We have this cool feature of the English language call the simile. With this simile, we can describe the features of an object by comparing it to another, unrelated object.
Example:
Joe is so strong, he is like an ox.
In this example, Joe clearly has no actual relation to an ox (we hope), however comparing him to an ox relates a charactaristic of Joe's, his strength, with a charactaristic easily noted when one looks at an ox - oxen are very strong compared to humans. This simile does not even imply that Joe's strength is equal to that of an ox, in this example hyperbole (more on that in another lesson) or exageration is used to highlight the quality of Joe that is being described.
In the example of the summary, they use simile by saying "crop circle-like" to describe what the formations look like. This does not imply that these formations ARE crop circle markings, in fact, the use of simile could actually imply that they are NOT the same thing. Had they simply said "crop circle", they would have either been incredibly inacturate or really, really bad at using metaphore (similar to simile, but not covered in this lesson).
Why the hell should he buy new equipment? He's already got Cisco, and Cisco does it.
Man, do you normally buy new gear that does exactly what your current gear does, just because the new gear has a cheaper price tag on it? What a complete waste of money.
You sound like a project manager for my company, only they usually go from less expensive perfectly capable current equipment to more expensive less capable new equipment. PM: "We need " Engineer: "Why?" PM: "Because, it does X, Y, and Z, and we need that!" E: "But already does X, Y, and Z, as well as G, E, and F. We wouldn't be operating without that." PM: "We need it anyway, do it."
What everybody fails to mention about Climate, is that 99% of it is caused by the Sun. Earth's spin gets the last 1%, which lets the sun do cooler stuff with wind than it could without it.
We actually have a miniscule affect on climate. The only bad part is it may not take much at all to kill us.
It might ease the problem, but it wouldn't solve it. The controller on the drive needs to clear the pages and re-set everything back to zero, it doesn't do that with just a format as far as I am aware. You'd need a format -and- a trim to get it back to like-new speeds.
I've never heard of a 20% fail rate for SSDs. I've heard of wear concerns, as each little bit on the drive can only be written a set number of times (it's at 10,000 or so, if I remember correctly). However, thanks to the majic of wear leveling and the large amount of separate chips in an SSD drive, you can fill up your drive completely and you will have only written to each bit exactly once. That means you could theoretically fill your SSD up 10,000 times before you would expect failure. Reality is a bit lower than that, maybe 3,000-5,000 times due to having to TRIM to re-arrange the bits, but it's still significant.
Of course, even with the performance hit TFA talks about after filling your SSD (which is fixed with the TRIM function TFA also talks about) the fastest spinning disks are still much much slower than all but the very worst SSDs out there.
Anyway, the 20% fail rate may have been a specific manufacturer of SSDs, there are already some really shitty ones out there.
Lastly,
Also doesn't one of the hardware manufactures (Samsung I think) have a patent on SSD so no one else can make the drives any way. Proprietary == Dead
You may need to get some more education about how patents work, because if that were true IBM would not have the fastest SSD on the markent. See, they do this thing called licensing, which basically means company Y purchases an agreement from company X to use their technology to manufacture a product. It creates an incentive for company X to allow other manufacturers to use their technology, flooding with the market with both quality and crap, but ultimately lowering the price and speeding innovation regardless of the high quality stuff (and improving the quality of the cheap stuff, it works both ways usually).
It's actually the reason patents exist. We only get in a fuss when people patent stuff that either a.) should never need a patent (which means the patentor can sue for damages for infringement) or b.) some company goes around buying patents from legitimate inventors for the sole purpose of hoping said patents become infringed upon by an unwitting third party. The former is a failure in the patent system, and the latter is patent trolling, which is an unethical and disgusting abuse of the process.
In very simple terms (because I'm no expert), it's because of the way SSDs deal with wear leveling and the fact that a single write is non-sequential. When it writes data, it is writing to multiple segments across multiple chips. It is very fast to do it this way, in fact the linear alternative creates heavy wear and is significantly slower (think single chip usb flash drives) than even spinning disk tech, and so this non-sequential write is essential.
Now, to achieve this, each chip is broken down into segments, and those segments are broken down into smaller segments, which are broken down into bytes, which are then broken down bits. When the SSD writes, it writes to the next available bit in the next available segment on each of the chips in the drive. Because it keeps track of exactly where it left off, this process is extremely fast, as all new data goes to the next place in line.
The problem comes when you fill up the hard drive and then delete data. When you delete data, you are deleting little bits spread all over the physical drive. Unless it is a tiny file, every chip will have a little bit of the file. What's worse, unless it was a massive file, you probably wont be clearing whole sequential segments on the drive. To add to that even further, the OS doesn't actually delete anything, it just flags it! So what this means is after you cleared a bunch of room on your hard drive, when writing new data your SSD is still massively fragmented, and to write new data the drive has to find free bits and clear them first. Think worst case scenario for spinning disk fragmentation and that's what you have - and you will get it every single time you fill up an SSD. You can actually re-format the drive and it won't necessarily fix the fragmentation problem, because formating won't reset the segments on the chip to factory state and update the internal drive index in such a way that it maximizes speed again.
