I bought a laptop with an LED screen and I have to be very clear - it's obviously a sharper, better, higher contrast screen. The white is very white and very bright, and the blacks are deep and dark. Sitting next to the LCD screen (I run dual head) the difference is glaring.
LCD is sharper (to me) than CRT, and LED is brighter/more contrast than LCD. Best of both worlds?
Why the hell can't we just have taxes for the purpose of paying for government? Rather than these "I don't like what you do with your life so I'm going to try to hinder you from doing it through a passive-aggressive tax measure"
Because it's a politically cheap way to raise tax revenue without "raising taxes". If you need cash to pay for a new program, it's easier to institute a use tax on some minority (such as smokers, fat people, gamblers, and soda drinkers) because there's a tacit, guilt-based consent to taxing twinkies or cigarettes, as opposed to something more broadly needed like gasoline or grain.
Since it works, it's also actually lobbied for by people who would like to pick on these minority groups.
Look, this is an idiotic move. Anybody with more than about 85 IQ points and a modicum of education in the Scientific Method could concoct any number of test scenarios that would logically rule in/out Wifi. What's retarded about this situation is that we have educators (who are responsible for teaching the children Science, among other subjects) who are going along with this idiocy.
I angel invest in companies for the fun and excitement of creating something, not because I want to make money.
And this, perhaps, is why you aren't making any money at it. See, when your neck is on the line, you'll do more to perform!
I am CTO of a small, rapidly growing company experiencing at least 100% growth this year. While we did have some private cash up front, it was a fairly small amount (less than $100k), otherwise our growth has been organic. And because we all eat from whatever our company makes, we've made damned sure to be profitable from the earliest point possible. We had to be lean to make it at first. My office was, for years, the study at home!
And this underlying emphasis on cost control and keeping the bottom line in focus has resulted in a company that has unbelievably good margins on extremely slim expenses. As we continue our exponential growth curve, our profit margins are very fat, even as our customer service is unparalleled, and our infrastructure takes the extra load with ease and crazy low administration costs. What's driving our growth isn't so much our marketing department as our happy customers and jaw-dropping feature set!
If you Angel-invest in companies as a hobby, you get hobby companies, and the very reason for your poor returns is your hobby-oriented approach. Companies at the Angel stage need strong guidance as well as cash. You want to succeed? Well, then, you'd better run really lean, really mean, and play for keeps! Aeron chairs don't even enter the equation until well AFTER you've paid off your Angels. Until then it's the $75 Office Depot "Executive leather" seat, when they are on special clearance! You don't "make a go of it" - you do whatever it takes. You really, really have to have a much better product that solves a real problem at 1/4 (or less) the cost of your competition, or you'll have a tough time getting enough oxygen to survive, and to achieve this result, you really can't do it halfway.
As a startup junkie / investor, my advice is for you to move on - anybody you "help" with your money you hurt with your passive attitude.
hese are major and invasive changes to POSIX. No reasonable person would expect to be able to do things like change PID semantics or shared memory.
I don't think that they are expecting people to wholeheartedly change the 30+ year old POSIX API and adopt their new developments. This is research, remember? These are students who are exploring new ways to improve security and address problems with the POSIX API. It's there, we can adopt what we want, and in the meantime, students learn examples of how to write secure application development environments.
MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity.
I agree, but not for the reasons you state. Brand recognition? Seriously? You think 30 seconds with a google search isn't going to turn up the forks?
It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up.
Except that *all* these forks have a consistent problem: there is no commercial license available. The owners of MySQL could dual-license their works, and people are free to fork the MySQL GPL edition, but they can't then turn around and offer commercial licenses to those who need them. The GPL is a bit "too free" (or too restrictive, depending on your definition of free) to be palatable.
In a strange sort of way, if Oracle doesn't develop MySQL enough, more projects will start with PostgreSQL and will never even consider Oracle. The fact that MySQL sucks as bad as it does works for Oracle, and if they actually kill it, they risk losing revenue!
