The Mac's menu bar behavior is a vestigial design decision from the days before multi-tasking; they keep it around because it's part of the "look-and-feel"... hence form above function. That was my point. (Sure, it's subjective, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of serious computer users would agree that the menu-for-each-window scheme works better.)
Absolutely not. The whole reason the menu bar is at the top is because you can slam your mouse there, instead of having to aim it per-window. Apple's usability studies in the 1980's showed it was more efficient.
I'm a pretty serious computer user, and I tend to prefer the menu bar at the top.
Those are all examples of companies that have used a combination of open source and proprietary components to create a marketable product for a non-technical consumer.
They're not examples of volunteer open source groups creating and delivering one or more marketable products. I think Apache is probably the closest, in that they deliver marketable products for technical consumers.
Actually, everything you're pointing out is marketing.
Picking the exact combination of ease of use between iTMS and iTunes and the iPod? That's marketing. It's about creating a position (being the world's elite personal music player) and a perspective (a music ecosystem is what matters, not the device itself).
Marketing is about "creating a customer". Innovation would be implementing that combination in a way that economically succeeds. Part of marketing is to shape the nature of what the word of mouth will be -- what features are values, who the device is positioned to, etc. A number of the pro v. con iPod debates that occur have already been scripted by marketers at Apple, and we just regurgitate them.
What you seem to be saying is that most people can resist advertising. And that's definitiely true -- people don't necessarily buy innovative products based on brand advertisements alone. Sometimes direct advertisements do incent people, which is why paid programming continues to work ("Buy the super ginsu 2000 for only 4 payments of $19.95! Call now!")
But while brand advertising doesn't sell product, it's useful background amplification -- especially if it is unique and provocative. It tunes peoples ears into the conversation occuring on the product -- the word of mouth -- when normally they wouldn't think about it otherwise. Ever notice that when you've visited a new city you start noticing it more often on TV and in movies? Same idea with brand advertising. You start noticing people talking about subjects that never interested you before.
The shadow dancers are one of the most talked about ad campaigns in recent memory. People that never would have normally thought personal music all of a sudden were open to conversations on the subject. There already was a word-of-mouth buzz built up from early and mid adopters, but when you threw in a provocative ad campaign, it pushed the iPod over the edge last Autumn from a "cool gadget" into a pop culture craze. Apple's probably one of the most successful companies at pulling off repeatedly: I can think of the Think Different campaign in 1997, which saved their public perception at a desperate time. It didn't incent people to buy Macs that normally wouldn't. But arguably Think Different laid the perceptual foundation that led Apple to its current successes. For example, Apple retail stores have been a smash, beyond what every industry analyst predicted. It also drove iPod early adopters from outside the Mac community. Apple was "cool" again.
Frankly I see a lot of innovation happening in blade servers & grids. The problem , as usual, is the software, not the hardware. Software seems to lag the hardware innovations by years. Clusters are only now (the past 5 years) becoming really viable.
I was living in San Jose in 1999 on annual equivalent of $50k, living in a comfortable 2 bedroom apartment (with a roomate) and I could make payments on my small car. I even saved money.
Could I support a family on that? No. If I had a live at home wife and 1 child, then yes, $90k would likely be a necessary salary.
The number of reports is too large to discount, but plenty of people are saying there's no problem. It seems that some fraction of nanos are affected, but not all of them.
There was a problem with broken screens that Apple said will be replaced here. As for crazy scratches... perhaps they'll settle again. I seriously doubt the plaintiffs will get anything close to the battery settlement.
Apple settled the battery lawsuit, with a $50 voucher and extra warranty. A lot less than what the Nano suit is asking for (a portion of profits?).
The battery lawsuit was a bit nutty -- I have an 1G iPod from 2001 that still runs to this day with the original battery. Yes, it's down to about 2 hours capacity from 8, but claims about it only lasting 18 months were unfounded. There are many different rechargable devices out there, and they *all* degrade over time. The real problem was that Apple did not have an official battery replacement program, they relied on aftermarket providers. The lawsuit hit, and amusingly, Apple had a replacement program within a short number of weeks (which probably was in the works beforehand).
As for the Nano, I have one, yes in my pocket, yes my screen is a bit scratched, but no more than my other iPods, and it's still very legible.
The Servlet developer's kit was originally released in beta on March 4, 1997 (see timeline), with the 1.0 release of the Java Web Server on June 5, 1997. I remember putting a servlet-based application into production in Autumn 1998.
Even JavaServer Pages was released before that date, on June 2, 1999 -- and there was JHTML before that from ATG.
