It's often just a virtualized single server, running on a single server on Amazon's rack. And Amazon doesn't care about uptime for that individual server, because it's a cloud, and you shouldn't be so dumb as to run a service on a single server, despite that being what people are using it for.
Yes, it was a great idea - write everything in a distributed way, and it can be omnipresent. Like a cloud. But only if you wear the cost of doing it the right way, which nobody does.
Cantonese is very much a minority language. The reason so many overseas Chinese speak it is because they immigrated from Hong Kong, where Cantonese is spoken.
Mainland Chinese (and or including Taiwanese, depending on your political stance) learn Mandarin at school, and have for decades. You can meet old people (especially in poor areas) who only speak local dialects, but all young people know Mandarin.
Well, OpenID *can* be made safe, but only if the application developer knows what they are doing. Which they won't. Here's a hint - some developers were using Facebook's OAuth, and taking "name" to be the unique identifier. If the names clash (and some people have the same names), then they would share accounts. If I change my Facebook name to "Barack Obama", I might be able to log onto a few "Facebook login" sites as the president.
BrowserID is even better than OpenID, as it uses email as the ID, and verifies this with the email provider (i.e. sends you a verification email, which you will only have to sign once). It will only get better as browsers start supporting it.
>>> As you argue, increasing the length increases the complexity exponentially fast, while increasing the character set increases the complexity only logarithmically fast.
Are you really sure?
def POST(self, response):
password = self.getargument('password')[:20] # what's the size of the password field in the database?...
In a few months, they do this:
def POST(self, response):
password = self.getargument('password')[:32] # I checked, and MD5 hexdigest is 32 characters!...
And your password won't work, because it isn't being truncated anymore.
(I can't access my Bank of China account on anything but IE; BOC requires a browser plugin for "security" that won't run on anything but IE. Guess I'll be doing all of my online banking at work, because I run Macs and Linux at the house.)
Chinese don't need anything but IE to access their internet, because their internet is damned ugly with no sense of design or aesthetics. The entire Chinese internet is like visiting MySpace. The few sites that cater to us expats usually have non-Chinese designers.
ActiveX for security, yep, that's smart.
As for Chinese website design, I think it's partly linguistic. Chinese can fit a whole sales pitch on two square inches. So their websites look like lots of little boxes, all crammed together. It's a weird aesthetic. Japan has it too. Other websites (especially official ones) are just badly designed, by someone with more "connections" than skill.
God, you haven't tried Apple's Mail. What a pain it was, when I last tried to use it (10.5).
Some RSS feed (thank you Mr internet) somehow managed to lock it up, every time I opened Mail. A native app shouldn't crash because of malformed XML, or some broken image, or whatever it was trying to do.
He could pull if off, if he goes for an older, wiser, and even ruthlesser personae. If he tries to do young Ash, it will just be like that Duke Nukem game - a sad rehash.
There's dozens of resellers on alibaba (http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=mini+displayport+to+hdmi&Country=&IndexArea=product_en&fsb=y), but most of them only sell them in lots of 100. On the other hand, the unit price is, like, $1-$5.
Thinking about it though, after the third one in the series though it does start to go downhill fast. I wonder if Card himself has Hollywood-itis, the tendency to beat a dead horse until money stops falling out.
How about this then?
Scene 1:
Han Sparrow - a scrappy, self interested, but charismatic space pirate makes landfall on a backwater planet. He has a brief confrontation with some blond guy, who is obviously keen on the princess of this planet (who wishes to return his affections, but is already promised to another). All is interrupted when the horribly warped "Space Invaders", led by Captain Vadar attack, kidnapping the princess; believing that her DNA contains the code to unlock the curse of their mutations. Actually, it's the blond guy's DNA they need, due to some kind of mix-up.
Believing that the Sun is the center of the solar system: check.
Believing that time slows down as speed increases: check.
Just because a lot of people think your ideas are insane doesn't mean they aren't valid.
I'll bite.
I studied physics. Trust me, it's valid. If you don't believe me, you can study it too. There's a fair amount of hard evidence, if you understand what you are doing.
Now, there's priests (and pastors, etc) who study theology. But they *don't* claim to have any better evidence than you do. It's like Postmodernism - you can study it for decades trying to get to the bottom of it; and end up with no more evidence than a 4th grader has. You will have a lot of circular arguments about why it's right, and how the best way to believe it is to not think too hard about the contradictions.