That said, for better or for worse (worse IMHO, but that's just my opinion) "no-SQL" databases like CouchDB and MongoDB seem to be gaining a lot of traction.
No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store. Calling them a database is an insult to databasses the world over. Yes, there are times when a "no-sql" solution is better than SQL, and the vector is pretty much that point where you realize that storing files in databases makes sense like hauling bales of hay in sports cars does.
Sounds to me like a fork is in order... you find the project useful enough to patch it, why not just fork the project if you aren't getting any traction?
Don't think you are getting into some obligation, you aren't. You are no more obligated to do anything than the guy you're pulling a fork from, you will see your good work benefit the community, and you just might save the project over the long haul.
Basically, it's important for VOIP to have a certain quality of service for clear voice calls, but different QOS rules may make sense for other data types
Do you remember when the millimeter wave full-body scans weren't going to be recorded? But now they routinely are? Remember when seatbelt laws would only be enforced in conjunction with another type of violation, but now they are an arrestable violation all on its own? Maybe you don't remember these things, but I do, with countless other examples I could name, I see a trend....
If it's possible, they'll do it and they already have (Comcast vs Torrents, anyone?) and the only reason they don't do it more is because people got pissy about it. We need to get pissy about this, too. Somehow, despite lacking all these vital QoS rules, the Internet has grown to become the dominant global information network, winning out over many other networks having such things as QoS enforcement. (EG: Proprietary ATM networks, etc)
Sorry, but I like my Internet the way it is, spam and all. It really needs to be nothing more than a Network of Endpoints all sharing equivalent potential value. Let people decide what's valuable and what's not.
You can probably assume plenty of deviation; with my smartphone's link with the company Zimbra collaboration server, my monthly average is around 7 GB per month. Strangely, watching a movie or two on my phone in an airport doesn't seem to make any noticeable difference in my actual usage.
Government wants to pretend its like the private world in so many ways, especially at reelection time, but then it goes off and does something like this. And they wonder why they get taken advantage of. Ugh.
I am SOOOO goddamned sick of this attitude that government is somehow incompetent by its very nature. Governments are comprised of PEOPLE. Companies are comprised of PEOPLE. Both are equally competent at fucking up finances!
Private companies do it all the time - take a look at BP, Enron, and every other company that's managed to go out of business. Hey, even I managed to get in trouble with the IRS and my business is both highly profitable and growing fast!
Why do we somehow assume that Government is like a 3 year old and that we can't expect anything more than "hold them accountable" when they inevitably fark it up? Why not just admit that if your local town is horking up the finances, that the people running the show maybe could use some training and education, and then, if that fails, fire them?
In the United States, governance is paralyzed and ineffective to the degree that it is because NOBODY is willing to work WITH their government and spend all their time trying to beat it up.
It's just sad one of the freest, wealthiest societies in human history, and a government truly designed to serve its population, and all the population does is sit around and whine about how horrible it would be if their government actually tried to make their life better and call it "socialism".
Writing "I want to be a programmer" is like saying "I want to be a doctor!". There are a million different sub-fields, from orthopedics (EG: fixing borken bones) to orthodontics (fixing teeth) and there's a million details to know for each field.
Programming is a big, big field and covers everything from hacking firmware in assembler to writing SQL queries to using macros in Excel. Laugh all you want to, but the lowly Excel macro quite literally runs Billion-dollar enterprises, and is legitimately a programming art, just as much as assembler or kernel coders in that it gets the job that's needed, done.
Start with finding out what you are trying to accomplish, and then work from there! My goal was to build and sell information management tools, and for me, PHP and SQL seemed like good tools for the job. They haven't disappointed me, for my focus, but then, I'm not trying to build a 3D FPS, either!
Then, get the right tool for the job, and roll with it.
Really? Ask Wordstar, Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBaseIII, Netscape, and countless other companies what fat lot of good the early lead did for them?
In each of these cases, it took a goodly amount of determined effort and cash on the part of Microsoft to unseat them. Much as the M$ h8terz around here would hate to admit, Microsoft did come up with useful products in each of these categories that were either easier for end users to use or significantly cheaper than the named competition.
