PLEASE PLEASE, make a single Realm where each players only have one life. And when he dies he dies. (The user can the ofcause then create a new player).
Just go play Nethack and delete your save game when you die. Seriously, modern MMOs and RPGs are not designed like this, and they never will be. Other than a very small minority of the players, people do not like perma-death. How would you like to spend thousands of hours building your virtual character, only to lose it all due to lag or a server disconnect while you're in combat?
A most interesting and pertinent question! I think that if such a memory reached the speed of RAM with the capacity of a HDD then we could merge the two concepts into a central memory that would be used for anything.
Interestingly enough, Solaris had this concept since at least the early to mid 1990s. I remember I could allocate a chunk of RAM to serve as a "caching" RAM filesystem in front of any back end storage device. Any local disk, NFS server, CD/DVD disk, or mountable filesystem could have a 500GB or so caching RAM filesystem in front of it. The data would be read from disk once, then accessed from nearline memory at all times.
At that point, your outdated spinning media (aka hard disk platters) actually become a "near-realtime" backup system, where cached writes are eventually written out to disk as soon as the kernel has the spare cycles to flush the write cache.
I truly think storage is moving more towards this type of system with fast RAM, slower RAM, and disk. Operating systems will have to adjust their outdated concepts of "free memory" and just have "free fast memory" and "free slow memory" and intelligent processes that pre-fetch and copy data between the slow and fast zones in anticipation of which applications and files the user accesses the most. Hell, if Solaris could do it 15 years ago, I'm sure Mac OS X or Linux could do it today.
Child porn downloading needs to be made illegal to increase the cost of making and distributing it. That is, if downloads weren't illegal and the people downloading it weren't afraid of getting caught, their cost/benefit would be different. Making it legal to download but not to make child porn decreases the cost for consumers, which would make it more easily profitable for sellers.
Your argument is flawed. Can you name one product, substance, or idea, that once made illegal, dropped in price? When something is illegal, black market suppliers move in and charge high prices, making higher profits.
Want to see profit go down and costs drop for anything? Make it legal and I guarantee you the free market will lower the cost (and also the profit margin).
Before you get all uppity, I'm not defending child porn. I think it's disgusting, but just making something illegal usually has the opposite effect of what you're describing.
This means that anybody who's used Debian or a Debian derived distribution like Ubuntu needs to go back and destroy all host and personal keys generated since 2006. All of those keys are potentially guessable.
Great... just when I had mostly convinced the PHBs in management that yes, open source software was trustworthy, and that yes, good developers write Linux, and that no, you don't always get what you pay for, and answered all the hundreds of questions about "why do you think they would develop this software for free?" Now some jackass that shouldn't have even been touching this code fucks around with OpenSSL... I'm not trolling, but maybe open source isn't ready for the enterprise. If some coder did this at a company at least I'm pretty confident they'd get their ass fired, but with open source it's basically "whoops, my bad."
At $600, this is not really such a good laptop. I know it's been mentioned before, but they just lost the impulse buyer. Now it's just another laptop, and really not a very good one. I'd say ok, at $400, but at $600 they have priced themselves out of the game.
On Dell's support site, I discovered that not only is there a DOS/Windows BIOS update utility for the Precision M4300, but a Linux version as well!! That has got to be the first Linux BIOS update utility I have ever seen. Perhaps others have seen this, but it was a first for me and Dell is doing it.
HP has been doing this for years as well. All of their servers have Linux BIOS updates available, and their Firmware Maintenance boot CD, which will flash the firmware on all your system components like motherboards, hard drives, RAID controllers, and iLO cards (remote management) is really just a LiveCD that boots Linux and loads Firefox as your windows manager, which takes you to a web-based firmware update page that scans your system and launches all of the update binaries.
It's funny because at my work, I've been convincing Windows admins that have never touched Linux before that Linux is superior, simply because so many important things (TM) can be done by booting a LiveCD:
1. Need to recover a Windows administrator password you forgot? Here's an NTpasswd LiveCD that will do it for you... "Funny how you need to use Linux to recover your Windows password," I say as I hand them the CD. 2. Need to update firmwares on your server? Here's a Firmware Maintenance CD that boots into Linux. 3. Need to repartition or grow/shrink your NTFS partitions? Here's a gparted CD that boots Linux. 4. Need to virtualize your Windows servers? Well guess what? VMware runs on Linux too.