Sure, there's anecdotes about people who improve their life through faith, but there's also people who say their lives have been improved by weed or LSD. Only LSD has any real evidence behind it.
So what? It's always easier for a project if they can re-relicense the code.
Imagine if you pick a popular license (say, the BSD license), then find it's not compatible with the latest GPL (as is the case with the old BSD license). Do you track down every contributor, and ask them to relicense their code, or just be stuck with the limitations your license has?
I guess the solution is to use the GPL, as it can be "upgraded" without contributor permission. But the GPL is not everyone's cup of tea.
So if you don't want to go GPL, you may be best getting permission to "do whatever I want" with the code.
We can have a troll-war over GPL vs copy-center vs left-of-the-GPL licenses that prevent people from wrapping it in an XML web interface to circumvent the viral nature of the license; but the reality is that different projects have come to different conclusions.
Then the advantage of hydro is that you need hydro if you want wind. Wind power is fairly cheap, but unreliable. Hydro is great for occasionally filling the gaps left by unreliable sources.
No. That's simply not true. If there is a 99% chance of you stepping *back* and a 1% chance of you stepping *forward*, the probability of you *eventually* reaching your house approaches 100%, eventually. The average time for you to reach your house, however, is really quite long.
In former Eastern Germany, their communist regime provided retail stores only for foreigners (or specially privileged East Germans with western money). This made people there very resentful of their government... and eventually, they got rid of it. China's communists should be careful not to rise the ire of their citizens too much if they want to remain in power. Then again, why not? China could really need a breath of fresh air, at least politically.
What makes you think it's not a deliberate step? China is not a monolith. There is a large and powerful free speech lobby, Wen Jiabao (the Premier - head of the government, but not the military; which is under party rule) is a big backer (but he gets censored himself). However, I guess consensus is that free speech is a genie you can't put back in the bottle, so the conservatives can buy time. Incremental reform, though, is certainly on the agenda.
What bothers me isn't just the shitty treatment (and subsequent brain drain) of programmers.
It's the focus on hours.
Profitable companies force their employees to get the job done. Stupid companies force their employees to work 100 hour weeks. The employees very quickly sense that their boss is an abusive shithead, and take their revenge by lowering their profitability-per-hour. They don't get the job done, they just screw around doing busy-work (pretending to be productive). Why should they bust their asses to ship, when all the profits and credit will go to the shithead boss?
BUSINESS SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON REPEAT CUSTOMERS. ENFORCED OBSOLESCENCE WILL MAKE PEOPLE GO ELSEWHERE, LIKE A COMPETITOR. LIKE IBM IN THIS CASE.
It's not as if Solaris support is free, ya know. They make money even on the old equipment. This is just Larry being a dick.
One of the reasons for buying Sun equipment in the first place, and paying for the premium over generic white box equipment, was its longevity. If this is no longer the case and the customers are forced on an upgrade path, why stay with Sun/Oracle equipment when there is a supplier that will actually do long-term support? IBM is going to love this.
-- BMO
Larry doesn't make money despite being a dick. He makes money by being a dick. He saw Sun's behavior not being dickish enough, and decide to arbitrage it.
Paraphrasing Steve Jobs, for Sun (now Oracle) to win, IBM doesn't have to lose. In this case, the customer can lose instead!
That DITP uses ODBC as "your first python program"? Good call, ODBC sucks as a way to introduce python. Something URL or HTML based would be 10 times better.
That DITP uses advanced inline stuff in the first example? I'm ambivalent. It can help to "dive in" then explain later.
Shaw's hard-man personae? OK, it's a bit over the top. But if Zed Shaw comes out with "I don't think this is the most appropriate example." rather than "DITP should be shot in the fucking face."; nobody will think he's seriously objecting.
Slashdot Mirror
But IT'S OFTEN NOT DISTRIBUTED.
It's often just a virtualized single server, running on a single server on Amazon's rack. And Amazon doesn't care about uptime for that individual server, because it's a cloud, and you shouldn't be so dumb as to run a service on a single server, despite that being what people are using it for.
Yes, it was a great idea - write everything in a distributed way, and it can be omnipresent. Like a cloud. But only if you wear the cost of doing it the right way, which nobody does.
Cantonese is very much a minority language. The reason so many overseas Chinese speak it is because they immigrated from Hong Kong, where Cantonese is spoken.