Whether or not that "cheaper" aspect was actually legal is a different story, but it was certainly the cause of the majority of Netscape's downfall.
As an aside, I wrote a significant project using PHP-GTK (version 1) some years ago. (2003?) Well, the php-gtk project has moved on to newer version (2) and have all but dropped support for PHPGTK1, documentation, everything.
Yet my project is still alive and well on the old version, and I'm doing an update to that program now! My only recourse for the documentation is (of course) archive.org, which has all the old documentation (dating all the way back to 2001) which is, for my purposes, very nearly as useful as the original documentation's website was.
I'd be lost without this archive! IMHO, archive.org should be incorporated into the Library of Congress and treated as an imperpetuity electronic archive of the Internet.
Lost amidst all of the desire to permanently archive and hold on to every bit of past memory is the idea that we're supposed to forget. It's built into our DNA. I'm not convinced that it is a practical or necessary goal to hold on to and remember every little thing, especially video game heritage.
If it weren't built into our DNA to try to remember stuff, we wouldn't remember stuff. Except that we do, so obviously remembering stuff is "in our DNA".
What I think you are missing is the fact that the way our mind works, every time we remember something, we strengthen that memory. Memories don't really "go away" in a binary sense, they simply fade over time. Similarly, the Internet DOES forget over time the stuff that isn't all that relevant. If some emulation of an Odyssey game is irrelevant, then it will be visited less and less, and fewer links to it will appear on the Internet, (web, ftp, etc) and to that extent, it will be forgotten. Whether or not the Internet forgets stuff that you want it to is, of course, another story.
But actually forgetting something altogether is rarely a good idea, and it's not even how your mind works. If you really REALLY need to remember some detail from long, long ago, your mind can (and does) go into a deep scanning mode. Often, the memory will "come to you" hours or even days later, and if it's really important, it will still be important then when your mind actually manages to find the information.
I see software archives like this working in a similar way. Software emulators of a computer system that originally had 64 Kb of RAM use so little space that the actual cost to society is almost nill. However, this software could have unknown value in the future, so the benefits of archiving it someplace could and will serve some future value that we can only guess today, even if it is to build a history of how Skynet came to be!
we... found PostgreSQL to be easier to maintain with less table corruption
Really? Because in over 10 years of using Postgres in HEAVY production use, I've never had a table corrupt. Not once. (knocks on wood) Even if PG does corrupt a table someday, it will be a rare event and something that over 10 years of experience indicates is a very rare thing.
MySQL, especially with replication, was about as reliable as a prostitute witness in a court trial. It was just horrible. Tables corrupted constantly, and it was practically my job to reset MySQL (sigh) again from backup!
Mostly people think that if they get scammed, that they were stupid or suckers and don't want to admit that they were duped. Calling the Credit Card company to reverse a charge for $40 is embarrassing, and they would rather just pay the "sucker tax" than go thru the effort, confusion, and embarrassment of disputing a charge.
And this is true in those cases where they even know they can dispute a charge - how many card holders even know that they can do this? I probably had a card for at least 5 years before I found this out, and I would consider myself somewhat more informed than the average consumer.
Don't get me wrong, The Daily Show is great, but it's not really journalism - they don't break any stories, send reporters out into the field, etc. It's more editorial or commentary on the news. All of the new clips they show on the program come from other news sources.
I wish I had source, but a while ago, it was found that people who watch the Daily Show are much more likely to be "well informed" about news and current events. Strangely, making the news fun makes the news accessible and that's just as useful as making the news available!
Modern journalism is, for all intents and purposes, completely lacking in real critical analysis. Journalists today are either pansies, afraid to offend anybody and willing to gently put up with even the most atrocious liars, or frothing at the mouth drooling idiots who decry anybody with the "D" in front of their senate seat as hitler-loving baby stealing socialists.
