The University system in Ancient India was forcibly decimated as a result of Islamic invasions. There are accounts of students and teachers at Nalanda being killed in the thousands and the great library razed to the ground. The library burnt for 3 months, according to historical records.
Again, there's a body of books on the historical development of higher education and nowhere in published literature on the subject have I found an opinion that the ancient schools of India, China, or Middle East should be called universities on their own merit (as opposed to how laymen call them). If you can point me to a scholarly source, either monographs or journal papers, that would corroborate your claim, I will be very thankful for that. I've posted one reference below. I'll be glad to look for some more.
That's because you've studied a very euro-centric view of history.
Not your fault...that's how things were in the 20th century (and have carried forward into the 21st century as well). When the current crop of "academics" croak, then we might see some realism as far as history is concerned. If one read history per Western academics, nothing happened in asia save the fueling of Western adventurism, materialism (business, science, technology, etc) and a need to educate the heathen in the ways of the Christian god!
Don't know if this counts...I don't have the patience to try and find this out. We studied about it in Indian history (in India)...so it is common knowledge for Indians who studied in India.
http://whc.unesco.org/en/tenta...
Nalanda is one of the most ancient international centers of education and learning equivalent to modern universities, with a very rich library. An inscribed seal written "Sri-Nalandamahavihariy-Arya-Bhikshu-Sanghasya" identifies the site as Nalanda Mahavihara.
Nalanda has a very ancient history and goes back to the days of Mahavira and Buddha in sixth and fifth centuries B.C. Many references in the Pâli Buddhist literature mention about Nâlandâ. It is said that in course of his journeys Buddha often halted at this place. It is also the place of birth and nirvana of Sariputra, one of the famous disciples of Buddha.
The place rose into prominence in 5th Century A.D. as a great monastic-cum-educational institution for oriental art and learning in the whole Buddhist world, attracting students from like Hiuen Tsang and I-Tsing from China and other distant countries. The galaxy of luminaries associated with it includes Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Vasubandhu, Dharmapala, Suvishnu, Asanga, Silabhadra, Dharmakirti, Shantarakshita. Another important mention in history, is that around second century, Suvishnu built one hundred and eight temples at Nalanda to prevent the decline of the Hînayâna and Mahâyâna schools of Buddhism.
Various subjects like theology, sabda-vidyâ grammar, hetu-vidyâ (logic), astronomy, metaphysics, chikitsâ-vidyâ medicine and philosophy were taught here. The accounts of pilgrim state that Nâlandâ was bustling with literary activities.
Nâlandâ had now acquired a celebrity spread all over the east as a centre of Buddhist theology and educational activities. This is evident from the fact that within a short period of thirty years following Hiuen Tsang's departure, no less than eleven Chinese and Korean travelers are known to have visited Nalanda.
Life lead by Nalanda monks is regarded as the ideal to be followed by the Buddhist all over the world. This celebrity status persisted through ages. It is also attributed that a detailed history of Nalanda would be the history of Mahayanist Buddhism.
The institution was maintained by the revenue collected from the villages bestowed specifically for the purpose by the contemporary rulers as evident from inscriptions. Royal patronage was therefore the key note of the prosperity and efficiency of Nâlandâ.
Just like the word "madrasa" can be used very broadly in Arabic to refer to many kinds of schools, even those have been reformed along the organizational and legal lines of a European-style university. And? Again, universitas was a kind of medieval European institution, and much later, one specific type of it later spread across the world. I'm sorry for your poor grasp of language logic and history, but if word X currently happens to be used in India to describe an institution of type Y that exists in India today, and a thousand years ago it was used in the same place to describe a different type of institution Z that existed in India a thousand years ago, that doesn't suddenly mean that institutions of type Y coexisted with institutions of type Z a thousand years ago. That only means the name was later co-opted for a purpose. But later language changes don't retroactively reshape historical facts. There's a lot of books you can read on the history of higher education, and they happen to be quite unanimous on the subject.
Are you generally this obtuse or is it a "special" effort for this topic? I suppose it is the latter.
Don't be anachronistic when it comes to comparing historical data with present time. Just because the term "Y" was used to refer to institutions that taught "AB&C" in the 16th century in Europe, doesn't mean the same term "Y" is used to refer to institutions that teach the same subjects now. More likely "AB&C" have been replaced with "DE&F".
It is not a question of co-existence of "Y" and "Z" (though in the alphabet they are grouped chronologically one after another). It is a question of whether "Y" now in the West can be used to refer to "Z" in the East of a time past.