The ability of Linux to function as a low-level "need to get the job done but don't want to pay the MS tax" operating system is selling open-source to the otherwise clueless Windows admins of the world. Seriously, we've all been there at one point in our career. Using DOS or Windows or whatever OS you grew up on because you don't know any better. Then you learn what a real OS is and you move up to UNIX and Linux.
If they shit all over their OS just to keep people from exercising their legal rights - fuck them. Seriously. They sell a product and are already messing it up (hardware detection) so that it has less value.
You're an idiot because you don't even understand that your basic premise is wrong. Apple doesn't do any hardware detection. They just don't support standard MBR style boot, so you need an EFI bootloader. Before you go talking out your ass you better do your research first.
How so? You just go into system preferences, and check a single box to enable file sharing. Easier than any other OS available.
I can't easily change my icon theme without buying third party software.
There are a ton of freeware utilities that will change your font theme without having to buy anything.
I can't find any easy way to uninstall Garage Band, et al, so that the automatic updater stops bothering me about them.
If you want to uninstall Garage Band, just drag it from the Applications folder to the trash.
I can't find a way to move windows between desktops ("spaces"), and all new windows seem to open on the same desktop that the program originally opened on, making multiple desktops virtually useless.
Click the frickin' Spaces icon, then drag the windows between desktops as much as you want.
I need third party software to have an automatically changing desktop wallpaper.
Another lie. Click on desktop/screen saver preferences and you can tell it to automatically change your wallpaper every X minutes. Built right into the OS and doesn't require any third-party utility.
I can't drag windows around by alt-clicking on the window.
No, in order to drag windows around you just have to click and drag, just like any other OS. Is that really so hard?
I can't close a window that is minimized without showing it.
Right-click on the dock icon and choose Quit.
All that I am saying is that if I, a power user of several decades, couldn't figure out how to do it over the last year it didn't "just work."
You might think of yourself as a power user, but you're an idiot if you can't figure this stuff out. Grandmas and housewives have no problem using Mac OS X, unlike some other operating systems. Spend 10 seconds on Google or Macosxhints.com and figure it out. Or better yet, just shoot yourself and take yourself out of the gene pool. If you can't figure out how to use a Mac you are a complete tool.
Look at the specs though, you cant compare the two. Where the clone is faster and has more memory, it lacks firewire, wireless (while you could get away with no wireless unless your using it for a media PC, firewire I find essential no matter what until Apple adds external SATA), and the options to select it bump it up to the same price as the only slightly slower Apple Mini.
You know, from a company selling these to the mass market, I would have expected better. I built a hackintosh in my spare time, using an Intel 975BX2 motherboard. I have working Firewire, my fan control works (whisper quiet, you can't even hear a fan), sleep/wake works, basically, it's as good as a real Mac. I'm surprised they can't build a decent hackintosh, when a luser like me can build one in my spare time. I guess they probably decided to cheap out on the components. After all, the 975BX2 motherboard cost about $180. You can't really cheap out on components if you want a "good" hackintosh.
What worries me the most about this whole situation is that until now, Apple hasn't had much reason to crack down on the hackintosh community. Sure, there's a few hackers/geeks like me that want to build them in our spare time, and they pretty much let it slide until now. Unfortunately now they have to crack down on it because otherwise the beige box vendors will start eating their lunch. If Psystar does this and gets away with it, what would stop an organized company like HP or Dell from doing the same thing? I hope they don't start putting some serious copy protection into Mac OS X, but chances are they probably will now. Fuck Psystar for making them do this.
I applaude this decision and will do my best to support them if they continue selling XP.
This is more of a win for Microsoft than it is for Dell:
1. Microsoft gets to "sell" a Vista license with all of these new computers. 2. Dell gets a bundled Windows XP "downgrade" license and just installs XP on the computer instead of Vista. 3. Microsoft gets to brag about how many millions of people have bought Vista and how successful it is. 4. Profit?
