Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Time for a non-commercial copyleft license ? (Score 1) 175

Too many problems.

Look at the serious issues that surround CC BY-SA-NC -- you have two sets of "copyleft" material that are completely incompatible, and you have one set that has an extremely ill-defined definition of "commercial". Is advertisement supported commercial? Is use in a business setting for an internal system commercial? Is it just commercial if you're selling something that includes a copy of the work?

Comment Re:Modern audiophiles are no different. (Score 0) 469

It's difficult to even tell a difference above ~128 kbps (assuming a proper VBR encoder -- constrained VBR or, especially, CBR is different), and essentially impossible above ~192 (again, with a good VBR encoder). The big benefit to keeping a lossless collection is just that you can encode, without repeatedly losing quality, into whatever the format-of-the-day is.

There are a few exceptions, some tracks or samples that essentially just fall to pieces under most encoders at anything other than a very high bitrate, but they're extremely rare.

Transportation

Prototype Volvo Flywheel Tech Uses Car's Wasted Brake Energy 262

cartechboy (2660665) writes "Sometimes we get carried away with sexy moonshot car tech--whereas most everyday gains are about reducing inefficiencies, piece by piece. Volvo's flywheel energy-recovery prototype is a great example of the latter--not to mention similar to one used in Formula 1 racing. The system recaptures energy that would be wasted in braking, like a hybrid does, to reduce fuel consumption by up to 25 percent. When you hit the brakes, kinetic energy that's usually wasted as heat is transferred to a "Kinetic Energy Recovery System" mounted to the undriven axle. It spools up a carbon flywheel that turns at 60,000 rpm to store the energy. When the driver hits the gas, some of the stored energy is transferred back to power the wheels through a specially designed transmission, either boosting total power to the wheels or substituting for engine torque to cut fuel consumption."

Comment Re:Not everything is up for discussion (Score 1) 667

The short version is it's because everything about you is your fault and responsibility. If you're not smart, you're just not trying hard enough. If you're poor, you're just lazy. This creates a recipe for absolutely crushing children if you treat them harshly -- it's not just a matter of "You didn't do well, but that's okay.", it's become "You didn't do well, and that's your own fault.". It's not stated overtly like that, but the sentiment is so pervasive and has been so deeply ingrained in people over the past thirty years that it doesn't have to be said directly.

This ends up creating a lot of weird contradictions in education environments. If you want to be kind to someone, which is a lot of peoples' instinct when dealing with children, you have a very hard time with criticizing their ideas or capabilities because you're no longer just criticizing their ideas or capabilities -- you're implicitly criticizing the person directly. From the other direction, education has become a push for everyone to succeed... Because if they fail, you've failed to get them to work hard enough. It's not that anything is beyond anyone's capabilities -- it's that it's either their personal failure for failing, or your personal failure for not pushing them to work hard enough. Standardized testing is the poster child of this latter issue.

Of course, this makes for a lot of problems later in life, too, when someone who's been told their entire life that they can do anything if they want it enough... Fails to do that anything. They obviously just didn't want it hard enough, or didn't work hard enough. Ending up in a mediocre (or worse) job is their own personal failing, and people often need to find some way to escape from that (be it escapism like video games, TV, books, or movies, or mind-altering substances, or spiraling down into depression). Doesn't make for a great society at all.

This isn't the only problem with the world or society, but it's a really big one and, for most people, really difficult to even notice.

Comment Re:Have they fixed the need to manually rebalance? (Score 1) 91

You can run into the same sort of error, if I understand correctly, from other filesystems running out of inodes. Typically the solution there is to know what kind of workload (roughly) you'll be doing with the filesystem, and set the inode-to-block ratio appropriately. I imagine btrfs should have something similar for metadata allocation?

Comment Re:why not the new thing? (Score 4, Informative) 279

If a daemon has problems and needs to restart itself how does it do that?

...Monit? runit? Two completely different approaches to service monitoring, one not even in an init system. And there are more (s6, daemontools, etc.).

hundreds or thousands of daemons

...What the heck are you running that puts thousands of daemons on a single server? If you're doing something this large, you might want to consider virtualization. Thousands of daemons is a gigantic attack surface to have on a single system, and a mess if something were to go wrong with one of them that takes down everything.

Comment Re:systemd violates the UNIX philosophy (Score 3, Insightful) 279

Wayland is actually one of the "new Linux" things that I'm interested in. I'm not getting rid of X anytime soon, but when Wayland has the tools, hardware support, etc. I need, I'll likely switch to it without any fuss. (For the curious, I use i3 as a window manager, and there's just no equivalent compositor for Wayland yet. None of my applications are GTK+3 or QT5, either, so I'd be using the X compatibility layer for essentially everything too.)

But systemd I really am not fond of. It's not an issue of being different (though that is some part of it), so much as the way it dictates so much of how you use things. It seems to touch every single part of your system on an ongoing basis, rather than just booting the system and staying out of the way. I sincerely doubt there would be as much distaste for it if it was just the init system part, rather than stuffing everything else in too.

Comment Re:I see a lot of discussion about systemd (Score 5, Insightful) 379

The biggest thing that pushed adoption was when it absorbed udev. You can still run udev without it, but it's plastered with systemd branding and building udev without also building systemd (and then having to manually strip udev out, if you want to run it standalone) is difficult. Beyond that, Gnome 3.8 made it (almost) a hard requirement. Strictly speaking you can run Gnome without, but, as I understand, it loses almost all of the power/disk/device management.

People like it because it's obsessed with boot times (which is apparently a really important thing to people who don't actually run a real-world system, where boot times of 10 seconds vs. 5 seconds are meaningless), has a few useful features (often, subjectively, questionably implemented), and has really good PR. The problems with it include an obsession with APIs (Unix, everything is a file -> systemd, everything is an API), an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach (NIH: write their own binary-formatted logging daemon, their own cron daemon, their own implementation of dbus, ...), and a horrid misunderstanding of what an initsystem really needs to do for servers (LP: "Control groups of course are at the center of what a modern server needs to do." -- which, really, what it needs to do is serve things, not shuffle processes around various metaphorical boxes). The project is, as a result of including the kitchen sink, also extremely monolithic -- everything is stuffed in a single git repo, a single tarball, and is heavily interconnected.

Two of the primary developers (Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers) are also notoriously hard to deal with if you ever suggest they've done something incorrectly. You can find a lot of examples of this, largely to do with LP's attitude towards anything that isn't systemd, and Sievers' regular breaking of udev over the past few years.

Comment Dangerous... (Score 5, Insightful) 399

While in rare cases job security is a problematic issue due to incompetence (or worse, in extreme cases), stripping away job security typically creates even more, worse problems in the long term with an even faster race-to-the-bottom. If this succeeds, they could find themselves, instead, fighting against the school board hiring cheap, less-competent or less-experienced teachers because they can get rid of the expensive, experienced ones quickly and easily.

Also, teachers are, in most places, unionized (the article doesn't seem to mention if California teachers are or not). Go against the union in such a drastic manner and you may find yourself with a widespread strike on your hands.

Comment Re:...but if you want free software to improve... (Score 2) 1098

To vastly simplify it... BSD emphasizes freedom for developers. GPL emphasizes freedom for end-users. Different goals, and impossible to ever say which is "more free", since it depends heavily on the context.

You can just as easily point to instances where companies have taken BSD sources, closed them off, and sold them, saying that now the end-users have less freedom than they would with GPL sources.

Slashdot Top Deals

Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable, and three parts which are still under development.

Working...