Right on - Techie toys list these are a waste of time with a 2 year old.
My 3 year old wouldn't touch a computer game until he was 33 months.
Even now, at 40 months, the computer games are worthwhile - these give him the opportunity to learn how to use the mouse. But the Leapster and its ilk sit idly by in the toybox.
Someone said "Lego" (Duplo). I agree wholeheartedly.
Add to that the Brio / Thomas the Tank Engine / Imaginarium wooden track sets. Seems silly, but there's a lot of playing, and a lot to learn, from those sets.
But don't waste your money on those "educational" gadgets.
Chr!$t almighty! How many layers of abstraction do we really need to code in the name of portability and "enterprise-worthiness"?
I've done my share of stored proc programming, shell scripting, OO design, and J2EE implementations, and after 15+ years of it, and while all the theory around this appears sound, I continue to see these systems collapse not on their own weight, but the weight of the surrounding corporate IT infrastructure.
When was the last time you witnessed a project that, with a little nip here and a little tuck there, went from Oracle and iPlanet on Solaris to DB2 and Jrun on Windows? It's never "a little nip here and tuck there". The enterprise ecosystem is too diverse to make it that simple. So why bother in the first place?!?!?!?
Oh, I forgot...the "consulting" body shops like to push these "enterprise architectures". Gotta migrate platforms due to the latest corporate buyout/merger? That'll be $5.5M, half up front, thank you very much.
And of course, I could be wrong. But with all the provocative press Google is getting, and comments like this one from Ballmer, I can easily imagine a world with Google and M$ getting all "Alien-vs-Predator" on each other.
This has nothing to do with anything more than Google trying to "divide and conquer" a potential M$+AOL future.
M$ strategy: Embrace and extend all NON-Google online assets to make it a two-party game.
Google strategy: Marginalize M$ as deeply and often as inhumanly possible.
MS and Google can NEVER share space. Even if Google buys a tiny percentage of AOL, it's enough to poison the well so that M$ cannot usurp AOL into its own.
Aside: It's become clear that AOL is comfortable in its role as bastard-manipulatee.
Fact: Oracle is gobbling up both development tool and packaged application middle-tier products and plans to "fuse" them into their middleware platform now called "Oracle Fusion" using a Web Services platform.
Fact: Oracle Application Server is really a best-of-breed solution that leverages Apache, PHP, Perl, Orion J2EE Server and acquired reverse proxy caching technology. Oracle has in effect morphed into a company with an "acquire and merge best-of-breed" mentality.
Fact: Larry Ellison knows that, with the purchases of TimesTen, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft and Siebel, that there are not really any more fish to catch, pragmatically speaking (MS doesn't count - really). Oracle's goal for the next 10 years is to build these discrete products into a massive quasi-open platform that even interoperates with/competing/ products. They'd lose the very customer base they purchased if they did otherwise. Here is where Oracle plans to win - by embracing open (and Open Source)/standards/, they clobber the Microsoft beast in the enterprise market.
So why buy InnoDB? I think (a) Oracle genuinely understands it needs to play fair, especially in the Open Source space, so better that it acquire InnoDB than Microsoft; (b) Oracle needs (ok, wants) the InnoDB talent to figure out how best to interoperate its own products with other MySQL-friendly products (and corollary to [a], it might have been easier to simply buy InnoDB than to "partner" with them), and (c) as they are doing with TimesTen, by integrating InnoDB into their product line, they create a convenient migratory path to the Oracle RDBMS for companies that outgrow MySQL (and, yes, you *can* outgrow MySQL - if you don't understand this, then you don't understand the nature of enterprise computing). Finally, (d) I'm pretty sure Oracle's future direction depends pretty heavily on data caching at many levels in the computing infrastructure - heck, Oracle App Server caches requests/responses for HTTP, stored procedures and portal "portlets", and TimesTen is being positioned as a database-level cache for distributed networks, so why not add InnoDB to that pot as well?
MySQL recently said they were happy to have Oracle at the top end, and that they were quite happy at the low-to-mid end. Somehow, I believe Oracle bought InnoDB so they have a vested interest in the low-end, where there's noplace for a customer to go but up.
