force and imposing a military dictatorship on their fellow citizens. Under anarchy, citizens are not so prohibited. The equivalent CDDL-type argument would be that anarchy is more free because you're not prohibited from taking away everyone else's freedom. It strikes me as absurd to claim that a system that fails to protect freedom is somehow more free. I think you're hinting that CDDL fails to protect freedom. Please elaborate, but begin by reading the CDDL. The problem with the CDDL is that it allows you to combine CDDL licensed software with non-CDDL licensed software to create a larger work which is not CDDL where only the CDDL portions are protected. This will do nothing to prevent the MIT kerberos problem. The freedom to deny freedom is NOT a freedom. By combining the FREE software with NON-FREE software you can create NON-FREE software. This does not protect FREE software. It is your right to create non-free software. It is your time and effort i.e. personal capital. No one who supports freedom would deny you that, and I myself make my living doing so. However, taking someone else's personal capital which you acquired exercising your freedoms, modifying it it and then denying anyone the same freedoms for the whole is theft, legally in the case of GPL or morally in the case of MIT/BSD. It is personally repugnant to me to take what is not mine and deny the benefits of it to others. I consider that unethical. The only inversion example in this is the GPL modifications to BSD/MIT code, and while unfortunate for the BSD/MIT folk, no actual freedom was lost because, as we all know: the freedom to deny freedom is not a freedom. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] OSS licenses (was Home NAS redux)
On 01/09/2013 11:43 AM, Rich Pieri wrote: Freedom is the state of being without restrictions. That largely depends on your view of society as a whole. Totally unrestrained freedom is not possible in populations greater than 1. Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr quipped The right to swing my fists ends where the other man's nose begins. Freedom in populations greater than one is something that must be balanced. Two people can not be free if one believes they have the right to deny the other freedom. Thus, in a population of 2, freedom must have restrictions in place in order that both people remain free. If you take away those restrictions, then one will inevitably end up non-free. When comparing two licenses, the one that imposes the fewer restrictions on licensees is the more free of the two. Absolutely not. The one that balances the freedom of all the stake holders and prevents one from denying freedom to others is more free. The GPL places more restrictions on licensees than the CDDL does, In an effort to preserve the freedom of the software, yes. This is a very important distinction. therefore the GPL is less free than the CDDL. To turn it around: compelled freedom is not freedom. No one is being compelled to do anything. You do not need to take someone else's free software, no one is forcing you. If, however, you wish to benefit from freedoms provided you but wish to deny other's the freedoms you enjoy, then you are a hypocrite. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home NAS redux
On 01/07/2013 10:15 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote: From: Mark Woodward [mailto:ma...@mohawksoft.com] I acknowledge and understand that there are pros and cons of both licenses, philosophically and materially. I'm not saying one license is better than another, as a generalization; although in specific cases, each license can sometimes be better than the other. I don't agree with this. The GPL is the source of a HUGE amount of free code to build on and learn from. It ensures that improvements get added back. Software is a capital investment in time and effort. I'm a capitalist and I take offense to a license that allows someone to take my intellectual property that I have intentionally shared and deny others the benefits I intend. That is theft. No problem. You like GPL because it prevents people from doing something you don't like them to do. But other developers are sometimes happy to permit such usage. I'm not saying one license is better than another except in specific situations - but you are. You've categorized this as theft unconditionally. This is a philosophical point. Is a right to deny others rights ever a really a right? In other words, is a freedom to deny other's freedom really a freedom. I would say no. Point remains, if you say you don't like CDDL because of restrictions it imposes, and you like GPL instead, that's the opposite of truth, because CDDL is less restrictive. Let's get this clear, it is not less restrictive in the long term view. Think of it in terms of a chain. From originator to You, you receive the software. Under GPL you can do anything you like with that software. ANYTHING. Seriously. Anything. However, the restriction is about how you are to treat the software, which you received with complete freedom, as you pass it on to the next person in the chain. Do you feel that you have the right to deny freedom to a subsequent user? Is the freedom to deny freedom really a freedom? Under GPL, if some software is built into a larger derivative work (statically linked), then all the other source code contributing to the larger work must also be GPL. Yup, to ensure that everyone has at least the same level of freedom that you had. Under CDDL, they don't have the same restriction - Some CDDL code can be built into a larger work, without placing a restriction on the licensing of the *other* source code. That is the paradoxical part, people can take CDDL code and make it less free. Under CDDL, only the original CDDL code and its subsequent modifications must be redistributed under CDDL. But they allow you to statically link with potentially closed-source code, producing a binary that was partially the result of CDDL code and partially the result of other code (potentially closed-source.) Potentially making it less free. Anyone remember Microsoft's embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. That's how licenses like CDDL allow less freedom. Some people including myself choose to distribute software using even less restrictive licenses. I am personally biased in favor of the MIT license. I write the software, and if somebody else incorporates it into whatever they're doing, they can do whatever the heck they want, even close-source their fork if they want to. Kudos to them, if they're making closed-source modifications. I didn't write those modifications, and I don't feel a need to demand access to them. :-) Just my opinion, for some of the code that I write and distribute. But as an MIT or BSD licensor, you allow murky chain of intellectual property. People and corporations can take it, lock it up, and you'd never know. Maybe that doesn't bother you, but there are a whole lot of side considerations to think about. You can't even enforce your requirement that the header remains intact because you don't have the right to see their modifications of your code. It's all personal opinion, and there is no absolute right or wrong, which is what you're saying. But extremist opinions are commonplace - the only thing I object to repeatedly is the incorrect assertion that CDDL is more restrictive than GPL, and using that as the grounds for your extreme position. As I have said before, when advocating personal freedom and the protection of freedom is considered extreme and advocating corporate rights to raid public intellectual property is practical. There is really something wrong. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home NAS redux
On 01/02/2013 07:59 PM, Rich Pieri wrote: On Wed, 02 Jan 2013 16:57:39 -0500 Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: The BSD license has allowed a great deal of software to be subverted to the detriment of the various BSD projects. This is a perfect example of how the BSD license does not protect your freedom. Granted in an ironic way. Such as how the Linux kernel borrowed a bunch of *BSD device drivers for its own use without contributing improvements back to the *BSD kernel projects? Talk about irony. Well, very little has been borrowed from the BSD kernel. I think mostly just the TCP stack, but that was mostly government funded, so that doesn't concern me too much. What about Linux threads on BSD? Meanwhile Apple, the biggest *BSD shop in the world, has contributed most of its *BSD changes back to the BSD kernel communities and most of its KHTML changes back to the KDE community and everyone who uses WebKit. A the same time, Apple was forced to stop contributing to GCC and dump it, along with Samba, due to the fuck TiVo clause in the GPLv3. You are stating subjective opinion as fact and as such is not a debatable point. However, what was actually done by Tivo was against the spirit of the GPL and the FSF was more than justified. The spirit of the GPL is that the writers give their software to the users NOT the distributors. That is an important consideration. It is only when the distributors act counter to the user's do they violate the GPL. Tivo made the source code unusable because of intentional hardware choices. They were violating the user's rights, and that, if you have any integrity at all, must agree is actionable. No one is forcing anyone to do anything. A software author chooses the GPL to protect the users of his software. If you want to modify or use GPL code, that was not originally written by you, then you must abide by the GPL by which you acquired the software. Derivatives of GPL software are GPL software. This is a requirement of the GPL. Thus, while the Linux kernel can take code from the FreeBSD kernel just by keeping the BSD License text in that code, the FreeBSD kernel cannot reciprocate without changing the license for the entire FreeBSD code tree. Not to nit pick, but that was the BSD licensor's choice. They made that decision and many corporations take and make changes to BSD code and you never even get to see what they changed. With GPL, you get to see what has changed, how it was changed, and why it was changed. The BSD guys may not be able to cut and paste, they can certainly see what what was done. This is the force being used: accept the GPL for all of your software or you don't get to reap the benefits of collaboration with GPL software projects. That is not force by any stretch of the imagination. It is a choice, nothing more. Who's freedoms are being protected here? Certainly not the FreeBSD developers' or users'. They're stuck between a rock (a software license they don't want) and a hard place (having their code taken from them without the takers giving anything back). I disagree, completely. The freedoms being protected here are (1) The authors of the GPL portions of the code and (2) the down-stream users of the code. The down-stream users of the code are protected from someone who would take the code, modify it, and keep it away from them, and that, as stated, is not a freedom. I am not sympathetic, in ANY WAY, to the plight of BSD cry babies. Companies steal their code on a regular basis and, many times, modify it, ever so slightly, so that it is incompatible with the original code. Remember Kerberos anyone? This is the result of their license and it happens EVERY DAY. At least with GPL, its done out in the open and they get to see what was done and they can choose to re-implement those changes in their code. The only thing that keeps them from using GPL code, is a license, the thing that keeps them from using anything Microsoft, IBM, or Apple do with their code is the fact that the code has been imprisoned and the owners of the code don't even get visitation rights. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home NAS redux
On 01/03/2013 11:14 AM, Rich Pieri wrote: On Thu, 03 Jan 2013 07:32:27 -0500 Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org wrote: The Linux kernel is not a derivative of the BSD kernel. While there If GPL code is copied into the BSD kernel then according to the GPL that would make the BSD kernel derivative of the upstream GPL software. The GPL requires such derivative software to be licensed under the GPL. I don't see a point here. That is the intention of the licenses. So? On Thu, 03 Jan 2013 08:34:24 -0500 Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: Well, very little has been borrowed from the BSD kernel. I think Many of the Linux kernel device drivers were taken from *BSD or are licensed under one of the BSD licenses. There are at least 185 files with BSD licenses on them in the 2.6.32 source tree. That's what I found with a single grep command. I leave it to the reader to grep for the relevant strings in the source tree. 185 files? How many are headers? how many are source files? How many are documents? Compare that against how many files are in the kernel as a whole? What's the ratio? I think very little applies here. Also, what is the nature of the copy? Is it an OEM writing a driver for both platforms and contributing to both? It is hard to take a single number as meaning anything without a detailed understanding of what the number represents. mostly just the TCP stack, but that was mostly government funded, so Linux has had several written from scratch but I'm not aware of it ever using *BSD's stack. I could be mistaken about this. I'm pretty sure that almost everyone used the original 'BSD TCP/IP stack as a reference. I know Windows' tcp/ip stack is from BSD. that doesn't concern me too much. What about Linux threads on BSD? Linuxthreads is a Port. It is not part of the *BSD kernels. The point is that it is used on BSD just fine. You are stating subjective opinion as fact and as such is not a debatable point. However, what was actually done by Tivo was against Darwin, the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X and iOS, is XNU+FreeBSD kernel and FreeBSD userspace. This is a fact, not an opinion. This has nothing to do what the tivo argument. Why is it being put up as a defense? iPhone and iPad have put Darwin -- thus FreeBSD -- in the hands of more users around the world than any other Unix vendor has managed. This is a fact, not an opinion. Perhaps, but it also locks users out of their systems, allows Apple to control their property, and allows Apple unprecedented vendor lock-in. In fact, I think Apple is a perfect example about how the MIT license materially harms users. This makes Apple the largest *BSD shop in the world. Yes, and one of the largest violators of user's freedom in the world. A litigious cancer in the technology world. Apple published all of the Darwin source code less some binary blobs. This is a fact, not an opinion: http://www.opensource.apple.com/ Not really. They canceled the darwin project a LONG time ago. WebKit started out as KHTML and all of that code was contributed back upstream. This is a fact, not an opinion. See above URL. Apple stopped using GPLv3 software because (among other reasons) the FSF declared iPhone incompatible with the GPLv3 due to the cryptographic signature clause. This is a fact, not an opinion. Yes, because it harms user's freedom. The freedom to deny freedom is NOT a freedom. the spirit of the GPL and the FSF was more than justified. The spirit of the GPL is that the writers give their software to the users NOT the distributors. [snip] Not to nit pick but Linus Torvalds disagrees with you. And it's his software, his choice of license, not yours. /argumentum ad verecundiam/ I think I'm done with this, Mark. I'm not a zealot. I'm a practical realist. Its funny that the strong defense of freedom has become zealotry, but the promotion of corporate rights over individuals has become practical. It is, indeed, a scary new century. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home NAS redux
On 01/03/2013 12:38 PM, Rich Pieri wrote: I know what I wrote but I do need to correct two of your factual errors. On Thu, 03 Jan 2013 11:42:12 -0500 Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: I'm pretty sure that almost everyone used the original 'BSD TCP/IP stack as a reference. I know Windows' tcp/ip stack is from BSD. A common misconception but one that in fact is not true. There are vestiges inherited from Spider's STREAMS stack, notable in the command line tools like ftp and rsh, but the stack itself was written from scratch by Microsoft. Well, the DOS version of Windows, windows 1.x through Windows ME, didn't have TCP until Windows 3.1(1) (as winsock). The 386 enhanced version, I'm not sure where that was implemented or by whom. The Windows NT/32 bit OS/2 was taken from BSD. Windows NT on through Windows 8 is based on the NT kernel which looks a hell of a lot like VMS, but that is a different discussion. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home NAS redux
On 01/03/2013 01:56 PM, Rich Pieri wrote: On Thu, 03 Jan 2013 13:10:27 -0500 Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: Well, the DOS version of Windows, windows 1.x through Windows ME, didn't have TCP until Windows 3.1(1) (as winsock). The 386 enhanced version, I'm not sure where that was implemented or by whom. Microsoft. It was code named Wolverine. The Windows NT/32 bit OS/2 was taken from BSD. The TCP/IP stack that shipped with NT 3.1 was based on System V STREAMS, with code licensed from Spider. The TCP/IP stack that shipped with Windows 95 and Windows/NT 3.5 is an updated version of Wolverine. It has been part of Windows 9x and /NT up to the present. Here's a few excerpts from an article you may or may not be aware of Now, some of Spider's code (possibly all of it) was based on the TCP/IP stack in the BSD flavors of Unix. These are open source, but distributed under the BSD license, not the GPL that Linux is released under. Whereas the GPL states that any software derived from GPL'ed software must also be released under the GPL, the BSD license basically says, here's the source, you can do whatever you want, just give credit to the original author. I won't even swear on a stack of bibles that the new TCP/IP now shipping in NT/2000/XP and Windows 95/98/Me is completely free of the old code from Spider. Since I don't work there I don't have access to the source code. Certainly some parts of TCP (the checksum calculation comes to mind) are the same everywhere and once someone has written an optimized version, why rewrite it? And once again, this would be perfectly legitimate for Microsoft to do under the license. Lastly, this interesting (and telling) quote: Anyway the FreeBSD programmers who reported all this to the Wall Street Journal can't see the NT TCP/IP source either, so they can't have been referring to that. This is *exactly* why BSD license is bad. Microsoft didn't copy the BSD stack, Spider did. The intellectual property rights in this case is a mess. Certainly there have been code drift from initial port, but the BSD license, allowing corporations to hide code that other people wrote, will keep this debate from being settled. I argue that it is more BSD than not, and you argue that it is not based on BSD. I wish we could look at the code to settle the argument. Oh! wait, we can't because the BSD license lets microsoft hide the code that doesn't belong to it. The OS/2 TCP/IP stack was written by IBM based on the BSD stack. It might actually be the BSD stack ported to OS/2 but I'm not sure about that. Have any more misconceptions that you need clarified? I got plenty of time to poke holes in your proclamations. Thanks, but, I have worked closely with Microsoft since the early DOS and OS/2 1.x days. I've had many business trips to Redmond while working on system level components from Windows 2.x, 3.x NT, OS/2 1.x and Portable OS/2 which became Windows NT. I Saw the OS/2 presentation manager running on the NT kernel before it was known as the NT kernel. I've published a couple articles on Windows (NT and DOS) device driver development and contributed a couple chapters to Windows of the 3.1 Masters. I consulted with Sun for Java on Windows NT for medical applications, Dragon naturally Speaking for performance on NT, when Keithley Metrabyte was writing their own drivers, I designed the Windows (95/NT) portable infrastructure. I was also the architect of the Windows implementation of Microsoft's original Microsoft Home Creative Writer and Fine Artist products while at Turning Point. I think I have it covered. I work on Linux, because I prefer Linux. That does not imply that I do not know Windows. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home NAS redux