Only at the Daily Show do you find somebody willing to poke at and point out hypocrisy and lies from anybody, regardless of party affiliation. Yes, they lean a bit left, but they aren't "party liners" either.
And so, if you want to be properly informed and able to think for yourself, the Daily Show is a fun, entertaining, and useful way to accomplish this!
The problem with "offline" storage is that you can end up offline... forever
Such as when you forget to back up your data. Ask around: how many of your friends have done a backup in the last 2 weeks?
When that happens, the fact that the cloud can hold my entire music collection is a handy thing.
It always amazes me when people talk about local storages as if all of the management and administration was already done. It's not. Local storage is CRAP and hardware vendors and service providersseem intent on also making it EXPENSIVE too.
It's the administration that sucks. Cloud vendors have potential. Their main problem is that they're terribly new and sometimes inexperienced.
Turnabout is fair play. Both strategies have their place!
So, is that the real story, "MicroSoft, now more like Apple!"
Only instead of calling it the "iTunes" they'll call it "MyTunes" and "MyPad" and so on. It will look kinda shiny and make gorgeous "bleem" noises. The hard disk light will be perpetually on, and the status bars will be shiny. And it will crash periodically and Microsoft will announce a similar simultaneous effort that will pick up some industry adoption before being marked irrelevant.
1) Nuclear energy, as it's been sold so far, is ANYTHING but clean. 98% of the "fuel" that goes into a classic-style nuclear plant comes back out as highly toxic nuclear waste that isn't fit to live next to for 100,000 years. It can be reprocessed, but that comes with its own suite of problems.
2) There isn't an infinite amount of Uranium, either. Many would argue that we're already past "peak Uranium" so it's out of the pan and into the fire...
3) You can't just stick power plants wherever you like. High capacity transmission lines are *expensive* - it's usually much cheaper to stick your power plants closer to supply. Closer to supply means people are nearby, and people still freak out when they find out a Nuke plant might open up 10 miles away...
4) Why would we put nuke plants in the desert when they are so ripe for solar power? Solar power has now become cheap enough to compete with traditional power sources dollar for dollar in many areas, and the price is continuing to drop as new techologies continue to push the envelope Solar Energy does very well in sunny areas where the solar energy available closely matches the peak demand for Air Conditioning.
Nuke *can* be done right. But the (mostly legal/political) hurdles to do so are tall, and the benefits of a successful nuclear program are less compelling every year.
Don't worry. Microsoft, along with multiple abstraction layers (through the browser etc.), and slower interpreted programming languages to the rescue!!
And while this is funny, it's the *opposite* of what's happening. Javascript performance has improved some 100 fold over the last few years. Enough that the drawbacks of compiled code (platform dependence, having to precompile binaries per platform, etc) are really starting to become show-stoppers.
10 years ago, I witnessed the maturation of server-side scripting languages. Long shunned for their poor performance, they improved enough as processing power became cheap enough that they became extremely viable tools for information management. I built my business using PHP and Postgres and while PHP has its share of warts, I haven't regretted a single, highly profitable day that it has provided for me and my business.
In the last year or two, I've seen the same thing happening with javascript. Prodded first by Firefox, and then even further by Chrome, javascript performance has increased so dramatically that it's like working with a whole new platform. The browser is now its own development platform; one that IE is blowing badly after nearly a decade of utter stagnation.
While we still maintain our cluster of Postgres/PHP/Apache servers, we are increasingly moving the raw processing of data into the browser itself, making our web-based applications "client side" while still preserving the security model of the server-based platform.
It's a good shift, and one that we intend to use as every advantage to its fullest!
Slashdot Mirror
Have you seen an LED screen recently?
I bought a laptop with an LED screen and I have to be very clear - it's obviously a sharper, better, higher contrast screen. The white is very white and very bright, and the blacks are deep and dark. Sitting next to the LCD screen (I run dual head) the difference is glaring.
LCD is sharper (to me) than CRT, and LED is brighter/more contrast than LCD. Best of both worlds?