This is all a shell game for Microsoft. They can't polish the turd that is Vista so they'll just continue to sell XP but make it look like Vista on the books, so that Wall Street is none the wiser.
And before you think I'm an anti-Microsoft, I just bought a copy of Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit so I can run a few games in DX10. It runs slower and crashes more often (even with nothing installed I get regular MS error reports) than XP on the same hardware. Right now I find I'd rather boot back into XP SP2 and run most of my games, even though I can only use 3.2GB of memory, than reboot into Vista and endure slower framerates and random shit popping up and crashing all the time...
The sad thing is, I know exactly why this is happening. There's someone (or a group of people) who honestly believe that 'P2P is eating all our bandwidth' and that if they use this blocking method, it'll all be OK.
It's much more nefarious than that. To understand why Comcast prevents people from uploading (seeding) torrents, but doesn't prevent people from downloading torrents, you need to understand how peering agreements between large backbone internet providers work.
ISP A (let's call them Comcast) wants to peer (exchange traffic) with ISP B (let's call them AT&T). So Comcast and AT&T both run a big fat pipe to each other, and the agreement is written like this:
If Comcast sends (uploads) more traffic to AT&T's network, they have to cut a check to AT&T like they were a customer, to pay for the traffic that is transitting AT&T's network. If AT&T sends (uploads) more traffic to Comcast, then it's the other way around. AT&T has to cut a check to Comcast for the traffic that is transitting Comcast's network.
So, you see, some "creative" accountants, who probably came over from Enron or Worldcom, looked at these peering agreements and said "hey, if we can just reduce or eliminate our outbound traffic, but keep our inbound traffic high, we can game the system and make $$$$."
In other words, Comcast is just gaming the system. This is a stupid move because the backbone providers they peer with will simply write new contracts when they are up for renewal, and Comcast will end up paying through the nose for bandwidth, in order for them to recoup all of their losses. But it looks good to shareholders and creates temporary short-term gains, which allows executives to retire with golden parachutes once the market turns sour, which it inevitably will.
Mark my words, Comcast will be the next Enron/Worldcom fiasco. Creative accounting cooking the books short-term by gaming the system. It always comes back to haunt you.
You make some pretty good points, but I have to take issue with this one:
For all practical purposes, there are infinite jobs in the high tech industry, because it has this property of increasing the industry in size in response to excess talent.
I would strongly disagree with this statement. There are not infinite jobs in the tech industry. Even for large companies like Microsoft and Google, there are not infinite jobs. If Google has some project that they estimate to be X million lines of code to complete, they have some formula that says "for a project with X million lines of code, we need Y developers to write that code, and Z support people (HR, accounting IT helpdesk, etc) to support those developers." Then they go about hiring the developers and support staff to reach that goal.
In non-IT companies the equation is much the same "I have an IT project that requires X million lines of code", etc. I can't just wave my magic wand and wish that there were more good tech jobs.
Just to take a simple example, if there are 10 million software development jobs in the US economy, and 8 million of those are taken, 1 million CS graduates will enter the workforce, that leaves 1 million waiting to be filled by either H1B visas or other people that might want them. In this example, there is a shortage of workers so the law of supply and demand will drive salaries up. If 20 million US citizens decided they wanted to be a software developer, there's no way they're going to all find jobs. That creates a glut in the market and the law of supply and demand drives salaries down.
This isn't rocket science people. There is no magic wand I can wave and make an infinite number of IT jobs. IT jobs are like any other skilled labor... there's only a finite amount of IT work that needs to get done. Bringing in the right amount of foreign guest workers can help companies reach their short-term goals. If you want to really fix the system, improve CS education programs and you won't need as many foreign guest workers.
So - what is the reason for not having 3G on the east and west coast of USA?
Uh... I live on the east coast and we do have 3G with pretty much 100% coverage in most metropolitan areas. The west coast is the same. Apple just wanted to sell a product that you could also buy in Bumfuck, Iowa and not bitch about being unable to get 3G.
The only reason why MS is coming out on top is because they own the kitchen and cook their own numbers to order.
Exactly. MS intentionally sits on vulnerabilities and doesn't announce them publicly until the patch is available. Apple, on the other hand, uses a lot of free and open-source software where full disclosure is considered important enough to notify all users through normal mailing lists, newsgroups, and other channels.