I've actually picked up "These Are The Vistas" in iTMS and I'm quite happy with the quality; compressed AAC at 128kb is about as good as MP3 at 192k in my experience.
Having said that, if you really want Dolby 5.1, you'd actually need the artist to record it that way. Nine inch nails' latest album _With Teeth_ was released with 5.1 DVD-Audio on one side , CD on the other. The 5.1 tracks certainly have a different feel to them. I'm not sure if it's "better" but I can pick out the individual sound tracks much more easily.
I've seen the HD H.264 Serenity trailer play well on an iMac G5 at the local Apple Store.... which is at least double the quality of DVD. it certainly is unplayable on my Powerbook, but I'm curious why an even smaller res H.264 would cause you problems.
I should have been clearer, what I meant to say was "lest you lack conviction" in pursuing your hypothesis.
Faith is belief in the face of doubt. It is not blind, it is a choice, and it is often a necessary one. These nobel laureates had faith that stomach ulcers weren't caused by stress and were curable, even though there was little independently verified evidence for their claim. Sure, they eventually built up evidence, but... you need to start somewhere.
I prefer to practice realism (to the best of my ability) than delude myself with a reality distortion field built on expectations that are by definition unrealistic and founded on false premises.
That assumes two things:
1. That humans have access to the truth behind "reality" (which you do qualify by suggesting "to the best of my ability"). Whereas a contrary position is to say that people don't have access to reality, they merely have perception and verify their perception's correlation to reality through social relationships (aka "trust"). The scientific community, for example, requries a lot of Independent verification of experimental observations. Rationalists would end the analysis here.
Others (post-modernists, while an overloaded term, probably is the proper one) believe that this approach, while a useful approximation to eliminate certain classes of human foibles (lying, cheating, making mistakes), doesn't guarantee greater access to reality, as reality is much more complex than our observational capabilities are. (Cue debates about the uncertainty principle)
2. That faith based on logic. It is not. (I'm taking this definition from the "existentialist" definition of faith, mostly attributed to Kierkegaard's book Fear and Trembling.) Faith is belief on the strength of the absurd. What makes faith very interesting is it is somewhat of a paradox: to have faith, one must be aware that the belief is absurd in the first place. Otherwise it's blind.
'Faith' as a solution is at best a kludge and at worst a red herring, that can lead down a dark path with disastrous repercussions on a global scale. Addressing root causes such as inequality, injustice, and persecution are more effective approaches at dealing with the things that drive people to 'faith' based groups in the first place.
The same could be said for any belief system, though. For example, is "rational absolutism" really a better approach? Not that you're suggesting this, but just to provide an illustration my point, let's explore rationality as a superior means to handle social issues.
Rationality and/or "scientifically deducted" approaches to handling social issues assume that humans, or at least a group of humans, have better access to "reality" than others, and can thus determine "the answer" to problems. Unfortunately, social experimentation tends to take decades, and observation is far from objective.
For example, if scientific evidence, independently verified, were to incidate that certain human races were intellectually superior to others, would it not be justified to repress the inferior races in a way similar to what we've done with the more intelligent animals?Or, for another example, if a group of people objectively believes, based on sound scientific reasoning, that the root causes of inequality and injustice were based on property relations and ownership of the means of production, would it not be justified to incite violence to overthrow the existing property relations and economic system in an effort to bring about an equal and just society? Another example might be a scientific rejection of the "individual" as having any merit; since truth can only be determined through trust relationships, the order of society and civilization are all that matters, liberty and freedom do not. My point is that Western civilization's recent tragedies of Racism, Anarchist Marxism, and Totalitarianism, have all been justified through science and reason, just as much as Christian or Islamist theocratic rule is justifyable through religious dogmatism.
I think if you don't have any doubt about your hypotheses there is something seriously wrong with your approach. Even if your right you ought to have doubts about it and set out to prove yourself wrong until you are certain you are right, that's how hypotheses progress to being regarded as 'proven'.
I should have been clearer; what I meant was that faith becomes the source of strength to "Keep On Truckin
Instead of "knowledge management", I've often wondered if it's more appropriate to talk about "ignorance management". What can I responsibly not know....
If the idea is "massive parallelism using commodity hardware", then grids are pretty much clusters with better management tools for single-system image, provisioning and/or re-distributing resources (CPU, I/O, etc.). Grids are mostly in the scientific community though you're starting to see it creep in commercial data centres (Oracle being a big proponent with their database version 10g, "g" standing for Grid).