Now, because the SSD is sort of like a very large RAID array with very tiny disks, even in this state is still faster than a conventional spinning-disk hard drive. But it is nowhere near as fast it was when it was clean and new.
Thus, the TRIM functions that have been mentioned. Basically these go through and do a de-frag of the data, which requires maximising the space at the "back" of each chip, then re-setting those free segments to the factory state. Depending on how much needs to be moved, this can have wear concerns, so you don't really want to do this all the time. The idea with SSDs is to fill them all the way up, then clear out as much room as you possibly can before trimming the drive. Once trimmed the drive should be back to pre-fragmentation speeds, but you have also just written many more times to some bits on the drive than others, which raises wear concers if the process has to be repeated too many times.
The primary is advertising, you nitwit. Blogger blogs, gets lots of people to read blog. Blogger then sells ad-space to advertiser, so the people who read the blog also get to see the ad. A small number of people purchase items from advertiser. Blogger, advertiser, and visitors all win.
Was that simple enough for you?
Other ancillary services would include merchendise (t-shirts, hats, books, etc), or perhaps an additional service related to the blog (i.e. you blog about organization tips, then offer organizational consulting services for a fee), etc.
There are a lot of options, newspapers just can't think of any. The small time guys who make it big are usually really good at it though. Note that not all small time guys will make it big, and the ones who don't probably aren't good at selling ancillary services, or they'd have made it big.
You do know what the terms "profession" and "professional" mean, right?
A profession is essentially the task or series of tasks you perform to supply your living. Anything you can do and get people to pay you for qualifies as a profession. Hell, I could be a professional water dumper if I could get someone to pay me to dump water.
If what you do is blog, and someone pays you for it, that is your profession. It makes you a professional blogger. The opposite of course is the amature blogger (or amature anything, really) who does blogging as a side hobby or aspect of their work, but does not take the bulk of their energy and does not provide most of their income.
Actually a number of Sci-Fi authors give away their books, or at least some of them. Oddly enough they usually see a jump in the sale of their dead-tree versions.
Imagine that.
Anyway, check out Baen's Free Books if you want more info, I'm too lazy to look it up but a quick google will find it for you.
There is also the right of the defendant to reject illegitimate requests for unrelated information.
Names of 2 or 3 posters who made veiled threats could be considered legitimate.
Names of all posters on the board, regardless of the content of their post, is not legitimate. It's like subpoenaing the tax records of an entire neighborhood because one person is engaged in tax evasion. It does not make sense, and the prosecutor does not have a right to request that information.
This is all related to the First Amendment, philosophicaly if not literally. Newspapers have a long history with the First Amendment, and they tend to fight anything even remotely related to it, because it is their protective shield.
So they are fighting this, and apparently have gotten the prosecution to back the request down to two posters instead of the entire list, if what other slashdotter's say is true. That is much more reasonable, but may still be worth fighting for the newspaper. They've gotten anonymous sources pretty well protected (though not completely).
I honestly don't know of any large business that uses MS as their main OS support provider. Consulting sure, but not day-to-day support.
There is a whole industry that provides support for Microsoft OSes, and oddly enough, Microsoft is not king of that arena. Actually I believe IBM is, with HP and Fujitsu not too far behind.
Microsoft makes their money with licensing. Have you ever spec'd out a network with, say, 5 servers and 500 users? Assuming things like email server, file server, and a database, you are probably looking at a few hundred thousand dollars, at least.
But you know what? It's worth it. Microsoft's enterprise solutions are top-notch. Even when everyone was complaining about Vista, Server 2008 (the server version of Vista) was the bee's knees.
It is cheaper for a company to spend $300,000 in licensing on a MS network and pay a network admin $75,000 per year to maintain it than it is spend nothing on licensing and pay $120,000 per year each on three Unix admins to get the same functionality out of the network.
Actually my very rough calculation for the MS licensing on a network assuming exchange, sql, and win2k8 server and client licenses comes out to around $200,000. Cheap when hidden costs are figured in for alternatives.
In some cases it may be fear and hype that keep people away from linux, but the truth is, in most cases it is simply better for business needs. I can't say the same for desktop software, I actually trashed Vista and replaced it with Linux on my personal laptop for a while, because its hardware incompatabilities pissed me off too much. Of course, about a year later (actually just the other day) I went back to Vista for the very same reason - hardware issues with Linux.
Frankly, MS makes great technology. They just seem to manage to ruin a lot of it with stupid shit. Server 2k8 vs Vista is a great example of this, they have the exact same core technology, yet 2k8 was something like 20% faster than Vista. Stunning, really. They don't mess around with their enterprise products. Of course, their enterprise products cost 8-20 times more.:)
Er, regarding your three examples of why you hate javascript:
The first was someone who hasn't properly learned Javascript - the "name" convention for the input box is very beginner stuff. I don't program javascript, I don't program much of anything really, and I know about that one. They have reference books for that sort of thing, and the guy just needs more experience with it. That he avoids it instead of tackling the problems isn't helping his situation with javascript. It would be almost like complaining that you have to separate items in an array with commas in C. If you can't remember that, it's not the language that has a problem.