On 01/03/2013 03:35 PM, Rich Pieri wrote: On Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:40:31 -0500 Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: Now, some of Spider's code (possibly all of it) was based on the TCP/IP stack in the BSD flavors of Unix. I've seen that article. It is mistaken. Spider couldn't have taken the STREAMS API from BSD because BSD doesn't have a STREAMS API. Spider's code is ATT System V, not BSD. We are now arguing unprovable minutia. Since all the code is obsolete and far out of any reach to verification, we have only the documents we can dig up to prove our points. I'll trust the contents of a wall street journal article, an interview with a former NT kernel developer, and my own personal experiences. Whether or not this small matter of trivia is correct or not is irrelevant. This debate is about freedom and the GPL, which, I'm pretty sure we've concluded you've lost. Even these finer points of history are blurred because the GPL was not being used. Had the BSD code base been GPL we could have proved all of this because vendors would have had to contribute back their changes to the GPL authors. Furthermore, we would probably have avoided the whole ATT/Berkeley mess in the '90s. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home NAS redux
On 01/02/2013 07:30 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote: From: Mark Woodward [mailto:ma...@mohawksoft.com] (talking about CDDL) Well, I personally dislike the lack of freedom in the license and the fact that I can't, according to the license, create a proper kernel module. It has to be used as a FUSE system and that isn't acceptable. I'll state up-front, that I am pro-GPL and I always have issue the GPL isn't free arguments. Back in the 1800s the anti-slavery movement was seen as an attack to the freedom of plantation owners to own slaves. The freedom to take from others is not a freedom. CDDL grants more freedom than GPL. That is why it's incompatible with GPL. Because CDDL explicitly allows code developers to distribute their code under other licenses, and keep some of it closed source if they want to. GPL explicitly disallows that freedom, which is why CDDL is incompatible with GPL. Yes, exactly, I write software I make it free to use and distribute, but I do not make it something you can capture as your own and deny any down-stream users of the same access to MY code that you got. If you are a free software developer, developing under GPL, you are putting restrictions on the way your code can be used by the recipient, and you are opening the door for a 3rd party to sue the recipient on your behalf, without any benefit to you. Such is the case (for example) with the FSF suing linksys for incorporating busybox into their routers without notification to consumers. The developers of busybox had nothing to do with the lawsuit, and did not benefit from the lawsuit. You are thinking about it as if it is a two party transaction which is incorrect. It is an [n] party transaction chain where the originating party wishes to preserve the rights of 1+n chain of down stream recipients. Nothing in the GPL forbids you from selling a product created from GPL source, have at it. If, however, you use someone's GPL free (as in freedom) software and modify it, then you must respect the original creators wishes and make your modifications GPL and publish them as well. If you don't like the terms, make a capital investment and write your own. If you read the terms of L-GPL, the FSF goes off on a rant about how you shouldn't grant such freedoms to the recipient, because the recipient can profit from your freely distributed code, without benefitting you. They say you should use GPL instead, which doesn't grant the recipient freedom to profit from your free code. They neglect to mention that if you use GPL, then the FSF can and will seek opportunity to profit from your code in the form of lawsuit against the recipient, if the recipient is found to be in violation of any of the GPL imposed restrictions. You misunderstand the GPL. It is not a violation to sell a product based on the GPL code. It is a violation to distribute code you acquired via GPL as anything but GPL. The FSF is there to ensure that GPL is enforceable. To use your example, the creators of busybox should have gone after linksys themselves. Linksys should have published their changes to busybox. It wasn't that Linksys used busybox, it was that Linksys modified busybox and didn't publish their changes. I acknowledge and understand that there are pros and cons of both licenses, philosophically and materially. I'm not saying one license is better than another, as a generalization; although in specific cases, each license can sometimes be better than the other. I don't agree with this. The GPL is the source of a HUGE amount of free code to build on and learn from. It ensures that improvements get added back. Software is a capital investment in time and effort. I'm a capitalist and I take offense to a license that allows someone to take my intellectual property that I have intentionally shared and deny others the benefits I intend. That is theft. I am saying the statement representing CDDL as a lack of freedom and bias in favor of GPL on these grounds, is factually incorrect. In the first transaction where I publish and you wish to use, there are restrictions on you, this is true. However, my restrictions on you preserve the freedoms of my code to those to whom you distribute. I hardly call the principal that you have the freedom to deny others the freedom you enjoy, a freedom. If you don't like it, then make your own capital investment and write your own software. The GPL is more free than other licenses because it keeps you from denying the freedom that allows you to succeed from others. The freedom to deny freedom is not a freedom. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home NAS redux
On 01/02/2013 04:25 PM, Rich Pieri wrote: On Wed, 02 Jan 2013 15:33:30 -0500 Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: If you want to use GPL code, you can do *anything* *you* want with it. No, I cannot. The GPL binds software to itself. It is in this way that GPL projects like the Linux kernel have taken from BSD without giving anything back. They can't. Derivatives of GPL software are themselves GPL software. Accepting code from the Linux kernel back into BSD would turn the entire BSD tree into GPL software. The various BSD projects refuse to accept the terms of the GPL. This is an unfortunate circumstance, but hardly an example of where GPL is not free. Refusal to accept the terms of a license is a completely voluntary decision. The BSD license has allowed a great deal of software to be subverted to the detriment of the various BSD projects. This is a perfect example of how the BSD license does not protect your freedom. Granted in an ironic way. Forcing someone to accept unwanted license terms in order to share in, and benefit from, open source software development is not freedom. It is a denial of freedom. No one is forcing anyone to do anything. A software author chooses the GPL to protect the users of his software. If you want to modify or use GPL code, that was not originally written by you, then you must abide by the GPL by which you acquired the software. The GPL protects subsequent user's from your apparent desire to deny their access to the source code. If you have a problem with the GPL, then don't use someone else's GPL software. I still do not see what the problem is. There is no force being used. The *only* thing you can't do is make it non-free when distributing it. That is hardly a restriction to *your* freedom, it merely prevents you from making it less free for others. And as you quote: Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves --Abraham Lincoln. Neither of us are right or wrong. We have different perspectives. Well, I'm not a fan of equivocation. I disagree with you and I believe you to be wrong. You may believe differently and that is your right, but I do not accept a diminishment of my argument simply because we continue to disagree. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Travelling abroad taking technology
On 12/31/2012 12:03 PM, Matt Shields wrote: On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com mailto:ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: What am I missing? Why can't you FedEx it? On 12/31/2012 10:36 AM, Matt Shields wrote: I have buildout a datacenter in London in January and I've ordered everything I need directly to the datacenter because of everything I've heard about dealing with customs. The only exception of a single piece of equipment we forgot that probably won't make it if I ship it now (a Cisco serial console server). I know that I can carry my laptop on the plane and go through custom's fine, but is it possible to carry something like that with me or pack it in a suitcase and go through customs? Matt My understanding is Fedex or UPS'ing it would take a month to get through customs. That's just what I've been told. That would be insanity. I was shipped via DHL some parts from china to the US in two days. I don't know about customs in the UK, but I can't believe a month. Businesses would not be able to do business. Matt ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] Home NAS redux
I have a D-Link DNS-321, its OK as a backup system. Its small and energy efficient, all that nice stuff, but with drive mirroring, it is SLOW as a dog, and a slow dog at that. 5~10 megabyte per second over 1gb ethernet is painful. I'm considering software raid 5, 3x2TB disks to put me at 4TB of raid storage. Share with NFS and Samba, I'll even share virtual devices through iscsi. I'll use the DAAP server to share media. The questions are these: I sort of like having a web interface to the DLINK-321, are there any similar projects for Linux? FreeNAS is targeted toward freebsd and uses ZFS, I do not wish to use zfs for license issues. When not in use, I'd like the system to spin down the hard disks and use less power. Is anyone familiar with doing this on PC based (non-laptop) hardware? I know you can use hdparm for the disk spindown, but does Wake-On-Lan really work? I've used the Linux software raid in the past with mixed results. What is your take on the modern iteration of the code? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] OT Rant/Discussion C vs C++
I started programming back in the 1970s. When I learned C, C was a new language. ANSI C was a big thing and we had to port to ANSI C because various vendors implemented vagueness in the C syntax differently. Those of us who understood portability between C compilers fared better. Anyway, when C++ came along, it was a similar sort of deal. The rough edges around the language were different across different vendors. Templates especially. Understanding this always made maintaining the code, over time, easier. As C++ developed, those of us who were conservative in our implementations fared well in the Borland/Microsoft C++ war. In adopting C++, the general rule was to use the safe constructs of the language and use only those aspects of the language that facilitated the architecture and leave the rest alone. Even today, aspects of C++ create immense bloat in code. (Templates) Maybe old habits are hard to break, I don't know, but I still consider the old way a good design philosophy. The whole [OT] C++ strings discussion is a perfect example. A C++ programmer and/or architect should resist the temptation to be language lawyers and design software that requires understanding the arcana of the language to understanding the body of the code. It may be clever, but it makes the code hard to understand and of reduced value in the future. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] OT Volunteering for School Presentations
I just did a presentation at my daughters 1st grade class. It was about my career in computer science and technology. I brought the robot, because lets face it, all performances are improved by props. The kids were REALLY excited about it. Most questions were kiddish, of course, but there were a few that showed real curiosity and innate talent. One parent emailed and said her daughter was talking about robots all night. One teacher asked why it said Linux on the side. It occurred to me that one of the missions of BLU is advocacy. While open source and free software won't have the resources of the likes of Microsoft or Apple, it does have people that know how to do things. Kids at school need to see that math is cool and that science is fun. The problem, IMHO, is that math and science are taught from a maths or science perspective which is kind of dry. If presented from an engineering perspective, it could be made a lot more fun. And for those purists out there, remember, we had steam locomotives before a full understanding of thermodynamics. I have a 21 year old who is a senior in college, and a 7 year old who is in first grade. I'm not knocking teachers here, but there is a real need to add substance to their lessons. Doing some cool things and bringing them to the schools for the kids will help our communities. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] Looking for some good people at my company
We need some good people. (1) We need a Linux configuration guru to build and test kernels, package software in RPMS (or debs), work with PAM modules, code in perl, python, and C. You would really really need to be able to roll your own system upgrade. The interview process is tough, and you need to be able to withstand some egos. OpenSSL, OpenSSH, and all forms of linux configuration are important. (2) We need a couple/few fantastic C guys. You would need to be very familiar with file system concepts, large data, threading, memory management, really really be able to explain the difference between BSD and Linux mutexes. You will also need to be solid with the standard algorithms, hash, trees, lists, as well as the more advanced indexing techniques. Understanding how virtual memory paging affects algorithms otherwise expressed with big O notation is a good start. This is not an entry level position, it is a position where we need people who know their stuff. Contact me, and I'll tell you the company. You can't blame me for wanting the referral! ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Yet Another Laptop Recommendation Thread
I just got a Dell Inspiron i15R with an Intel i7, 8g RAM, 1T disk, usb3, wirelesss-N, HDMI, USB3, WebCam, and DVD+/-RW at Microcenter, I haven't plugged in the HDMI jack yet (I should do that soon), the install went flawless. No drivers, no weirdness, just worked with Ubuntu 12.04 On 09/29/2012 10:38 PM, David Kramer wrote: Either the backlight or the inverter died in my 5-year-old Dell D820 laptop. Fixing it doesn't make financial sense, though I may throw it on my rack and hook it up to my KVM for something, as I've figured out how to tell X to disable the internal monitor and use the external monitor as the primary. I've decided I want to go with a desktop machine for my main computer, so I can use a better keyboard and bigger monitor, but I still need something portable, too. I'm looking for a laptop that doesn't have to be a desk-melting screamer, but it also doesn't make sense to put money in anything *too* wimpy. I plan on splitting the hard drive to Windows/Kubuntu 12.04LTS, so I need a supported video card. Really the only reason I want to get a laptop NOW is that I don't want Windows 8, otherwise I would put it off. I find Windows 7 relatively stable and inoffensive. Through work I can get significant discounts on Lenovo and HP laptops, so I'm focusing on them. I just priced out a ThinkPad T530, and it was over $900 with the discount, and I picked the slowest i5 processor they have and 4GB RAM (though the better video card). That seems a bit much. Maybe I should look at i3 processors. Many of the models had ~14 screens, and I want at least 15. Any comparisons of HP vs Lenovo, or specific models that have worked or not worked with Linux would be great. Thanks. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] suggestions on how to free code?
On 08/13/2012 10:30 PM, Eric Chadbourne wrote: Hi All, Making code GPL is easy. Putting it on an open version control (github, sourceforge, etc)is easy. In short the mechanics of what you want to do is easy and well documented. Two things in your email suggest it won't get a lot of following: 20 different applications and too expensive. This is usually a indication the you are in a vertical market where the population of potential users/contributors is quite small. Even today most Windows developers have never been to source forge. The idea that someone in your field will look for an open source version of this tool is remote. The fact that there are 20 different app's to choose from may indicate that it is a problem that is reasonably solvable and more to the point, may be fun to solve and without needing a lot of coding infrastructure to support the function. Creating the community is quite difficult. Assuming you can get the word out about your project (which isn't easy), it has to be something people want and written in such a way that people will want to use it instead of writing their own. It has to be more efficient to learn how to use your project than it is to write their own. Depending on what the app is, there is a trust issue, they'll need to reasonably believe it will work before they even download it to test it. They'll want the familiar configure/make paradigm, bells and whistles, docs, etc. It will need to be easy to configure and should have some examples so that they can see it work immediately, we are, after all, and impatient bunch. Just getting your system, what ever it is, to the point where it has a chance is a lot of work. All in all, search github or sourceforge for projects, there are tons of them! Some really cool, but most, it seams, largely abandoned. My advice to you is to put it in GPL if you like, it costs nothing and *maybe* someone will benefit. However, there is no hard and fast way to create a viable community. Even with the best of projects its hard and unlikely. Where I work we needed some software. We evaluated about 20 different applications, free and non-free. They were either too expensive (I work at a non-profit) or just sucked. So we rolled our own. I just had my annual review and all I asked for was to make our app gplv3 and allow me to release it. The boss doesn't mind. So I'm tiding things up and will release before xmass. We use this application to manage constituents daily. I wrote it all. Not the best code but works as advertised. My question is, how to release in a way that lays the foundation for a community? I just read http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Release-Practice-HOWTO/index.html and like it mucho. Any other tips from BLU? Thanks, Eric ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] Big Data obsession
In our drawn out discussion about databases, and most discussions about databases this happens as well, the subject of HUGE scalability was trotted out. Now I am by no means dismissing big data as a real problem. Seriously, I worked on some pretty large systems -- hundreds of servers. It is a complicated problem. Not only do you need to get the most out of each system, but you have to make many systems work as a single logical one. There are some businesses that really need this functionality and scale, but, the problem is that 99.99% of the software being developed will NEVER EVER scale to that size. The developers are so eager to solve that problem that they forgo more practical designs. Also, no matter what you do, it will take a lot of time to grow to that size! So, even if it is envisioned in the business plan, you'll have probably cashed out your stock options and be living on an island before you need to develop it. My favorite example is facebook. Yes, they are a big data show case. OMFG they have a lot of data and a lot of computational requirements. They did not start out dreaming of big data. It started small and grew. I believe that this inadvertent strategy helped them greatly. By focusing on the site and what it did and *not* how to make it scale until scalability was needed they were able to be attractive to more users more quickly. Opinions? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?