The problem with clusters has always been software; to fund new software development, one needs to build a little bit of hype. That means new terminology. Kind of like how "expert systems" are now called "rules engines", workflow is now called "BPM", and interface contract negotation is now called "choreography". Not to belittle the work in these areas, there is much good being done, just an observation about funding cycles and human attention spans.
I mean, just think about what faith is... No matter how much evidence goes against what you believe, you will still believe it anyway.
Faith is an essential means to remain optimistic in an uncertain world. Faith is belief in the face of doubt / the absurd. Faith is arguably very important to scientific discovery, lest one doubt their hypotheses.
On the other hand, blind believe in the face of evidence strikes me more as dogmatism. And there certainly has been a lot of that in the history of science.
... I think you're overreacting. There's a lot of reason to be skeptical and critical of SOA, especially given the hype. Having said that, since SOA is an IT-management focused opportunity, Slashdotters are not particularly inclined to really value or understand it, nor should they.
The market is around US$10B this year, and according to Gartner (IIRC), it'll be US$95B in the next decade or so. That's Billion with a B.
That estimate, IIRC, is for the entire integration marketplace -- SOA or no, and I believe it's projected a few years out. It's also a bald-faced estimate, also known as a crap shoot. And Gartner's batting average is certainly not above.500.
Reuse under SOA is virtually guaranteed - because the tools are graphically assembling the underlying services.
Working for one of the aforementioned software vendors in the SOA marketplace, I make a living talking to CIO's about this stuff. I would get thrown out by my ear in 5 seconds if I suggested that reuse is due to some kind of drag 'n drop GUI. That's patently ridiculous, and almost a cliche'. Angle-brackets and better data transformation / routing tools aren't going to bring about the reuse nirvana; you're just going to have a more maintainable set of "web services" that are marginally re-usable.
To get to re-use, you need to sort out tremendous business process, organizational, political, governance, semantic, and data quality issues. It's a slog along very non-technical lines. Sure, the newer products help, and it's arguably the last roadblock to make it palatable to the visionaries -- but It's going to be the long slog that enterprise data warehouses were in the early to mid 90's, which I believe was the last successful wave of business-oriented re-use.
Recall that most organizations failed to build out an enterprise data warehouse, they just wound up popping marts & cubes everywhere, except for the cream (Amazon, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, a few Telcos, a handful of Banks). Similarly, not many orgs are going to succeed in changing their IT departments to a services-oriented world view; those that do will take years and it will be due a lot less to product or consultants than to the vision of their leaders.
Yet the immediate feedback that one gets from modern environments tends to change the way that one thinks about things... It's a very different mental experience to program today than it was in the olde times.
What I do agree with, however, is that many programmers lack "intent" -- they make changes without understanding the intent behind them. Kind of like how some people blurt out things they don't mean in regular discourse.
I got a black nano, yes, my screen was scratched, but it was from change & keys in my pocket. The screen is still legible and I can see pictures on it. Am I disappointed it scratched so quickly? Yes. Am I upset that I want a refund / lawsuit? No, I'm still quite happy with my gadget. I think people get way too worked up about wear and tear; I even thought the battery issue was blown way out of proportion (my first gen iPod still run on its original battery).
Anyway, now I keep it in a seperate pocket or my shirt pocket. Contrary to the hysterics, "clothing" doesn't scratch it from what I can tell. Also, this seems to scratch about as much as my first generation iPod did, but the white shows it less. The iPod Mini was the most scratchless iPod that I've noticed, mainly because of the (I believe) annodized alumnium exterior and different kind of screen.
Never had a battery problem (my 1st generation iPod from 2001 still runs with 2.5 hours life) nor a click wheel (on the original, mini, or my new nano). Only issue I had was my first iPod in November 2001 died after about 6 weeks, replaced under warranty.
My 2 friends that bought Dell DJ's have to keep a paperclip on them to reset the thing, it crashes so much. And it's very heavy. And the "up / down wheel" is much more thumb-cramping than the iPod's round click-wheel. Another friend that bought a Creative Zen finds it OK but still prefers my iPod, he bought the creative purely because it was on sale.:shrug: According to your post above, I'm still an idiot for having a good experience, and my friends are idiots for preferring my iPod. Whatever. I think you're an idiot for painting such a broad brush. At least there is symmetry.
What I find most interesting about these economic debates about restricting supply vs. demand is that they seem to always stop at the level of distribution -- supply and demand is in terms of # of songs downloaded, # of CD's sold, etc. People then proceed to focus on the costs of distribution, and not looking at the costs/risks associated with financing development.
The upstream supply of developing songs that people want to hear is the real scarcity here, and is really what determines pricing.