Oracle has a vested interest in GPL - it helps them make money. I don't think the acquisition of InnoDB reveals anything incongruous. Heck, Zend just moved from Israel to a place down the street from Oracle, and Oracle just established a significant relationship with Zend to enhance Oracle interoperability with Zend's "PHP performance cache", but I really don't see PHP ever being 0wn3d by Oracle.
"5) Some [reporter] with some b*lls ought to get on TV and say this "If our government can't get relief to a city 1 day's car trip from D.C., what makes you think you can rebuild Baghdad or any other part of Iraq?"
You're in luck. The N.O. Mayor did, in effect. Listen:
(1) I live in Detroit (2) Your dripping-with-cynicism assessment is not necessarily a negative one.
I work for a number of tier-two suppliers in Detroit, and I can vouch for the inertia that masquerades as "forget hybrids, lets do hydrogen". Detroit just doesn't yet know how to make a *meaningful* hybrid.
As your typical left-leaning yuppie scum, I would love to purchase a hybrid for the reasons you mention...but the Big Three hybrid offerings are nothing short of lame. Heck, the performance characteristics of the new Saturn Green Line are just laughable, but the line serves its "elitist" purpose quite well, thank you very much.
Compare that with the Prius - which I have driven - and is a really nice car - and I know I'll have to buy a Toyota to be both environmentally effective *and* a vessel for Republican shame.
Look out Chrysler! I'm a gonna have to trade in my Caravan for a Toyota Sienna soccer-hauler!
I can't admit how I know this, but to be sure, the recent purchase of AT&T by SBC was made EXCLUSIVELY to *stem* the growth of VoIP.
AT&T had recently sworn off their Big Bell ways and dedicated themselves to VoIP exclusively.
It was just a setup, guys. AT&T *wanted* to get bought out, and by an old Baby Bell too. What better way to do this than to threaten the Baby Bells with something they'd like to extinguish?!?!?
Anything that threatens the necessity for twisted pair to the house is a threat to the burgeoning Baby Bells. VoIP represents the biggest of those threats.
Shoot! It doesn't take an MBA to see that once Comcast is managing VoIP packets, they'd be quite happy to prioritize said packets based on their destination soft-switch/router.
SCENARIO: We both have Comcast broadband. You have Vonage. I have Comcast VoIP. Your VoIP calls are choppy , echo-laden, and drop frequently. Mine don't.
Guess what - if you want better VoIP quality, you'd better drop Vonage for Comcast.
Vonage, AT&T and Packet8 will get complaints. They'll take their complaints to Comcast. Comcast, basking in the glory of an unregulated sub-market, will claim those complaints are unsubstantiated and unprovable. And in the meanwhile you'll drop your Vonage account due to unresolved poor quality. You might even sign up with Comcast VoIP, because, hey, even at $40/mo, unlimited calling via VoIP beats the Bells.
Why the ***k can't the FCC, FTC or anyone else see that it's just plain fscking DANGEROUS when the OWNER OF THE PIPE is the same party as the PROPREITOR OF THE SERVICE OR CONTENT???!?!?!?!?!?
...you mean, like IBM did with their legendary "clicky" keyboards?
I've got a couple original IBM "clicky" keyboards - I'm using one right now.
Plus, a couple years ago, I bought, sight unseen, a couple "IBM" keyboards (likely manufactured soon after their foray into Lexmark).
These keyboards *look* EXACTLY like the originals, and have the IBM logo on them, but the keyboard feel is mushy, missing that "clicky" attribute that made the keyboards both so great to use and indestructible.
I *have* to believe these late model cheap ones were the result of cost cutting measures taken as "Lexmark" tried to be price-competitive for IBM.
So I venture to guess that IBM is not past allowing a third party to ruin a previously-great product.
I don't know about you, but I currently own a Thinkpad T22 and a Powerbook 17". Plus, I've owned 2 other Thinkpads over the last 7 years.