The second basically said javascript would be great (with a caveat or two) if it weren't associated with useless web crap and turned off all the time.
The third was talking about ALL programming languages, javascript and python were just used as examples.
Quit whining, seriously. It's like complaining that python isn't as fast as C, or that C is harder to write than python. They have their purposes, if you want to do client side browser scripting you should learn javascript.
Besides, as the poster above me noted, you've got quite a bit of selfish double-speak going on.
Hah! You think Remedy is bad? As far as ticket tracking systems go, it's one of the better systems out there.
Be glad you don't use DigitalWorkflow, especially through a citrix session to a server halfway across the US.
But essentially we have to do the same thing, our daily metric is 5 tickets per tech per day. It's an average, so one tech can do 30 simple tasks and the rest can tackle the tough jobs, but they guy doing 30 tasks is spending most of his workday closing tickets.
High ticket numbers are how we justify our job. It's in the contract. There is even a bonus if we close more than a certain number of tickets in a quarter! Of course, we lowly employees don't see the bonus, but they may hire another tech at another site in the US if we close more tickets...
Today the minimum time per user issue is about 10-15 minutes, regardless of how long it actually takes to fix the problem. And that's just on the tech's end. On the user's end it is at -least- 15 minutes to make the request, not counting the wait time before someone looks at the problem. It gets routed to a help desk in Canada who tries and fails to fix even the dumbest issues (wasting potentially hours of the user's time) before sending the ticket to the local tech. Average time spent with a user is probably 10-20 minutes, somewhere in that neighborhood (easy issues push it down, headaches push it back up, it all averages out).
The helpdesk, of course, made more money if they solved the problem rather than sending it on to us so they would do their best. Unfortunately, "solving the problem" was determined by closing the ticket, so they weren't doing their best to help the user, they were doing their best to close the ticket. If a new ticket was created for an unresolved issue, that just means they get even more money for it.
It is rediculous. Unfortunately, there really isn't a better way to manage a top-down, global IT service solution. The better management, of course, is local management. Back in the "old days" the system was a simple email account that all the techs looked at. Users would send an email there, or if their computer was down call a number, the techs fixed the issue and most everything was done in minutes (or sometimes days) like the current system we use. It doesn't provide a lot of granularity for financial guys, but with quality management all the way through the financial guys don't NEED granularity, it's a non-issue. Also, with no real tracking system beyond a trustworthy team lead with quality management up the chain, the techs had time to hand-hold the user and help keep them from making the same mistakes again.
Not very possible now.
Of course, my alternate and I don't actually have to work on that particular contract. We are with the same group on a separate contract, and our metrics are: - Are the servers running like the are supposed to? - If they fail, is the redundant server back up and running within the required time window? (it's a process network, and they have to shut the plant down if the network or certain servers are down for more than a few hours) - Is the network secure?
It is refreshing as hell, we have free control of the network, and our job is basically to continually improve it. This means uptime, redundancy, and disaster recovery. Our metric is that it works and works well, and the people looking over our shoulder are more than savvy enough to tell, which means your improvements actually have the ability to impress them on their technical merits, and they can understand the need for a massive change if you pitch it well and it is actually needed. And that is a very good thing.
In mine it can take a week to get the hostname approved, which then allows you to apply for approval to install the OS. Of course, that requires a change request for which a backout plan is mandatory. What's your backout plan for if your server doesn't boot? I don't know, turn it off and troubleshoot? Makes no sense, but still required. Oh yeah and the first submission of any change request is an automatic denial, just to be sure you really want. This process, if you're lucky, may only take days. But it may also take months.
Ok, so, by now, you are cleared to install the OS. Time to order the server (no point in keeping it on hand on the off chance your request is denied outright, in spite of the fact that your department is the one paying for it, not corporate), that will only take a week or two. Unless you are remote, like me, then it can take longer. Fortunately, just ordering the hardware is much simpler, and you don't expect any hangups there.
Now, 1-3 months after you initiated the process to get the new server, you can set it up, which generally takes an afternoon + a few days to a month of testing time, depending on what is going on it.
You should try working in a monolithic corporate structure, EVERYTHING is like that. It sucks. But it pays well.
That's not really what happens at all. The rotation of the earth has absolutely nothing to do with satellite orbit. With the exception of the tiny amount of matter that gets shifted by the earth's rotation, the movement of the satellite would be exactly the same if the earth did not spin at all.
The direction of the satellite's forward motion (provided by momentum and thrust to overcome what friction there is) is altered by the force of gravity toward the earth. That change in direction creates the acceleration that produces force in the opposite direction of gravity. All you need to do is make sure that acceleration is equal to 9.8 meters per second squared and you have orbit.