This is what you get for "software as a service"
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Oracle To Buy Siebel
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Which is actually what lots of open source people are pushing.
It's going to be a long, hard road to drive down the cost of software. Right now, it really looks like shifting money from license fees into consulting.
"Why buy a product when you can build it fairly quickly using XYZ open source framework?" is a common refrain I hear from many hallways. Not that this isn't a good option at times, it's just being pushed as the only option by a set of stakeholders with a vested interest in "building".
.Net cannot be called a standard, as Microsoft has stated it won't openly publish network protocols.
Let's be clear -- you've been referring to.NET interchangeably with CORBA, IPC, and DSM, as if it's some sort of distributed computing technology. It's not. It's a set of programming languages, a "common language" runtime, a "common language" interface, a class library, and has facilities for several distributed computing models or protocols:
.NET remoting (proprietary/homogenous RPC)
ASP.NET (for serving web pages and XML web services over HTTP)
COM+ (which uses the DCOM extensions to DCE RPC)
MSMQ (proprietary message queue)
ADO.NET (an interface to database protocols, whether OLE DB, ODBC, or proprietary)
.NET has standardized its main language, C#, along with the common language interface and base runtime and class library with the ECMA. Certainly, this was a token gesture, as it doesn't include useful things like ADO.NET or ASP.NET.
Under the DMCA, it is illegal for Americans to reverse-engineer unpublished components of.Net or use components reverse-engineered by others.
MONO seems to have done this without legal troubles (thus far). Mainly due to the above published standards with the ECMA.
.Net is not designed for a clustered environment, it is designed for a PoP (Pile-of-PCs) environment. There's a big difference.
The.NET framework has very little to do with what clustering model you use, that's the responsibility of the server infrastructure you run it on. It's sort of like saying that Python or Java could never run in a clustered environment -- they sure can. It would be more accurate to say (in.NET's case) that this is IIS' problem.
Also becoming more popular are extranets and co-location. (Probably more so, after recent hurricanes.).Net isn't built for the kind of fluid network topography this implies.
I find this to be a bizarre statement. As I've said,.NET is a programming environment, I'm not quite sure how it isn't built for co-location and extranets. Fluidity in topography is regulated through indirection; this can be accomplished through DNS for base IP's or UDDI for XML web service bindings.
Finally, High Availability is also becoming the norm. At the present time, I don't believe.Net is capable of checkpointing connections, so I don't know how.Net programmers plan on doing hot standby. The best I can see is a cold standby, which was the norm - about 6 or 7 years ago. Technology has moved on.
Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS - aka the "Wolfpack" cluster) has been available with hot standby for several years as 2-node active/passive, I believe it's up to 8 nodes now and allows for active/active too. You can go further with simple Pile-of-PC's for web farms, since most highly available Windows configs that I've seen put the session state in a central database, and use MSCS to harden the database. Both Oracle and SQL Server 2000 have facilities to use MSCS; I think Oracle calls this "Failsafe", which is a separate facility from their "Real Application Clusters" (RAC) approach.
This is not to say that Microsoft has had a lot of success with getting people to use MSCS. In 1998 it was the next great thing to make Windows scale to a mainframe, but 7 years later it's been relegated to "just another feature". It's not really used except for the largest SQL Server installs, such as the one at Verizon (which is over 9 terabytes, for their billing system).
I think the main issue is that they took a very academic approach to what "clustering" means, and as such it's a completely general clustering service, similar to the Veritas HA Cluster Service. That means people have to build or intrusively retrofit their software to specifically USE the clust
Opinions, reviews, etc. are a key part of newspapers and magazines. Very often I buy some of these periodicals just because I value the opinion of its columnists, having gotten my "news" from the Internet or other sources.
MySQL is much easier to manage. I don't know anybody who runs a heavily loaded Oracle server in production without spending significant $$$ on DBAs and commercial tools. I feel quite comfortable doing this with MySQL.
In other words, you're not actually running an enterprise-scale software system (which would require significant $$$, professional DBAs, and tools no matter WHAT database product you're using). You're running a single-man shop.
This is a great troll -- all of your points are sufficiently broad as to be impossible to prove or disprove either way. They're all obvious personal opinions but phrased as facts. Who's to say that any arbitrary enterprise software system can be satisfied with MySQL's features, or another's isn't? Or that you find MySQL's administration tools better than Oracle's (which I find to be therichest out there). Or that any "gotchas" you've had with BLOBs and CLOBs seem purely anecdotal.
