Allowing wireless providers the ability to regulate the flow of information sort of makes sense right this moment. The technology is still week compared to expected usage
True, but the summary was talking about Google and Microsoft.
And things always get larger so even if 4GB isn't a problem now it might be pretty soon. For example our (front-end) web servers has 512MB in 2003 but now the smallest we have is 2GB and I reckon 512MB wouldn't be enough any more (although I couldn't say off the top of my head why).
Although 2GB < 4GB, who knows what will be standard in 10 years.
I suppose so, but if the process is "Firefox" then that's still a problem.
And ways around it, I mean I reckon that could be OK if you have maybe RAM being 2x or 4x the address space (although for sure not fun for developers; but OK fun for developers is irrelevant for the users..)... but I mean imagine a 16-bit 64KB address-space with a few MB of RAM, you'd spend all your time switching pages in and out of address space.. I mean the same would be true if you have a 32-bit 4GB address-space with e.g. 128GB of RAM..
Yeah I dunno, maybe memory availability will not expand as fast as I imagine it will, or maybe ARM will address the issue (as x86 and others have), but if ARM doesn't address the issue, it's going to be a problem one day, the only question is when.
Is ARM 64-bit? By which I mean, can an OS create a process of larger than 4GB in size? (Or can it even use more than 4GB of memory in total?)
I was on public transport the other day, there was a leaflet advertisement from a consumer electronics high-street shop, selling TVs, DVD players, PCs etc, and there was a €500 PC (US$ 700) with 8GB of memory. So assuming in 2 years, every (Intel) PC you buy off the high street has say 8-16 GB of memory, ARM computers (90% of PCs according to the guy) are going to look pretty stupid with a 4GB limit.
But maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's totally 64-bit? But Wikipedia doesn't seem to think so, and I can't find much evidence one way or the other.
And it's not the case that "nobody needs more than 4GB" either, a) every PC will just have that much memory, and b) Because of that, programs will start to use that much memory. i.e. there is often a speed vs memory trade-off, and if everyone has GBs of memory, there's no point making your program run slower to fit in 100MB of memory.
And further, "nobody needs more than 4GB", well I mean in a way nobody needs more than 100MB I would say (10 years ago my desktop machine had 128MB, could do word-processing, internet browsing, etc.) But have fun running modern software on a 128MB computer! The same will happen to 4GB computers.
Yes I totally agree, that's one reason why I'll never buy a Mac. (And I'm sure Apple aren't going to change any time soon, as all their users are presumably used to their positioning).
CTRL should clearly be on the left, that's where you expect it to be from normal keyboards. If there's one key that's flexible where you put it, it's the FN key, that doesn't have an equivalent on normal keyboards so there is no expectation.
But surely if you readvertize and leave the sync off, then data inconsistencies will start to occur? (e.g. a modification to the one database, and a different modification e.g. to the same row in another database). How are these inconsistencies then reconciled?
"The issue is when the systems designed to create redundancy actually cause the failure" - exactly.
For example we had two Oracle systems (hot-cold) and one disk array connected to both systems. The second Oracle was triggered to start automatically when the first Oracle died. One time the second Oracle thought the first Oralce had died and started, even though the first Oralce hadn't died. (We never knew why it started.) Then we had two live instances writing to the same set of data files, and not knowing anything about each other - not good.
I'm not saying redundancy is bad, but it has consequences, and one of those consequences is complexity which can introduce its own downtimes.
Were you running relational databases? What did you do about schema changes?
(i.e. presumably if you were running relational DBs then there would be one big data set which would be shared between all three sites; you couldn't e.g. deadvertize one site, change the schema, then readvertise, as then the schemas would be different...)
You assume that payment is needed to view the site (in which case URLs being sent to random people who hadn't paid wouldn't work.)
However there could be other alternatives, e.g. pay to be able to upload something, then it's available for everyone, i.e. combining payment and being able to view stuff.
(I mean for sure that has other consequences as well, but I just wanted to point out that payment doesn't have to imply non-emailable URLs)
Why should your grandmother care? If she wants to surf the web, she clicks on Safari in the dock.......
How on earth would anyone know that "Safari" was a web browser?
Everyone who visits my flat, and uses my computer (a Mac) asks me how to get a browser up. It's not obvious.