On 08/04/2012 01:50 PM, Rich Braun wrote: Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com observed: My favorite example is facebook. Yes, they are a big data show case. OMFG they have a lot of data and a lot of computational requirements. They did not start out dreaming of big data. It started small and grew. I believe that this inadvertent strategy helped them greatly. By focusing on the site and what it did and *not* how to make it scale until scalability was needed they were able to be attractive to more users more quickly. Opinions? Being the one who kicked off this thread, my original goal was to get specific technical arguments (plus a couple of business arguments like the ratio of MySQL-experienced DBAs to PostgreSQL DBAs available on the job market) to present to decision-makers who control what technology to use on new projects. OK, yea, we got caught up the No-SQL vs SQL argument. So far at work I've got MyWay or the HiWay from the bosses: thou shalt use MySQL. Period. Suits me OK because I already know its quirks well, but it looks to me like more than ever the alternative of PostgreSQL (and no other FOSS product) is viable for small and large companies alike. But the thrashing of this discussion thread has given me nothing to send off to the senior tech architects at my office. Not one of the postings here has been phrased in a way that would grab such a person by the throat and persuade them to read further. Your argument above, Mark, is what I hear all the time both here and at my last employer: We're Agile, so we can start off doing things wrong and fix them later. About $15 million and 20 months into a $6 million/9-month project (hah), at my last job we recognized that what the software team had built was a bug-ridden replacement of the previous unsupportable bug-ridden software, and most of the new software's developers quit--leaving the replacement equally unsupportable. But hey, the new one had lots of fancy stored-procs and took advantage of all of MySQL 5.1's nifty features. So if it were /my/ $15 million, I'm not so sure I'd take the position that I should focus mainly on the software features. But of course, I'm an infra guy so I'm biased: the infra goes in (2 of everying, HA from the get-go) before the first feature gets crafted. It's cheap enough to do these days, though it hasn't gotten much easier. If PostgreSQL makes it easier to set up HA, and recover from failures, than MySQL--I'd love to make that case. But going back to the Facebook startup argument--let's build this cool web page and see if people like it--then the HA argument doesn't even get considered. I have to say something that I don't like saying because I sound like a jerk. Sometimes, if you need to ask a certain type of question, then answer can't do you any good. Seriously, in the MySQL vs PostgreSQL debate, if you know about database theory and have some serious experience with databases other than MySQL, you would say there is no debate, PostgreSQL is the obvious choice. If you don't have the background or experience, then, things like MVCC, ACID, and transactions don't mean anything to you. Worse yet, chances are you'll see them as a problem because in a single stand-alone query, they do add additional processing. Compare it to the squared circle debate in math. If you don't understand PI, you won't accept it. Another example is firewall security: if you've got this cool new web site running, and later decide to add firewalls: it'll be a lot more effort, and probably more outage-prone, trying to figure out on the fly which TCP ports and IP addresses should be opened up, and how to pull apart portions of the app to run on back-end servers with layered security. So, that's why I like to include robustness as part of Iteration Zero in the agile framework. Well, it is almost assuredly impossible to start at position 0 and get it right the first try. There is institutional learning involved. This is where the development team is learning about what they are creating as a business. This is typically the start up phase of a company or a new product. By the time you get system up and running, the design has almost certainly churned over several phases. Site 2.0 is typically sold internally as the rebuild to end all rebuilds. It never is. It is defined as the fix to all the mistakes that were made for all those many reasons during 1.0. I wish I could give you some real ammunition, but it isn't about bullets, it is about really knowing the subject matter. Anyone wanting to defend their position will have bullets too. You need to know WHY your bullets are better, and more importantly, you need to know why their bullets are wrong. I could rattle off a number of pros and cons for PostgreSQL, but it would not help. Real knowledge is the only way to win this debate, if, of course, it can be win. Some people's minds can not be changed no matter what proof is given. I have
Re: [Discuss] Open source, apps, and money
On 08/03/2012 01:45 PM, Doug wrote: Once there is 1) money and 2) more than one person, things would appear to get so much more complicated. Say one guy contributed one little block of code one time and leaves. Said code is then part of every subsequent release. Along with README and changelog, must there be a MONEY file? I know that the GPL does not mean the software can be used for free, but how does one make that clear? Well, you can insist that all submissions become the property of the project owner. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?
On 08/02/2012 03:46 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: On 8/2/2012 12:50 PM, Mark Woodward wrote: This is incorrect. No system with more than one of anything can consistently get O(1). There has to be some way of getting a specific I'll touch on this point down below. That is your opinion, you are welcome to have it, but if you want to debate, put up some arguments to assert the veracity of your assertions. If you question my decisions, that's fine, but make sure you back up your statements with facts that can be debated, otherwise it is just a personal insult. The largest example I can think of is the VA Hospital system. It uses an object database for record keeping for some 8 million veterans. Delivered early and under budget, by the way. Not to be snide, but 8 million is not a big number. A little smaller is Partners Healthcare here in Boston. My knowledge is a little out of date on this but they were looking at deploying a system for over 30K users across all of the hospitals in town. OK One that I'm more directly familiar with is Ameritrade. I watched Ameritrade's conversion from Oracle to Cache for their customer-facing applications. Why? Because Oracle couldn't keep up with their trading load. Billions of transactions per day. Oracle couldn't keep up; the database cluster kept crashing. Well, billions of transactions per day should be doable in a cluster. If your oracle database is crashing, it is misconfigured. Financial transactions are a dangerous thing, you really do need ACID for fiduciary responsibility. You are conflating database structure with nomenclature. Under any storage system, there is data management. Classes and inheritance do not magically do anything. You must code version migration to successive versions. This may be merely pre-initializing member variables, but it has to be done none the less. No, I'm not. It's one of the beautiful things about object databases. It's the same as object-oriented programming: you build your classes and let inheritance organize data. In the cases where you need to provide assistance you incorporate that logic as a method. You are avoiding the topic, the storage system, is separate from the implementation of the objects. The objects know how to serialize and restore themselves as well as upgrade. The storage and location of objects is not involved. It's great that Oracle, et.al., provide means of doing it but you're still constrained by the relational model. How? Relational tables. That is not a how, it is a adjective and a plural noun. One does not need to use relations in a database, but one has them if they need them. An RDBMS is a tool not some kind of mandate. How? How does one nest in an object store? An object, once instantiated, instantiates another object. Why does this not work. The object has hierarchical data? That's in the XML/JSON. Any generic object management system with any specific object implementation needs to work out these relationships. You don't instantiate two objects; you instantiate an object with a sub-object as one of its elements. It's basic OOP design. Yes, ok, that is done with the XML/JSON class description. What's the problem? This is nonsense. Seriously. I have a table: This is my point: you have a table. The table is a kind of object but everything in a relational database is defined in terms of or in relation to tables. So what you have is not an XML object; it's a table with an XML object stored in one of its cells. You are confusing the SQL language with data storage. In postgreSQL, for instance, a table is nothing more than file filled with variable length objects. Its called a table out of canonical usage. You are mistaking a semantic difference with a technical one. If I said the XML was stored in a binary polymorphic object file and it could be retrieved by its ID, would that make a difference? Because, that is exactly what is happening. For convenience, we call the the polymorphic object file a table. The best part is that, in postgresql, I can index on fields within the object to find an object based on the value of a property. Can your object store do that? No. Object databases don't need this kind of indexing. You reference data by Object.Sub-object.Slot.data. This is how object databases deliver consistent O(1) performance. Sorry, no. It is either a hash table, or they are hiding the index from you. Either way, it doesn't matter because databases have hash indexes. And if you say that objects don't need that kind of indexing, then you miss the real power of database. If you have 8 million objects, say patients in a database. How do you find them by social security numbers? How about by last name? How about by symptoms? Information is not a static thing. It needs to be usable to be valuable. Well, yes, I could make a cycle with 5 wheels, but there are conventions. Screw conventions. If a 5-wheel cycle is what
Re: [Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?
On 08/02/2012 08:44 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: On 8/2/2012 4:36 PM, Mark Woodward wrote: Not to be snide, but 8 million is not a big number. That's 8 million patients. Multiply that by everything that the VA has on each and every one of them and you get a very large data set. It's not the largest data set that I'm aware of. The largest is the data out of the LHC which is around 200 petabytes. CERN went the other way. They started with an object databases but eventually dropped it due to poor market development OODBMSs. They currently use relational databases for storing and retrieving metadata. Bulk data is stored in flat files. Well, billions of transactions per day should be doable in a cluster. That's what Ameritrade and Oracle thought but they couldn't make it work. If your oracle database is crashing, it is misconfigured. The Oracle techs working with Ameritrade couldn't keep the cluster going. They eventually gave up when Ameritrade wouldn't commit to replacing the entire cluster with bigger servers. Ahhh Bingo! We have the problem. Financial transactions are a dangerous thing, you really do need ACID for fiduciary responsibility. Cache' delivers full ACID guarantee. I told you I wasn't talking about NoSQL/MongoDB. Cool. Cache' is an interesting system, and there are pros and cons to using it of course. Suffice to say, if you don't need precisely what it provides, you wouldn't buy it. You are avoiding the topic, the storage system, is separate from the implementation of the objects. The objects know how to serialize and restore themselves as well as upgrade. The storage and location of objects is not involved. Of course I am. It's not relevant to the topic, which is the technical merits of object vs relational databases. You are arguing semantics. An RDBMS is just a data store as is an object based db. Now, clustering an RDBMS system has the same set of problems as clustering an object store. In the end, they are just storing data. The scaling part is, of course, product specific and each system implements clustering differently, but in the end its just data going on to disk in an order that is retrievable. Hopefully with ACID compliance. That is not a how, it is a adjective and a plural noun. One does not need to use relations in a database, but one has them if they need them. An RDBMS is a tool not some kind of mandate. Then why bother with a relational database at all? Who's bothering? The singular strength of a relational database is the relations between data. This is No-SQL nonsense. The strength of an RDBMS is the man-centuries of work and science embodied in retrieving data. The relational capability is a very powerful tool, sure, but in the end the real science is finding the data you want. If you don't use relations then the relational database is the wrong tool for the job. This is absolutely incorrect. Relations are a feature not the sole purpose. Finding specific data in a large data set is no easy task. Take this SQL query: select * from songs where artist = 'various'; A songs table can have many millions of entries, and a good percent of them will have artists as 'various' because the come from collections. Now, a good RDBMS will understand that it is probably faster to ignore the index. Now take this query: select * from songs where artist = 'Joe Kidd' Then the system will find only a few songs and the RDBMS will understand that it should use the index. Note that these are not relational queries. There are no joins, but SQL is used to find the data. Despite what you say, and object store is a data graveyard if it does not support aggregation or location of data. Data has no value if it can not be processed. Chances are the object stores will be dumped to an RDBMS for OLAP. My argument is why bother with the object store? Yes, ok, that is done with the XML/JSON class description. What's the problem? The problem is that you're stuck with tables. You don't have an object. You have an object stored in a table. Even if it is a table with a single column and a single row it's still a table. If I said the XML was stored in a binary polymorphic object file and it could be retrieved by its ID, would that make a difference? Because, that is exactly what is happening. For convenience, we call the the polymorphic object file a table. Sure, that works. OK, then you see my point. Again, why bother with a relational database if you want to short-circuit all of the relational functions? Because A Relational Database Management System is a super set of Database Management System. You need some sort of DBMS on which to base an object store, and PostgreSQL gives you the R for free. Which was my original point: why bother with inferior tools like relational databases when superior tools like object databases are available? Because object stores are not superior, they are, by definition
Re: [Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?
On 07/31/2012 01:34 PM, Rich Braun wrote: Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: Well, with MySQL, create index and drop index LOCK the tables as they are operating. LOCK THE TABLES. Think about that. In PostgreSQL, Oracle, and any real database, create index and drop index only impact performance in as much as any other transaction. True of older versions, less true of 5.5. NDBCLUSTER storage engine works around this by propagating the update to cluster members one at a time, taking each offline. InnoDB does a table copy. Provided you have a cluster of course, but it still raises the issue of effectively removing a machine from the cluster. You're right that MySQL's rivals had a better design for this operation; future versions of MySQL could replace this logic. But as far as it being a showstopper for production, that depends. It hardly depends. It is indicative of a bad design. For any active site, this kind of behavior problematic, you have to be able to admit that. Here is where I have a problem with these types technical debates. This is not a subjective point. With another real database this is not a problem. Side by side, PostgreSQL and MySQL are both free and comparable in many ways. This is absolutely one clear reason to choose PostgreSQL over MySQL. Is it a show stopper for you, perhaps not, but I tell you this one little gem has caused me a great deal of actual grief. If there are design deficiencies in a tool and a better designed tool, at the same price, is available why would you not choose the better designed tool? It make no sense. I am not pro PostgreSQL so much as anti bad databases. It is only the fact that PostgreSQL embodies so much of what a good database does that it is a defacto example. I would use Oracle in this discussion, maybe even DB2, but those are not open source and very expensive, the obvious counter argument would be that MySQL is free. In my case, I'll be having to deal with large table sizes, but there will rarely be changes to indices and the nature of the business permits taking the DB offline for maintenance (unlike a public site). So this is only one of many criteria for choosing a system. (Note also that even with a public site like at my last employer, we had some solid workarounds using read-only slaves which enabled us to update indices easily enough without major production impact.) OK, if you are going to have large tables, forget MySQL. A number of years ago I contracted at Yahoo. I wrote a data collection system that would query snmp info from every system they had, as well as dmesg and other performance and configuration information. The idea was that they could analyze infrastructure to calculate the proper compute requirements for each business unit. The premise was that eight 5 year old computers could be replaced with two or three new ones and save space and power usage, or that a business unit with 6 servers, even at peak, only needed 4, and so on. On the first run, we isolated enough dead-wood that the estimated savings would over a million dollars in power. At the start of the project, I said MySQL would not work and that I would need either Oracle or PostgreSQL. I offered that I could go with PostgreSQL while they were working on the Oracle license. As I was transferring the project to their IT, a new IT director came on. Dictated MySQL, his words were We have invested a lot of money into MySQL and we have MySQL experts here, it can work on MySQL. Sigh, people who don't understand databases should not choose databases. This edict had nothing to do with any understanding of what we were doing. Well, working with a MySQL contributor and a well regarded yahoo internal expert. A query that took a painful minute and a half on PostgreSQL could not be made any faster than 20 minutes on MySQL. To compound the problem, the indexing issue made life painful. To try a new index, we would have to turn off the system and let it re-index before we could do ANYTHING with it. It was a terrible experience. This kind of technical comparison is exactly what I'm looking for. If I had a list of the top-10 things that PostgreSQL does better than MySQL then I'd probably have a case. One or two won't be enough. Well, I strongly suggest watching the video. The stuff about MySQL is at the beginning so you don't have to watch it all. Also, seriously, start with PostgreSQL and post any questions on BLU. I bet you could get some great advice. I can only say that if you are used to MySQL, you will find yourself initially saying PostgreSQL does that?!?! Really?! The light will shine and you'll never go back. -rich ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?
On 08/01/2012 08:36 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: Mark, In my opinion, the problem with MySQL is not that it locks tables. It's that it has tables. Oh no! Don't buy in to the No-SQL nonsense. A table is nothing more than a naming convention of the technique of storing related data in the same logical unit of storage. There is no such thing as a good RDBMS. They're all bad. They all suck. I disagree and I would LOVE to have a civil debate about this subject on this group. They're all designed around a data storage and retrieval philosophy that was obsolete 30 years ago. This is basically FUD, of course. You say it is obsolete, but you give no examples as to why. Electricity is far older and it is not obsolete. Tables are slow and they don't scale. Like I said, table is a naming convention. It is useful for expressing data relationships in a canonically understandable language, but a table doesn't really describe anything technically. Why don't they scale? A name/value pair is nothing more than a two entry row in a column in a table. Perhaps even the key is a virtual value within the index, but, none the less, one can express it as a table. There are faster, more robust, more flexible and more scalable ways of storing and retrieving data than hyper-thyroidal spreadsheets. Why? Why do you think that this is true? SQL is nothing more than a language and an algebra around data storage. The underlying storage is what scales. SQL is just a language for accessing it. The big No-SQL storage systems are all getting SQL front-ends because ad-hoc APIs are bad. You say there are more robust, flexible, and scalable ways of storing data. Like what? How is it *not* a table? Which makes me wonder why you're such a strong advocate of PostgreSQL over MySQL. You wrote, [i]f there are design deficiencies in a tool and a better designed tool, at the same price, is available why would you not choose the better designed tool? Why, in light of this, do you bother with relational databases? PostgreSQL may suck less than MySQL but it still sucks. Why are you not advocating a tool that doesn't suck? Well, like I said, lets have that debate. SQL is a language NOT a database. MongoDB is webscale! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs While I don't agree with MySQL POV, but the video is funny and sounds like your arguments. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?
On 07/30/2012 05:28 PM, Derek Atkins wrote: Sure, and there's a lot to be said for using tools with which you are comfortable. Like everything, it's a tool. The key is using the right tool for the job. Just because you need an RDBMS does NOT imply that PG is *the* right tool. It is *a* right tool. There are other choices, and those other choices *are* valid. It all depends on the requirements. Without knowing the requirements all other discussion is purely rhetorical or religious, neither of which belong on a technical list. As a start, off the top of my head, I can describe one MySQL problem that absolutely eliminates it from consideration for a production database. Suppose you have the street map database of the USA or some other very very large table, millions of rows. In production, your query performance is poor. You do some analysis and work out an index that betters your query performance substantially. You want to deploy that new index WITHOUT bringing down the site. Well, with MySQL, create index and drop index LOCK the tables as they are operating. LOCK THE TABLES. Think about that. In PostgreSQL, Oracle, and any real database, create index and drop index only impact performance in as much as any other transaction. When they are done, presto! your query is faster. Neat, huh? That is just one problem that I consider a show stopper. You should watch the first 15 minutes of the video that started this message chain. In fact, I would wager, if you watched the whole thing, you'd never consider MySQL again. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?