The number of features that Oracle has over MySQL is simply staggering, as is its ability to robustly handle enormous concurrent loads. Its clustering support, backup & recovery abilities, and query optimizer are second-to-none. I'm glad you've found a cheap and better alternative, but I hardly think it's applicable to all.
Who needs MIN() and MAX() anyway? What's wrong with something like SELECT height FROM suspects ORDER BY height ASC LIMIT 1 ?
Well, besides the verbosity of the latter, you'd have to use an inline correlated-subquery to do any form of GROUP BY style queries. Most SQL optimizers wouldn't have a clue how to compensate for such a contorted request, whereas a simple MIN/MAX aggregate function usually is an easy hint to just scan whatever B*Tree index is on the column.
Come to think of it, I probably would just use SELECT *....., read the whole record into a numeric array and pull out the field I wanted.
Completely by-passing the SQL optimizer and the whole point of why relational databases exist. I'm in awe.
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The Mac's menu bar behavior is a vestigial design decision from the days before multi-tasking; they keep it around because it's part of the "look-and-feel"... hence form above function. That was my point. (Sure, it's subjective, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of serious computer users would agree that the menu-for-each-window scheme works better.)
Absolutely not. The whole reason the menu bar is at the top is because you can slam your mouse there, instead of having to aim it per-window. Apple's usability studies in the 1980's showed it was more efficient.
I'm a pretty serious computer user, and I tend to prefer the menu bar at the top.
Those are all examples of companies that have used a combination of open source and proprietary components to create a marketable product for a non-technical consumer.
They're not examples of volunteer open source groups creating and delivering one or more marketable products. I think Apache is probably the closest, in that they deliver marketable products for technical consumers.
Actually, everything you're pointing out is marketing.
Picking the exact combination of ease of use between iTMS and iTunes and the iPod? That's marketing. It's about creating a position (being the world's elite personal music player) and a perspective (a music ecosystem is what matters, not the device itself).
Marketing is about "creating a customer". Innovation would be implementing that combination in a way that economically succeeds. Part of marketing is to shape the nature of what the word of mouth will be -- what features are values, who the device is positioned to, etc. A number of the pro v. con iPod debates that occur have already been scripted by marketers at Apple, and we just regurgitate them.
What you seem to be saying is that most people can resist advertising. And that's definitiely true -- people don't necessarily buy innovative products based on brand advertisements alone. Sometimes direct advertisements do incent people, which is why paid programming continues to work ("Buy the super ginsu 2000 for only 4 payments of $19.95! Call now!")
But while brand advertising doesn't sell product, it's useful background amplification -- especially if it is unique and provocative. It tunes peoples ears into the conversation occuring on the product -- the word of mouth -- when normally they wouldn't think about it otherwise. Ever notice that when you've visited a new city you start noticing it more often on TV and in movies? Same idea with brand advertising. You start noticing people talking about subjects that never interested you before.
The shadow dancers are one of the most talked about ad campaigns in recent memory. People that never would have normally thought personal music all of a sudden were open to conversations on the subject. There already was a word-of-mouth buzz built up from early and mid adopters, but when you threw in a provocative ad campaign, it pushed the iPod over the edge last Autumn from a "cool gadget" into a pop culture craze. Apple's probably one of the most successful companies at pulling off repeatedly: I can think of the Think Different campaign in 1997, which saved their public perception at a desperate time. It didn't incent people to buy Macs that normally wouldn't. But arguably Think Different laid the perceptual foundation that led Apple to its current successes. For example, Apple retail stores have been a smash, beyond what every industry analyst predicted. It also drove iPod early adopters from outside the Mac community. Apple was "cool" again.
Frankly I see a lot of innovation happening in blade servers & grids. The problem , as usual, is the software, not the hardware. Software seems to lag the hardware innovations by years. Clusters are only now (the past 5 years) becoming really viable.
I was living in San Jose in 1999 on annual equivalent of $50k, living in a comfortable 2 bedroom apartment (with a roomate) and I could make payments on my small car. I even saved money.
Could I support a family on that? No. If I had a live at home wife and 1 child, then yes, $90k would likely be a necessary salary.
The number of reports is too large to discount, but plenty of people are saying there's no problem. It seems that some fraction of nanos are affected, but not all of them.
There was a problem with broken screens that Apple said will be replaced here. As for crazy scratches... perhaps they'll settle again. I seriously doubt the plaintiffs will get anything close to the battery settlement.
Apple settled the battery lawsuit, with a $50 voucher and extra warranty. A lot less than what the Nano suit is asking for (a portion of profits?).
