Chris Ball comments

"Transcript of Lawrence Lessig Obama video." by Natural Depression Remedies

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:40:35 +0000

Raise Some good points about Obama. I think it has much potential, but I think only time will tell. A great job in transcribing this great article that was a nice reading.

"Summer of Code" by utah windows

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 13:39:08 +0000

Summer is the warmest of the four temperate seasons , between spring and autumn . It is marked by the longest days and shortest nights

"Multi-pointer Remote Desktop" by Chrome OS

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:17:14 +0000

Chrome OS

"Summer of Code" by utah window

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 04:16:49 +0000

Summer is the warmest of the four temperate seasons , between spring and autumn . It is marked by the longest days and shortest nights. ...

"Btrfs snapshots proposal" by replica watches

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:28:13 +0000

thanks for the share

"The Best Card Trick" by Chris

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:16:17 +0000

Any chance you have that pdf on a non password-protected site?

I don't, but Googling ["The Best Card Trick" kleber] will bring up the same password-protected URL with a "Quick View" button that brings up the PDF. (There are some other direct hits to a copy of the PDF farther down the search results, too.)

"The Best Card Trick" by DarwinSurvivor

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:06:16 +0000

Any chance you have that pdf on a non-password-protected site?

I'm kind of a card and math guy, so I'm interrested as to how this works.

"Computers that aren't computers" by Kragen Javier Sitaker

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:28:10 +0000

"You just wait 'til iPad gets verbed."

What do you think it will mean?

Man, I really got iPadded last night. I couldn't stop vomiting until noon.

Sakharov really got iPadded when he protested against the invasion of Afghanistan; he was under virtual house arrest and couldn't see his friends or any foreigners for six years.

Shit, my computer's been iPadded. I knew I shouldn't have downloaded that cracked copy of Crysis. Now I have to reinstall.

I don't know, I think we should hold a competition for the best definition for "iPad."

"Computers that aren't computers" by Pablo Rodríguez

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:13:49 +0000

Thanks for saying it so nicely.

I think that the essential point here is not about open source but about having platforms for selling content or general-purpose machines.

And if the iPad is a toy that you can only play with the way Apple wants you to play, it is rather useless and extremely expensive for me (I'd rather use TouchBook instead).

"Computers that aren't computers" by Stephen

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:12:06 +0000

"Relax - 95% of apple hardware is open source anyway. Webkit+freebsd... And apple give back stuff."

True - take LLVM for another example - Apple have been pumping funds into it and Clang for years (since they use it as part of their IDE for static analysis, and eventually it will release GCC as the default compiler on OS X).

"Computers that aren't computers" by ddd

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:23:12 +0000

hmm. No TV, DVD players, wrist watches, cars, kitchen appliances, central heating, radio, clocks, electric musical instruments, telephone, digital electricity and gas meters...

And definitely no slick portable webbrowsers!

Relax - 95% of apple hardware is open source anyway. Webkit+freebsd... And apple give back stuff.

"Computers that aren't computers" by Andres

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 06:59:50 +0000

You just wait 'til iPad gets verbed. "Yeah, i was iPadding all night". Then you'll be singing a different tune (probably something off of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band).

"Computers that aren't computers" by Adam

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:58:34 +0000

Old technology never dies (until 451 deg F). New technology dies when you drop it.

"Computers that aren't computers" by Navin

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:40:23 +0000

Technology never dies.

"Heroes" by Yuri Mizyuk

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:36:25 +0000

Peter Singer's mother Cora developed Alzheimer's disease, and towards the end of her life she could not speak, recognise her children or take pleasure in even the most basic human acts. And this reality lies at the root of his philosophy...

"Btrfs snapshots proposal" by anon

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:34:00 +0000

(MySQL rarely changes its disk format for precisely this reason.)

mysql was an example. It applies to anything that stores data on disk.

"Btrfs snapshots proposal" by Chris

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:48:27 +0000

Thanks, dash, I didn't realize this. I agree; that's a nice policy.

"Btrfs snapshots proposal" by dash

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:35:30 +0000

@Chris:

I don't want to deprive LWN of subscriptions, so I'm not going to post a subscriber link to the thread, but I've e-mailed you one individually. (And will do so for other people if they ask.)

This is considerate of you, but actually, LWN approve such subsciption links according to their FAQ:

Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?

Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing lists, and weblog entries are all appropriate. As long as people do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared.

I guess they think the positive PR you give LWN by posting about one of their articles is greater than any negative effect of defeating the need for a subscription for this isolated article. I think they have made a good call.

Signed
LWN subscriber

"Btrfs snapshots proposal" by Chris

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 05:59:40 +0000

Hi,

The problem is that we don't have one partition for rpm-stuff, and one for everything else.

I don't think it's a huge problem. We get to choose between the status quo of "your system gets hosed, you reformat" and the new feature of "your system gets hosed, you rollback to the last checkpoint and can manually bring files back from the hosed version if you need them", and I think the new feature is an obvious improvement. It does not solve every problem for everyone, but that's okay.

so if you upgrade mysql and it is unstable, you lose all the data you wrote to the database with the new version AS WELL AS all your data because the new data files cannot be read by the older version.

(MySQL rarely changes its disk format for precisely this reason.)

Again, I think this is better than living in a world with no rollbacks: you upgrade, and everything breaks. Would you rather be totally screwed, or have the option of reverting to the world in which the upgrade had never happened, and at least getting your old data back? There's no disadvantage to having the rollback feature, only potential advantages.

"Btrfs snapshots proposal" by anon

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:36:23 +0000

Wasn't this discussed on the mailing list?

The problem is that we don't have one partition for rpm-stuff, and one for everything else.

The second problem is that application data tends to be readable only by newer software, not older software: so if you upgrade mysql and it is unstable, you lose all the data you wrote to the database with the new version AS WELL AS all your data because the new data files cannot be read by the older version.