Mainland Chinese (and or including Taiwanese, depending on your political stance) learn Mandarin at school, and have for decades. You can meet old people (especially in poor areas) who only speak local dialects, but all young people know Mandarin.
BrowserID is better than OpenID / OAuth.
Well, OpenID *can* be made safe, but only if the application developer knows what they are doing. Which they won't. Here's a hint - some developers were using Facebook's OAuth, and taking "name" to be the unique identifier. If the names clash (and some people have the same names), then they would share accounts. If I change my Facebook name to "Barack Obama", I might be able to log onto a few "Facebook login" sites as the president.
BrowserID is even better than OpenID, as it uses email as the ID, and verifies this with the email provider (i.e. sends you a verification email, which you will only have to sign once). It will only get better as browsers start supporting it.
>>> As you argue, increasing the length increases the complexity exponentially fast, while increasing the character set increases the complexity only logarithmically fast.
Are you really sure?
def POST(self, response): ...
password = self.getargument('password')[:20] # what's the size of the password field in the database?
In a few months, they do this:
def POST(self, response): ...
password = self.getargument('password')[:32] # I checked, and MD5 hexdigest is 32 characters!
And your password won't work, because it isn't being truncated anymore.
(I can't access my Bank of China account on anything but IE; BOC requires a browser plugin for "security" that won't run on anything but IE. Guess I'll be doing all of my online banking at work, because I run Macs and Linux at the house.)
Chinese don't need anything but IE to access their internet, because their internet is damned ugly with no sense of design or aesthetics. The entire Chinese internet is like visiting MySpace. The few sites that cater to us expats usually have non-Chinese designers.
ActiveX for security, yep, that's smart.
As for Chinese website design, I think it's partly linguistic. Chinese can fit a whole sales pitch on two square inches. So their websites look like lots of little boxes, all crammed together. It's a weird aesthetic. Japan has it too. Other websites (especially official ones) are just badly designed, by someone with more "connections" than skill.
IBM doesn't sell many physical widgets anymore*, but they still make OSS.
1) Realize your monopoly on low-end hardware has been disrupted.
2) Contribute to open source, to secure your stronghold on the enterprise.
3) OPEN A MASSIVE CONSULTING DIVISION.
4) Profit.
I always wanted to know what went in the "...".
* I'm sure people who've seen their profit margins on mainframes will tell me that's a load of BS, which it is.
God, you haven't tried Apple's Mail. What a pain it was, when I last tried to use it (10.5).
Some RSS feed (thank you Mr internet) somehow managed to lock it up, every time I opened Mail. A native app shouldn't crash because of malformed XML, or some broken image, or whatever it was trying to do.
Yuck.
It *does* reduce the chances of disease. Of course, so do these things called "condoms", which have been around for a while now.
Or slashdot. It prevents *heaps* of STDs.
+1. Depressingly true.
So? You can also get cracked commercial software (or just shit pretending to be it) and get your viruses that way.
He could pull if off, if he goes for an older, wiser, and even ruthlesser personae. If he tries to do young Ash, it will just be like that Duke Nukem game - a sad rehash.
There's dozens of resellers on alibaba (http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=mini+displayport+to+hdmi&Country=&IndexArea=product_en&fsb=y), but most of them only sell them in lots of 100. On the other hand, the unit price is, like, $1-$5.
Thinking about it though, after the third one in the series though it does start to go downhill fast. I wonder if Card himself has Hollywood-itis, the tendency to beat a dead horse until money stops falling out.
How about this then?
Scene 1:
Han Sparrow - a scrappy, self interested, but charismatic space pirate makes landfall on a backwater planet. He has a brief confrontation with some blond guy, who is obviously keen on the princess of this planet (who wishes to return his affections, but is already promised to another). All is interrupted when the horribly warped "Space Invaders", led by Captain Vadar attack, kidnapping the princess; believing that her DNA contains the code to unlock the curse of their mutations. Actually, it's the blond guy's DNA they need, due to some kind of mix-up.
Believing that the Earth is round: check.
Believing that the Sun is the center of the solar system: check.
Believing that time slows down as speed increases: check.
Just because a lot of people think your ideas are insane doesn't mean they aren't valid.
I'll bite.
I studied physics. Trust me, it's valid. If you don't believe me, you can study it too. There's a fair amount of hard evidence, if you understand what you are doing.