The battery lawsuit was a bit nutty -- I have an 1G iPod from 2001 that still runs to this day with the original battery. Yes, it's down to about 2 hours capacity from 8, but claims about it only lasting 18 months were unfounded. There are many different rechargable devices out there, and they *all* degrade over time. The real problem was that Apple did not have an official battery replacement program, they relied on aftermarket providers. The lawsuit hit, and amusingly, Apple had a replacement program within a short number of weeks (which probably was in the works beforehand).
As for the Nano, I have one, yes in my pocket, yes my screen is a bit scratched, but no more than my other iPods, and it's still very legible.
The Servlet developer's kit was originally released in beta on March 4, 1997 (see timeline), with the 1.0 release of the Java Web Server on June 5, 1997. I remember putting a servlet-based application into production in Autumn 1998.
Even JavaServer Pages was released before that date, on June 2, 1999 -- and there was JHTML before that from ATG.
I've actually picked up "These Are The Vistas" in iTMS and I'm quite happy with the quality; compressed AAC at 128kb is about as good as MP3 at 192k in my experience.
Having said that, if you really want Dolby 5.1, you'd actually need the artist to record it that way. Nine inch nails' latest album _With Teeth_ was released with 5.1 DVD-Audio on one side , CD on the other. The 5.1 tracks certainly have a different feel to them. I'm not sure if it's "better" but I can pick out the individual sound tracks much more easily.
I've seen the HD H.264 Serenity trailer play well on an iMac G5 at the local Apple Store.... which is at least double the quality of DVD. it certainly is unplayable on my Powerbook, but I'm curious why an even smaller res H.264 would cause you problems.
I should have been clearer, what I meant to say was "lest you lack conviction" in pursuing your hypothesis.
Faith is belief in the face of doubt. It is not blind, it is a choice, and it is often a necessary one. These nobel laureates had faith that stomach ulcers weren't caused by stress and were curable, even though there was little independently verified evidence for their claim. Sure, they eventually built up evidence, but... you need to start somewhere.
I prefer to practice realism (to the best of my ability) than delude myself with a reality distortion field built on expectations that are by definition unrealistic and founded on false premises.
That assumes two things:
1. That humans have access to the truth behind "reality" (which you do qualify by suggesting "to the best of my ability"). Whereas a contrary position is to say that people don't have access to reality, they merely have perception and verify their perception's correlation to reality through social relationships (aka "trust"). The scientific community, for example, requries a lot of Independent verification of experimental observations. Rationalists would end the analysis here.
Others (post-modernists, while an overloaded term, probably is the proper one) believe that this approach, while a useful approximation to eliminate certain classes of human foibles (lying, cheating, making mistakes), doesn't guarantee greater access to reality, as reality is much more complex than our observational capabilities are. (Cue debates about the uncertainty principle)
2. That faith based on logic. It is not. (I'm taking this definition from the "existentialist" definition of faith, mostly attributed to Kierkegaard's book Fear and Trembling.) Faith is belief on the strength of the absurd. What makes faith very interesting is it is somewhat of a paradox: to have faith, one must be aware that the belief is absurd in the first place. Otherwise it's blind.
'Faith' as a solution is at best a kludge and at worst a red herring, that can lead down a dark path with disastrous repercussions on a global scale. Addressing root causes such as inequality, injustice, and persecution are more effective approaches at dealing with the things that drive people to 'faith' based groups in the first place.
The same could be said for any belief system, though. For example, is "rational absolutism" really a better approach? Not that you're suggesting this, but just to provide an illustration my point, let's explore rationality as a superior means to handle social issues.
Rationality and/or "scientifically deducted" approaches to handling social issues assume that humans, or at least a group of humans, have better access to "reality" than others, and can thus determine "the answer" to problems. Unfortunately, social experimentation tends to take decades, and observation is far from objective.
For example, if scientific evidence, independently verified, were to incidate that certain human races were intellectually superior to others, would it not be justified to repress the inferior races in a way similar to what we've done with the more intelligent animals?Or, for another example, if a group of people objectively believes, based on sound scientific reasoning, that the root causes of inequality and injustice were based on property relations and ownership of the means of production, would it not be justified to incite violence to overthrow the existing property relations and economic system in an effort to bring about an equal and just society? Another example might be a scientific rejection of the "individual" as having any merit; since truth can only be determined through trust relationships, the order of society and civilization are all that matters, liberty and freedom do not. My point is that Western civilization's recent tragedies of Racism, Anarchist Marxism, and Totalitarianism, have all been justified through science and reason, just as much as Christian or Islamist theocratic rule is justifyable through religious dogmatism.