Quite frankly, my preferences between the two come down to this:
(1) The Powerbook is the better Road Warrior, with better overall thoughtful packaging. I'm productively running all different pieces of Oracle on PPC/OSX, BSD/Unix and Wintel in that square foot. And you really can't underestimate the WOW factor of that snazzy case!
(2) There will NEVER be another notebook brand that has the superb keyboards that the Thinkpads do. Those keyboards make the machine. Between the keyboard and the support network, it's easy to see why Thinkpads are such a consistent number one choice.
I'm glad I have both. Put me on a deserted island with a choice between the two, and I'm liable to hang myself before choose betwen the two.
If Levono is stupid enough to abandon the customer base they just purchased through increasingly inferior products, well, I'll just have to go get myself a job as a greeter at Walmart for the remainder of my days.
(1) Air America is a new left-leaning radio network; seems to be doing well for itself.
(2) In this left-vs-right radio survey, I'd venture to say that most moderate-to-left folks tend to support public radio, the avenue that rightists refer to as among the "liberal media".
(3) Left-leaners simply may listen to the radio less, or differently, on the whole, than right-leaners. Consider a recent theory that telephone-based surveys skew to the right because surveyors do NOT call cell phones, and a disproportionately high number of young and/or progressive people have given up their landlines and use cell phones exclusively. Similarly, left-leaners *might* use other media outlets (like newspapers and Internet) more than radio (at least to get their politics on), resulting in a for-profit radio market that skews to the right.
(4) Left-leaners tend to live on the coasts and in big cities; right-leaners make up the balance. This results in a very different population density for the two groups. But a radio station transmitter covers a fixed geography, so there would need to be *more transmitters* - more *radio stations* carrying right-wing syndicated content - to reach their base. It might take 10 radio stations, each syndicating O'Reilly content in America's Heartland, to cover the same number of conservatives that it would take 1 transmitter to cover the same number of liberals in Eastern New England.
I second this - I've tried countless times to make something of the GATOS drivers, but end up throwing my hands up in the air.
I eventually went with a Hauppague WinTV card.
To appease my prior purchase (ATI AIW Radeon), I've taken to using Open Source tools (Perl, PHP, WebVCR, Apache, XMLTV) to create an online scheduling app that works with the ATI AIW scheduleing software and MMC app. I'll post it to Sourceforge when it's ready...
From what I can remember, grooves perpendicular to the tire travel will result in really noisy pavement; the trend lately is to introduce grooves parallel to tire travel. This appears to have worked on both I-275 and the Washtenaw County part of M-14.
I used to live in apartments right off I-75 near Livernois, so I sympathize with your noise comment.
What stretch are you talking about? I remember MDOT talking about I-375 using an experimental type of cement, and it appears to be holding. More recently, I-275 was "grooved", resulting in a reasonable reduction in noise.
Ditto ditto ditto ditto ditto. I use FutureQuest to host a variety of mini-sites for the Fortune "10" - yes, "Ten" (that's the beauty of sub-subcontracting - the customer doesn't care how the solution is delivered, so long as it works). Needless to say, FutureQuest has been outperforming a Very Large Detroit Company's Massive IT Arm for 3+ years now. Simply marvelous.
Slashdot Mirror
Right on - Techie toys list these are a waste of time with a 2 year old.
My 3 year old wouldn't touch a computer game until he was 33 months.
Even now, at 40 months, the computer games are worthwhile - these give him the opportunity to learn how to use the mouse. But the Leapster and its ilk sit idly by in the toybox.
Someone said "Lego" (Duplo). I agree wholeheartedly.
Add to that the Brio / Thomas the Tank Engine / Imaginarium wooden track sets. Seems silly, but there's a lot of playing, and a lot to learn, from those sets.
But don't waste your money on those "educational" gadgets.
Chr!$t almighty! How many layers of abstraction do we really need to code in the name of portability and "enterprise-worthiness"?
I've done my share of stored proc programming, shell scripting, OO design, and J2EE implementations, and after 15+ years of it, and while all the theory around this appears sound, I continue to see these systems collapse not on their own weight, but the weight of the surrounding corporate IT infrastructure.