It's satellite velocity + gravity that create orbit, earth's spin has nothing to do with it. Now, the spin of the Earth does have something to do with geo-stationary orbit, because the speed of the earth at the surface and the velocity necessary to maintain orbit mean that a certain altitude will be required. It factors into the calculations on where to put the satellite, but still, it doesn't create the forces involved in orbit.
He wasn't criticizing dark matter theory any more than you just did.
He was pointing out that the statement "hypothesis are usually created to fit the data, not the other way around" was utter non-sense. Ideally, that's true, but we end up with observations that should not exist based on everything else we observe, it's a thorn in the side and it needs an explanation. Thus what are essentially still just hypothesis get called theories because a) observations necessary have so far been impossible and b) they have been around a while and no better explanation has come up from all the available data.
A hypothesis is little more than guess with (hopefully) some good intelligence behind it. You make the hypothesis, then work to gather evidence that proves or disproves it. Dark Matter is more hypothesis that fixes current cosmic theory than a stable theory in and of itself, as there is only weak evidence to support it (the expansion of the universe is accelerating after all, and it shouldn't be). What keeps it around is there isn't a better explanation.
This "burning wall" is in the beginning stages of the process, but it seems to me like it should be easier to gather evidence supporting it than is possible with dark matter.
In any case, please don't take every statement very concisely pointing out a flaw in another person's reasoning as a personal attack against you and your favorite theory.
Apparently. I don't personally know anybody who does though.
reaction #2 to your post: people search for "reddit.com" instead of just going there??
Absolutely. Do you realize how many people get caught in phishing scams because they typo'd the url? Googling it is safer - not perfectly safe mind you, but safer nonetheless. I actually do this a lot, even when I know the address I'm usually halfway there anyway and go "screw it" and finish.
Plus, with chrome's browser bar search, they're the same thing now anyway.
If Bing is able to match or surpass Google's search engine in any way, they sure as hell had better pay attention even if it is not a significant improvement. You can't stay ahead if you are falling behind, and you'll fall behind if you aren't aware of what the competition is doing. While Google wouldn't go away any time soon, they have a lot less room for failure than MS does.
Minor point, but I forgot to mention the practice of buying keyword search terms.
This was the way all search engines before Google made money. You bought your ranking on the search engine
Google's results were purely a result of their algorithm applied to their crawled websites. It was impossible to purchase search engine rankings - instead they sold adds at the top and sides of the results, not in the results themselves, which was a much more honest way to go about it. So, Google's results were more accurate for that reason as well, and so more trustworthy.
All of this contributed to their crushing defeat of the search engine market, and at the same time made them one of the most trusted well-known companies in the world.
I wouldn't call their competitors incompetant - but I would call them absent.
You do realize that, before Google was king, there were litterally hundreds of search providers. And compared to Google, they all sucked.
Were you not around when the best way to find what you were looking for was to hit up 3 or 4 search engines? Engines like Altavista, Excite, and Yahoo were the best, but none of them could be relied upon solely. It was so bad, my favorite website at the time was DogPile.com, which was a search engine search engine. They would search 20+ search engines for your query, and flood you with the results. While it wasn't very good at finding what you wanted in context, it at least put all the results in one place for you to dig through.
Then Google came along, and crushed them. They started with a better search ranking system than anybody else had. Most search engines at the time just used the number of keywords on the page for relevance ranking, which led to websites with "invisible" text at the bottom of the page filled with thousands of keywords, relevevant and irrelevant, repeated over and over. Google's "linked to by other websites" vastly improved the quality of the search results, and as they gained popularity they were able to garner better advertising, and thus make more money to expand their web-crawling enterprises.
For the past four or five years, I have used one search engine and have had consistantly good results. Google isn't the best because there is no competition, that's backwards. In fact there has been no competition the last few years because Google is far and a way the best. Yahoo has managed hold their head above water, but they've had to move away from search being their big money maker. MS has always provided their search function as an additional service, it was never a big money maker for them.
There are only two ways Google can loose their search engine dominance: a "black swan" shows up with vastly improved search service from out in left field, or a competitor with enough clout releases a moderately better product and markets the hell out of it. Microsoft actually has a decent chance at both, but the latter is far more likely, and they are about the only ones in the market right now with the clout, capitol, and name recognition to pull that off.
Frankly, I hope Bing is better than Google, cause I'll start using it and be getting better search results.:)
Slashdot Mirror
We have this cool feature of the English language call the simile. With this simile, we can describe the features of an object by comparing it to another, unrelated object.
Example:
Joe is so strong, he is like an ox.
In this example, Joe clearly has no actual relation to an ox (we hope), however comparing him to an ox relates a charactaristic of Joe's, his strength, with a charactaristic easily noted when one looks at an ox - oxen are very strong compared to humans. This simile does not even imply that Joe's strength is equal to that of an ox, in this example hyperbole (more on that in another lesson) or exageration is used to highlight the quality of Joe that is being described.
