“What rankles about Google is their hypocrisy”
While I’m wearing my Google-hating hat, here’s a Daring Fireball piece that adds another piece to the puzzle. My favourite bit:
But those statements from Jobs and Ive are not absurd. If they’re not the absolute truth, they’re at least truthy. Whereas Larry Page’s pablum regarding Google not being pitted against other companies is farcical.
You’ll need to click through for the context.
“Larry Page wants you to stop worrying and let him fix the world”
I’ve been meaning to link to this one for a while. A good article to read if you don’t understand why people like me don’t trust Google. Meanwhile, PRISM has happened. The plot is thickening.
If you’re an OS X/Linux geek who also runs Windoze, cygwin is probably installed on at least one of your computers. (On the other hand, if you have no clue what cygwin is, you’re allowed to skip this one.)
I use cygwin for occasional access to GNU utilities like find, and for rsync-based data replication between computers. Given POSIX permissions don’t map to NTFS permissions, this can be problematic. By default, when cygwin writes to NTFS volumes it replaces any existing NTFS permissions with new ones that replicate the effect of POSIX permissions. This is fine for cygwin-only parts of the filesystem, but if you like your NTFS permissions (including, say, ACL inheritance and propagation) and don’t want them to be butchered, you’ll need to mount your filesystems with the noacl option.
Unfortunately, noacl slows down cygwin’s filesystem operations by a factor of… well, lots. I’ve been enduring this for a while now, but I’m glad to have finally found the cause. With noacl enabled, cygwin can’t efficiently determine the executability of files, so it has to read the first few bytes of each file to figure it out. This slows stat down immensely.
The solution? Add exec, notexec or cygexec to your filesystem mount options. These instruct cygwin to treat every file on the filesystem as executable (or not executable). With this line in /etc/fstab, I’m golden:
none /cygdrive cygdrive binary,posix=0,user,noacl,exec 0 0
It’s pretty much a given that major Microsoft product releases follow the release-first fix-later model these days (e.g. Vista → Windows 7, Windows 8 → Windows 8.1).
Should they adopt Apple’s “don’t-even-announce-it-until-it’s-RTM” approach, or would Google’s “launch-it-in-beta-and-fix-it-on-the-fly” be a better fit?
Click through for Owen Williams’ take on what Microsoft’s current approach is costing them, and what their options are. (via Svbtle)