When was the last time you witnessed a project that, with a little nip here and a little tuck there, went from Oracle and iPlanet on Solaris to DB2 and Jrun on Windows? It's never "a little nip here and tuck there". The enterprise ecosystem is too diverse to make it that simple. So why bother in the first place?!?!?!?
Oh, I forgot...the "consulting" body shops like to push these "enterprise architectures". Gotta migrate platforms due to the latest corporate buyout/merger? That'll be $5.5M, half up front, thank you very much.
IMO, it was not speculation:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/microsoft-c
And of course, I could be wrong. But with all the provocative press Google is getting, and comments like this one from Ballmer, I can easily imagine a world with Google and M$ getting all "Alien-vs-Predator" on each other.
This has nothing to do with anything more than Google trying to "divide and conquer" a potential M$+AOL future.
M$ strategy: Embrace and extend all NON-Google online assets to make it a two-party game.
Google strategy: Marginalize M$ as deeply and often as inhumanly possible.
MS and Google can NEVER share space. Even if Google buys a tiny percentage of AOL, it's enough to poison the well so that M$ cannot usurp AOL into its own.
Aside: It's become clear that AOL is comfortable in its role as bastard-manipulatee.
Stop speculating on anything else, guys.
Fact: Oracle is gobbling up both development tool and packaged application middle-tier products and plans to "fuse" them into their middleware platform now called "Oracle Fusion" using a Web Services platform.
/competing/ products. They'd lose the very customer base they purchased if they did otherwise. Here is where Oracle plans to win - by embracing open (and Open Source) /standards/, they clobber the Microsoft beast in the enterprise market.
/you/ think?
Fact: Oracle Application Server is really a best-of-breed solution that leverages Apache, PHP, Perl, Orion J2EE Server and acquired reverse proxy caching technology. Oracle has in effect morphed into a company with an "acquire and merge best-of-breed" mentality.
Fact: Larry Ellison knows that, with the purchases of TimesTen, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft and Siebel, that there are not really any more fish to catch, pragmatically speaking (MS doesn't count - really). Oracle's goal for the next 10 years is to build these discrete products into a massive quasi-open platform that even interoperates with
So why buy InnoDB? I think (a) Oracle genuinely understands it needs to play fair, especially in the Open Source space, so better that it acquire InnoDB than Microsoft; (b) Oracle needs (ok, wants) the InnoDB talent to figure out how best to interoperate its own products with other MySQL-friendly products (and corollary to [a], it might have been easier to simply buy InnoDB than to "partner" with them), and (c) as they are doing with TimesTen, by integrating InnoDB into their product line, they create a convenient migratory path to the Oracle RDBMS for companies that outgrow MySQL (and, yes, you *can* outgrow MySQL - if you don't understand this, then you don't understand the nature of enterprise computing). Finally, (d) I'm pretty sure Oracle's future direction depends pretty heavily on data caching at many levels in the computing infrastructure - heck, Oracle App Server caches requests/responses for HTTP, stored procedures and portal "portlets", and TimesTen is being positioned as a database-level cache for distributed networks, so why not add InnoDB to that pot as well?
MySQL recently said they were happy to have Oracle at the top end, and that they were quite happy at the low-to-mid end. Somehow, I believe Oracle bought InnoDB so they have a vested interest in the low-end, where there's noplace for a customer to go but up.
Oracle has a vested interest in GPL - it helps them make money. I don't think the acquisition of InnoDB reveals anything incongruous. Heck, Zend just moved from Israel to a place down the street from Oracle, and Oracle just established a significant relationship with Zend to enhance Oracle interoperability with Zend's "PHP performance cache", but I really don't see PHP ever being 0wn3d by Oracle.
What do
dude, i have but one word for you, and it's not "polopony"...
"5) Some [reporter] with some b*lls ought to get on TV and say this "If our government can't get relief to a city 1 day's car trip from D.C., what makes you think you can rebuild Baghdad or any other part of Iraq?"