In the example of the summary, they use simile by saying "crop circle-like" to describe what the formations look like. This does not imply that these formations ARE crop circle markings, in fact, the use of simile could actually imply that they are NOT the same thing. Had they simply said "crop circle", they would have either been incredibly inacturate or really, really bad at using metaphore (similar to simile, but not covered in this lesson).
In other words, you're an idiot.
So,
When a website works for everyone else, obviously it's the website that is broken when your browser can't display it correctly.
I think there is a flaw in the logic there, but I'm not sure where...
Oh the subtleties of the english language.
Well said sir!
Damn my lack of previewing!!
The missing information is, from top to bottom:
"new expensive product A"
and
"older currently installed less expensive but more functional product B"
Kudos if you find where the second goes, it might not be blatantly obvious at first. ;)
Why the hell should he buy new equipment? He's already got Cisco, and Cisco does it.
Man, do you normally buy new gear that does exactly what your current gear does, just because the new gear has a cheaper price tag on it? What a complete waste of money.
You sound like a project manager for my company, only they usually go from less expensive perfectly capable current equipment to more expensive less capable new equipment.
PM: "We need "
Engineer: "Why?"
PM: "Because, it does X, Y, and Z, and we need that!"
E: "But already does X, Y, and Z, as well as G, E, and F. We wouldn't be operating without that."
PM: "We need it anyway, do it."
What everybody fails to mention about Climate, is that 99% of it is caused by the Sun. Earth's spin gets the last 1%, which lets the sun do cooler stuff with wind than it could without it.
We actually have a miniscule affect on climate. The only bad part is it may not take much at all to kill us.
It might ease the problem, but it wouldn't solve it. The controller on the drive needs to clear the pages and re-set everything back to zero, it doesn't do that with just a format as far as I am aware. You'd need a format -and- a trim to get it back to like-new speeds.
I like your idea for ramdisks and cache though.
I've never heard of a 20% fail rate for SSDs. I've heard of wear concerns, as each little bit on the drive can only be written a set number of times (it's at 10,000 or so, if I remember correctly). However, thanks to the majic of wear leveling and the large amount of separate chips in an SSD drive, you can fill up your drive completely and you will have only written to each bit exactly once. That means you could theoretically fill your SSD up 10,000 times before you would expect failure. Reality is a bit lower than that, maybe 3,000-5,000 times due to having to TRIM to re-arrange the bits, but it's still significant.
Of course, even with the performance hit TFA talks about after filling your SSD (which is fixed with the TRIM function TFA also talks about) the fastest spinning disks are still much much slower than all but the very worst SSDs out there.
Anyway, the 20% fail rate may have been a specific manufacturer of SSDs, there are already some really shitty ones out there.
Lastly,
Also doesn't one of the hardware manufactures (Samsung I think) have a patent on SSD so no one else can make the drives any way. Proprietary == Dead
You may need to get some more education about how patents work, because if that were true IBM would not have the fastest SSD on the markent. See, they do this thing called licensing, which basically means company Y purchases an agreement from company X to use their technology to manufacture a product. It creates an incentive for company X to allow other manufacturers to use their technology, flooding with the market with both quality and crap, but ultimately lowering the price and speeding innovation regardless of the high quality stuff (and improving the quality of the cheap stuff, it works both ways usually).
It's actually the reason patents exist. We only get in a fuss when people patent stuff that either a.) should never need a patent (which means the patentor can sue for damages for infringement) or b.) some company goes around buying patents from legitimate inventors for the sole purpose of hoping said patents become infringed upon by an unwitting third party. The former is a failure in the patent system, and the latter is patent trolling, which is an unethical and disgusting abuse of the process.
In very simple terms (because I'm no expert), it's because of the way SSDs deal with wear leveling and the fact that a single write is non-sequential. When it writes data, it is writing to multiple segments across multiple chips. It is very fast to do it this way, in fact the linear alternative creates heavy wear and is significantly slower (think single chip usb flash drives) than even spinning disk tech, and so this non-sequential write is essential.
Now, to achieve this, each chip is broken down into segments, and those segments are broken down into smaller segments, which are broken down into bytes, which are then broken down bits. When the SSD writes, it writes to the next available bit in the next available segment on each of the chips in the drive. Because it keeps track of exactly where it left off, this process is extremely fast, as all new data goes to the next place in line.
The problem comes when you fill up the hard drive and then delete data. When you delete data, you are deleting little bits spread all over the physical drive. Unless it is a tiny file, every chip will have a little bit of the file. What's worse, unless it was a massive file, you probably wont be clearing whole sequential segments on the drive. To add to that even further, the OS doesn't actually delete anything, it just flags it! So what this means is after you cleared a bunch of room on your hard drive, when writing new data your SSD is still massively fragmented, and to write new data the drive has to find free bits and clear them first. Think worst case scenario for spinning disk fragmentation and that's what you have - and you will get it every single time you fill up an SSD. You can actually re-format the drive and it won't necessarily fix the fragmentation problem, because formating won't reset the segments on the chip to factory state and update the internal drive index in such a way that it maximizes speed again.