This study is intentionally biased to make MS look good and Apple look bad. Which would you rather have, the blackhat broke into your network through an undisclosed MS hole that allows remote privilege escalation across the network (typical for MS products), or an open source library that you never use and is not exposed to any network facing service has a publicly announced vulnerability (which doesn't affect you personally) and is patched 6 months later by Apple?
It's such a non-issue in the first place because OS X is UNIX and UNIX is fundamentally more secure than any Windows architecture based machine. But MS can keep buying all the studies in the world to try to prove to the PHB crowd that the sky isn't blue, it's green, and that water really isn't wet. It works in politics... tell a lie often enough and people start to believe it (there are WMDs in Iraq) so it must work for technology too (Windows is more secure than OS X)...
The age of database lockin might finally be falling behind us. We might finally be free to use whichever DB is best for the job today, not determined by which DB was best for some other job yesterday.
It's interesting to note that what is driving all of this is the rise of multi-core processors. Oracle charges entirely too much for licensing ($$$ per CPU) and only discounts 50% if that second CPU is another core. So, now that companies like Sun and IBM are starting to push quad core, octo-core, and in Sun's case, the Niagara architecture which has something like 16-32 threads, you're starting to see Oracle licensing for a single database server jump from $$(tens of thousands) up to $$(hundreds of thousands).
Both IBM and Sun see a market opportunity in selling open-source databases that are not tied to archaic per-CPU licensing schemes like Oracle. Unless Oracle adapts their licensing and drops costs dramatically (something like 5-10% per additional core, not 50%) they stand to lose a lot of market share on the low end to MySQL and PostgreSQL.
I say this as a sysadmin that supports lots of Oracle database servers running on Linux. Oracle should see the writing on the wall and fix their licensing... We spend way more than the hardware costs on Oracle licenses alone, and that just isn't right.
Oh, yeah, if they were paying enlisted footsoldier wages you'd be right. As I understand it they're paying $80-$120K-ish, but you can do better than much than in the private market if you're aggressive and/or unscrupulous. If we get some confirmation they're paying $20-$30K I'll completely retract my assertion, but I don't think that's true.
Show me any soldier, period, that makes $80K plus, whether in cyber command or not. No soldier makes this much money. Since enlisted salaries are known, I think it's up to you to prove that they make more, not up to me to prove they make less.
So, US Government, please let us know when you're ready to put your money where your mouth is, and we'll subsequently give you the best damn computer security on Planet Earth. Until then, you're just another employer trying to get more than he's paid for out of his staff.
If you read between the lines, what's really being said is that you'll never get rich in the military, but on the other hand, if you become a defense contractor and sell your services to the military, you can make a fortune.
DoD contractors typically make 2-3 times what their enlisted counterparts do. Of course you've got to know what you're doing, or at least be able to pretend you do. I was once offered a DoD contract job as a sysadmin for a parts ordering database that allowed foreign countries to buy parts for their F16s so they could bomb the crap out of whatever local population they needed to suppress. I turned it down for philosophical reasons (no thanks, I'd rather not help people buy weapons systems that are used to kill other people), but the salary was quite tempting.
He doesn't want to hire you. He wants people who aren't motivated only by money.
Because if you're motivated only by money, when the Ruskies (allow my cold war allusion) come by with a $40M bag you're going to tell them everything you know.
I don't buy this argument. If you want to keep people loyal, you not only need to find people that are patriotic in the first place, you also need to pay them a decent living wage. If I recall correctly, the salary for most enlisted personnel starts somewhere in the 20s and goes up into the 30s or 40s after a few years of service. This is so far below what anyone working in IT should be paid it's pathetic.
Sorry, but if you want to keep people from selling secrets to enemies of the state, you need to make it so they aren't easily tempted by someone flashing a few $100s in front of them. Paying them decent salaries is a big part of that.
Don't you think private companies haven't figured this out already? An IT person working on Wall Street for $120K a year is much less likely to take a small bribe for insider information than some poor schmuck barely eking out a living at $30K a year...
... a lot of people in the states see the free market as the Holy Ghost...