/ index.html
You're in luck. The N.O. Mayor did, in effect. Listen:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/nagin.transcript
A listen to this was the clarifying moment that caused me to get up off my ass and donate to the Red Cross, for starters...
You hit it right on the head...
(1) I live in Detroit
(2) Your dripping-with-cynicism assessment is not necessarily a negative one.
I work for a number of tier-two suppliers in Detroit, and I can vouch for the inertia that masquerades as "forget hybrids, lets do hydrogen". Detroit just doesn't yet know how to make a *meaningful* hybrid.
As your typical left-leaning yuppie scum, I would love to purchase a hybrid for the reasons you mention...but the Big Three hybrid offerings are nothing short of lame. Heck, the performance characteristics of the new Saturn Green Line are just laughable, but the line serves its "elitist" purpose quite well, thank you very much.
Compare that with the Prius - which I have driven - and is a really nice car - and I know I'll have to buy a Toyota to be both environmentally effective *and* a vessel for Republican shame.
Look out Chrysler! I'm a gonna have to trade in my Caravan for a Toyota Sienna soccer-hauler!
get it? "Man driva'"
Ugh...
"In the retrospect the Comcast bid for Disney and AOL buying Time Warner start making sense."
I can't fscking believe it took you that long to figure this out.
From January:
FSCK THAT! it's Comcast's ADVANTAGE owning the net
People - PLEASE GET A CLUE!
I can't admit how I know this, but to be sure, the recent purchase of AT&T by SBC was made EXCLUSIVELY to *stem* the growth of VoIP.
AT&T had recently sworn off their Big Bell ways and dedicated themselves to VoIP exclusively.
It was just a setup, guys. AT&T *wanted* to get bought out, and by an old Baby Bell too. What better way to do this than to threaten the Baby Bells with something they'd like to extinguish?!?!?
Anything that threatens the necessity for twisted pair to the house is a threat to the burgeoning Baby Bells. VoIP represents the biggest of those threats.
AT&T bought? Threat averted.
Shoot! It doesn't take an MBA to see that once Comcast is managing VoIP packets, they'd be quite happy to prioritize said packets based on their destination soft-switch/router.
SCENARIO: We both have Comcast broadband. You have Vonage. I have Comcast VoIP. Your VoIP calls are choppy , echo-laden, and drop frequently. Mine don't.
Guess what - if you want better VoIP quality, you'd better drop Vonage for Comcast.
Vonage, AT&T and Packet8 will get complaints. They'll take their complaints to Comcast. Comcast, basking in the glory of an unregulated sub-market, will claim those complaints are unsubstantiated and unprovable. And in the meanwhile you'll drop your Vonage account due to unresolved poor quality. You might even sign up with Comcast VoIP, because, hey, even at $40/mo, unlimited calling via VoIP beats the Bells.
ENDGAME: Broadband monopoly maintained. Score one, Comcast.
Why the ***k can't the FCC, FTC or anyone else see that it's just plain fscking DANGEROUS when the OWNER OF THE PIPE is the same party as the PROPREITOR OF THE SERVICE OR CONTENT???!?!?!?!?!?
...you mean, like IBM did with their legendary "clicky" keyboards?
I've got a couple original IBM "clicky" keyboards - I'm using one right now.
Plus, a couple years ago, I bought, sight unseen, a couple "IBM" keyboards (likely manufactured soon after their foray into Lexmark).
These keyboards *look* EXACTLY like the originals, and have the IBM logo on them, but the keyboard feel is mushy, missing that "clicky" attribute that made the keyboards both so great to use and indestructible.
I *have* to believe these late model cheap ones were the result of cost cutting measures taken as "Lexmark" tried to be price-competitive for IBM.
So I venture to guess that IBM is not past allowing a third party to ruin a previously-great product.
I don't know about you, but I currently own a Thinkpad T22 and a Powerbook 17". Plus, I've owned 2 other Thinkpads over the last 7 years.
Quite frankly, my preferences between the two come down to this:
(1) The Powerbook is the better Road Warrior, with better overall thoughtful packaging. I'm productively running all different pieces of Oracle on PPC/OSX, BSD/Unix and Wintel in that square foot. And you really can't underestimate the WOW factor of that snazzy case!