Now, because the SSD is sort of like a very large RAID array with very tiny disks, even in this state is still faster than a conventional spinning-disk hard drive. But it is nowhere near as fast it was when it was clean and new.
Thus, the TRIM functions that have been mentioned. Basically these go through and do a de-frag of the data, which requires maximising the space at the "back" of each chip, then re-setting those free segments to the factory state. Depending on how much needs to be moved, this can have wear concerns, so you don't really want to do this all the time. The idea with SSDs is to fill them all the way up, then clear out as much room as you possibly can before trimming the drive. Once trimmed the drive should be back to pre-fragmentation speeds, but you have also just written many more times to some bits on the drive than others, which raises wear concers if the process has to be repeated too many times.
Muchos Gracias.
The primary is advertising, you nitwit. Blogger blogs, gets lots of people to read blog. Blogger then sells ad-space to advertiser, so the people who read the blog also get to see the ad. A small number of people purchase items from advertiser. Blogger, advertiser, and visitors all win.
Was that simple enough for you?
Other ancillary services would include merchendise (t-shirts, hats, books, etc), or perhaps an additional service related to the blog (i.e. you blog about organization tips, then offer organizational consulting services for a fee), etc.
There are a lot of options, newspapers just can't think of any. The small time guys who make it big are usually really good at it though. Note that not all small time guys will make it big, and the ones who don't probably aren't good at selling ancillary services, or they'd have made it big.
Er, why?
You do know what the terms "profession" and "professional" mean, right?
A profession is essentially the task or series of tasks you perform to supply your living. Anything you can do and get people to pay you for qualifies as a profession. Hell, I could be a professional water dumper if I could get someone to pay me to dump water.
If what you do is blog, and someone pays you for it, that is your profession. It makes you a professional blogger. The opposite of course is the amature blogger (or amature anything, really) who does blogging as a side hobby or aspect of their work, but does not take the bulk of their energy and does not provide most of their income.
In other words, you're a moron.
Actually a number of Sci-Fi authors give away their books, or at least some of them. Oddly enough they usually see a jump in the sale of their dead-tree versions.
Imagine that.
Anyway, check out Baen's Free Books if you want more info, I'm too lazy to look it up but a quick google will find it for you.
There is also the right of the defendant to reject illegitimate requests for unrelated information.
Names of 2 or 3 posters who made veiled threats could be considered legitimate.
Names of all posters on the board, regardless of the content of their post, is not legitimate. It's like subpoenaing the tax records of an entire neighborhood because one person is engaged in tax evasion. It does not make sense, and the prosecutor does not have a right to request that information.
This is all related to the First Amendment, philosophicaly if not literally. Newspapers have a long history with the First Amendment, and they tend to fight anything even remotely related to it, because it is their protective shield.
So they are fighting this, and apparently have gotten the prosecution to back the request down to two posters instead of the entire list, if what other slashdotter's say is true. That is much more reasonable, but may still be worth fighting for the newspaper. They've gotten anonymous sources pretty well protected (though not completely).
So, in other words, you're completely fucking wrong, you idiot retard.
Do you mind if I borrow that for my sig? I imagine you saying that in a sort of angry condescending tone, and I love it.
I honestly don't know of any large business that uses MS as their main OS support provider. Consulting sure, but not day-to-day support.
There is a whole industry that provides support for Microsoft OSes, and oddly enough, Microsoft is not king of that arena. Actually I believe IBM is, with HP and Fujitsu not too far behind.
Microsoft makes their money with licensing. Have you ever spec'd out a network with, say, 5 servers and 500 users? Assuming things like email server, file server, and a database, you are probably looking at a few hundred thousand dollars, at least.
But you know what? It's worth it. Microsoft's enterprise solutions are top-notch. Even when everyone was complaining about Vista, Server 2008 (the server version of Vista) was the bee's knees.
It is cheaper for a company to spend $300,000 in licensing on a MS network and pay a network admin $75,000 per year to maintain it than it is spend nothing on licensing and pay $120,000 per year each on three Unix admins to get the same functionality out of the network.
Actually my very rough calculation for the MS licensing on a network assuming exchange, sql, and win2k8 server and client licenses comes out to around $200,000. Cheap when hidden costs are figured in for alternatives.
In some cases it may be fear and hype that keep people away from linux, but the truth is, in most cases it is simply better for business needs. I can't say the same for desktop software, I actually trashed Vista and replaced it with Linux on my personal laptop for a while, because its hardware incompatabilities pissed me off too much. Of course, about a year later (actually just the other day) I went back to Vista for the very same reason - hardware issues with Linux.
Frankly, MS makes great technology. They just seem to manage to ruin a lot of it with stupid shit. Server 2k8 vs Vista is a great example of this, they have the exact same core technology, yet 2k8 was something like 20% faster than Vista. Stunning, really. They don't mess around with their enterprise products. Of course, their enterprise products cost 8-20 times more. :)
Ahh, I get you.