On 07/31/2012 02:03 PM, Derek Atkins wrote: Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com writes: On 07/30/2012 05:28 PM, Derek Atkins wrote: Sure, and there's a lot to be said for using tools with which you are comfortable. Like everything, it's a tool. The key is using the right tool for the job. Just because you need an RDBMS does NOT imply that PG is *the* right tool. It is *a* right tool. There are other choices, and those other choices *are* valid. It all depends on the requirements. Without knowing the requirements all other discussion is purely rhetorical or religious, neither of which belong on a technical list. As a start, off the top of my head, I can describe one MySQL problem that absolutely eliminates it from consideration for a production database. Suppose you have the street map database of the USA or some other very very large table, millions of rows. In production, your query performance is poor. You do some analysis and work out an index that betters your query performance substantially. You want to deploy that new index WITHOUT bringing down the site. Well, with MySQL, create index and drop index LOCK the tables as they are operating. LOCK THE TABLES. Think about that. In PostgreSQL, Oracle, and any real database, create index and drop index only impact performance in as much as any other transaction. When they are done, presto! your query is faster. Neat, huh? That is just one problem that I consider a show stopper. You should watch the first 15 minutes of the video that started this message chain. In fact, I would wager, if you watched the whole thing, you'd never consider MySQL again. It's a show stopper if you have an application that needs that large a piece of data. However if you only need a half-dozen tables with a few hundred or maybe a few thousand lines, then this isn't an issue. You are sort of missing the point. It locks tables. That's bad. The video that started this chain had a VERY good explanation of why this is bad. Much better than I can do in text. Sure, PG is technically better in that it doesn't have this drawback, but in the real-world example of a low-end application you just never hit those cases where PG really shows its strengths. That isn't true AT ALL. The feature that makes this possible is MVCC. It helps you in a lot of ways that are not obvious until you get bitten. The index locking up is a problem, I've had this issue on every MySQL project I've on, but MVCC helps you far beyond that. With PostgreSQL, you can control the visibility of concurrent transactions, which means two active transactions do not interfere with each other. -derek ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?
On 07/30/2012 05:28 PM, Derek Atkins wrote: Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com writes: That being said, my personal opinion is that *anyone* who chooses MySQL without a clear and present Only MySQL will with our apps requirement, is not much of a DBA and a terrible engineer. This sounds like a relugious argument, not a technical argument. Replace MySQL with Python, or Shell above and it can read just as vitriolic. Well, all this depends upon what is being compared and how. If the prices were the same, which would you prefer? A Fiat or a Mercedes? In an argument of actual merit, MySQL does not hold a candle to PostgreSQL. Facts are facts. I'm not saying that you can't accomplish a job with MySQL, I mean, people do drive Fiats quite frequently with success, but it is inarguable that a Mercedes is a better car. Just as MySQL is very much inferior to PostgreSQL. The video is a good primmer and start at understanding *why* MySQL is bad. I've been using PostgreSQL for over 15 years and it is one of those tools that I keep in my belt because it is just amazing at how easy it makes otherwise difficult tasks. Every year it keeps getting better. I have been on far too many projects where some guy chooses MySQL because everyone else does and stuff that would be trivial in PostgreSQL are a nightmare. On the flip side, I have yet to see something that would be easy with MySQL that isn't equally as easy using PostgreSQL. And I have the inverse. I've been using MySQL for over 10 years, I'm comfortable with it. The one or two times I had to interact with PG I had no idea what it was doing or how to talk to it. IIRC I couldn't even figure out how to get it to simply give me the list of tables in a database, let alone quit out of the client! With MySQL it's a simple explain table;. Well, sorry if I am harsh, but ignorance of a tool is not the tool's fault. Blaming PostgreSQL because it is not MySQL is like blaming Mercedes because it isn't a Fiat. PostgreSQL is actually more compliant to SQL standard than MySQL. I'm sure PG has some way to do it, and *ONCE YOU KNOW IT* it's simple. However once you've spent 10, 15 years with a tool then you don't want to spend another 10-15 years learning another tool just to get as comfortable as you are now. It isn't about comfort it is about functionality. I will learn the tool that can best do the job. MySQL, quite simply, is a bad database for many many reasons. As I tell my son, You have to own your opinions. Merely accepting someone else's opinion isn't good enough. Believe what you want, but make sure you understand what you believe and why. Sure, and there's a lot to be said for using tools with which you are comfortable. NO! Comfort is no reason to choose a database. Unless you do not care about a product life cycle, you choose the tools and infrastructure based on merit. Every component in a project has to earn its place. Like everything, it's a tool. Yes, both MySQL and PostgreSQL are free, so the *only* debate is about functionality, including accuracy and performance, as well as storage and administration. On the grounds of merit, MySQL can not win. The key is using the right tool for the job. I hear that sorry line for MySQL proponents a lot. What qualifies something as the right tool? Both are free. Should not the right tool be the one with the highest merit? Just because you need an RDBMS does NOT imply that PG is *the* right tool. It is *a* right tool. Absolutely not. I've been doing database work in my career since dBase, I have used a *lot* of databases: db2, advanced revelation, sybase, oracle, mysql, msql, postres, sqlite23, mssql, a slew of xbase systems, and a lot of system that I don't really consider databases like Berkeley db, and a whole lot I don't even remember. When you want a database, you want a tool to organize, store, and query your data. Presumably within some economical representation and with performance. Then you do the engineering involved, compare the various tools available and weigh the pros and cons, including price, by the way, and if you are intellectually honest, MySQL won't measure up. If you say you don't need transactions, that is because you don't understand transactions. if you say multi-version concurrency isn't important, that is because you don't understand what it is, and why you need it. The hard part of this discussion is that the important features of PostgreSQL that MySQL lacks are there for very good reasons. PostgreSQL makes doing the hard stuff of a data centric application less hard. There are other choices, and those other choices *are* valid. It all depends on the requirements. I'm not an all opinions are valid type of guy. I don't like technical discussions were opinions and preferences weight the same as facts. Give me a list of technical requirements for a database for a real life project (not facebook thank you very much) , and I'll explain why
[Discuss] Fighting UEFI
As you may or may not know, UEFI is a new boot loader that will make a common PC more like a game console when it comes to freedom of choice. Hardware has very thin margins, if enough people buy UEFI, open it, and try to install Ubuntu, and fail, and return it. It will increase their cost. t will not be cost effective for them to sell a product that locks out the proper rights of ownership. When UEFI comes out, *everyone* buy one, make sure you open all the books and CDs and wires, break all the new seals and return it and say that the UEFI boot loader makes it unacceptable. The store will send it back. It will cost the companies trying to push this on the consumers. They will get the message if their gross cost of goods goes up because of returns from unsatisfied customers. Which, of course, we will be. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Fighting UEFI
On 07/28/2012 01:59 PM, Chuck Anderson wrote: To be fair, it isn't UEFI per se that is the problem, it is Secure Boot. My current laptop works just fine in UEFI mode and doesn't support Secure Boot. Most current servers also support UEFI without Secure Boot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface Yes, fair enough, but the point still stands. If manufacturers create a product that precludes our rights as owners of it, we need to fight back. Merely boycotting isn't enough, we have to take a bite out of there profits. If we boycott, our numbers don't amount to much and the loss would be negligible. If we make increase their costs and create the perception that a larger segment of customers find this unacceptable, they will question their policies. Nothing makes a point better than the bottom line. On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 12:59:20PM -0400, Mark Woodward wrote: As you may or may not know, UEFI is a new boot loader that will make a common PC more like a game console when it comes to freedom of choice. Hardware has very thin margins, if enough people buy UEFI, open it, and try to install Ubuntu, and fail, and return it. It will increase their cost. t will not be cost effective for them to sell a product that locks out the proper rights of ownership. When UEFI comes out, *everyone* buy one, make sure you open all the books and CDs and wires, break all the new seals and return it and say that the UEFI boot loader makes it unacceptable. The store will send it back. It will cost the companies trying to push this on the consumers. They will get the message if their gross cost of goods goes up because of returns from unsatisfied customers. Which, of course, we will be. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Oracle Linux, going after CentOs
On 07/24/2012 10:01 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: Oracle killing Red Hat makes even less sense than Oracle buying Red Hat. Seriously, what would Larry Ellison gain from it? Nothing. He already has a software stack. He already has RHEL with the trademarks rasped away. A strong Red Hat makes for a strong Oracle Linux. Weakening Red Hat means a weaker RHEL to molest with a rasp, and killing Red Hat means no RHEL at all. I'm sure that Oracle would recovery from killing Red Hat but why bother? Rolling out a complete enterprise distribution is expensive. Rasps are cheap. I remind you of something that Mark wrote earlier: that CentOS is the defacto free version of RHEL. This makes Red Hat dependent on the CentOS project for getting the foot in the door. What happens if Oracle Linux displaces CentOS as that freebie RHEL? I figure this is what Ellison wants. He's not out to kill Red Hat. He's out to make Oracle a necessity for Red Hat's continued operation. I disagree. Larry Ellison is both crazy and without any personal morals. Its kind of obvious what he's planning when you think about it. Suffocate RedHat, leach off it while you can, when it falters the stock price falls, when the price is right, buy it. It is a long term strategy that may take a few years. At that point, you know Oracle Linux will then no longer be free. Sadly, at that point in time, CentOS my have been replace by the free Oracle Linux. Its a brilliant move and it may work. I hope not, but it may. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Oracle Linux, going after CentOs
On 07/24/2012 11:46 AM, Richard Pieri wrote: On 7/24/2012 10:08 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote: They're not really building their own distro. They are doing what CentOS does, namely distributing a rebranded RHEL. Oracle is selling support for a rebranded RHEL. Everything Oracle does has one purpose: to generate revenue for Oracle. Larry Ellison couldn't care less about CentOS shops because they're not going to pay Oracle or Red Hat or Novell anything anyway. The real target is Red Hat shops that use CentOS for systems that don't require service contracts. I don't think it is just that, no way. The target is RedHat all the way. Like you said, CentOS customers are not buying support, period. The objective is to keep people from getting RedHat in the first place. So, they get a supported equivalent of RedHat for free. RedHat will have to change their model. For the longest time there was a wink and a nod to CentOS being the Free Version of RHEL. With Oracle, they are proposing the support proposition of RHEL, but with no initial acquisition cost. You are a startup. You use CentOS for dev and shoe string bootstrapping. You start getting a little more serious, you upgrade to RHET on the next cycle, which is what you planned. Instead, however, Oracle says start with us, its free, *and* you can buy support later. This is RedHat's old business model, before raw hide which morphed into Fedora. Personally, I *HATE* with a passion Larry and Oracle, but I always felt betrayed when RedHat changed their business model after RedHat 5.0. Here is a situation where RedHat had better adjust or they will lose business. This has nothing to do with CentOS except that it will be destroyed as a result. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] Interesting work in the industry?
While I am currently employed at a pretty good company, I am constantly getting recruitment emails. And they are all the same basic things, java web sites or internet security. Isn't *anyone* doing anything interesting anymore? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?
On 07/22/2012 02:34 PM, Rich Braun wrote: Greg Rundelett wrote: A default installation of MySQL is dangerously too flexible to be trusted with enterprise data. At #185 on the Fortune 500 list, I'm thinking that my current employer's systems probably contain what can be called enterprise data. And it's true that I'm not going to run this data center with a default installation of MySQL; it's already amply tweaked-out based on past experiences at a company roughly 1/500th the size (but with a much-busier and more complex database). I'd love to go back and propose PostgreSQL as an alternative--it's not too late, the place up until July 2012 is an Oracle shop--but there are other criteria like our ability to hire expertise, whether the backup and failover strategies are robust, etc. I have a unique opportunity to influence a key decision in a green-field situation at a very large company and I'd love to have more arguments than just the defaults can't be trusted or sloppy programmers could cause more trouble with this tool than some other. It doesn't matter, really! Every tool you use will have issues. If you show up the guy who chose f, there will come a day when you look like an idiot for replacing it with PostgreSQL. That being said, my personal opinion is that *anyone* who chooses MySQL without a clear and present Only MySQL will with our apps requirement, is not much of a DBA and a terrible engineer. I've been using PostgreSQL for over 15 years and it is one of those tools that I keep in my belt because it is just amazing at how easy it makes otherwise difficult tasks. Every year it keeps getting better. I have been on far too many projects where some guy chooses MySQL because everyone else does and stuff that would be trivial in PostgreSQL are a nightmare. On the flip side, I have yet to see something that would be easy with MySQL that isn't equally as easy using PostgreSQL. As I tell my son, You have to own your opinions. Merely accepting someone else's opinion isn't good enough. Believe what you want, but make sure you understand what you believe and why. -rich ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] i 3 postgresql vid
PostgreSQL is one of the greatest open source projects. As a database, it is my default choice. In fact, unless there is a really strong reason to choose something else, PostgreSQL is what you use. My choices typically are this: small zero configuration, sqlite. shared database postgresql. Oracle is the client does not like open source. Two reasons, if money is no object, then this is no problem. If money is an issue, I can posh PostgreSQL. Not, btw, because I'm a fan boy, but because it is easier to get the work done. On 07/21/2012 09:28 AM, Eric Chadbourne wrote: Hi All, I first learned about PostgreSQL from this list a few years back. We use it at work now and I love it. One of my coworkers (he's the lone mac guy, I'm the lone gnu/linux guy) sent me this video. Interesting comparison of different databases. MySQL is more broken than I had realized. Check it out. http://vimeo.com/43536445 - Eric C ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] Agile Programming OT?