Why the hell can't we just have taxes for the purpose of paying for government? Rather than these "I don't like what you do with your life so I'm going to try to hinder you from doing it through a passive-aggressive tax measure"
Because it's a politically cheap way to raise tax revenue without "raising taxes". If you need cash to pay for a new program, it's easier to institute a use tax on some minority (such as smokers, fat people, gamblers, and soda drinkers) because there's a tacit, guilt-based consent to taxing twinkies or cigarettes, as opposed to something more broadly needed like gasoline or grain.
Since it works, it's also actually lobbied for by people who would like to pick on these minority groups.
Slashdot has gone from valuable to random, and is going from random to stupid.
I'm guessing by this comment and your high UID that you are new around here?
Look, this is an idiotic move. Anybody with more than about 85 IQ points and a modicum of education in the Scientific Method could concoct any number of test scenarios that would logically rule in/out Wifi. What's retarded about this situation is that we have educators (who are responsible for teaching the children Science, among other subjects) who are going along with this idiocy.
I angel invest in companies for the fun and excitement of creating something, not because I want to make money.
And this, perhaps, is why you aren't making any money at it. See, when your neck is on the line, you'll do more to perform!
I am CTO of a small, rapidly growing company experiencing at least 100% growth this year. While we did have some private cash up front, it was a fairly small amount (less than $100k), otherwise our growth has been organic. And because we all eat from whatever our company makes, we've made damned sure to be profitable from the earliest point possible. We had to be lean to make it at first. My office was, for years, the study at home!
And this underlying emphasis on cost control and keeping the bottom line in focus has resulted in a company that has unbelievably good margins on extremely slim expenses. As we continue our exponential growth curve, our profit margins are very fat, even as our customer service is unparalleled, and our infrastructure takes the extra load with ease and crazy low administration costs. What's driving our growth isn't so much our marketing department as our happy customers and jaw-dropping feature set!
If you Angel-invest in companies as a hobby, you get hobby companies, and the very reason for your poor returns is your hobby-oriented approach. Companies at the Angel stage need strong guidance as well as cash. You want to succeed? Well, then, you'd better run really lean, really mean, and play for keeps! Aeron chairs don't even enter the equation until well AFTER you've paid off your Angels. Until then it's the $75 Office Depot "Executive leather" seat, when they are on special clearance! You don't "make a go of it" - you do whatever it takes. You really, really have to have a much better product that solves a real problem at 1/4 (or less) the cost of your competition, or you'll have a tough time getting enough oxygen to survive, and to achieve this result, you really can't do it halfway.
As a startup junkie / investor, my advice is for you to move on - anybody you "help" with your money you hurt with your passive attitude.
Next to nothing? Gas costs about $3/gallon, making this a $3 billion annual "fatso tax"
Wait until the next 3 Billion dollar tax increase hits Washington, and all the overweight tea party nutbags start screaming socialism!
hese are major and invasive changes to POSIX. No reasonable person would expect to be able to do things like change PID semantics or shared memory.
I don't think that they are expecting people to wholeheartedly change the 30+ year old POSIX API and adopt their new developments. This is research, remember? These are students who are exploring new ways to improve security and address problems with the POSIX API. It's there, we can adopt what we want, and in the meantime, students learn examples of how to write secure application development environments.
Augh! Posts like this make my BRAIN HURT!!
MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity.
I agree, but not for the reasons you state. Brand recognition? Seriously? You think 30 seconds with a google search isn't going to turn up the forks?
It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up.
Except that *all* these forks have a consistent problem: there is no commercial license available. The owners of MySQL could dual-license their works, and people are free to fork the MySQL GPL edition, but they can't then turn around and offer commercial licenses to those who need them. The GPL is a bit "too free" (or too restrictive, depending on your definition of free) to be palatable.
In a strange sort of way, if Oracle doesn't develop MySQL enough, more projects will start with PostgreSQL and will never even consider Oracle. The fact that MySQL sucks as bad as it does works for Oracle, and if they actually kill it, they risk losing revenue!