I think if you don't have any doubt about your hypotheses there is something seriously wrong with your approach. Even if your right you ought to have doubts about it and set out to prove yourself wrong until you are certain you are right, that's how hypotheses progress to being regarded as 'proven'.
I should have been clearer; what I meant was that faith becomes the source of strength to "Keep On Truckin
Instead of "knowledge management", I've often wondered if it's more appropriate to talk about "ignorance management". What can I responsibly not know....
If the idea is "massive parallelism using commodity hardware", then grids are pretty much clusters with better management tools for single-system image, provisioning and/or re-distributing resources (CPU, I/O, etc.). Grids are mostly in the scientific community though you're starting to see it creep in commercial data centres (Oracle being a big proponent with their database version 10g, "g" standing for Grid).
The problem with clusters has always been software; to fund new software development, one needs to build a little bit of hype. That means new terminology. Kind of like how "expert systems" are now called "rules engines", workflow is now called "BPM", and interface contract negotation is now called "choreography". Not to belittle the work in these areas, there is much good being done, just an observation about funding cycles and human attention spans.
I mean, just think about what faith is... No matter how much evidence goes against what you believe, you will still believe it anyway.
Faith is an essential means to remain optimistic in an uncertain world. Faith is belief in the face of doubt / the absurd. Faith is arguably very important to scientific discovery, lest one doubt their hypotheses.
On the other hand, blind believe in the face of evidence strikes me more as dogmatism. And there certainly has been a lot of that in the history of science.
... I think you're overreacting. There's a lot of reason to be skeptical and critical of SOA, especially given the hype. Having said that, since SOA is an IT-management focused opportunity, Slashdotters are not particularly inclined to really value or understand it, nor should they.
.500.
The market is around US$10B this year, and according to Gartner (IIRC), it'll be US$95B in the next decade or so. That's Billion with a B.
That estimate, IIRC, is for the entire integration marketplace -- SOA or no, and I believe it's projected a few years out. It's also a bald-faced estimate, also known as a crap shoot. And Gartner's batting average is certainly not above
Reuse under SOA is virtually guaranteed - because the tools are graphically assembling the underlying services.
Working for one of the aforementioned software vendors in the SOA marketplace, I make a living talking to CIO's about this stuff. I would get thrown out by my ear in 5 seconds if I suggested that reuse is due to some kind of drag 'n drop GUI. That's patently ridiculous, and almost a cliche'. Angle-brackets and better data transformation / routing tools aren't going to bring about the reuse nirvana; you're just going to have a more maintainable set of "web services" that are marginally re-usable.
To get to re-use, you need to sort out tremendous business process, organizational, political, governance, semantic, and data quality issues. It's a slog along very non-technical lines. Sure, the newer products help, and it's arguably the last roadblock to make it palatable to the visionaries -- but It's going to be the long slog that enterprise data warehouses were in the early to mid 90's, which I believe was the last successful wave of business-oriented re-use.
Recall that most organizations failed to build out an enterprise data warehouse, they just wound up popping marts & cubes everywhere, except for the cream (Amazon, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, a few Telcos, a handful of Banks). Similarly, not many orgs are going to succeed in changing their IT departments to a services-oriented world view; those that do will take years and it will be due a lot less to product or consultants than to the vision of their leaders.
Yet the immediate feedback that one gets from modern environments tends to change the way that one thinks about things... It's a very different mental experience to program today than it was in the olde times.
What I do agree with, however, is that many programmers lack "intent" -- they make changes without understanding the intent behind them. Kind of like how some people blurt out things they don't mean in regular discourse.
I got a black nano, yes, my screen was scratched, but it was from change & keys in my pocket. The screen is still legible and I can see pictures on it. Am I disappointed it scratched so quickly? Yes. Am I upset that I want a refund / lawsuit? No, I'm still quite happy with my gadget. I think people get way too worked up about wear and tear; I even thought the battery issue was blown way out of proportion (my first gen iPod still run on its original battery).
Anyway, now I keep it in a seperate pocket or my shirt pocket. Contrary to the hysterics, "clothing" doesn't scratch it from what I can tell. Also, this seems to scratch about as much as my first generation iPod did, but the white shows it less. The iPod Mini was the most scratchless iPod that I've noticed, mainly because of the (I believe) annodized alumnium exterior and different kind of screen.
Never had a battery problem (my 1st generation iPod from 2001 still runs with 2.5 hours life) nor a click wheel (on the original, mini, or my new nano). Only issue I had was my first iPod in November 2001 died after about 6 weeks, replaced under warranty.