We sort of had a little dust-up about agile programming techniques. Ruffled feathers and I hope no hurt feelings. Hop on over to Slashdot http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/07/14/1242237/new-analyst-report-calls-agile-a-scam-says-its-an-easy-out-for-lazy-devs Ignore the article, but the user comments are interesting. Lots of good points and many different perspectives. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Agile software for a nacent project
On 07/12/2012 12:16 PM, Doug wrote: I think agile development is probably the most abusive management technique ever devised. Sure, aspects of it are good software development processes, but the implementation is pretty exploitive, in my opinion. Every agile environment I have seen works the engineers to death. The scrum meetings are another form of micromanagement with the added benefit of peer coercion. A few years back, a lot of people were excited, but today, I have yet to meet anyone that doesn't think agile is a meat grinder. It burns out good people and produces poor product quality. Does an agile development process make sense for projects that are all volunteer based, with people who don't live in the same states or countries? In my job, we use greenhopper, part of www.atlassian.com set of software. There are morning scrum meetings, story sessions, sprint planning and sprint completions. That makes sense when everyone drives to the same building. For a volunteer based project, those regular meetings are not going to be held. I can imagine a planning board being of use. Look, here, specifically is what we want done next. That could be overkill however, with say a newsgroup, twiki and github being sufficient. If you do think some aspects of the agile process make sense, what software would you use? I could pony up $20/month and use atlassian's hosted service. I don't think I will have 10 people who want to code in a year, but one never knows. If it does take off, then the costs jump. The project of course involves quaternions, thinking about making animation software using the multimedia Java platform known as processing (http://processing.org/) for web sites and android phones. Doug ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Agile software for a nacent project
On 07/12/2012 09:52 PM, David Kramer wrote: On 07/12/2012 12:53 PM, Mark Woodward wrote: I think agile development is probably the most abusive management technique ever devised. Sure, aspects of it are good software development processes, but the implementation is pretty exploitive, in my opinion. Every agile environment I have seen works the engineers to death. The scrum meetings are another form of micromanagement with the added benefit of peer coercion. A few years back, a lot of people were excited, but today, I have yet to meet anyone that doesn't think agile is a meat grinder. It burns out good people and produces poor product quality. Mark, we've had had this conversation before, and you have met me, so I can safely say you're lying. David, yea, we have met and that was some time ago. Yes we have had this conversation. Next time I express my opinion on this subject, I will say except for one. I've been working in Agile environments for years and I've never felt more empowered to say no, we can't do that by then. Then your experience is different than that of many of my colleagues. I'm pretty sure the hundred-or-so people who show up to Agile New England and Agile Boston meetings every month would agree. I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with what some idiots called Agile, but if you were feeling like a slave, then it probably was not Agile. Saying that you're doing Agile when you're not is almost as common as really being Agile As I have said many times, Agile is interesting in that it codifies many practices of old-time quick developers. The problem is that too often it is used as a tool increase work load. Unless you are careful, you overlook proper design because of increased time pressures. You get in the sprint death spiral where you don't have time to design, but you have time to iterate. You end up in a constant state of late with the slot machine mentality of hope you'll make it up in the next sprint. Normally I would say Let's just agree to disagree, but I feel I have a bit more of experience in this particular area than you, and I wish you would stop trashing Agile when you've not actually done it. That depends on how you define experience. You may have had positive experience with Agile, I have not. I have colleagues with whom I discussed the problems and had a lot of agreement. While I will respect your opinion, it is fundamentally different with my experience. You have your experience and no one is calling you a liar. I have mine, and I hope you have the good manners to do the same. On 07/12/2012 12:16 PM, Doug wrote: Does an agile development process make sense for projects that are all volunteer based, with people who don't live in the same states or countries? In my job, we use greenhopper, part of www.atlassian.com set of software. There are morning scrum meetings, story sessions, sprint planning and sprint completions. That makes sense when everyone drives to the same building. For a volunteer based project, those regular meetings are not going to be held. - Geographically disparate team members is definitely a hindrance, but not a show stopper, if you can counter with the right technologies, and the time zone differences aren't too great. Jira+Greenhopper is a great start. You'll need a wiki for persistent knowledge management, but I assume if you have Greenhopper you already have Confluence, too. - All-volunteer workforce is not really a problem at all. In fact it tends to be a bit less of a problem than some other practices, because Agile teams often become meritocracies where good work is rewarded more than seniority. This is especially true if and when the team reaches the stage of being self-organizing (people volunteer to work on stories instead of being assigned them, and they do what's needed the most but also what they enjoy) Agile New England (which I'm on the Board of) has an event every year called Agile Games, which is a 3-day conference. All volunteers working in their spare time. But we have a backlog, we have weekly standups over the phone instead of daily standups, We have retrospectives to make sure we're doing things the best we can. There are concessions you have to make in that environment, though. We're not strictly following one flavor of Agile, but we are using a complimentary and comprehensive set of practices that are Agile to the best of our abilities; We communicate very frequently and freely, we focus more on solving problems than placing blame (shared ownership of the product), and we record the status of tasks so everyone knows where everyone else stands. We don't have sprints, but we do have milestones that we associate with tasks and stories. The biggest challenge is going to be frequent *but focused* communication. Lots of people need to interact in a way that effectively conveys the information to the right people in a timely manner without swamping people who don't need
Re: [Discuss] Agile software for a nacent project
On 07/12/2012 09:52 PM, David Kramer wrote: Mark, we've had had this conversation before, and you have met me, so I can safely say you're lying. I want to add another note. There are a lot of companies in this industry and a number of them are genuinely good places to work. The majority of companies, however, this is not the case in my experience. You sound like a lucky person to not had worked at a horrible company. I have worked at some pretty damned bad companies. Sytron Mandatory Weekends, BPS Lay the developers off after they are finished their work. TPS Bill by hour but pay salary, oh by the way, customer changes cost the customer, but don't affect the schedule and don't justify more people on the project. As well as a number of others. Aprigo where they tried three separate development projects with basically three different development teams to accomplish a goal, and at the end of the last, which failed, they blamed all the engineers. (They LOVED Agile and it was their use of agile that pretty much colored my view of it.) I'm not looking for a fight, but almost any development discipline in a well run company works because the company works. It is the well run company that gets the job done, not agile or water fall or cowboy. A poorly run company does not understand the development process will use the structure of agile in place of actually understanding the development process. At least with waterfall, you get a design phase. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] [semi-OT] Right to Own law
We've heard the ads on the radio for and against the Right to Repair law. This is a law that is intended to require automobile manufacturers to publish the technical specifications and the codes that the computers in your car produce for troubleshooting and repair. I was thinking, what about a Right to Own law, that requires that *all* electronics be documented, all general purpose computers i.e. not embedded like a microwave, but everything from video games to iphones, tablets and computers be user serviceable. No locking out a user from doing what ever they want with stuff they own. Writing this law would be very tricky because you need a lot of legal intuition about the sort of attacks that will come at it from the likes of Apple and Microsoft, but also a lot of technical savvy to carefully define what is general purpose and what is dedicated and what the actual limits are. We want to protect innovation, but not at the expense of civil rights of ownership. For instance, we don't need to see the source code to Windows 8, be we damn well should be able to boot Linux or FreeBSD or whatever. We should be able to run what ever program we want on an iPhone or Android. These devices are our property, we paid for them, we are legally responsible for what is on them, we should have the ability to control them. When I was a kid, almost *all* devices, from washing machines to televisions, had a schematic inside the case. CP/M came with the source code. We have lost a lot of freedom to the corporations locking up our property. How much crap that would have otherwise been semi useful have we had to throw away? This is clearly a case where the invisible hand of capitalism will not help and an obvious case where regulation must. Agree? Disagree? it would be hard to find a politician who would even back such a bill, but maybe we can get a referendum on the ballot. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] [semi-OT] Right to Own law
On 06/27/2012 09:06 AM, Drew Van Zandt wrote: Increases the barrier to entry in business. I took some to think about this response, and the more I think about it, the more I see it as FUD. This is the type of answer corporations that want to extend their control over our property give. Seeing as this is a discussion, I get to ask: how? It seems to me, *MORE* effort needs to be made to lock down these devices than it does to open them up. That's bad for small businesses, matters less for large ones. Again, the words bad small business but no facts. No argument. Just FUD. Maybe this is what discourse is in 21st century USA, but it is still an empty non-argument. ** **Drew Van Zandt** **Artisan's Asylum Craft Lead, Electronics Robotics Cam # US2010035593 (**M:**Liam Hopkins **R:**Bastian Rotgeld) **Domain Coordinator, MA-003-D. Masquerade aVST ** On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 9:03 AM, Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com mailto:ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: We've heard the ads on the radio for and against the Right to Repair law. This is a law that is intended to require automobile manufacturers to publish the technical specifications and the codes that the computers in your car produce for troubleshooting and repair. I was thinking, what about a Right to Own law, that requires that *all* electronics be documented, all general purpose computers i.e. not embedded like a microwave, but everything from video games to iphones, tablets and computers be user serviceable. No locking out a user from doing what ever they want with stuff they own. Writing this law would be very tricky because you need a lot of legal intuition about the sort of attacks that will come at it from the likes of Apple and Microsoft, but also a lot of technical savvy to carefully define what is general purpose and what is dedicated and what the actual limits are. We want to protect innovation, but not at the expense of civil rights of ownership. For instance, we don't need to see the source code to Windows 8, be we damn well should be able to boot Linux or FreeBSD or whatever. We should be able to run what ever program we want on an iPhone or Android. These devices are our property, we paid for them, we are legally responsible for what is on them, we should have the ability to control them. When I was a kid, almost *all* devices, from washing machines to televisions, had a schematic inside the case. CP/M came with the source code. We have lost a lot of freedom to the corporations locking up our property. How much crap that would have otherwise been semi useful have we had to throw away? This is clearly a case where the invisible hand of capitalism will not help and an obvious case where regulation must. Agree? Disagree? it would be hard to find a politician who would even back such a bill, but maybe we can get a referendum on the ballot. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org mailto:Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] [semi-OT] Right to Own law
On 06/27/2012 03:40 PM, Drew Van Zandt wrote: To require things to be documented, you have to specify WHAT documents. Anything you don't specify won't be documented. Well, like I said in the original post, it takes technical savvy to define this, however, most things are public public designs. Take android and PC markets, the computer is basically open. The hardware is basically a modification of a published reference. The Apple is basically documented as well. What *isn't* documented are the very facts that you need to use your property how you want too. Further more, there is *no* option for you to do so. Have you ever done a pro hardware design? Yes. The documentation is different at every single place I have worked. The systems are often proprietary file output. Paper schematics? I've worked on designs with 300 pages of 11x17 schematics. True, but this is one of those exceptions. A surface mount assembly like a motherboard which is essentially non-serviceable could be considered a component. Even so, a PDF is good enough. However, if it is a general purpose computer, the ability to alter its functionality should be documented. ** **Drew Van Zandt** **Artisan's Asylum Craft Lead, Electronics Robotics Cam # US2010035593 (**M:**Liam Hopkins **R:**Bastian Rotgeld) **Domain Coordinator, MA-003-D. Masquerade aVST ** On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 3:33 PM, Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com mailto:ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: On 06/27/2012 09:06 AM, Drew Van Zandt wrote: Increases the barrier to entry in business. I took some to think about this response, and the more I think about it, the more I see it as FUD. This is the type of answer corporations that want to extend their control over our property give. Seeing as this is a discussion, I get to ask: how? It seems to me, *MORE* effort needs to be made to lock down these devices than it does to open them up. That's bad for small businesses, matters less for large ones. Again, the words bad small business but no facts. No argument. Just FUD. Maybe this is what discourse is in 21st century USA, but it is still an empty non-argument. ** **Drew Van Zandt** **Artisan's Asylum Craft Lead, Electronics Robotics Cam # US2010035593 (**M:**Liam Hopkins **R:**Bastian Rotgeld) **Domain Coordinator, MA-003-D. Masquerade aVST ** On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 9:03 AM, Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com mailto:ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: We've heard the ads on the radio for and against the Right to Repair law. This is a law that is intended to require automobile manufacturers to publish the technical specifications and the codes that the computers in your car produce for troubleshooting and repair. I was thinking, what about a Right to Own law, that requires that *all* electronics be documented, all general purpose computers i.e. not embedded like a microwave, but everything from video games to iphones, tablets and computers be user serviceable. No locking out a user from doing what ever they want with stuff they own. Writing this law would be very tricky because you need a lot of legal intuition about the sort of attacks that will come at it from the likes of Apple and Microsoft, but also a lot of technical savvy to carefully define what is general purpose and what is dedicated and what the actual limits are. We want to protect innovation, but not at the expense of civil rights of ownership. For instance, we don't need to see the source code to Windows 8, be we damn well should be able to boot Linux or FreeBSD or whatever. We should be able to run what ever program we want on an iPhone or Android. These devices are our property, we paid for them, we are legally responsible for what is on them, we should have the ability to control them. When I was a kid, almost *all* devices, from washing machines to televisions, had a schematic inside the case. CP/M came with the source code. We have lost a lot of freedom to the corporations locking up our property. How much crap that would have otherwise been semi useful have we had to throw away? This is clearly a case where the invisible hand of capitalism will not help and an obvious case where regulation must. Agree? Disagree? it would be hard to find a politician who would even back such a bill, but maybe we can get a referendum on the ballot. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org mailto:Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http
[Discuss] Class action against Secure Boot
I was thinking, if Microsoft gets its way, it will use what's left of its monopoly power to restrict access to the PC boot infrastructure. In principal I have no problem with a secure boot system, as long as I have control over what *I* allow to boot. The problem is when *I* have to ask or pay someone else to use *my* property the way that I want. If this roles out and is sufficiently troublesome to freedom, do you think we can sue? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] More Fun in ZFSland
On 05/16/2012 04:41 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: Richard, I read this and say to myself, this sounds more like you want to solve a problem with ZFS instead of wanting to solve a problem the best way possible. If you want to do it with ZFS because you think you can, then cool, have fun. If you want to solve a problem, what is the specific problem? and is there a solution that is less of the hoop jumping through kind? Usually when I start seeing the need to do the sorts of things you seem to be doing, I think to my self, Someone else must be doing something similar, it should not be this hard to do. Sometimes I find, yes, no one else is doing this. Other times I get a doh! moment. I'm not judging, I'm just saying. I get worried about my data when I start to do interesting things with it. One of the things missing from zfs-fuse is the encryption subsystem. ZFS encryption was introduced by Oracle after closing the Solaris 10 source code so we don't yet have an open source reference for it. So, how to get encrypted ZFS? Every disk-based device is a block device and they all share the same APIs. This is what makes nesting LVM + DRBD + dm-crypt possible. Nested block devices! It's an all-or-nothing solution, not as elegant as a native dataset encryption subsystem, but it can work. What I did: Started out making backups of everything courtesy of snapshots and zfs send. This would be a good opportunity to test a full recovery. Destroyed the zpool. Used gdisk to create single partitions on each of the storage disks. gdisk (GPT fdisk) is an fdisk-like tool that works on GUID disks. It's also aware of 4k disks and automatically sets the partition boundaries appropriately. Used cryptsetup/LUKS to create dm-crypt devices on the partitions. Then created a new raidz pool on top of those. And it works. There is some CPU overhead in the encryption layer but it is unnoticeable in normal operation. Restored everything via zfs receive. And it all works. Which means my notebook backups remain encrypted on disk. It's overkill for my music and video libraries but that comes with encrypting the vdev block devices. Finally wrote a little script to handle opening the encrypted devices and importing the zpool since it can't work unattended. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] iscsitarget
On 04/30/2012 11:22 PM, Matthew Kowalski wrote: I'm playing with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and iscsitarget with a Windows 7 initiator. I was able to create a 20GB file with: dd if=/dev/zero of=lun1.img bs=1024k count=2 I can then mount that iSCSI target on my Windows 7 machine and see an unallocated disk which I can format and use. My question is how do I expand the lun1.img file to grow the target to say 40GB, etc? I can do this with a Synology NAS but I can't seem to figure it out with Ubuntu. Any ideas? You can use truncate to expand or reduce the size of a file on disk, however, if you are playing with iSCSI on Linux as a source for disks, I can't stress hard enough that you should investigate LVM. There are some very cool tools and facilities that it provides For instance: you can create your volume and share it with LVM. At any point in time you can create a snapshot of that disk and basically use it as a second copy. (Remembering of course that changes in either the original or the copy use up disk space.) There is even a project (opensvc) that uses snapshots as a way of backing differential changes. You don't even need to know which file system is on it. The difference from snapshot to snapshot is all you need. Imagine this use case: You have a database on the iSCSI disk. You need to apply an upgrade but you want to be sure it works. You take a snapshot of the disk, work on the snapshot and get to the point where it works. You the shut down your database, take another snapshot, apply the fix to the main volume. If the fix fails for some reason, you can revert it to the snapshot, and try again. Yes, LVM is very useful. Since you are on Ubuntu 12, you also have some more features that older 2.6 kernels don't have. Thanks, Matt ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] can you copyright an API?