That said, for better or for worse (worse IMHO, but that's just my opinion) "no-SQL" databases like CouchDB and MongoDB seem to be gaining a lot of traction.
No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store. Calling them a database is an insult to databasses the world over. Yes, there are times when a "no-sql" solution is better than SQL, and the vector is pretty much that point where you realize that storing files in databases makes sense like hauling bales of hay in sports cars does.
The question isn't whether or not /. contributes to the "haox" - the question is whether or not contributing to the hoax by the media actually works.
I never bought *anything* from half.com...
Sounds to me like a fork is in order... you find the project useful enough to patch it, why not just fork the project if you aren't getting any traction?
Don't think you are getting into some obligation, you aren't. You are no more obligated to do anything than the guy you're pulling a fork from, you will see your good work benefit the community, and you just might save the project over the long haul.
Basically, it's important for VOIP to have a certain quality of service for clear voice calls, but different QOS rules may make sense for other data types
Do you remember when the millimeter wave full-body scans weren't going to be recorded? But now they routinely are? Remember when seatbelt laws would only be enforced in conjunction with another type of violation, but now they are an arrestable violation all on its own? Maybe you don't remember these things, but I do, with countless other examples I could name, I see a trend....
If it's possible, they'll do it and they already have (Comcast vs Torrents, anyone?) and the only reason they don't do it more is because people got pissy about it. We need to get pissy about this, too. Somehow, despite lacking all these vital QoS rules, the Internet has grown to become the dominant global information network, winning out over many other networks having such things as QoS enforcement. (EG: Proprietary ATM networks, etc)
Sorry, but I like my Internet the way it is, spam and all. It really needs to be nothing more than a Network of Endpoints all sharing equivalent potential value. Let people decide what's valuable and what's not.
We need to be pissy about this issue.
5.25 drives, especially full height, outta hold a *lot* more than a mere 6 TB - I'm thinking 20-30 TB.... 5.25 full height is *big*.
You can probably assume plenty of deviation; with my smartphone's link with the company Zimbra collaboration server, my monthly average is around 7 GB per month. Strangely, watching a movie or two on my phone in an airport doesn't seem to make any noticeable difference in my actual usage.
Government wants to pretend its like the private world in so many ways, especially at reelection time, but then it goes off and does something like this. And they wonder why they get taken advantage of. Ugh.
I am SOOOO goddamned sick of this attitude that government is somehow incompetent by its very nature. Governments are comprised of PEOPLE. Companies are comprised of PEOPLE. Both are equally competent at fucking up finances!
Private companies do it all the time - take a look at BP, Enron, and every other company that's managed to go out of business. Hey, even I managed to get in trouble with the IRS and my business is both highly profitable and growing fast!
Why do we somehow assume that Government is like a 3 year old and that we can't expect anything more than "hold them accountable" when they inevitably fark it up? Why not just admit that if your local town is horking up the finances, that the people running the show maybe could use some training and education, and then, if that fails, fire them?
In the United States, governance is paralyzed and ineffective to the degree that it is because NOBODY is willing to work WITH their government and spend all their time trying to beat it up.
It's just sad one of the freest, wealthiest societies in human history, and a government truly designed to serve its population, and all the population does is sit around and whine about how horrible it would be if their government actually tried to make their life better and call it "socialism".
Sad...
Writing "I want to be a programmer" is like saying "I want to be a doctor!". There are a million different sub-fields, from orthopedics (EG: fixing borken bones) to orthodontics (fixing teeth) and there's a million details to know for each field.
Programming is a big, big field and covers everything from hacking firmware in assembler to writing SQL queries to using macros in Excel. Laugh all you want to, but the lowly Excel macro quite literally runs Billion-dollar enterprises, and is legitimately a programming art, just as much as assembler or kernel coders in that it gets the job that's needed, done.
Start with finding out what you are trying to accomplish, and then work from there! My goal was to build and sell information management tools, and for me, PHP and SQL seemed like good tools for the job. They haven't disappointed me, for my focus, but then, I'm not trying to build a 3D FPS, either!