I agree with your comment 100%, but I would like to note that these companies like Comcast operate in anything but a free market. Free market != government sanctioned monopoly. I'd be fine with an Ayn Rand, objectivist, libertarian free market if the market really was free and had low barriers to entry. What we have in the US is closer to fascism (the merger of corporate and government power) than libertarianism.
As a scientist I am likely to disregard most attempts at serious conversation on the subject of astrology.
While I would say that most science can prove that astrology is fiction, as scientists, we should keep the following things in mind:
1. Magnetic fields can have an effect on DNA, as observed in a laboratory setting by exposing embryos to strong magnetic fields.
2. Stars, planets, and other astronomical bodies exert a magnetic field on the earth, and all animals, plants, and humans on it.
3. I hypothesize that personality differences observed by astrology (such as certain signs have certain personality traits) might very well be attributed to the influence of magnetic fields on human embryos at an early stage of development. Different stellar bodies exerting magnetic fields at the time of fertilization/early gestation of an embryo might very well affect it's DNA which could affect personality in the adult.
It is not out of the question that both science and astrology can exist in a reasonable mind. Astrology might just be the layman's way of explaining why certain people born at different times of the year have certain personality traits. Modern science can't yet explain how magnetic fields affect us, but we do know that they affect most living animals significantly.
I don't think it's unreasonable to allow your girlfriend/wife/significant other to believe in astrology while keeping a firm scientific method in your own thought process. Issuing ultimatims like "I'll never date someone that believes in astrology," or whatever ultimatim you might want to project, is just a way of being divisive and generating conflict with others around you.
As geeks and scientists we should attempt to communicate with others. We don't convince others of the things we know in our mind by shutting them out completely.
The linked PDF contains pre-CFS kernel benchmarks.
Prior to 2.6.23, the 2.6 kernel used the Completely Fair Queuing (CFQ) scheduler, which was also bad for database workloads. Please see this note by Werner Puschitz:
The Completely Fair Queuing (CFQ) scheduler is the default algorithm in RHEL4 which is suitable for a wide variety of applications and provides a good compromise between throughput and latency. In comparison to the CFQ algorithm, the Deadline scheduler caps maximum latency per request and maintains a good disk throughput which is best for disk-intensive database applications. Hence, the Deadline scheduler is recommended for database systems.
Also note that RHEL4 (RedHat Enterprise Linux 4) uses kernel 2.6.9, which was pre 2.6.23 and CFS.
To be honest, when using Linux for database applications, you shouldn't use the Completely Fair Scheduler. I build and tune Oracle database servers for a living, and I've researched this very thoroughly. Take it from the master himself, Mr. Werner Puschitz:
The Completely Fair Queuing (CFQ) scheduler is the default algorithm in RHEL4 which is suitable for a wide variety of applications and provides a good compromise between throughput and latency. In comparison to the CFQ algorithm, the Deadline scheduler caps maximum latency per request and maintains a good disk throughput which is best for disk-intensive database applications. Hence, the Deadline scheduler is recommended for database systems.
Granted, this is for Oracle database, which may be different than Postgres or MySQL, but I'd be willing to bet that database workloads are very similar between Oracle and the other databases.
Also, this is a common tactic of people producing benchmarks when they want to make one system or OS look better: Tune the one they want to win so that it is optimally configured for the benchmark, and leave the one they want to lose at the default setting, or worse, just tune it so that it's performance suffers. In this case, leaving Linux at the default setting of CFQ scheduling is not good for database applications.
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At that point, your outdated spinning media (aka hard disk platters) actually become a "near-realtime" backup system, where cached writes are eventually written out to disk as soon as the kernel has the spare cycles to flush the write cache.
I truly think storage is moving more towards this type of system with fast RAM, slower RAM, and disk. Operating systems will have to adjust their outdated concepts of "free memory" and just have "free fast memory" and "free slow memory" and intelligent processes that pre-fetch and copy data between the slow and fast zones in anticipation of which applications and files the user accesses the most. Hell, if Solaris could do it 15 years ago, I'm sure Mac OS X or Linux could do it today.