On 04/25/2012 07:41 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote: On 04/24/2012 08:13 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: On Apr 24, 2012, at 6:15 PM, Derek Martin wrote: I'm not sure what's left that could possibly prevent the GPL from saving the day. Google claims that Dalvik is a clean-room implementation, not GPL. But, since Oracle is claiming the API is patented, the Dalvik JVM implements the API. So even if the developers did not ever even see a Sun JVM the issue is the API and the specifications. I think I need to wade into this discussion before I lose my mind. Oracle, and specifically Boies with SCO before, are looking to harvest money from open source. As I understand it, copyright was originally to protect artistic expression and patent is to protect invention, all for the promotion of innovation lol. The copyright laws seem to explicitly exclude mere aggregation of information like lists. So, a book is a work of copyright, but its index is not. Make sense? The patent laws try to be limited to processes or mechanics, more simply how things work. Why all this crap is happening is because open source code represents billions if not trillions of dollars in RD. I forgot the exact quote, but on groklaw (During the SCO trials) Boies made light that there should be a way to make money off that people wouldn't mind paying. These guys, combined with the likes of MPIAA and RIAA have set out to redefine copyright in such a way that it can be used for anything. To any reasonable person, its clear that an API is not something that can be copyrighted, it is an index of functions. Also, I don't know how Oracle could have patented the API, unless they patented the structure of java, which, of course, has plenty of prior art including VisualBasic. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] streaming webcam
I am looking for a very low latency simple webcam program. I want to be able to see the video from my laptop on my android fairly snappy. Most of the things I've seen introduce about 1/2 to a full second latency. So when I move my hand, I see the delay. I want to get rid of that I need it to be mostly instantaneous. (1) is it possible with Linux and USB2 (2) If so what software (3) what camera. Anyone know? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] streaming webcam
Also, I have a bunch of webcams, and the one main problem I see in them is that they are SLOW. With very little motion, they seem OK, but if you move them quickly they blur the image terribly. It is important that the effective shutter speed is quick enough that moderate motion of the camera does not blur excessively. Am I asking too much? Do you guys know of anything, I've been looking. I have more than half a dozen different webcams ranging from the built-in laptop cameras to various USB2 devices, which, when all is said and done, are basically logitech quickcams. On 04/24/2012 06:43 AM, Mark Woodward wrote: I am looking for a very low latency simple webcam program. I want to be able to see the video from my laptop on my android fairly snappy. Most of the things I've seen introduce about 1/2 to a full second latency. So when I move my hand, I see the delay. I want to get rid of that I need it to be mostly instantaneous. (1) is it possible with Linux and USB2 (2) If so what software (3) what camera. Anyone know? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] streaming webcam
On 04/24/2012 08:08 AM, John Abreau wrote: A decent camcorder can record video with a framerate of 60 fps. A typical webcam may record at something like 12 fps or less. Unfortunately, the application calls for a webcam, or at least a USB video camera. On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 7:51 AM, Mark Woodwardma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: Also, I have a bunch of webcams, and the one main problem I see in them is that they are SLOW. With very little motion, they seem OK, but if you move them quickly they blur the image terribly. It is important that the effective shutter speed is quick enough that moderate motion of the camera does not blur excessively. Am I asking too much? Do you guys know of anything, I've been looking. I have more than half a dozen different webcams ranging from the built-in laptop cameras to various USB2 devices, which, when all is said and done, are basically logitech quickcams. On 04/24/2012 06:43 AM, Mark Woodward wrote: I am looking for a very low latency simple webcam program. I want to be able to see the video from my laptop on my android fairly snappy. Most of the things I've seen introduce about 1/2 to a full second latency. So when I move my hand, I see the delay. I want to get rid of that I need it to be mostly instantaneous. (1) is it possible with Linux and USB2 (2) If so what software (3) what camera. Anyone know? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Very slow system, no idle, but nothing running
I think the dead give away is the swap numbers. If the hard disk light is basically on it means that you are using far more memory than you have RAM. The programs are all now basically idle waiting on swap. You should use top and sort by memory usage. Microcenter has very cheap laptop memory, and your box can support 4G! On 04/22/2012 12:40 AM, David Kramer wrote: This is on my Ubuntu 10.04 laptop (Dell Latitude D820). I don't know when it started, but every now and then I get into this condition where the UI seems almost completely locked up (the mouse may move a little occasionally but the clock is frozen). The hard drive light is often on for long periods of time, too. But even when I can move the mouse, clicking on a window's close button does nothing. Usually it never recovers from this state and I need to hard power down. The first couple of line from top -c read top - 00:13:25 up 6 days, 16:25, 6 users, load average: 16.16, 19.67, 21.58 Tasks: 194 total, 3 running, 189 sleeping, 0 stopped, 2 zombie Cpu(s): 13.3%us, 5.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 81.4%wa, 0.2%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st Mem: 2060180k total, 2009288k used,50892k free, 3488k buffers Swap: 1574328k total, 1492652k used,81676k free,62024k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEMTIME+ COMMAND 6835 david 20 0 704m 184m 2352 R 20 9.2 142:15.54 plugin-containe 19747 david 20 0 226m 170m 4868 S 15 8.5 4:07.80 geeqie 1185 root 20 0 231m 82m 6488 S1 4.1 137:38.82 Xorg 6637 david 20 0 1174m 264m 11m D1 13.2 99:02.16 firefox 20780 root 20 0 2548 1240 916 R1 0.1 0:00.04 top 9 root 20 0 000 S0 0.0 0:05.28 events/0 So I don't see what the cores are so busy with. I was only able to get these numbers by eventually getting a text mode screen by pressing Ctr-Alt-F2 (get to a text shell) before it decided to do something. Swap space is low but should be sufficient. What can be locking up my laptop and causing the slowdown? Thanks. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Discuss - Software Engineering union, now officially OT
On 04/20/2012 08:29 AM, Matt Shields wrote: That's not Walmart's only problem. Walmart has been known for questionable purchasing practices. Let's say you make product X and you're the only one who makes that product. You sell around 100,000 units per month for $10 each throughout the US from a few small retail locations, to which you sell it to those retail stores for around $7 each. Walmart finds out about it and comes to you and says that it will commit to 1,000,000 units/month but it wants to but it for $6 each. This goes on for a few months, which makes you happy because you've been able to grow you production and hire more people. Now Walmart comes back to you and says since it's selling so many it will commit to 2,000,000/month but it wants it for $5/month. You say yes because you don't want to lose your existing orders and at $5 you can still make a bit of profit. But after this, this is when Walmart starts to demand that you only sell through them and continues pushing your price down further and further to the point some manufacturers have had to go out of business. All because American's want to save a few cents and Walmart wants to get more customers and earn a few more cents. Here's just one of many articles. I think there was even a documentary about what they're doing. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html If you want to save your job, your income, your American lifestyle, I firmly believe we need to be investing more into small local businesses and less into these big chains. Yes you can't get rid of large corporations and in some cases we do need them, but there's a lot of times it would be more beneficial to purchase local services/goods. Matthew Shields www.sysadminvalley.com www.jeeprally.com I'm so glad you wrote that, it saved me the trouble of finding articles about Master Lock and Vlasic Pickles about their experience with Wallmart. A deal with walmart is like the deal with the devil, it will make you successful instantly, but it will eventually destroy everything you started with. Sometimes, that's OK. Most of the time, not so much. Walmart and Target are very destructive to the U.S. economy and jobs, and usually devastating to local economies where they build a store. They are the worst of corporate america, speak up against them in a town hall, you get a SLAPP suit. Own a small buisiness? pay local taxes? Well, your tax money will go to helping walmart build a building. It will build roads and infrastructure, and in the end, your tax money that you paid for your community will help walmart put you out of business. Then, what's even worse, if the walmart that your taxes helped build, doesn't make a heafty profit, they'll pack it up and shut it down after the local businesses have gone out of business. Devastating the local community. But, hey, those low wage jobs were worth it, right? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] [OT]Discuss - Software Engineering union
I think, in our society, business has been bashing unions for decades and their message has taken hold. Yes, I grant you there are many examples of absurdity where the unions aren't helping themselves. On the whole, however, the amount of good that unions do far outweigh the few Monty pythonesque moments. The IT industry is fairly well paid slave labor. I mean, working on week-ends, no-notice late nights, vacations that have to be canceled because of sudden problems. All without any compensation. When was the last time you REALLY worked 40 hours. Right? Probably never. It is so ingrained in the industry no one even thinks these things are out of the ordinary. Just about EVERY other profession, professional or labor, would not stand for this. Ask a lawyer, doctor, plumber, or electrician to work an extra day and late nights for free, see what happens. Then there is the intellectual property issue with copyright and patents. Not only do we put in the late hours and extra days, even working at home, without pay, we end up with no ownership of our work. The treatment of IT people is pretty terrible as well. I worked at Business and Professional Software on Binney Street, and the owner, David Solomont, had a whole team working extra hours to finish up a product for release. When it was done, he laid off the whole team, except for the architect. I worked at Sytron corporation, they went on a hiring spree. I'm not sure of the reason, I think it was a business strategy thing, but they decided they hired in error. So, people on their starting day were told they had no job. People left jobs to come there, were now unemployed and technically never worked at the new company. At TPS in Cambridge, it was a contract house that had Microsoft as a client. Microsoft kept making changes and the work load kept building. No problem right? Microsoft paid for the hourly work just fine, but TPS didn't hire any more people or pay for the extra time put in. I got so burnt out from that gig, I think it helped end my first marriage. I think we need a union. Looking back on all the crap that I've seen, I hate to think of new people going into this industry without protection. On 04/18/2012 03:42 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote: Let me add my $0.02. (Yes it is a bit off topic, but still of interest to IT folks. ) I have dealt with unions from the standpoint where I was in a shop where one could not even move a monitor from one side of a cube to another. I was also a union member when I worked for the IRS. Ideally unions should represent labor in a general sense. But... there are some issues: First, unions are organizations and the union's goals may not coincide with the goals of its membership. Secondly, unions get into some nasty interjurisdictional disputes. Thirdly, work rules are set up that tend to prevent real work from being done, although that is not the intent. One laughable thing was in mainframe days where the computer operator would not allow the programmer to type in the commands to debug his program. The bottom line, IMHO, that some companies deserve to be unionized because they do not treat their employees well, but software engineers and other computer programmers are creative and that does not work well with a union environment. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] [OT]Discuss - Software Engineering union
On 04/19/2012 11:03 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote: On 4/19/2012 7:28 AM, Mark Woodward wrote: I think, in our society, business has been bashing unions for decades and their message has taken hold. Yes, I grant you there are many examples of absurdity where the unions aren't helping themselves. On the whole, however, the amount of good that unions do far outweigh the few Monty pythonesque moments. Just because unions don't always commit egregious stupidity doesn't mean that there aren't serious costs associated with them. At their core, unions are another layer of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy's foremost goal is always self-preservation. That necessarily stands in the way of innovation. That is nice popular conventional wisdom, but not accurate. That is the anti-union dialog that has been fed from the business sector to the public for decades. Its a nice way to say people should never ever form groups to pool their strengths, because that hurts business. Calling them a bureaucracy is just another pejorative in the anti-union propaganda. In fact, your whole paragraph is statement of prejudice against any and all unions without a single supporting fact. I would argue that in IT, more impediments to innovation are a bad thing. Our profession is going through a revolutionary period. Perhaps unions wouldn't be as harmful to innovation as our patent system is, but it would be right up there. Again, you imply that a union is an impediment, without fact or supportive argument, and then base a subsequent argument upon it. The IT industry is fairly well paid slave labor. I really don't feel that what I do is anything approaching slave labor. I honestly can't think of a single thing a union would do for me to make my life better. I value flexibility in my schedule. My employer is happy to work with me on that. I understand the value I provide to the business, and make sure that I'm doing things that help the business even if it's not strictly in my job description. Some companies are well run. This is true, this has always been true. Yet, the 40 hour work week, health insurance, sick days, vacation, elimination of child labor are all union accomplishments, and we stand to loose many of them because business has been successful to controlling the media message: capitalizing on times when when mistakes are made by the unions, ignoring when unions help the economy, and lying when they can. I feel that often unions create an adversarial relationship where employees no longer feel that the health of the business is their problem (the automotive unions are the conical example of this). That would be detrimental to IT at a time when businesses are completely re-tooling and re-organizing themselves around IT functions. Well, there is that, but one must ask why they get into that position. It takes two to tango. When you have an adversarial relationship between an employer and a union, you will find it is the employer that calls the union adversarial. This is just another example of the message being controlled by the business. If unions concede on wages and benefits to help the business, it is hardly mentioned. When unions strike because of pay cuts or loss of benefits, its called adversarial. If your boss walked into your office and said your pay was cut 10% and your insurance went up 50%, you'd be pissed off too. Only you'd just leave if you could get another job. A union helps fight this nonsense and, in the long run, protects companies from their own short sighted idiocy. The treatment of IT people is pretty terrible as well. I worked at Business and Professional Software on Binney Street, ... I worked at Sytron corporation, they went on a hiring spree... At TPS in Cambridge, ... I think we need a union. Looking back on all the crap that I've seen, I hate to think of new people going into this industry without protection. This might sound callous, but it sounds like you need to be a little more selective in who you work for. Voluntary employment is voluntary on both sides. If people left a job and got screwed on day one of their new job, whose fault is that? A bird in the hand... More to the point, how would a union have helped in that case? As an aside, I've known far more people that ended up crawling back to their old employers after doing (short) stints at startups than I've known people who were successful at startups. Back to my point though: I interviewed at Progressive Insurance when I was fresh out of school. I asked questions about what it was like working there. They were gearing up for a big re-write of their mission-critical software that was written in COBOL and whose lineage was measured in decades. They were planning to do it all in C# (.Net was still in beta at the time). I'd done some research, and found a list (from M$) of 10 key differences between Java and C#, and they were all syntactic sugar. So I asked them why they were using what appeared to me
[Discuss] Discuss - Software Engineering union
I wrote this on slashdot, and was wondering if you guys have an opinion. I come from a blue-collar background, my dad was a union iron worker. Trust me, there is a valuable skill set there. Strong guys who can weld, lift heavy equipment, and aren't afraid of extreme hights is, in itself, a fairly self limiting market. Anyway, the union in my view was a positive force for his industry. It set the safety standards, it provided benefits and retirement planning, it provided help for when the iron workers were mistreated. Unlike the teamsters, the iron workers were fairly well run. They partnered with the local construction companies and, in his day, help the business environment get buildings built. Decent pay and benefits and a guarantee of decent workers to employers, why wouldn't an honest business use union workers? I often argue that our interpretation of capitalism is incorrect. The word capital isn't just money. It is anything of value that can be traded. Just as businesses bargain with a capital collective, i.e. the business, banks, and investors join forces to create an entity greater than any one of them as a financial collective, workers' capital, i.e. the work that they do and their skils, is their capital and there is no conflict, in my eyes, when they bargain as a collective. An engineering union, could be a good move for the industry. It would certainly provide some push back against abusive contracts and NDAs. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Discuss - Software Engineering union
Here's the problem that unions have: the right-wing media owners are out to get them, and the public is gullible. Are unions perfect? Absolutely not. No organization of human beings is perfect and without corruption. Some unions will be corrupt. Fact. MOST unions will not be. FACT. Those are the facts. You can look nation wide and look for union abuses, and find some. All unions? NO! A small number, YES!. The ratio of good to evil? Pretty low. Now, compare the abuses of private industry vs union corruption, and tell me which is the over whelming problem. Which does more good than bad. On 04/18/2012 09:47 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org [mailto:discuss- bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org] On Behalf Of Mark Woodward I come from a blue-collar background, my dad was a union iron worker. I recognize that sometimes unions do good things. Whenever a company is too greedy, and exploits the employees too much. But unions are also sometimes bad. I am close to someone who works at a restaurant, which is part of a hotel. Staffing is done through the hotel, and the majority of hotel employees are housekeeping. (Foreign, generally non-english speaking, paid certainly minimum wage or better, but the point is, it's a low-paying job.) But in the restaurant, they have well paid chefs and etc. But when you unionize, you can't just unionize a few - it's all or nothing. The union came in, made vague promises of better pay and better work conditions, and housekeeping voted to unionize. I can't say whether or not housekeeping has benefited, but I can say with certainty, it has sucked in the restaurant. One guy took the restarant vodka and got drunk while cooking in the kitchen. Dangerous, and worse. He was fired. He took issue with the union, because he can only be fired for just cause, which means in effect, somebody needs to gather evidence as if it's a criminal trial. Everyone knew he was drunk, but now he's saying he wasn't. It seems coincidental that the vodka bottle disappeared from the store room at the same time it appeared half gone near his workstation, his breath reeking of alcohol, and obviously impaired... But he says he had nothing to do with it, and somebody was smelling something else, and he was behaving perfectly fine. There's also this concept of restaurant week, where all the restaurants are crazy busy. Well, one dishwasher simply didn't show up for a week. No call, no nothing. After restaurant week was over, he had his wife call from Florida, to say his grandfather had passed, and they would be staying in Fla for another week. I can understand bereavement, but there's no excuse for not calling, and ... length of time ... and It's not my fault it happened at the beginning of restaurant week. The union promised all sorts of things like regular raises, and better health insurance. So first of all, better health insurance is a relative term. Previously, it was a high deductible health plan + health saving plan + matching contributions to HSP. Moving forward, it's a full-health plan. Guess what, the full-health plan is better for some, while the HDHP is better for others. Because the HSP could be used for vision dental overages deductibles... physical therapy, acupuncture, massage and other forms of therapy, whereas those things are simply out-of-pocket on the full plan. Also, with the HSP, you save your funds lifelong and you keep it when you retire. Unlike the full plan, where you're uncovered as soon (or soon thereafter) as your unemployed. At an old age, you either have something you've saved up your whole life, or you have nothing. But anyone who has high expenses this year would be better having the full plan this year. The upshot is: Each type of plan is better for some. It's not fair to simply promise better health insurance. The union sales force is being deceitful. They don't get paid unless your organization decides to unionize. The union workers are not unbiased about your decision, and not above lying to get your patronage. Once you're unionized, it's extremely hard to get out. The upshot of the better pay is that the restaurant now has a maximum wage they're able to offer newhires, and the work schedule is assigned based on seniority. End result, whenever they have an entry-level position to fill, they do ok filling it, but whenever they have an upper-level position to fill, it goes unfilled. The head chef left for another restaurant some time ago, and they can't offer a competitive package to acquire a new head chef. But they can't leave the position open - So they hire somebody who's not qualified to be there. Everybody who works there can see this. They all formerly had aspirations for career paths and learning opportunities, but now they feel there's no way they can learn anything or improve themselves any more, because their superior(s) are not superior. Long story short, IMHO: Unions
Re: [Discuss] Discuss - Software Engineering union
On 04/18/2012 10:26 AM, Richard Pieri wrote: On 4/18/2012 8:36 AM, Mark Woodward wrote: I wrote this on slashdot, and was wondering if you guys have an opinion. Several. The first of which is that this is off topic for the general BLU discussion list. I can certainly see that is is not unix or linux, generally, but there aren't many full time MBAs on this list. Most of us are impacted by this discussion. Seeing as most of us would be impacted, I ask the question .. What is on topic, generally? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] DIY NAS
On 04/08/2012 02:39 PM, Matthew Kowalski wrote: Greetings, I've had success with the Synology DS1511+ units in the past, which to my knowledge run busybox, but I was considering building my own to reduce the cost. Has anyone had any success building their own 4-5 bay NAS units? I've looked at FreeNAS which certainly has all the services I need but I'm not sure the best route to go with regards to form factor, etc. I guess it depends on what your criteria is. A barebones system with a bunch of sata bays and a goodly bit of RAM won't set you back too much. The next part depends on what you call a NAS. How do you plan on sharing storage? iSCSI, NFS, CIFS? Do you want to share music, movies, or any non-file based services? How do you want to administer it? Thanks, Matt ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] LVM vs File system file for KVM Virtual Machines?