Contrast that with Windows, where you click on "Start" and there is "Internet Explorer".
The problem is interfaces change; not REST vs XML
on
The Zen of SOA
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· Score: 1
As functionality changes, so does the interface. If PirateBay changed its functionality (e.g. added an "add item" command) you'd need a new interface for that. It doesn't matter if you communicate via XML or REST, if PirateBay adds a new command and you want to support it, you're going to have to program the new interface.
And the fact that system A you bought demands a certain interface (e.g. "bill the user" interface), but system B you bought exposes a different interface (e.g. accountancy system has its own way of doing billing; firstly defining products in some configuration system, etc..): this problem is also independent of any XML vs REST vs anything else debate. This will always happen. You always need to integate systems produced independently. At least with XML you have XSLT to translate between one schema and the next.
With XML it's easy to define the character set i.e. send/recieve data in UTF-8. When talking about "global enterprises" etc, one needs more than ASCII. I feel confident in relying on XML parsers/generators to respect the UTF-8 header (in langauges which can support Unicode like Java and Perl, although I would not be confident about PHP!); I do not feel confident in getting some URL-based software to accept non-ASCII characters on the URL. What's the convention? These days UTF-8 then URL-encode. That's what I use but who knows if everyone else uses that. And it's just a convention as the character set is not stated anywhere in the URL.
The EU has a law that you have to have at least 25 days vacation - sick leave and public holidays not included in that 25. (Although the UK only had 20 days up until recently so evidently it was possible to opt out.)
Surely either it is necessary to protect consumers from exploding devices or not.
1) If it is necessary, they shouldn't be relying on credit card data - what if you bought the machine with cash? Then it'd explode and they'd have no way of contacting you.
2) If it is not necessary, then they don't need to be sending you stuff. You could update the firmware yourself if you wanted by downloading it, or not if you didn't want to.
our live oracle crashed once, and it happend i was logged in to it on the command line at the time, and our guy got on to oracle, and they asked me what i'd been doing at the time - i said it didn't matter, as it was far from certain that my session caused the crash (we must have had >100 software processes connected and active at the time) and i didn't do anything out of the ordinary - but they wanted to know anyway so i told them - i did a "truncate table", it took a few seconds for some reason so i pressed ctrl-c for some reason, then not being sure why i pressed ctrl-c, i executed the truncate table statement again. a few minutes later a link to a bug report came back from oracle support, describing a known bug in oracle which was exactly that sequence of events - truncate table; ctrl-c; truncate table (i.e. not a generalization of which that sequence of events was a special case, but specifically that sequence of events). i really really wonder how specifically this sequence of events and no others can trigger a particular bug.
in addition i liked the bug report which said that oracle would supply a bug fix "if the customer can demonstrate that this is a serious problem for them". i mean it's not like oracle's cheap
Do you understand how your modern car works, with no user-servicable parts? It not, why do you drive it?
What about DVDs? Or do you just buy a machine, put the disk in, and expect it to work?
For that matter what about the optimization and pipelining your CPU is doing right now?
Too many complex things exist in our modern society to expect people to have even a basic understanding of everything. It is arrogant to assume that the aspect of it which you happen to understand is the most important, and people who do not have an understandng of it are fools.
Talking of reading other people's emails...
on
Ethics In IT
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· Score: 5, Funny
A friend of a friend was working in IT as a Windows administrator. He was called to fix someone's computer, who then went out to lunch leaving the friend alone with the computer. He saw a mail on the computer that he found interesting, so he forwarded it to himself.
This is surely a bad thing to do, and the end of the story is that he got fired, but he probably would have got away with it apart from the mistake he made....
He managed to spell his own name wrong in his email address. So when the guy got back from lunch, there was a bounce mail waiting for him in his inbox....
Slashdot Mirror
Allowing wireless providers the ability to regulate the flow of information sort of makes sense right this moment. The technology is still week compared to expected usage
15 years ago wired networks were the same.
True, but the summary was talking about Google and Microsoft.
And things always get larger so even if 4GB isn't a problem now it might be pretty soon. For example our (front-end) web servers has 512MB in 2003 but now the smallest we have is 2GB and I reckon 512MB wouldn't be enough any more (although I couldn't say off the top of my head why).
