vicaya

Make the drawing area bigger! It's extremely hard to write signature fluidly in tiny area with digital devices.

The industry term is NVM, which refers to all classes of non-volatile memory, typically high density ones.

How do you like Crystal Ridge?

This is anything but minimalist.

Why do I need a slower plugin manager that requires editing .vimrc to enable/disable plugins, when a couple of simple shell commands is faster and less error prone?

  vimenable() { mv $VIM_DISABLED/$1 $VIM_BUNDLE }
  vimdisable() { mv $VIM_BUNDLE/$1 $VIM_DISABLED }
  vimupdate() { for p in $VIM_BUNDLE/*; do (cd $p; git pull); done }

The dependent plugin support is interesting but until all the plugins include a standard dependency spec, I have to do it manually anyway.

There is little reason to use non-crypto hash these days, given fast crypto hash like SipHash.

FLP/CAP merely illustrates the fundamental trade-off between "safety/consistency" and "liveliness/availability" of distributed systems.

There is a spectrum of design choices between strong consistency with best effort availability and best effort everything that make sense to many practical use cases.

This is wrong as well. VMware standard and distributed virtual switch is in hypervisor kernel.

"Virtualization doesn't really add much of anything for that specific problem other than increased context switching and slightly lower performance."

This is BS. What if you have 3 physical servers with 30% utilization? DRS can _seamlessly_ consolidate _arbitrary_ application VMs to one server and shutdown the rest. With bare metal, only certain specifically designed workloads (stateless web farms and some distributed systems etc.) can be moved easily.

It seems that dismissing virtualization out of sheer ignorance is a fad these days. Virtualization provides important hardware abstraction to a much wider variety of workloads.

One missing feature/todo is the one of the important features that differentiates HDFS from many "academic" distributed file systems (including Ceph) is end-to-end data checksums, which are computed in client and stored on data nodes and verified in client upon retrieval.

Personally, I'd avoid any distributed storage systems without end-to-end checksums.

Another related mandatory feature is background scrubbing (periodically verify block checksums and discard corrupted replicas).

Is this something new or the good ole' hole196?

http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/07/wifi-hole196-major-e...

Always love the practical hardware designs from these guys. I'm also interested in some software stories: Linux kernel/distro used, issues encountered/solved etc.

Open floorplans are great for hackathons and bugfixes for system integration in fire-fighting mode. It's disastrous for actual feature implementation.

Whoever downvoted me, please provide reference. AFAIK, there is no weakness found in Z-Wave protocol itself but a specific implementation in a specific brand of lock, which is demonstrated by the z-force hack.

The "just like SSL" comment is justified, AFAICT.

Well, locks are special beasts due to the security command class, which requires extra challenge/response round trips. My VeraLite-G (the cheap $135 one) is more than 50ft and a couple of dry walls away from the door and the overall latency is consistently around 1.4 seconds measured, while sending commands to the thermostats takes less than 0.2 seconds. It feels instant enough for me. The commands to the lock is routed through my thermostats and appliance module. I'm actually pleasantly surprised with how well the Z-wave mesh network worked. I need two Wifi APs to cover my house, if it were not for the second AP, the wifi signal at the door would be too weak to function reliably.

OTOH, I'm too somewhat disappointed at the quality, security and the development of the MiOS, but we as hackers can at least do something about it.

I'm saying that you can put together a better (customized) system than Nest with these parts without relying on any external services.

I was partially being facetious. This article is about a Rube Goldberg-esque API and this site is about hackers. I'm just pointing out that it can be done cheaply with better flexibility and precision by hackers like me. I'm one of those people who find the Nest algorithm frustrating and want to tinker with it (with more properly placed sensors etc). It's not really rocket science for people who understand the basics of control theory.

BTW, what does a deadbolt have anything to do with your Nest/HVAC system? Do you want to depend on Google to open/close your locks as well? It's _not_ normal to take 15-30 seconds to open a Z-wave deadbolt remotely (it's immediate if you use the lock keypad) with 50% of success rate: something (probably the security C/R exchanges) is timing out: the default timeout is 20 seconds. For me, it was 100% (knocking on wood:) with a few seconds latency for the times I tried, executing a night arrival scene from a phone in a car, which turned on path/door lights and unlocked the door, because I'd have groceries/takeouts in my both hands.

I'd tend to agree that Z-Wave devices and a Vera* controller is probably too much for non-tinkerers to handle in the current state, because average people can't even handle a wifi printer :). There are people who use Nest as a basic thermostat, i.e., for the looks only.

The main motivation for me to squawk on this topic is that I don't like the _trend_ of external services (nothing against Google per se :) owning my data and now control of my home.

We (hackers/tinkerers) can do better and demand a choice.

Yeah, just like SSL :)

Trivial and cheaper (for more thermostats/sensors) to do with $80 z-wave thermostats and one Vera* controller with no external service dependency.

Nest is $250 each. Ouch.

A motion/temperature sensor from Monoprice: $30.

A VeraLite-G (eBay make an offer): $135.

A Z-Wave thermostat (2-gig CT100 that can display humidity on the main display): $80 (I got a couple for $62 on sale)

No dependency on Google to control your home: priceless.

Disclosure: I use MasterCard sometimes.

Nest is reinventing home automation badly, IMO.

You can already do all that and more with plethora of Z-Wave devices with Vera* without any external services.

If you actually read the link you mentioned, Internet connectivity to Nest (Google) service _is_ required to make any changes (control) remotely. Why would people buy a $250 to use as a regular thermostat?

I'm not opposed to Internet connectivity per se but the external (Nest/Firebase/Google) services requirement for remotely controlling and/or automation of the devices.

The only appeal of Nest to a hacker is its industrial design, IMO. Apparently its UX is not that great (humidity display fail) either, while an $80 z-wave thermostat is much more usable/flexible.

I personally will never buy a Nest or any home automation devices that _require_ any external service(s) to control and function.

OTOH, I'm probably not part of the target market, as I'm perfectly happy futzing around with Vera* and VLAN/VPN/SSH tunnels.

Anybody here tried this at all?

I tried to get a takeout with my emails several times, all I got is on 2.3MB errors.html, telling "service cannot retrieve this item" over and over again.

"IBM will retain its System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, and PureApplication and PureData appliances."

"Transactions in ArangoDB are atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable (ACID)." "Collections consist of memory-mapped datafiles...". "by default, ArangoDB uses the eventual way of synchronization...synchronizes data to disk in a background thread."

So it's not ACID by default and practically not usable with immedaite sync turned on (huge amount of seeks due to use of mmap), just like mongo.

This _could_ be another case of premature optimization, as gcc 4.9+ could automagically devirtualize non-overridden virtual functions. icc could do that for years.

Animations can be easily turned off in settings

If SSO is the goal, why can't Google simply implement alternative persona a la Yahoo groups that has the feature for more than a decade? You still have SSO but _can_ have different public persona per property, should users choose to do so. Isn't this a solved problem?

For reads, sure. LSMs are optimized for writes, while LMDB, which is a nice B-tree implementation is optimized for reads.

LSMs are getting popular because it's harder to scale durable writes than reads, which can be handled (in many cases independently) by caching.

Would appreciate a comment from whoever down-voted. I recognize/appreciate the effectiveness/power of story telling, especially to convey intangibles/teachings. I (maybe others too) just have an aversion to the story telling in politics and commercial products.

OTOH, whenever somebody tries to tell me a story, I know (s)he's selling something and automatically get turned off.

I suspect that the story trick (as all tricks that appeal to anything other than critical thinking) will backfire soon enough.