Then, get the right tool for the job, and roll with it.
Really? Ask Wordstar, Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBaseIII, Netscape, and countless other companies what fat lot of good the early lead did for them?
In each of these cases, it took a goodly amount of determined effort and cash on the part of Microsoft to unseat them. Much as the M$ h8terz around here would hate to admit, Microsoft did come up with useful products in each of these categories that were either easier for end users to use or significantly cheaper than the named competition.
Whether or not that "cheaper" aspect was actually legal is a different story, but it was certainly the cause of the majority of Netscape's downfall.
As an aside, I wrote a significant project using PHP-GTK (version 1) some years ago. (2003?) Well, the php-gtk project has moved on to newer version (2) and have all but dropped support for PHPGTK1, documentation, everything.
Yet my project is still alive and well on the old version, and I'm doing an update to that program now! My only recourse for the documentation is (of course) archive.org, which has all the old documentation (dating all the way back to 2001) which is, for my purposes, very nearly as useful as the original documentation's website was.
I'd be lost without this archive! IMHO, archive.org should be incorporated into the Library of Congress and treated as an imperpetuity electronic archive of the Internet.
Lost amidst all of the desire to permanently archive and hold on to every bit of past memory is the idea that we're supposed to forget. It's built into our DNA. I'm not convinced that it is a practical or necessary goal to hold on to and remember every little thing, especially video game heritage.
If it weren't built into our DNA to try to remember stuff, we wouldn't remember stuff. Except that we do, so obviously remembering stuff is "in our DNA".
What I think you are missing is the fact that the way our mind works, every time we remember something, we strengthen that memory. Memories don't really "go away" in a binary sense, they simply fade over time. Similarly, the Internet DOES forget over time the stuff that isn't all that relevant. If some emulation of an Odyssey game is irrelevant, then it will be visited less and less, and fewer links to it will appear on the Internet, (web, ftp, etc) and to that extent, it will be forgotten. Whether or not the Internet forgets stuff that you want it to is, of course, another story.
But actually forgetting something altogether is rarely a good idea, and it's not even how your mind works. If you really REALLY need to remember some detail from long, long ago, your mind can (and does) go into a deep scanning mode. Often, the memory will "come to you" hours or even days later, and if it's really important, it will still be important then when your mind actually manages to find the information.
I see software archives like this working in a similar way. Software emulators of a computer system that originally had 64 Kb of RAM use so little space that the actual cost to society is almost nill. However, this software could have unknown value in the future, so the benefits of archiving it someplace could and will serve some future value that we can only guess today, even if it is to build a history of how Skynet came to be!
we ... found PostgreSQL to be easier to maintain with less table corruption
Really? Because in over 10 years of using Postgres in HEAVY production use, I've never had a table corrupt. Not once. (knocks on wood) Even if PG does corrupt a table someday, it will be a rare event and something that over 10 years of experience indicates is a very rare thing.
MySQL, especially with replication, was about as reliable as a prostitute witness in a court trial. It was just horrible. Tables corrupted constantly, and it was practically my job to reset MySQL (sigh) again from backup!
Now using PG 8.4 and loving it!
Mostly people think that if they get scammed, that they were stupid or suckers and don't want to admit that they were duped. Calling the Credit Card company to reverse a charge for $40 is embarrassing, and they would rather just pay the "sucker tax" than go thru the effort, confusion, and embarrassment of disputing a charge.
And this is true in those cases where they even know they can dispute a charge - how many card holders even know that they can do this? I probably had a card for at least 5 years before I found this out, and I would consider myself somewhat more informed than the average consumer.
Don't get me wrong, The Daily Show is great, but it's not really journalism - they don't break any stories, send reporters out into the field, etc. It's more editorial or commentary on the news. All of the new clips they show on the program come from other news sources.
I wish I had source, but a while ago, it was found that people who watch the Daily Show are much more likely to be "well informed" about news and current events. Strangely, making the news fun makes the news accessible and that's just as useful as making the news available!
