It’s just hypocritical anyway, just telling people to be peaceful doesn’t address the underlying causes at all and the same people aren’t “peaceful” in their personal live either. They’re confused and in fact reject any clear understandings of what actually causes peace to begin with.
Do you have a clear understanding of the "causes of peace" that you'd like to share with us? Regardless, did you read any of the newsletters to give you a basis for your claims?
> It’s just hypocritical anyway...
Yeah, we're all hypocrites--get over it. It's true that almost nobody can be completely peaceful in all areas of their lives, but it shouldn't stop people from trying. You gotta start where you are.
This group would have been founded specifically against the Vietnam War, which America entered on the flimsiest of pretexts[1] with no clear national interest beyond "fuck Communists", and which killed tens of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. I don't see how it could possibly be clearer.
You seem to be arguing with anecdotal figures from your childhood. I'm sorry the people you grew up with were hypocrites, but if you want to claim that reflects on either Computer People for Peace or the peace movement in general, you'll need to give us more details.
The problem is that the core issue is the mind and these “peace” type arguments date back thousands of years, even in 340s AD in China’s Annals of Lu Buwei you find these same people not addressing their own minds and preaching “peace” or passivsem. The reality is if you bring up reasonable things they can do, such as not promoting egotism or having a materialistic views of everything which directly lead to a lack of what they feel is “peace”, it just goes over their head and they get angry. Again this is has been going on with these people for thousands of years now. So rather than some fake form of peace that doesn’t work, how about addressing the underlying causes of suffering for everyone instead and stop rejecting them?
Every time I read about DragonFly I’m never quite sure what it can do that’s different than other OSes that makes it interesting. The best I can tell it’s just that some of the subsystems are different and it’s more of an experiment for under the hood OS features.
Their filesystem is interesting but what I find impressive is they're at like a linux level of performance despite having a team of like 10 people because of the way they approached concurrency. I believe they spawned out of dillon disagreeing with freebsd's approach, and it's beautiful to me that they're competitive with linux despite not having a huge team of people polishing it.
I also want to say that Matthew Dillon is brilliant and a wonderful person. I played with dragonflybsd on my laptop for a while and hung out in the IRC, and he was always around and willing to help. I found a couple legitimate bugs and he had non-trivial patches up for me in like an hour.
Their networking stuff is very cool too, I can't really remember the details once, but I remember seeing an article about high performance networking that explained why you wanted to avoid the linux kernel so that you could do x,y and z yourself, and dillon explained that dragonfly kernel just does all that stuff itself.
I wish it got more use because there's so much potential there, but it's quite a chicken and the egg problem, and honestly I feel like the BSDs are kind of doomed unless they add apis that support linux containers.
IIRC, Matt forked FreeBSD from v4 as he disagreed with the approach taken to SMP (ie multi processor support) in v5. He forked v4 and wrote his own patch set to deliver SMP support. That is a long time ago.
I haven’t run Hammer / Hammer2 so cannot comment on why it is awesome. To me my file system needs to be properly battle tested and trusting my precious personal data to a one man band feels a bit too esoteric.
I have always wondered how Matt makes a living from this given the somewhat niche positioning of Dragonfly?
Hah, I wasn't around at that time. I believe FreeBSD 5 went ahead and did the same thing most other BSDs and Linux did initially, which was the so-called "Giant" lock scheme, where only one CPU could be in the kernel at a time. The plan being to gradually break things into smaller locks. That's more or less worked (for FreeBSD and maybe NetBSD — OpenBSD still has notoriously poor kernel concurrency in 2018), but didn't yield high concurrency up front, and there are still vestigial uses of Giant in FreeBSD.
I think Dillon had some sort of lock token thing? It looks like they're described here, under "LWKT Serializing Tokens:" https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/Locking_and_Sync... . Looks somewhat easier to integrate but also some tradeoffs — proper restart when all your lock tokens get dropped seems like it might be fiddly.
The whole project is about preserving information for current and future generations, so what place does limiting the availability of it have in history? It’s more likely it’ll just be lost due to DRM when no one can figure it out in the future. It’s the digital equivalent of losing the books, though due to someone being more concerned about their pocket book today than for future generations.
Would you prefer that the Internet Archive not make these books available at all? That was likely the alternative possibility.
I assume that the Internet Archive is holding onto the original, DRM-Free master copies. That's a job I trust the Internet Archive with, even if ideally I wish the data was more distributed.
I would actually, because it sets a bar that if you’d like your book to be preserved then you need to make a choice, is your book so valuable that it should be free? If not, there’s plenty of other places for DRM books. What they’re doing instead is trying to have it both ways.
They are having it both ways. A non-encrypted copy is preserved digitally within the Internet Archive, and that copy is made available, now, in the only way it legally can be. Once that copyright expires, the Archive can make the content freely available to all, having already been digitized.
In some cases the content doesn't belong to the person restricting it however, they're effectively copyrighting the digital medium, do you think that's right for them to DRM it?
> In some cases the content doesn't belong to the person restricting it however, they're effectively copyrighting the digital medium, do you think that's right for them to DRM it?
No, I don't think it's right for a separate entity to usurp this kind of authority, but that's not really a battle the Internet Archive can win.
They are doing their best within the restrictions placed on them. If you'd like to lobby for more sane copyright laws, please go ahead, I'll be behind you 100%. That does not negate the good being done by the Internet Archive right now.
It’s amazing how little we understand about things right in front of our faces like this. These are essentially like wolf run kingdoms not that different than humans.
My other thought is how surprised their wolf scientist will be when they discover humans too have orginzed into territories like them. :)
Agreed as well, though there is also the case of communicating the high level flows to others that are not software experts so that everyone has a common understanding and doesn’t have to rely on a few key developers with the knowledge. Most smart folk who aren’t developers reason pretty well about architectures so you want them to be self sufficient too.
Agreed. It’s also that there needs to be cultural changes in many cases, short term views are ingrained in many cultures and pointing out a fault in someone’s culture isn’t something people are open to no matter how dire the consequences are.
Azure’s main feature is that it’s not connected to Amazon retail and they’re committed to Windows. So their clients are often in it for the long haul good or bad, those who can switch do.
What’s the benefit of being “not connected to Amazon retail?” Serving a large customer that demands scale seems useful for driving the platform forward—what is the downside?
If I had to guess it's the perception that Amazon is out to compete in any and everything, and if they wanted to they could figure out what products and services are the growing the fastest based on the customer usage data from AWS and then come out with their own competitor.
I used to do $100,000 a month in revenue on Amazon with one HP skew. The product grew to #1 in its category within a couple months, another month after which Amazon started selling it to, "shipped from sold by Amazon".
Amazon is happy to help be your growth partner until you prove worth devouring.
Why would Netflix fund Amazon's prime video service?
Why would Walmart fund amazon.com and Whole Foods?
Why would Dropbox fund Amazon Drive?
AWS is their most profitable business in terms of margin. It makes sense to avoid funding your competition if possible, which is a problem for Amazon given how many business divisions they have and continue to add.
Competition. As Amazon grows as a conglomerate, competitors are less inclined to use their services, even if that one service isn't what they're competing over.
If you can link the fall of democracy to misinformation being spread on their platform, genocide and mob murders, yes I’d say not all tech companies are that bad.
I think poor education, stagnation of living standards and rising inequality is a lot worse in that area than Facebook.
Granted, I think angrymob-media would be a much more fitting description than social-media, but it’s not like humanity wasn’t perfectly capable of making really shitty decisions long before the internet.