Because we have something now that works, something in the future that may work better is not worth considering.
How short-sighted.
I guess innovation is dead, cause, you know, we have things. N'stuff.
Er, regarding your three examples of why you hate javascript:
The first was someone who hasn't properly learned Javascript - the "name" convention for the input box is very beginner stuff. I don't program javascript, I don't program much of anything really, and I know about that one. They have reference books for that sort of thing, and the guy just needs more experience with it. That he avoids it instead of tackling the problems isn't helping his situation with javascript. It would be almost like complaining that you have to separate items in an array with commas in C. If you can't remember that, it's not the language that has a problem.
The second basically said javascript would be great (with a caveat or two) if it weren't associated with useless web crap and turned off all the time.
The third was talking about ALL programming languages, javascript and python were just used as examples.
Quit whining, seriously. It's like complaining that python isn't as fast as C, or that C is harder to write than python. They have their purposes, if you want to do client side browser scripting you should learn javascript.
Besides, as the poster above me noted, you've got quite a bit of selfish double-speak going on.
Hah! You think Remedy is bad? As far as ticket tracking systems go, it's one of the better systems out there.
Be glad you don't use DigitalWorkflow, especially through a citrix session to a server halfway across the US.
But essentially we have to do the same thing, our daily metric is 5 tickets per tech per day. It's an average, so one tech can do 30 simple tasks and the rest can tackle the tough jobs, but they guy doing 30 tasks is spending most of his workday closing tickets.
High ticket numbers are how we justify our job. It's in the contract. There is even a bonus if we close more than a certain number of tickets in a quarter! Of course, we lowly employees don't see the bonus, but they may hire another tech at another site in the US if we close more tickets...
Today the minimum time per user issue is about 10-15 minutes, regardless of how long it actually takes to fix the problem. And that's just on the tech's end. On the user's end it is at -least- 15 minutes to make the request, not counting the wait time before someone looks at the problem. It gets routed to a help desk in Canada who tries and fails to fix even the dumbest issues (wasting potentially hours of the user's time) before sending the ticket to the local tech. Average time spent with a user is probably 10-20 minutes, somewhere in that neighborhood (easy issues push it down, headaches push it back up, it all averages out).
The helpdesk, of course, made more money if they solved the problem rather than sending it on to us so they would do their best. Unfortunately, "solving the problem" was determined by closing the ticket, so they weren't doing their best to help the user, they were doing their best to close the ticket. If a new ticket was created for an unresolved issue, that just means they get even more money for it.
It is rediculous. Unfortunately, there really isn't a better way to manage a top-down, global IT service solution. The better management, of course, is local management. Back in the "old days" the system was a simple email account that all the techs looked at. Users would send an email there, or if their computer was down call a number, the techs fixed the issue and most everything was done in minutes (or sometimes days) like the current system we use. It doesn't provide a lot of granularity for financial guys, but with quality management all the way through the financial guys don't NEED granularity, it's a non-issue. Also, with no real tracking system beyond a trustworthy team lead with quality management up the chain, the techs had time to hand-hold the user and help keep them from making the same mistakes again.
Not very possible now.
Of course, my alternate and I don't actually have to work on that particular contract. We are with the same group on a separate contract, and our metrics are:
- Are the servers running like the are supposed to?
- If they fail, is the redundant server back up and running within the required time window? (it's a process network, and they have to shut the plant down if the network or certain servers are down for more than a few hours)
- Is the network secure?
It is refreshing as hell, we have free control of the network, and our job is basically to continually improve it. This means uptime, redundancy, and disaster recovery. Our metric is that it works and works well, and the people looking over our shoulder are more than savvy enough to tell, which means your improvements actually have the ability to impress them on their technical merits, and they can understand the need for a massive change if you pitch it well and it is actually needed. And that is a very good thing.
A month is downright quick in some environments.
In mine it can take a week to get the hostname approved, which then allows you to apply for approval to install the OS. Of course, that requires a change request for which a backout plan is mandatory. What's your backout plan for if your server doesn't boot? I don't know, turn it off and troubleshoot? Makes no sense, but still required. Oh yeah and the first submission of any change request is an automatic denial, just to be sure you really want. This process, if you're lucky, may only take days. But it may also take months.
Ok, so, by now, you are cleared to install the OS. Time to order the server (no point in keeping it on hand on the off chance your request is denied outright, in spite of the fact that your department is the one paying for it, not corporate), that will only take a week or two. Unless you are remote, like me, then it can take longer. Fortunately, just ordering the hardware is much simpler, and you don't expect any hangups there.
Now, 1-3 months after you initiated the process to get the new server, you can set it up, which generally takes an afternoon + a few days to a month of testing time, depending on what is going on it.
You should try working in a monolithic corporate structure, EVERYTHING is like that. It sucks. But it pays well.