Modern journalism is, for all intents and purposes, completely lacking in real critical analysis. Journalists today are either pansies, afraid to offend anybody and willing to gently put up with even the most atrocious liars, or frothing at the mouth drooling idiots who decry anybody with the "D" in front of their senate seat as hitler-loving baby stealing socialists.
Only at the Daily Show do you find somebody willing to poke at and point out hypocrisy and lies from anybody, regardless of party affiliation. Yes, they lean a bit left, but they aren't "party liners" either.
And so, if you want to be properly informed and able to think for yourself, the Daily Show is a fun, entertaining, and useful way to accomplish this!
The problem with "offline" storage is that you can end up offline... forever
Such as when you forget to back up your data. Ask around: how many of your friends have done a backup in the last 2 weeks?
When that happens, the fact that the cloud can hold my entire music collection is a handy thing.
It always amazes me when people talk about local storages as if all of the management and administration was already done. It's not. Local storage is CRAP and hardware vendors and service providersseem intent on also making it EXPENSIVE too.
It's the administration that sucks. Cloud vendors have potential. Their main problem is that they're terribly new and sometimes inexperienced.
Turnabout is fair play. Both strategies have their place!
So, is that the real story, "MicroSoft, now more like Apple!"
Only instead of calling it the "iTunes" they'll call it "MyTunes" and "MyPad" and so on. It will look kinda shiny and make gorgeous "bleem" noises. The hard disk light will be perpetually on, and the status bars will be shiny. And it will crash periodically and Microsoft will announce a similar simultaneous effort that will pick up some industry adoption before being marked irrelevant.
Oh, wait - aren't they already doing this?
So many statements, so little truth!
1) Nuclear energy, as it's been sold so far, is ANYTHING but clean. 98% of the "fuel" that goes into a classic-style nuclear plant comes back out as highly toxic nuclear waste that isn't fit to live next to for 100,000 years. It can be reprocessed, but that comes with its own suite of problems.
2) There isn't an infinite amount of Uranium, either. Many would argue that we're already past "peak Uranium" so it's out of the pan and into the fire...
3) You can't just stick power plants wherever you like. High capacity transmission lines are *expensive* - it's usually much cheaper to stick your power plants closer to supply. Closer to supply means people are nearby, and people still freak out when they find out a Nuke plant might open up 10 miles away...
4) Why would we put nuke plants in the desert when they are so ripe for solar power? Solar power has now become cheap enough to compete with traditional power sources dollar for dollar in many areas, and the price is continuing to drop as new techologies continue to push the envelope Solar Energy does very well in sunny areas where the solar energy available closely matches the peak demand for Air Conditioning.
Nuke *can* be done right. But the (mostly legal/political) hurdles to do so are tall, and the benefits of a successful nuclear program are less compelling every year.
Don't worry. Microsoft, along with multiple abstraction layers (through the browser etc.), and slower interpreted programming languages to the rescue!!
And while this is funny, it's the *opposite* of what's happening. Javascript performance has improved some 100 fold over the last few years. Enough that the drawbacks of compiled code (platform dependence, having to precompile binaries per platform, etc) are really starting to become show-stoppers.
10 years ago, I witnessed the maturation of server-side scripting languages. Long shunned for their poor performance, they improved enough as processing power became cheap enough that they became extremely viable tools for information management. I built my business using PHP and Postgres and while PHP has its share of warts, I haven't regretted a single, highly profitable day that it has provided for me and my business.
In the last year or two, I've seen the same thing happening with javascript. Prodded first by Firefox, and then even further by Chrome, javascript performance has increased so dramatically that it's like working with a whole new platform. The browser is now its own development platform; one that IE is blowing badly after nearly a decade of utter stagnation.
While we still maintain our cluster of Postgres/PHP/Apache servers, we are increasingly moving the raw processing of data into the browser itself, making our web-based applications "client side" while still preserving the security model of the server-based platform.
It's a good shift, and one that we intend to use as every advantage to its fullest!