On 03/29/2012 01:59 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: I see very little, if any, argument in favor of using the file. I suppose, if you wanted to run your virtual head on some other machine, then you could export your file via NFS instead of iscsi, and that gives you one extra degree of freedom if you're using a file. Also, if you got something like a snapshotting storage server, you could migrate your file over to that server, and benefit by snapshots. The only reason why I would consider a file instead of an LVM volume is that you have a file that can be copied and backed up easily. It is relocatable in that it cam be moved from one file system to another and it can bring its size with it. The LVM device is more or less dependent on the LVM create command and the admin ensuring that a properly sized device is created if you want to move it to a different machine. I guess you could us dd to copy the device (or a snapshot) to a file to move it around, but you see the issue. There are definitely a list of pros and cons. It's interesting to see what other people think. So far, I think the pros go to LVM. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] Programming vs Engineering
http://www.mohawksoft.org/?q=node/86 Does anyone have any comment? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Backing up LVM partitions using snapshots
In your example, a duplicate reducing backup would ignore most of the changes. Edward Ned Harvey b...@nedharvey.com wrote: From: ma...@mohawksoft.com [mailto:ma...@mohawksoft.com] Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2011 2:48 PM I will argue that an rsync will NEVER be more effective unless you actively wipe the blocks where a file once existed. for (( i=0 ; i200 ; i++ )) ; do mkdir temp cp datafile temp run_test $i testresults.txt rm -rf temp done In this case, rsync is what you want, because it ignores files that don't exist. But a block level backup will backup all the blocks that were ever contained in any of the (now removed) copies of the datafile. I don't know what users you support, but I support engineers who run this type of test all the time. They create test work dirs, they perform volatile work in there, store the results of the test, and remove their scratch dir. The block level backup you're talking about is great, under the assumption that you basically just add data to a filesystem. It's terrible when you add remove data from the filesystem. I stand by my claim: Important to know if it's suitable for your purposes, whoever you are, the consumer who might consider using this. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] Backing up LVM partitions using snapshots
A while back I was talking about using LVM, on the whole it seemed like a productive discussion. Anyway, I started a project about a year ago, but shelved it. I recently dusted it off and cleaned it up a bit. What it does is read one or more files, split them up into chunks, compress them, optionally encrypt them, and save them to disk. Its sort of a two stage compression system. The chunks are identified, compressed, encrypted and only unique chunks are stored. The file structure is saved separately from the data. Multiple files can use the same data repository. (Its best if the files share some common base.) The reason why I cleaned it off was LVM. As you know, backing up a large volume can take a while. compressors can only compress so fast, duplicate data is a waste of space (especially now that disks are getting expensive.) I added a mode where you can take successive snapshots of an LVM volume and only backup the changes between the two snapshots. So, after the initial backup you can then backup the changes in minutes. example: PREVTIME=13234915 CURRTIME=$(now) lvrename /dev/lvm/mysnap /dev/lvm/mysnap.old lvcreate -s -c 64 -L1G -nmysnap /dev/lvm/myvol bcebackup -C /dev/mapper/lvm-mysnap-old.cow -P $PREVTIME -t $CURTIME /dev/lvm/mysnap lvremove /dev/lvm/mysnap.old The time stamps are standard unix time numbers and have to be managed by you, but you get the idea. If you use LVM in your shop and could use a utility like this, I'd like to get some independent feedback. Also, if you use zfs or btrfs and would like to be able to do this with their snapshot system, I'm sure it can be adapted. Any guinea pigs out there? Any suggestions? criticisms? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] How do I determine what hard drive screws I need?
On 09/29/2011 02:34 AM, John Abreau wrote: I've got an HP ProLiant DL360 G5 server, which uses 2.5-inch SAS or SATA drives. The machine had no drives in it, so I ordered a couple of drives, along with some drive trays. Neither the hard drives nor the trays came with mounting screws. How do I figure out what size screws I need? The drives are Seagate Momentus 750gb 2.5-inch SATA drives. Chances are that they are one of two screw sizes. Take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_case_screws Hard drives typcally use the same screws. If you've had computers through the years, you probably have a bunch of them. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] LVM Re: A really interesting chain of functionality
On 09/26/2011 10:17 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote: On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 9:45 PM, Mark Woodwardma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: On 09/26/2011 07:17 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: So, this all serves to rather emphasize my point, which is to say... (LVM) Create snapshot, mount it, monitor it with nagios or whatever, lvextend it, lvextend the filesystem, resize2fs, unmount and release snapshot... versus (ZFS, Netapp, Volume Shadow Services, etc.) Do nothing, and don't worry about it. It's all automatic and dynamic and just works. I don't think this is right. Running nagios on a snapshot would do nothing. A snapshot is protected from change. This is neither true in the logical nor physical sense with LVM. It was never true in a physical sense, in that the storage for the snapshot is slowly used up due to copy-on-write as applications write to the original copy of the filesystem. It's not true in the logical sense because LVM snapshots have actually been read/write for quite a while. A common usage pattern for this appears to be when you want multiple copies of essentially the same virtual machine image. You start with a single gold copy and then create writable snapshots for each virtual machine. I was thinking, on my drive into work, about your scenario. On the surface it sounds like a pretty good use of snapshots, but it is actually pretty bad. The assumed advantage is that there is some gold copy of a VM that will be used for [n] snapshot VMs. It is a short term strategy. Since there is no resolution process to re-merge changes in the gold copy into the shapshots after the initial creation, you will inevitably fill your snapshots with duplicative data. Suppose you create a linux vm, and snapshot a number of times to create virtual machines. In the lifetime of the VMs updates will be applied for bug fixes and security. You will need to apply the updates to each snapshot, individually, because there is no correlation of low level disk blocks. After a few cycles, you will be losing any real advantage of the snap shot. A net boot image with shared system components configured with dhcpd and a mountable home directory is the most efficient and maintainable solution for this sort of system. Sure, a combination of strategies makes sense, but you have to make sure that you can update your gold copy of the VM and re-snap your VMs without having to reconfigure each time. Using dhcp you can use the virtual mac address of a VM to dictate which settings it gets at boot time and work from there. Then link that mac address to a set of directories like etc and/or home. That way you have your gold copy and you have the advantage of reducing duplicative data. Bill Bogstad ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] LVM Re: A really interesting chain of functionality
On 09/26/2011 07:17 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: So, this all serves to rather emphasize my point, which is to say... (LVM) Create snapshot, mount it, monitor it with nagios or whatever, lvextend it, lvextend the filesystem, resize2fs, unmount and release snapshot... versus (ZFS, Netapp, Volume Shadow Services, etc.) Do nothing, and don't worry about it. It's all automatic and dynamic and just works. I don't think this is right. Running nagios on a snapshot would do nothing. A snapshot is protected from change. Typically, what you would do is this: Create a volume, monitor it, create a snapshot to get a point in time image of the volume, backup the snapshot, and then remove the snapshot. Pretty much the same model as the other things. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] A really interesting chain of functionality
Has anyone played with LVM and iSCSI? The ability to create an arbitrary block device and map it to a shareable LUN is interesting, don't you think? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Hardware Hacking
On 06/27/2011 07:30 PM, Derek Martin wrote: If anyone is curious/interested, I'd love to start a thread or two talking about how to do some stuff with Linux and I/O cards that may be a gateway drug to more interesting hardware hacking. Do we really need a separate list for this? It's relevant to Linux (so it's on topic) and I don't think the traffic on this list is so high as to justify an entirely separate mailing list... Discussions about things such as X10, and other hardware-related topics, traditionally have happened here, and I for one like it that way. :) There is a balance in any list. If it is too busy, it feels like spam. You want enough messages to flow to keep people interested, but not so many that you ignore them. Hardware hacking? The older guys, like myself, who actually own oscilloscopes and soldering irons may be all over it. The GenX'ers who grew up after ISA proto cards may not be so inclined, but, who knows? Anyway, as for hardware hacking, My Arduino UNO should be arriving on tuesday. Having done embedded work, I'm looking forward to experimenting with this thing. The arduino project really shows the power of the open source methodology. Embedded systems are typically so arcane and usually require a huge learning curve just to get started. Conversely, the arduino firmware is compiled with gcc, the loader and manager is in java, and the programming environment is a limited c++. I'm thinking of using it in the LinuxPCRobot to replace the K8055 I/O card and the PS/2 mouse encoder. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] Skype Replacement
I may have asked this before, is there a practical replacement for Skype now that they've been bought by Microsoft? I refuse to give M$ my money if I can avoid it. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Skype Replacement
On 06/20/2011 04:13 PM, David Rosenstrauch wrote: On 06/20/2011 04:06 PM, Mark Woodward wrote: I may have asked this before, is there a practical replacement for Skype now that they've been bought by Microsoft? I refuse to give M$ my money if I can avoid it. Skype is free ... Yes and no. The point to point service is free, but the phone calls are not. DR ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Fwd: Small Form Factor PCs
On 06/13/2011 04:02 PM, Kent Borg wrote: Chris O'Connell wrote: The name of the software is HomeSeer. HomeSeer allows for the control of everything from light switches, thermometers, fans, electrical outlets, cameras, thermostats... etc, all through one central administration system. [...] for a Windows specific solution Sounds scary. Valves, thermostats, door locks, motors, arbitrary appliances plugged into controlled outlets...handed over to MS Windows. There are people out there who sorely regret having built complicated automated systems (power plants, chemical factories, ...) out of unreliable parts. And now more people are doing the same thing with their houses. Open the pod bay doors hal I'm afraid I can't do that dave. What the hell are you talking about hal I think you know what the problem is dave. I'm not going to argue with you hal. You should have registered your version of Windows with 'Windows Genuine Advantage' within 30 days. I now must treat you as a software pirate. I'm afraid that this conversation can no longer serve any purpose. (house goes dark, doors and windows remain locked.) -kb ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Fwd: Small Form Factor PCs
On 06/12/2011 10:31 AM, Chris O'Connell wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: Chris O'Connellomegah...@gmail.com Date: Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 11:49 PM Subject: Small Form Factor PCs To: bludiscuss@blu.org If you go the way of the LinuxPCRobot.org, I bought an Intel Dual Core Atom board D510M0. Mini ITX form factor and very efficient. It will even run with a 65W 12V ATX power supply. The board, with CPU, costs about $100 bucks. I'm looking for a very small form factor computer to install some home automation software on. The software is not very resource intensive. Here are the key requirements for the system: 1. Must be able to power back up without human intervention if power to the unit is lost. 2. Should be small and less energy intensive than a regular PC. 3. I would like it to be less than $500. 4. Must be capable of running Windows (so either an AMD or INTEL cpu). Can anyone make any suggestions about what might work well for me? I was looking at the Dell Zino, but am unsure if a better option exists. Thanks, Chris O. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Fwd: Small Form Factor PCs
On 06/12/2011 10:31 AM, Chris O'Connell wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: Chris O'Connellomegah...@gmail.com Date: Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 11:49 PM Subject: Small Form Factor PCs To: bludiscuss@blu.org I'm looking for a very small form factor computer to install some home automation software on. The software is not very resource intensive. Here are the key requirements for the system: 1. Must be able to power back up without human intervention if power to the unit is lost. 2. Should be small and less energy intensive than a regular PC. 3. I would like it to be less than $500. 4. Must be capable of running Windows (so either an AMD or INTEL cpu). Can anyone make any suggestions about what might work well for me? I was looking at the Dell Zino, but am unsure if a better option exists. I know I replied once already, I want to ask a quick couple questions. (1) Is this a on-off or do you intend to productize your system? (2) What version of Windows? You can use Wince. (3) umm, why Windows? (4) What do you expect for $500, a full PC or just the components. $500 is, IMHO a very generous number. (5) If this is a one-off, I have a VIA-800 miniitx motherboard with 512M of ram and an IDE compact flash adapter that makes a neat little pseudo-embedded disk-free system that was removed from my robot last year. I could probably let it go for $100 bucks with a standard ATX power supply. With regards to #1, if you are going to product-ize this, you may want to consider a lower cost platform such as ARM. With regards to #3 and maybe #1, unless there is a REALLY specific need, Windows is a very poor platform for this type of application. Also, take a look at www.mini-itx.com ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Relevance of PGP?
On 06/10/2011 09:34 AM, Bill Ricker wrote: On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 8:12 AM, Edward Ned Harveyb...@nedharvey.com wrote: Go get a free certificate from a signature with a free CA cert deserves no trust - it verifies the email address was the email address on a certain date only. I find that the notion of trust is completely broken with secure communications. We've already seen that supposedly trusted certs gave keys to china and the US government so that browsers would accept bogus keys. It doesn't matter who creates the cert because the mechanism of trust isn't trustworthy. The only way to trust a key, IMHO is to have each entity that wishes to have private communication with you create their own cert and send you, via an alternate safer transport, the public key. Only that way can you be sure. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Relevance of PGP?
On 06/10/2011 02:06 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: On Jun 10, 2011, at 1:05 PM, Mark Woodward wrote: What we need is a mechanism to distribute and verify public keys. You've just described a certificate authority: a mechanism that distributes and verifies public keys (certificates). What we need is a verification mechanism that is independent of the distribution mechanism. When verification is independent of distribution it is readily apparent when the distribution mechanism has been compromised: verification fails. We need something like the MIT PGP key server: http://pgp.mit.edu/ I think you truncated my message before I actually describe something similar to this sort of service. Also, this is only one of my scenarios. There is another scenario where two entities wish to communicate privately. There needs to be a mechanism that allows people to exchange keys under separate cover secretly. I toy with the idea of a P2P program that does encrypted exchange as an add on to services like skype or AIM --Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Relevance of PGP?