:shrug: According to your post above, I'm still an idiot for having a good experience, and my friends are idiots for preferring my iPod. Whatever. I think you're an idiot for painting such a broad brush. At least there is symmetry.
My 2 friends that bought Dell DJ's have to keep a paperclip on them to reset the thing, it crashes so much. And it's very heavy. And the "up / down wheel" is much more thumb-cramping than the iPod's round click-wheel. Another friend that bought a Creative Zen finds it OK but still prefers my iPod, he bought the creative purely because it was on sale.
What I find most interesting about these economic debates about restricting supply vs. demand is that they seem to always stop at the level of distribution -- supply and demand is in terms of # of songs downloaded, # of CD's sold, etc. People then proceed to focus on the costs of distribution, and not looking at the costs/risks associated with financing development.
The upstream supply of developing songs that people want to hear is the real scarcity here, and is really what determines pricing.
Which is actually what lots of open source people are pushing.
It's going to be a long, hard road to drive down the cost of software. Right now, it really looks like shifting money from license fees into consulting.
"Why buy a product when you can build it fairly quickly using XYZ open source framework?" is a common refrain I hear from many hallways. Not that this isn't a good option at times, it's just being pushed as the only option by a set of stakeholders with a vested interest in "building".
Let's be clear -- you've been referring to
Under the DMCA, it is illegal for Americans to reverse-engineer unpublished components of
MONO seems to have done this without legal troubles (thus far). Mainly due to the above published standards with the ECMA.
The
Also becoming more popular are extranets and co-location. (Probably more so, after recent hurricanes.)
I find this to be a bizarre statement. As I've said,
Finally, High Availability is also becoming the norm. At the present time, I don't believe
Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS - aka the "Wolfpack" cluster) has been available with hot standby for several years as 2-node active/passive, I believe it's up to 8 nodes now and allows for active/active too. You can go further with simple Pile-of-PC's for web farms, since most highly available Windows configs that I've seen put the session state in a central database, and use MSCS to harden the database. Both Oracle and SQL Server 2000 have facilities to use MSCS; I think Oracle calls this "Failsafe", which is a separate facility from their "Real Application Clusters" (RAC) approach.
This is not to say that Microsoft has had a lot of success with getting people to use MSCS. In 1998 it was the next great thing to make Windows scale to a mainframe, but 7 years later it's been relegated to "just another feature". It's not really used except for the largest SQL Server installs, such as the one at Verizon (which is over 9 terabytes, for their billing system).
I think the main issue is that they took a very academic approach to what "clustering" means, and as such it's a completely general clustering service, similar to the Veritas HA Cluster Service. That means people have to build or intrusively retrofit their software to specifically USE the clust
Opinions, reviews, etc. are a key part of newspapers and magazines. Very often I buy some of these periodicals just because I value the opinion of its columnists, having gotten my "news" from the Internet or other sources.
MySQL is much easier to manage. I don't know anybody who runs a heavily loaded Oracle server in production without spending significant $$$ on DBAs and commercial tools. I feel quite comfortable doing this with MySQL.
In other words, you're not actually running an enterprise-scale software system (which would require significant $$$, professional DBAs, and tools no matter WHAT database product you're using). You're running a single-man shop.
This is a great troll -- all of your points are sufficiently broad as to be impossible to prove or disprove either way. They're all obvious personal opinions but phrased as facts. Who's to say that any arbitrary enterprise software system can be satisfied with MySQL's features, or another's isn't? Or that you find MySQL's administration tools better than Oracle's (which I find to be therichest out there). Or that any "gotchas" you've had with BLOBs and CLOBs seem purely anecdotal.
The number of features that Oracle has over MySQL is simply staggering, as is its ability to robustly handle enormous concurrent loads. Its clustering support, backup & recovery abilities, and query optimizer are second-to-none. I'm glad you've found a cheap and better alternative, but I hardly think it's applicable to all.
Who needs MIN() and MAX() anyway? What's wrong with something like SELECT height FROM suspects ORDER BY height ASC LIMIT 1 ?
....., read the whole record into a numeric array and pull out the field I wanted.
Well, besides the verbosity of the latter, you'd have to use an inline correlated-subquery to do any form of GROUP BY style queries. Most SQL optimizers wouldn't have a clue how to compensate for such a contorted request, whereas a simple MIN/MAX aggregate function usually is an easy hint to just scan whatever B*Tree index is on the column.
Come to think of it, I probably would just use SELECT *
Completely by-passing the SQL optimizer and the whole point of why relational databases exist. I'm in awe.