Now, there's priests (and pastors, etc) who study theology. But they *don't* claim to have any better evidence than you do. It's like Postmodernism - you can study it for decades trying to get to the bottom of it; and end up with no more evidence than a 4th grader has. You will have a lot of circular arguments about why it's right, and how the best way to believe it is to not think too hard about the contradictions.
Sure, there's anecdotes about people who improve their life through faith, but there's also people who say their lives have been improved by weed or LSD. Only LSD has any real evidence behind it.
So what? It's always easier for a project if they can re-relicense the code.
Imagine if you pick a popular license (say, the BSD license), then find it's not compatible with the latest GPL (as is the case with the old BSD license). Do you track down every contributor, and ask them to relicense their code, or just be stuck with the limitations your license has?
I guess the solution is to use the GPL, as it can be "upgraded" without contributor permission. But the GPL is not everyone's cup of tea.
So if you don't want to go GPL, you may be best getting permission to "do whatever I want" with the code.
We can have a troll-war over GPL vs copy-center vs left-of-the-GPL licenses that prevent people from wrapping it in an XML web interface to circumvent the viral nature of the license; but the reality is that different projects have come to different conclusions.
^ bys
Then the advantage of hydro is that you need hydro if you want wind. Wind power is fairly cheap, but unreliable. Hydro is great for occasionally filling the gaps left by unreliable sources.
Or that they split the billing over all the parts (so they could pay in installments), so some of the parts looked overpriced.
No. That's simply not true. If there is a 99% chance of you stepping *back* and a 1% chance of you stepping *forward*, the probability of you *eventually* reaching your house approaches 100%, eventually. The average time for you to reach your house, however, is really quite long.
Is that server grad? Because servers usually use SAS, which is about $300 for 300GB. Or roughly the same $/GB as SSD.
Or did SSD kill them?
In former Eastern Germany, their communist regime provided retail stores only for foreigners (or specially privileged East Germans with western money). This made people there very resentful of their government... and eventually, they got rid of it. China's communists should be careful not to rise the ire of their citizens too much if they want to remain in power. Then again, why not? China could really need a breath of fresh air, at least politically.
What makes you think it's not a deliberate step? China is not a monolith. There is a large and powerful free speech lobby, Wen Jiabao (the Premier - head of the government, but not the military; which is under party rule) is a big backer (but he gets censored himself). However, I guess consensus is that free speech is a genie you can't put back in the bottle, so the conservatives can buy time. Incremental reform, though, is certainly on the agenda.
A rail gun might work.
What bothers me isn't just the shitty treatment (and subsequent brain drain) of programmers.
It's the focus on hours.
Profitable companies force their employees to get the job done. Stupid companies force their employees to work 100 hour weeks. The employees very quickly sense that their boss is an abusive shithead, and take their revenge by lowering their profitability-per-hour. They don't get the job done, they just screw around doing busy-work (pretending to be productive). Why should they bust their asses to ship, when all the profits and credit will go to the shithead boss?
NEWS FLASH!
BUSINESS SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON REPEAT CUSTOMERS. ENFORCED OBSOLESCENCE WILL MAKE PEOPLE GO ELSEWHERE, LIKE A COMPETITOR. LIKE IBM IN THIS CASE.
It's not as if Solaris support is free, ya know. They make money even on the old equipment. This is just Larry being a dick.
One of the reasons for buying Sun equipment in the first place, and paying for the premium over generic white box equipment, was its longevity. If this is no longer the case and the customers are forced on an upgrade path, why stay with Sun/Oracle equipment when there is a supplier that will actually do long-term support? IBM is going to love this.
--
BMO
Larry doesn't make money despite being a dick. He makes money by being a dick. He saw Sun's behavior not being dickish enough, and decide to arbitrage it.
Paraphrasing Steve Jobs, for Sun (now Oracle) to win, IBM doesn't have to lose. In this case, the customer can lose instead!
Which of Shaw's objections?
That DITP uses ODBC as "your first python program"? Good call, ODBC sucks as a way to introduce python. Something URL or HTML based would be 10 times better.
That DITP uses advanced inline stuff in the first example? I'm ambivalent. It can help to "dive in" then explain later.
Shaw's hard-man personae? OK, it's a bit over the top. But if Zed Shaw comes out with "I don't think this is the most appropriate example." rather than "DITP should be shot in the fucking face."; nobody will think he's seriously objecting.