Want to see profit go down and costs drop for anything? Make it legal and I guarantee you the free market will lower the cost (and also the profit margin).
Before you get all uppity, I'm not defending child porn. I think it's disgusting, but just making something illegal usually has the opposite effect of what you're describing.
It's funny because at my work, I've been convincing Windows admins that have never touched Linux before that Linux is superior, simply because so many important things (TM) can be done by booting a LiveCD:
1. Need to recover a Windows administrator password you forgot? Here's an NTpasswd LiveCD that will do it for you... "Funny how you need to use Linux to recover your Windows password," I say as I hand them the CD.
2. Need to update firmwares on your server? Here's a Firmware Maintenance CD that boots into Linux.
3. Need to repartition or grow/shrink your NTFS partitions? Here's a gparted CD that boots Linux.
4. Need to virtualize your Windows servers? Well guess what? VMware runs on Linux too.
The ability of Linux to function as a low-level "need to get the job done but don't want to pay the MS tax" operating system is selling open-source to the otherwise clueless Windows admins of the world. Seriously, we've all been there at one point in our career. Using DOS or Windows or whatever OS you grew up on because you don't know any better. Then you learn what a real OS is and you move up to UNIX and Linux.
What worries me the most about this whole situation is that until now, Apple hasn't had much reason to crack down on the hackintosh community. Sure, there's a few hackers/geeks like me that want to build them in our spare time, and they pretty much let it slide until now. Unfortunately now they have to crack down on it because otherwise the beige box vendors will start eating their lunch. If Psystar does this and gets away with it, what would stop an organized company like HP or Dell from doing the same thing? I hope they don't start putting some serious copy protection into Mac OS X, but chances are they probably will now. Fuck Psystar for making them do this.
1. Microsoft gets to "sell" a Vista license with all of these new computers.
2. Dell gets a bundled Windows XP "downgrade" license and just installs XP on the computer instead of Vista.
3. Microsoft gets to brag about how many millions of people have bought Vista and how successful it is.
4. Profit?
This is all a shell game for Microsoft. They can't polish the turd that is Vista so they'll just continue to sell XP but make it look like Vista on the books, so that Wall Street is none the wiser.
And before you think I'm an anti-Microsoft, I just bought a copy of Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit so I can run a few games in DX10. It runs slower and crashes more often (even with nothing installed I get regular MS error reports) than XP on the same hardware. Right now I find I'd rather boot back into XP SP2 and run most of my games, even though I can only use 3.2GB of memory, than reboot into Vista and endure slower framerates and random shit popping up and crashing all the time...
ISP A (let's call them Comcast) wants to peer (exchange traffic) with ISP B (let's call them AT&T). So Comcast and AT&T both run a big fat pipe to each other, and the agreement is written like this:
If Comcast sends (uploads) more traffic to AT&T's network, they have to cut a check to AT&T like they were a customer, to pay for the traffic that is transitting AT&T's network. If AT&T sends (uploads) more traffic to Comcast, then it's the other way around. AT&T has to cut a check to Comcast for the traffic that is transitting Comcast's network.
So, you see, some "creative" accountants, who probably came over from Enron or Worldcom, looked at these peering agreements and said "hey, if we can just reduce or eliminate our outbound traffic, but keep our inbound traffic high, we can game the system and make $$$$."
In other words, Comcast is just gaming the system. This is a stupid move because the backbone providers they peer with will simply write new contracts when they are up for renewal, and Comcast will end up paying through the nose for bandwidth, in order for them to recoup all of their losses. But it looks good to shareholders and creates temporary short-term gains, which allows executives to retire with golden parachutes once the market turns sour, which it inevitably will.
Mark my words, Comcast will be the next Enron/Worldcom fiasco. Creative accounting cooking the books short-term by gaming the system. It always comes back to haunt you.
In non-IT companies the equation is much the same "I have an IT project that requires X million lines of code", etc. I can't just wave my magic wand and wish that there were more good tech jobs.
Just to take a simple example, if there are 10 million software development jobs in the US economy, and 8 million of those are taken, 1 million CS graduates will enter the workforce, that leaves 1 million waiting to be filled by either H1B visas or other people that might want them. In this example, there is a shortage of workers so the law of supply and demand will drive salaries up. If 20 million US citizens decided they wanted to be a software developer, there's no way they're going to all find jobs. That creates a glut in the market and the law of supply and demand drives salaries down.