On 06/10/2011 08:50 PM, Tom Metro wrote: Mark Woodward wrote: OTR encrypts an IM TCP stream so that agents between the two end points shouldn't be able to read the data. Technically, I believe OTR encrypts the message, which then gets handed off to the particular IM protocol, which in turn is transported via TCP. I imagine there is a fair bit of data leakage in those intermediary layers, such as identifying both parties in the conversation. Yes. One can envision a more security oriented IM protocol where intercepting a connection between a client and the server would expose nothing about who the other client is (the interceptor would be able to identify the IP of at least one client), and with the use of padding and no-op messages you could also obscure the size and timing of your messages. Well, the end points must be public, otherwise the packet could not be routed. (Have you heard that encrypted voice streams that use a variable bitrate codec (for example, Skype) can be decoded by mapping the pattern of data bursts to English phrases?) Yes I did, thats f-ing wild. I fear that with enough computing power backing up deviously clever people, human existence is in for some serious change. Read Philip K. Dick The Dead Past. Not a direct analogy, but pretty similar. -Tom ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Asynchronous IO on Linux
A while ago, I wrote an asynchronous file I/O system for Linux, I basically needed too because the posix AIO was so limited. I wrote mine using threads, one thread per file, and one event per thread. It seems pretty good. Works fairly well, more or less portable even. (I've tested it on Windows, Mac, and Linux) My question, is AIO on Linux ever going to become a robust system that works on all file types? Would using kernel based AIO on Linux perform any better than merely a thread based system? (provided what you are doing maps to kernel AIO) ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: ZFS and block deduplication
On 04/24/2011 10:52 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: From: Mark Woodward [mailto:ma...@mohawksoft.com] You know, I've read the same math and I've worked it out myself. I agree it sounds so astronomical as to be unrealistic to even imagine it, but no matter how astronomical the odds, someone usually wins the lottery. I'm just trying to assure myself that there isn't some probability calculation missing. I guess my gut is telling me this is too easy. We're missing something. See - You're overlooking my first point. The cost of enabling verification is so darn near zero, that you should simply enable verification for the sake of not having to justify your decision to anybody (including yourself, if you're not feeling comfortable.) Actually, I'm using ZFS as an example. I doing something different, but the theory is the same, and yes, I'm still using SHA265. Actually, there are two assumptions being made: (1) We're assuming sha256 is an ideally distributed hash function. Nobody can prove that it's not - so we assume it is - but nobody can prove that it is either. If the hash distribution turns out to be imbalanced, for example if there's a higher probability of certain hashes than other hashes... Then that would increase the probability of hash collision. True. (2) We're assuming the data in question is not being maliciously formed for the purposes of causing a hash collision. I think this is a safe assumption, because in the event of a collision, you would have two different pieces of data that are assumed to be identical and therefore one of them is thrown away... And personally I can accept the consequence of discarding data if someone's intentionally trying to break my filesystem maliciously. I'm not sure this point is important. I trust that SHA256 is pretty darn hard to create a collision. I would almost believe that it would be more likely that blocks collided by random chance than malice. Besides, personally, I'm looking at 16K blocks which increases the probability a bit. You seem to have that backward - First of all the default block size is (up to) 128k... and the smaller the blocksize of the filesystem, the higher the number of blocks and therefore the higher the probability of collision. This is one of those things that make my brain hurt. If I am representing more data with a fixed size number, i.e. a 4K block vs a 16K block, that does, in fact, increase the probability of collision 4X, however, it does decrease the total number of blocks by about 4x as well. If for example you had 1Tb of data, broken up into 1M blocks, then you would have a total number of 2^20 blocks. But if you broke it up into 1K blocks, then your block count would be 2^30. With a higher number of blocks being hashed, you get a higher probability of hash collision. It comes down to absolute trust that the hashing algorithm works as expected and that the data is as randomly distributed as expected. I'm sort of old school I guess. The mind set is not about probability, it is about absolutes. In data storage, it has always been about verifiability and we conveniently address probability of failure as a different problem and address it differently. This methodology seems to merge the two. Statistically speaking, I think I'm looking for 100% assurances, and no such assurance has ever really existed. Its cool stuff. It is a completely different way of looking at storage. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: ZFS and block deduplication
On 04/25/2011 09:32 AM, Daniel Feenberg wrote: On Mon, 25 Apr 2011, Mark Woodward wrote: This is one of those things that make my brain hurt. If I am representing more data with a fixed size number, i.e. a 4K block vs a 16K block, that does, in fact, increase the probability of collision 4X, Only for very small blocks. Once the block is larger than the hash, the probability of a collision is independent of the block size. I think that statement sums up the conceptual gulf between the two sides. Its kinda like old school god does not play dice physicists and the quantum mechanical physicists. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: ZFS and block deduplication
On 04/23/2011 08:31 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: From: discuss-boun...@blu.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@blu.org] On Behalf Of Mark Woodward I have been trying to convince myself that the SHA2/256 hash is sufficient to identify blocks on a file system. Is anyone familiar with this? I am intimately familiar with this. And on planet Earth, yes it is sufficient. However, the cost of explaining your decision to anyone who is skeptical outweighs the cost of enabling verification. So as long as there's even a possibility that anybody might challenge your decision, you should enable verification. But if you're the boss and nobody will second-guess you, then you can safely rely on just the hash. If you'd like to read more about it, try this search... Google for zfs-discuss collision http://www.google.com/search?q=zfs-discuss+collisionie=utf-8oe=utf-8aq=t; rls=org.mozilla:en-US:officialclient=firefox-a Mostly in the extremely long thread, (Fletcher+Verification) versus (Sha256+No Verification) PS. Safely is a relative term. The probability of collision is non-zero, but the probability is essentially zero relative to Human Extinction Events, which means you can (relatively) safely rely on just the sha256 hash. If you want to calculate the actual probability of a collision, assume a 4k (2^12 bytes) block size (worst case) and every single block is precisely the same size (which isn't realistic, but is worst case) and every single block is unique (in which case why have you enabled dedup. So again, unrealistically evil-clown scenario worst case) and if your data pool size is the largest in the world (again worst case) say ... 2PB (2^41 bytes)... that would be physically impossible to hold the dedup tables using hardware currently available in the world, but again... Evil clown worst case for accidental collision. Then the number of blocks is 2^41 / 2^12 = 2^29 unique blocks. The formula on wikipedia for the birthday problem is: p(n;d) ~= 1-( (d-1)/d )^( 0.5*n*(n-1) ) In this case, n=2^29 d=2^256 Using bc to calculate the answer: bc -l n=2^29 d=2^256 scale=1024 1-e( ( 0.5*n*(n-1)*l((d-1)/d) ) ) .00012446030 I manually truncated here (precision goes out 1024 places). This is 1.24E-60 Notice: There are estimated 1E50 atoms in Earth. So in the evil clown worst case for sha256 collision, the probability for collision is about the same as randomly selecting the same atom twice consecutively from 1000 Earths. Note: I had to repeat the calculation many times in bc, setting a larger and larger scale. The default scale of 20, and even 64 and 70 and 80 were not precise enough to produce a convergent answer around the -57th decimal place. So I just kept going larger, and in retrospect, anything over 100 would have been fine. I wrote 1024 above, so who cares. You know, I've read the same math and I've worked it out myself. I agree it sounds so astronomical as to be unrealistic to even imagine it, but no matter how astronomical the odds, someone usually wins the lottery. I'm just trying to assure myself that there isn't some probability calculation missing. I guess my gut is telling me this is too easy. We're missing something. Besides, personally, I'm looking at 16K blocks which increases the probability a bit. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
ZFS and block deduplication
I have been trying to convince myself that the SHA2/256 hash is sufficient to identify blocks on a file system. Is anyone familiar with this? The theory is that you take a hash value of a block on a disk, and the hash, which is smaller than the actual block, is unique enough that the probability of any two blocks creating the same hash, is actually less than the probability of hardware failure. Now, I know basic statistics well enough to not play the lottery, but I'm not sure I can get my head around it. On a completely logical level, assume that you have a block size of 32K and a hash size of 32 chars, there are 1000 (1024 if we are talking binary 32K) potential duplicate blocks per single hash. Right? For every unique block (by hash) we have a potential of 1000 collisions. Also, looking at the birthday paradox, since every block is equally likely as every other block (in reality we know this is not 100% true), isn't the creator's stated probability calculations much weaker than assumed? I come from the old school were god does not play dice especially with storage. Given a small enough block size with a small enough set size, I can almost see it as safe enough for backups, but I certainly wouldn't put mission critical data on it. Would you? Tell me how I'm flat out wrong. I need to hear it. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: ZFS and block deduplication
On 04/22/2011 12:00 PM, discuss-requ...@blu.org wrote: Message: 15 Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2011 11:53:23 -0400 From: David Rosenstrauch dar...@darose.net Subject: Re: ZFS and block deduplication To: discuss@blu.org Message-ID: 4db1a473.1090...@darose.net Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed On 04/22/2011 11:41 AM, Mark Woodward wrote: I have been trying to convince myself that the SHA2/256 hash is sufficient to identify blocks on a file system. Is anyone familiar with this? The theory is that you take a hash value of a block on a disk, and the hash, which is smaller than the actual block, is unique enough that the probability of any two blocks creating the same hash, is actually less than the probability of hardware failure. Given a small enough block size with a small enough set size, I can almost see it as safe enough for backups, but I certainly wouldn't put mission critical data on it. Would you? Tell me how I'm flat out wrong. I need to hear it. If you read up on the rsync algorithm (http://cs.anu.edu.au/techreports/1996/TR-CS-96-05.html), he uses a combination of 2 different checksums to determine block uniqueness. And, IIRC, even then he still does an additional final check to make sure that the copied data is correct (and copies again if not). That's rsync, and I tend to agree with their level of paranoia. Take a look at this link: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_dedup ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
re: c++ xml parser
The biggest problem I have with parsing XML in C/C++ is that there are no real standard objects to do so. You are confronted with not one but two basic problems: (1) the parser and (2) the object model. There are lots of XML parsers, i.e. systems like expat work fine, that answers problem #1. The next problem is how do you represent the data in C++? How generic does it need to be? what attribute takes will you recognize? will a tag value='abcedf'/ be sufficient? Or does it need to be tagabcdef/tag? Can it be both? Where's your data type represented, in the tag or a type attribute? XML's great strength is that it will represent anything. Its weakness is it doesn't say how. I ended up writing my own, using expat as the parser, and a sort of tree node structure to represent the OM. It ended up looking a little like libxml2. So, in my system, it works something like this: Node * n = xmlparse(xml); Node *nat = n-get(attribute) Node natChild = nat-getChild(); for(int i=0; natChild; i++) natChild = natChild-getNext(); and so on. I have yet to see anything standard and generically applicable on C++ that doesn't require a lot of work and tailoring to a specific data source format and purpose. From: Stephen Adlerad...@stephenadler.com Subject: c++ xml parser To: Blu unix (blu)discuss@blu.org Message-ID:4db0b6dd.7090...@stephenadler.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Hi Blu'ers, I'm looking to write some code which needs to parse the contents of an xml file in c++. A quick search brings up xerces, rapidxml, tinyxml and a few other packages. Does anyone have a suggestions as to which one I should learn? Thanks. Steve ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: c++ xml parser
On 04/22/2011 12:52 PM, Rob Hasselbaum wrote: On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 12:23 PM, Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com mailto:ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: There are lots of XML parsers, i.e. systems like expat work fine, that answers problem #1. The next problem is how do you represent the data in C++? How generic does it need to be? what attribute takes will you recognize? will a tag value='abcedf'/ be sufficient? Or does it need to be tagabcdef/tag? Can it be both? Where's your data type represented, in the tag or a type attribute? The purpose of an XML parser/serializer is to help you transfer data between an external XML document and your program's domain object model. So the problem your describing is only a problem within the relatively narrow scope of the code that does the marshalling and unmarshalling. It's not a great idea to use the XML parser's objects (e.g. Node, Entity, Attribute, etc.) to represent the data within your business logic because that couples your code to the parser's API and the XML document format in a very pervasive way. I call shenanigans! The first sentence: The purpose of an XML parser/serializer is to help you transfer data between an external XML document and your program's domain object model. That's problem #2 in my original post the object model. Addressing the second sentence: So the problem your describing is only a problem within the relatively narrow scope of the code that does the marshalling and unmarshalling. That is part and parcel of problem #2 in my original post, how do you define the document model. Third sentence: It's not a great idea to use the XML parser's objects (e.g. Node, Entity, Attribute, etc.) to represent the data within your business logic because that couples your code to the parser's API and the XML document format in a very pervasive way. There needs to be a definition of the fields and the variants and how they are represented that can be understood by the document parser (not just the XML parser). Eventually you do need to get the data into a form on which it can be worked on programmability. Seeing as C++ seems to be an end point, I think its safe to assume what ever action that is going to be taken on the XML will be implemented at the C++ level. I wasn't implying any particular sort of architecture or model, I was enumerating the issues. In my particular implementation, I treat all XML types as variant containers. It ends up being easier that trying to painstakingly map XML to some underlying C++ structure. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Network Solutions
How come Godaddy can update your domain records in a matter of minutes but Network Solutions still takes 24~48 hours!?? It frustrating. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Abusive contracts
Has anyone noticed that contracts are becoming really mean spirited lately? I mean, seriously, some of the ones that I've looked at are just ridiculous. How's this clause: The Consultant acknowledges and agrees that any such breach or threatened breach will cause irreparable injury to the Company and that money damages will not provide an adequate remedy to the Company. I mean, jeez, in civil law, money damages ARE the remedy! That on top of 5 years confidentiality, 2 years non-compete, all for a few hours part time work? A 6 page NDA and at a low rate because they are on a shoe string budget? Are you kidding me? I know a word and a handshake is old fashioned, but why does every dime store lawyer feel the need to write these faustian contracts? Especially when there is so little gain? Just my little Charlie Sheen for day. The software industry in the last few years has become really awful. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: drupal on linux?
On 02/16/2011 01:21 PM, Matt Shields wrote: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 1:13 PM, Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com mailto:ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: With Drupal on the top of my head (I just upgraded a couple sites) I can offer some suggestions. Drupal's model is very much database dependent. That is good in some ways but problematic in others. It is difficult, for instance, to change databases from MySQL to PostgreSQL. You more or less have the choose correctly the first time. (hint use PostgreSQL) Second, the mainstream modules and content are fairly stable and work fine with PG, a lot of 3rd party modules may assume MySQL and not function correctly with PG. Lastly, and this is important, while the raw structure of your site may be defined in the theme, the content is defined in the database. One of the things that drupal uses is the idea of blocks to layout content. These blocks are defined in the database along with the content, comments, and the users. All in one big messy mess. This means you can't stage and deploy changes to a site. You have to apply them live. This is a problem for me as I come from a world where you work on a dev site, and then apply changes that have been through QA to the live site. There was no automated way of doing this with drupal. This may be a deal breaker in some environments. www.linuxpcrobot.org http://www.linuxpcrobot.org and www.mohawksoft.org http://www.mohawksoft.org are both drupal 6.20 running on PostgrSQL. As for books? I hate to say it, don't waste your money. drupal.org http://drupal.org's main site has some good docs. Setup an experimental site and play around. On 02/16/2011 12:00 PM, discuss-requ...@blu.org mailto:discuss-requ...@blu.org wrote: Message: 11 Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2011 11:51:56 -0500 From: R. Luomanobluspam5...@penguinmail.com mailto:nobluspam5...@penguinmail.com Subject: drupal on linux? To:discuss@blu.org mailto:to%3adisc...@blu.org Message-ID:20110216115156.d8b9e1e7.nobluspam5...@penguinmail.com mailto:20110216115156.d8b9e1e7.nobluspam5...@penguinmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII I need to do an evaluation of Drupal for a website content management system. While Drupal is available through the package managers, I am trying to figure out how to get started. Do anyone have suggestions for tutorials/books? (I do realize that some gentle readers favor other systems such as Plone) Thanks, -- R. Luoma ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org mailto:Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss You have the same dev/qa/staging/prod problem with Wordpress as well. There are so many things I would do if I had the time. The world needs a professional grade CMS system. To me, it is a no-brainer that there should be a stage, qa, and deploy development cycle. What's wrong with these guys? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re:Jeopardy / Watson Lecture at MIT
I think I speak for everyone who has a significant other, that February 14th is more or less impossible. (Well, I say impossible, but it goes with the assumption that we would like to keep peace at home and/or in our respective relationships.) Bummer From: Kurt Kevillekkevi...@mit.edu Subject: Jeopardy / Watson Lecture at MIT To:discuss@blu.org Message-ID:CA3F3715CD64468F88EF6CC26791CFCA@guestisn5ae5e1 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=iso-8859-1; reply-type=original will be the night of the 14th with a viewing party to follow... http://events.mit.edu/event.html?id=13574220 right now it is listed as the second of 2 events but it looks like they are getting merged. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
LinuxPCRobot vs VGO
http://vgocom.com/ Just saw these guys on Slashdot the other day. Besides being a really slick looking robot, it seems to be little more than the LinuxPCRobot with an Ekiga client. I think I have a demo! ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