What was being taught in "Z" institutions in India around 400BCE? Philosophy, Mathematics and Medicine (including surgery) [You should read up on that before you proceed to lecture us on the difference between a school and a university]
People traveled from various neighboring countries to study at these institutions. So, they functioned very much like the universities of today (far more than the "universities" of medieval Europe.
3. Do you disagree with the statement that ZFS is a volume manager, a filesystem, a raid-like redundancy system, and a few other other things as well? In other words, that it's a big, monolithic package tat does many things. Do you disagree with that?
I'm suggesting that concepts such as "volume manager", "filesystem" and "raid-like redundancy system" don't need to be separate entities. The concepts such as "filesystem" and "volume" etc exist to conform to a 20th century vocabulary. And it's not that revolutionary any more. Companies like EMC, Netapp etc went that route too...thereby simplifying things like HSM etc at a "pool of disks" level.
Why is this considered "boasting"? Why can't it be considered emphatic celebration of a scientific/engineering achievement. Being the nerds that we Indians are in general, it is not that uncharacteristic of us to do so.
Better that than "boast" about being the world champions in Baseball or American football
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We generally call such place "a school". You don't get any more specific than that. And I've never said that Indians didn't have schools. But calling every school "a university" renders the term utterly useless, since we already have the genetic term "a school".
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"Schools" like Nalanda, Takshasheela, etc were called "Vishwa Vidyalayas" (translated from Sanskrit means World Educational Institutions). That is the term used even today in Indian languages to refer to Universities. Schools are called "Patha Shalas" (translated from Sanskrit, Learning Buildings).
So yes, India had UNIVERSITIES before the fsckin' term University was even invented. So go suck on that for a bit
Cons:
- cpu and ram overhead (even by current standards, uses a tonne of resources)
You can tune the size of the ZFS arc cache, thereby optimizing RAM use. In the Solaris world, upto 25% of RAM is used by ZFS by default, unless we throttle it. If you have SAN LUNs as the underlying block storage for ZFS, it is better to reduce the arc cache size. I suspect same thing is possible in Linux port as well.
- doesn't like hardware raid (apparently a lot of the pros rely on talkign to an actual disk)
It is not recommended to use hardware raid, but that's because ZFS has superior FT mechanisms (RAIDZ2/Z3 etc). And if you use a JBOD, you can leverage things like L2 ARC (using flash devices), SSD based ZFS write-ahead-logs (what's called the Logzilla in the ZFS appliance world)
- expandability sucks (can be done, but weird rules based on pool sizes and such) compared to most raid levels where you can easily toss a new disk in there and expand.
This is incorrect. Expanding ZFS pools is as simple as adding additional devices to the pool. Depending on your underlying striping strategy, you would have to add storage in commensurate manner of course. It's literally -- "zpool add "
The RAID, LVM, Filesystem approach is defunct in the modern world. Also, ZFS already incorporates multi-protocol support, ability to turn any host with local storage into a target (via the COMSTAR framework). Not sure how much of this is in the linux port, but I suspect that if it's close enough to Illumos, it should have these features.
ZFS is not in the microsoft tradition, it is a departure from 20th century storage design/architecture. The very idea that there has to be a RAID/LVM/FS is archaic and has been thoroughly disproven. In my previous shop we had petabytes of storage in ZFS pools and hardly ever lost data.
The Pool-based model that eliminates the layers of RAiD/LVM/FS results in better performance, easier supportability and superior diagnostics capabilities.
Do you realize that almost every major storage vendor first bashed ZFS and then about 3-4 years later started building architecture that was eerily like ZFS?
My shop was one of the early adopters of ZFS since back 2007. There were a few bugs then, but over the years I have been absolutely impressed with the efficiency and stability of ZFS.
Another 7-figure lawsuit jointly paid by AMC and the FBI perhaps?
[[[Only major shortcoming with pkg manager in solaris' 11 was with the fact that there was no directly accessible repository of software that could be used (albeit the dependency checks etc were missing too).]]]
This should read "only major shortcoming with pkg mgr in solaris less than or equal to 10"
I think there is some sort of censorship going on (thereby forcing me to get my slashdot password reset) so i can repost my comments, this time not as an AC.