This isn't rocket science people. There is no magic wand I can wave and make an infinite number of IT jobs. IT jobs are like any other skilled labor... there's only a finite amount of IT work that needs to get done. Bringing in the right amount of foreign guest workers can help companies reach their short-term goals. If you want to really fix the system, improve CS education programs and you won't need as many foreign guest workers.
This study is intentionally biased to make MS look good and Apple look bad. Which would you rather have, the blackhat broke into your network through an undisclosed MS hole that allows remote privilege escalation across the network (typical for MS products), or an open source library that you never use and is not exposed to any network facing service has a publicly announced vulnerability (which doesn't affect you personally) and is patched 6 months later by Apple?
It's such a non-issue in the first place because OS X is UNIX and UNIX is fundamentally more secure than any Windows architecture based machine. But MS can keep buying all the studies in the world to try to prove to the PHB crowd that the sky isn't blue, it's green, and that water really isn't wet. It works in politics... tell a lie often enough and people start to believe it (there are WMDs in Iraq) so it must work for technology too (Windows is more secure than OS X)...
Both IBM and Sun see a market opportunity in selling open-source databases that are not tied to archaic per-CPU licensing schemes like Oracle. Unless Oracle adapts their licensing and drops costs dramatically (something like 5-10% per additional core, not 50%) they stand to lose a lot of market share on the low end to MySQL and PostgreSQL.
I say this as a sysadmin that supports lots of Oracle database servers running on Linux. Oracle should see the writing on the wall and fix their licensing... We spend way more than the hardware costs on Oracle licenses alone, and that just isn't right.
DoD contractors typically make 2-3 times what their enlisted counterparts do. Of course you've got to know what you're doing, or at least be able to pretend you do. I was once offered a DoD contract job as a sysadmin for a parts ordering database that allowed foreign countries to buy parts for their F16s so they could bomb the crap out of whatever local population they needed to suppress. I turned it down for philosophical reasons (no thanks, I'd rather not help people buy weapons systems that are used to kill other people), but the salary was quite tempting.
Sorry, but if you want to keep people from selling secrets to enemies of the state, you need to make it so they aren't easily tempted by someone flashing a few $100s in front of them. Paying them decent salaries is a big part of that.
Don't you think private companies haven't figured this out already? An IT person working on Wall Street for $120K a year is much less likely to take a small bribe for insider information than some poor schmuck barely eking out a living at $30K a year...
1. Magnetic fields can have an effect on DNA, as observed in a laboratory setting by exposing embryos to strong magnetic fields.
2. Stars, planets, and other astronomical bodies exert a magnetic field on the earth, and all animals, plants, and humans on it.
3. I hypothesize that personality differences observed by astrology (such as certain signs have certain personality traits) might very well be attributed to the influence of magnetic fields on human embryos at an early stage of development. Different stellar bodies exerting magnetic fields at the time of fertilization/early gestation of an embryo might very well affect it's DNA which could affect personality in the adult.
It is not out of the question that both science and astrology can exist in a reasonable mind. Astrology might just be the layman's way of explaining why certain people born at different times of the year have certain personality traits. Modern science can't yet explain how magnetic fields affect us, but we do know that they affect most living animals significantly.
I don't think it's unreasonable to allow your girlfriend/wife/significant other to believe in astrology while keeping a firm scientific method in your own thought process. Issuing ultimatims like "I'll never date someone that believes in astrology," or whatever ultimatim you might want to project, is just a way of being divisive and generating conflict with others around you.
As geeks and scientists we should attempt to communicate with others. We don't convince others of the things we know in our mind by shutting them out completely.
You're completely right and I was incorrect. Thanks for clarifying this for me.
Also, this is a common tactic of people producing benchmarks when they want to make one system or OS look better: Tune the one they want to win so that it is optimally configured for the benchmark, and leave the one they want to lose at the default setting, or worse, just tune it so that it's performance suffers. In this case, leaving Linux at the default setting of CFQ scheduling is not good for database applications.