(2) There will NEVER be another notebook brand that has the superb keyboards that the Thinkpads do. Those keyboards make the machine. Between the keyboard and the support network, it's easy to see why Thinkpads are such a consistent number one choice.
I'm glad I have both. Put me on a deserted island with a choice between the two, and I'm liable to hang myself before choose betwen the two.
If Levono is stupid enough to abandon the customer base they just purchased through increasingly inferior products, well, I'll just have to go get myself a job as a greeter at Walmart for the remainder of my days.
They should change the name of the product to "SCuM" - Solicited Commercial uber-Meat!
Well, *I* laughed. Quietly. Never mind.
You are rig^H^H^Hcorrect...consider this tho:
(1) Air America is a new left-leaning radio network; seems to be doing well for itself.
(2) In this left-vs-right radio survey, I'd venture to say that most moderate-to-left folks tend to support public radio, the avenue that rightists refer to as among the "liberal media".
(3) Left-leaners simply may listen to the radio less, or differently, on the whole, than right-leaners. Consider a recent theory that telephone-based surveys skew to the right because surveyors do NOT call cell phones, and a disproportionately high number of young and/or progressive people have given up their landlines and use cell phones exclusively. Similarly, left-leaners *might* use other media outlets (like newspapers and Internet) more than radio (at least to get their politics on), resulting in a for-profit radio market that skews to the right.
(4) Left-leaners tend to live on the coasts and in big cities; right-leaners make up the balance. This results in a very different population density for the two groups. But a radio station transmitter covers a fixed geography, so there would need to be *more transmitters* - more *radio stations* carrying right-wing syndicated content - to reach their base. It might take 10 radio stations, each syndicating O'Reilly content in America's Heartland, to cover the same number of conservatives that it would take 1 transmitter to cover the same number of liberals in Eastern New England.
Just my C$0.03...
I second this - I've tried countless times to make something of the GATOS drivers, but end up throwing my hands up in the air.
I eventually went with a Hauppague WinTV card.
To appease my prior purchase (ATI AIW Radeon), I've taken to using Open Source tools (Perl, PHP, WebVCR, Apache, XMLTV) to create an online scheduling app that works with the ATI AIW scheduleing software and MMC app. I'll post it to Sourceforge when it's ready...
From what I can remember, grooves perpendicular to the tire travel will result in really noisy pavement; the trend lately is to introduce grooves parallel to tire travel. This appears to have worked on both I-275 and the Washtenaw County part of M-14.
;-)
I used to live in apartments right off I-75 near Livernois, so I sympathize with your noise comment.
I'd still rather see potholes go away!
What stretch are you talking about? I remember MDOT talking about I-375 using an experimental type of cement, and it appears to be holding. More recently, I-275 was "grooved", resulting in a reasonable reduction in noise.
I just wish they'd fix M-14 WB west of Plymouth.
It's a game!
No, it's a really fscking fast relational database!
NO, IT'S BOTH!
New "Full Throttle Sequel" RDBMS!
(You got my dander up with what I thought was a speed challenger to MySQL....darn.)
Ditto ditto ditto ditto ditto. I use FutureQuest to host a variety of mini-sites for the Fortune "10" - yes, "Ten" (that's the beauty of sub-subcontracting - the customer doesn't care how the solution is delivered, so long as it works). Needless to say, FutureQuest has been outperforming a Very Large Detroit Company's Massive IT Arm for 3+ years now. Simply marvelous.
Oh c'mon! You want Oracle to change their name to OracleSQL? SybaseSQL? InformixSQL? PostgreSQ---.
Never mind.
I begged Yahoo! to LDAP enable their "Address Book" web service years ago. I got blank stares at the time.
I'd pay Yahoo! or the like to provide such a service - a central repository for my personal addresses, RWable from (almost) any LDAP-enabled client.
Hmmm...if this guy's serious, maybe I'll start this meaningful new dotcom myself!
(VNC? Guys - get with the program!)
No I think he meant Tulane University Police Department...