Although 2GB < 4GB, who knows what will be standard in 10 years.
Yes !! I don't get why this isn't mentioned more ... 4GB will not be enough for desktop computers pretty soon, and certainly isn't enough for servers.
I suppose so, but if the process is "Firefox" then that's still a problem.
And ways around it, I mean I reckon that could be OK if you have maybe RAM being 2x or 4x the address space (although for sure not fun for developers; but OK fun for developers is irrelevant for the users..) ... but I mean imagine a 16-bit 64KB address-space with a few MB of RAM, you'd spend all your time switching pages in and out of address space .. I mean the same would be true if you have a 32-bit 4GB address-space with e.g. 128GB of RAM..
Yeah I dunno, maybe memory availability will not expand as fast as I imagine it will, or maybe ARM will address the issue (as x86 and others have), but if ARM doesn't address the issue, it's going to be a problem one day, the only question is when.
Is ARM 64-bit? By which I mean, can an OS create a process of larger than 4GB in size? (Or can it even use more than 4GB of memory in total?)
I was on public transport the other day, there was a leaflet advertisement from a consumer electronics high-street shop, selling TVs, DVD players, PCs etc, and there was a €500 PC (US$ 700) with 8GB of memory. So assuming in 2 years, every (Intel) PC you buy off the high street has say 8-16 GB of memory, ARM computers (90% of PCs according to the guy) are going to look pretty stupid with a 4GB limit.
But maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's totally 64-bit? But Wikipedia doesn't seem to think so, and I can't find much evidence one way or the other.
And it's not the case that "nobody needs more than 4GB" either, a) every PC will just have that much memory, and b) Because of that, programs will start to use that much memory. i.e. there is often a speed vs memory trade-off, and if everyone has GBs of memory, there's no point making your program run slower to fit in 100MB of memory.
And further, "nobody needs more than 4GB", well I mean in a way nobody needs more than 100MB I would say (10 years ago my desktop machine had 128MB, could do word-processing, internet browsing, etc.) But have fun running modern software on a 128MB computer! The same will happen to 4GB computers.
Anyone know?
Yes I totally agree, that's one reason why I'll never buy a Mac. (And I'm sure Apple aren't going to change any time soon, as all their users are presumably used to their positioning).
CTRL should clearly be on the left, that's where you expect it to be from normal keyboards. If there's one key that's flexible where you put it, it's the FN key, that doesn't have an equivalent on normal keyboards so there is no expectation.
But surely if you readvertize and leave the sync off, then data inconsistencies will start to occur? (e.g. a modification to the one database, and a different modification e.g. to the same row in another database). How are these inconsistencies then reconciled?
"The issue is when the systems designed to create redundancy actually cause the failure" - exactly.
For example we had two Oracle systems (hot-cold) and one disk array connected to both systems. The second Oracle was triggered to start automatically when the first Oracle died. One time the second Oracle thought the first Oralce had died and started, even though the first Oralce hadn't died. (We never knew why it started.) Then we had two live instances writing to the same set of data files, and not knowing anything about each other - not good.
I'm not saying redundancy is bad, but it has consequences, and one of those consequences is complexity which can introduce its own downtimes.
Were you running relational databases? What did you do about schema changes?
(i.e. presumably if you were running relational DBs then there would be one big data set which would be shared between all three sites; you couldn't e.g. deadvertize one site, change the schema, then readvertise, as then the schemas would be different...)
It is possible to change styles if you set it up properly when you are typing the document. Most people don't. It isn't the easiest thing to do..
But surely easier than using TeX, however.
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/03/just-to-clarify.html
"They've been doing MVCC now for almost 10 years"
Oracle introduced MVCC in Oracle 4, released 1984 (25 years ago)
What's your proposed alternative?
Most people in Germany and the surrounding area use Xing.
Not necessarily.
You assume that payment is needed to view the site (in which case URLs being sent to random people who hadn't paid wouldn't work.)
However there could be other alternatives, e.g. pay to be able to upload something, then it's available for everyone, i.e. combining payment and being able to view stuff.