That's not really what happens at all. The rotation of the earth has absolutely nothing to do with satellite orbit. With the exception of the tiny amount of matter that gets shifted by the earth's rotation, the movement of the satellite would be exactly the same if the earth did not spin at all.
The direction of the satellite's forward motion (provided by momentum and thrust to overcome what friction there is) is altered by the force of gravity toward the earth. That change in direction creates the acceleration that produces force in the opposite direction of gravity. All you need to do is make sure that acceleration is equal to 9.8 meters per second squared and you have orbit.
It's satellite velocity + gravity that create orbit, earth's spin has nothing to do with it. Now, the spin of the Earth does have something to do with geo-stationary orbit, because the speed of the earth at the surface and the velocity necessary to maintain orbit mean that a certain altitude will be required. It factors into the calculations on where to put the satellite, but still, it doesn't create the forces involved in orbit.
He wasn't criticizing dark matter theory any more than you just did.
He was pointing out that the statement "hypothesis are usually created to fit the data, not the other way around" was utter non-sense. Ideally, that's true, but we end up with observations that should not exist based on everything else we observe, it's a thorn in the side and it needs an explanation. Thus what are essentially still just hypothesis get called theories because a) observations necessary have so far been impossible and b) they have been around a while and no better explanation has come up from all the available data.
A hypothesis is little more than guess with (hopefully) some good intelligence behind it. You make the hypothesis, then work to gather evidence that proves or disproves it. Dark Matter is more hypothesis that fixes current cosmic theory than a stable theory in and of itself, as there is only weak evidence to support it (the expansion of the universe is accelerating after all, and it shouldn't be). What keeps it around is there isn't a better explanation.
This "burning wall" is in the beginning stages of the process, but it seems to me like it should be easier to gather evidence supporting it than is possible with dark matter.
In any case, please don't take every statement very concisely pointing out a flaw in another person's reasoning as a personal attack against you and your favorite theory.
Mmkay?
reaction #1 to your post: people use reddit??
Apparently. I don't personally know anybody who does though.
reaction #2 to your post: people search for "reddit.com" instead of just going there??
Absolutely. Do you realize how many people get caught in phishing scams because they typo'd the url? Googling it is safer - not perfectly safe mind you, but safer nonetheless. I actually do this a lot, even when I know the address I'm usually halfway there anyway and go "screw it" and finish.
Plus, with chrome's browser bar search, they're the same thing now anyway.
If Bing is able to match or surpass Google's search engine in any way, they sure as hell had better pay attention even if it is not a significant improvement. You can't stay ahead if you are falling behind, and you'll fall behind if you aren't aware of what the competition is doing. While Google wouldn't go away any time soon, they have a lot less room for failure than MS does.
Minor point, but I forgot to mention the practice of buying keyword search terms.
This was the way all search engines before Google made money. You bought your ranking on the search engine
Google's results were purely a result of their algorithm applied to their crawled websites. It was impossible to purchase search engine rankings - instead they sold adds at the top and sides of the results, not in the results themselves, which was a much more honest way to go about it. So, Google's results were more accurate for that reason as well, and so more trustworthy.
All of this contributed to their crushing defeat of the search engine market, and at the same time made them one of the most trusted well-known companies in the world.
I wouldn't call their competitors incompetant - but I would call them absent.
You do realize that, before Google was king, there were litterally hundreds of search providers. And compared to Google, they all sucked.
Were you not around when the best way to find what you were looking for was to hit up 3 or 4 search engines? Engines like Altavista, Excite, and Yahoo were the best, but none of them could be relied upon solely. It was so bad, my favorite website at the time was DogPile.com, which was a search engine search engine. They would search 20+ search engines for your query, and flood you with the results. While it wasn't very good at finding what you wanted in context, it at least put all the results in one place for you to dig through.
Then Google came along, and crushed them. They started with a better search ranking system than anybody else had. Most search engines at the time just used the number of keywords on the page for relevance ranking, which led to websites with "invisible" text at the bottom of the page filled with thousands of keywords, relevevant and irrelevant, repeated over and over. Google's "linked to by other websites" vastly improved the quality of the search results, and as they gained popularity they were able to garner better advertising, and thus make more money to expand their web-crawling enterprises.
For the past four or five years, I have used one search engine and have had consistantly good results. Google isn't the best because there is no competition, that's backwards. In fact there has been no competition the last few years because Google is far and a way the best. Yahoo has managed hold their head above water, but they've had to move away from search being their big money maker. MS has always provided their search function as an additional service, it was never a big money maker for them.
There are only two ways Google can loose their search engine dominance: a "black swan" shows up with vastly improved search service from out in left field, or a competitor with enough clout releases a moderately better product and markets the hell out of it. Microsoft actually has a decent chance at both, but the latter is far more likely, and they are about the only ones in the market right now with the clout, capitol, and name recognition to pull that off.
Frankly, I hope Bing is better than Google, cause I'll start using it and be getting better search results. :)