- Package manager was brain dead. apt, yum are far better. ( Sorry Solaris 11 was too late. Too much legacy out there. )
Only major shortcoming with pkg manager in solaris' 11 was with the fact that there was no directly accessible repository of software that could be used (albeit the dependency checks etc were missing too). That has been fixed in Solaris 11. You have to remember that Solaris 10 was released in 2004 (10 years ago). If you want to use Solaris today, you should switch to an opensolaris variant or Solaris 11.1
- Patching made no sense. You have no idea what packages are patched with a patch. Patches were just binary disk vomit that spewed crud all over the system. Impossible in the real world to build any sort of verification around them. ( Sorry Solaris 11 was too late. Too much legacy out there. )
It's an easy enough thing to fix. Use zones to convert physical servers into solaris 10 branded zones. All of a sudden you patching becomes non-sequiter and generally painless. In my shop we automate patching of 100s of solaris (yes 10) boxes at a time and using ZFS root + Iive upgrade we patch them all under 30 minutes. With Solaris 11, this is down to a 2 minute window. We literally patch Solaris 11 LDOMs in under 2 minutes flat, including reboot. And Solaris 11 has gone away from Patch IDs etc...they are all pkgs, just the same as Linux.
- Zones: Are a nightmare of security and privilege. I don't care what any says a zone is just a change root jail. Which means you will only every be as up-to-date as the host system. And it means you must be compatible and tested against the host system. Which is really no different than not having zones. Zones are a horrible horrible mess.
Zones are a very very cool technology. You can do a lot of powerful things with zones at zero additional cost. And with the advent of Solaris 11, you can now P2V physical hosts into Solaris 10 branded zones, and circumvent the whole patch/package issue. I have used zones with great success (100s of them running multi-TB DWH on M-class, T-class and x86 hardware). They are not a nightmare of security and privilege. The rules are very very clear and concise. There are things you can do within zones and things you cannot. It calls for a little old thing called RTFM, that's all.
- No dependable only repository of packages that is robust or up to date. Far to much package hunting still required to locate software for solaris. Most packages are
months to years behind there linux counterparts.
Not anymore. Solaris 11 SRUs are released at regular intervals and upgrading is as easy saying 1, 2, 3
- Java performs better on x64 than Solaris/SPARC. This has boggled me for years. Only recent sparc architectures let java and other highly threaded applications stacks really perform well. Why do I even have to know about processor binding for processes?
Try running you java apps within zones with dedicated vcpu and memory grants. And Solaris runs on x64 as well. Consider running java on the T4s and T5s and see how they run.
The whole concept of x AM - y PM is wrong when it comes to IT. IT calls for flexible work schedules (unless one is doing pure development work) and IT professionals should be given the flexibility to choose deliverable deadlines and left to their own devises, accountable for their promised work. I have found that in organizations that focus on end results as opposed to strict work schedules, IT is far more successful, because such environments tend to nurture innovation and talent. Another thing is to encourage lateral thinking (out of the box) and problem solving skills. It is amazing how quickly even an "average" skill level can turn into high-level, when provided with the opportunities and the freedom to think.
Most enterprise-level organizations don't allow that of their employees (at least most of those that are IT user as opposed to IT creators). The employees then, with the lack of freedom then become drones who regurgitate mindless, automaton-like work year on end.
IT is an intellectual profession and IT professionals should be encouraged and nurtured to be thinkers, philosophers even. They should be given an environment where they can question every decision, know every reason why a decision was made and how their work affects the bottom-line for their organizations' business. That's when a narrow focused, unimaginative IT professional can start developing and exhibiting real talent and develop real skill.
oh and did I forget to mention that Cisco will buy Intel and will provide the plumbing for all data in the world within the next 10 years?!?
With the state of affairs (financially) with players such as HP, the future doesn't look very multipolar. I suspect that the Enterprise computing market will become more and more bipolar (pun intended) and the focus will shift to selling "platform as a service" or "Infrastructure as a service" solutions which hook seamlessly into public cloud offerings...
HP will get bought, EMC will get bought, Netapp will get bought and then there will remain only 4 main players in the Computing platform market -- IBM, Oracle (Private Clouds) and Google and Amazon (Public clouds)!
Everyone's personal computing will be powered by an i or a Droid. Offices will become completely virtual, UNIX will (REALLY) be dead (this time), Systems admins will either have to work for the big four or start flipping burgers. All code will be automatically generated by some code vending virtual kiosks...
Hey wasn't there another thread about Operating Systems for Cities?!?
Innate talent can easily be squandered when it is not focused in the right direction. Someone had once said (and I mean a famous person) -- "Success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration"
In other words, intelligent hard-work is the key to success in any field.
The nation that controls magnetism controls the universe. -- Chester Gould/Dick Tracy