(I mean for sure that has other consequences as well, but I just wanted to point out that payment doesn't have to imply non-emailable URLs)
Can you give us more detail on the "shops that ran Tomcat .. had infrequent but persistent problems with transactions (lost updates, etc.)"?
Why should your grandmother care? If she wants to surf the web, she clicks on Safari in the dock. ......
How on earth would anyone know that "Safari" was a web browser?
Everyone who visits my flat, and uses my computer (a Mac) asks me how to get a browser up. It's not obvious.
Contrast that with Windows, where you click on "Start" and there is "Internet Explorer".
As functionality changes, so does the interface. If PirateBay changed its functionality (e.g. added an "add item" command) you'd need a new interface for that. It doesn't matter if you communicate via XML or REST, if PirateBay adds a new command and you want to support it, you're going to have to program the new interface.
And the fact that system A you bought demands a certain interface (e.g. "bill the user" interface), but system B you bought exposes a different interface (e.g. accountancy system has its own way of doing billing; firstly defining products in some configuration system, etc..): this problem is also independent of any XML vs REST vs anything else debate. This will always happen. You always need to integate systems produced independently. At least with XML you have XSLT to translate between one schema and the next.
With XML it's easy to define the character set i.e. send/recieve data in UTF-8. When talking about "global enterprises" etc, one needs more than ASCII. I feel confident in relying on XML parsers/generators to respect the UTF-8 header (in langauges which can support Unicode like Java and Perl, although I would not be confident about PHP!); I do not feel confident in getting some URL-based software to accept non-ASCII characters on the URL. What's the convention? These days UTF-8 then URL-encode. That's what I use but who knows if everyone else uses that. And it's just a convention as the character set is not stated anywhere in the URL.
The EU has a law that you have to have at least 25 days vacation - sick leave and public holidays not included in that 25. (Although the UK only had 20 days up until recently so evidently it was possible to opt out.)
Surely either it is necessary to protect consumers from exploding devices or not.
1) If it is necessary, they shouldn't be relying on credit card data - what if you bought the machine with cash? Then it'd explode and they'd have no way of contacting you.
2) If it is not necessary, then they don't need to be sending you stuff. You could update the firmware yourself if you wanted by downloading it, or not if you didn't want to.
ENUMs are an absolutely essential feature when doing data modeling.
[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/release-8-3.html
[2] According to MySQL documentation on ENUMs; there are comments there from 2002.
our live oracle crashed once, and it happend i was logged in to it on the command line at the time, and our guy got on to oracle, and they asked me what i'd been doing at the time - i said it didn't matter, as it was far from certain that my session caused the crash (we must have had >100 software processes connected and active at the time) and i didn't do anything out of the ordinary - but they wanted to know anyway so i told them - i did a "truncate table", it took a few seconds for some reason so i pressed ctrl-c for some reason, then not being sure why i pressed ctrl-c, i executed the truncate table statement again. a few minutes later a link to a bug report came back from oracle support, describing a known bug in oracle which was exactly that sequence of events - truncate table; ctrl-c; truncate table (i.e. not a generalization of which that sequence of events was a special case, but specifically that sequence of events). i really really wonder how specifically this sequence of events and no others can trigger a particular bug.
in addition i liked the bug report which said that oracle would supply a bug fix "if the customer can demonstrate that this is a serious problem for them". i mean it's not like oracle's cheap
I agree. However PHP already has that bug; it uses == for both string comparison and numerical comparison.
Do you understand how your modern car works, with no user-servicable parts? It not, why do you drive it?
What about DVDs? Or do you just buy a machine, put the disk in, and expect it to work?
For that matter what about the optimization and pipelining your CPU is doing right now?
Too many complex things exist in our modern society to expect people to have even a basic understanding of everything. It is arrogant to assume that the aspect of it which you happen to understand is the most important, and people who do not have an understandng of it are fools.
A friend of a friend was working in IT as a Windows administrator. He was called to fix someone's computer, who then went out to lunch leaving the friend alone with the computer. He saw a mail on the computer that he found interesting, so he forwarded it to himself.
This is surely a bad thing to do, and the end of the story is that he got fired, but he probably would have got away with it apart from the mistake he made....
He managed to spell his own name wrong in his email address. So when the guy got back from lunch, there was a bounce mail waiting for him in his inbox....