Firefly needs a "reboot" in that it needs to be FINISHED. It's a series that I discovered through the movie and watched online (thanks Hulu!) and fell in love with it by episode three. The characters are awesome, the acting was excellent, the plot was entertaining and managed to be simultaneously "wild west" and "high tech".
I would love love LOVE to see this series restarted!
It'll be difficult to say who's using it because they download it, try it, run it.. all quietly without fuss. No-one at PostgreSQL website can say who's using the downloads because there's no licensing or even a 'email to get your registration' type stuff going on.
We started with yum -y install postgresql-server and now, hundreds of busy clients later and a few updates later, Postgresql is still going stronger than ever...
And seriously, Postgres is the overachieving underdog of the database world. It has it all - replication, data integrity, legendarily stunning stability, MVCC, foreign keys, triggers, PLPGSQL, subselects, indexes, query scheduling, parameterized statements, DDBC, metatables, cross-database joins... I could go on, and on, and on. It holds up very nicely when Its security model is excellent. Its organizational model is stable. It holds up well under very demanding loads and just basically doesn't crash. (In a decade of using it every single business day, I've NEVER HAD an instance of Postgres corrupt running on a RedHat/CentOS server) It costs nothing, it's available by default on any RedHat install CD, and most other distros.
If Oracle is scared, they should be scared of PostgreSQL, and if you're looking to database something, you should strongly consider Postgres!
Most people don't give a rat's ass about the iPhone not being an open platform. Hell, a vast, significant majority of people don't even know what an open platform is...
It's a phone. I don't give a rat's ass about how "open" it is, except that I do. Because I've dealt with the new AT&T before, and there's no way in heaven or hell that I'm going to sign a contract with them. Just getting them to bill me the price they promised on my long distance has been hell - I've been charged over $4.00/minute for International calls that my calling plan matrix says should cost $0.09 per minute. And while I've called and complained, I've spent more time on the phone with various reps who never seem able to help me or even answer basic questions than I actually spent on the phone!
And no, it's not chump change - it's $1,300 in disputed charges that should cost me around $60 when all is said and done. And though I've been promised a call back several times, it's been weeks and still no call comes. My next step is to sue them in small claims.
Iphone? Forget about it. Not while it's tied to AT&T!
Oh wait... isn't that whole "tied to AT&T" have something to do with it being open? Yeah, maybe it does? Maybe I can go to (gasp!) MetroPCS with their flat-rate billing model, with an "open" phone?
Hell, I'd happily plunk down a few hundred today if I knew it would work...
The bottom line is that you have to run up against the fact that a decade ago CPU's could satisfy any reasonable need for processing power. Now all one is buying CPUs for is "fluff" -- watching TV on ones computer, playing games, etc. I.e. it produces nothing, it contributes nothing, it is simply a consumer computing mentality -- my computer exists to entertain me.
I have an Athlon XP 3200+. It's a nice chip, and all, a 32bit one. And for many tasks, it is more than adequate. But when watching flash video full screen on my 32" HiDef TV, it's very jerky. Yes, it's because of Flash being poorly optimized. But it's also what I want to do with my computer, because I DO watch TV. And rather than spend too much money to get Cable TV or Dish, I've switched to all 100% online TV. It saves me $75/month and is a better user experience! I no longer have to pre-plan my viewing, I just watch whatever's available when I want, on demand, right from the beginning of the show.
But while it works well on the Mac mini in my bedroom, and my Dell laptop, it doesn't work so well on the old Athlon. So, I go to Pricewatch.com and buy a new Athlon X/2 motherboard/video card combo upgrade board with 2.1 Ghz of RAM for $150, and now I have a 64-bit, dual-core MB, good RAM, fast processor. Flash plays nicely, and all for less than the cost of a decent DVD player.
Are you still telling me that the CPU doesn't matter? Maybe you are happy with the ancient processor from 10 years ago, and for many tasks, it's probably good enough, but not for everything...
Sorry about your camera, dude. I use a $59 generic digital camera I got in the shrink-wrap isle at the local Best Buy. It's 10 Mpixel with optical zoom, records decent quality video, and came with a free 2 GB memory card. It doesn't have every bell and whistle, but does a good job taking pictures and video. Armed with rechargeable batteries and a cheap external USB drive, my pictures cost almost nothing at all and I don't give a hoot about compatibility since it uses standard flash cards and image format. (JPG/WMV)
It means "a home, food on the table, education and health care".
I wonder about this. Average new home size has roughly doubled since the mid-20th century - not far from the 1962 statistic you mention. Also, the percentage of population with college degrees is higher, and health care today is a far cry from the health care available in 1962!
Today, one of my oldest sons deals daily with a horrible disease that costs some $1,000 per month - just to keep him alive. He gets the best care I can afford! But in 1962, treatment options for Diabetes were limited, and the official advice was: "Diabetics rarely live more than 20 years from the date that they are diagnosed". Today, diabetics typically live near-normal lifespans!
So I work 30% longer, but live in a spacious, comfortable, 2,000 SqFt home, fly a private airplane, and my son lives today? Sounds like a good deal!
The USA once was dominant in metrics like this. Now, our leadership position, being pissed away for so many years by inept leadership and increasily divisive politics, has been compromised in many areas.
In education, we rival the 3rd world. There is actually serious discussion about teaching so-called "Intelligent-Design" as a part of our Science curriculum! Our math and science scores are near the bottom, and are actually beaten by 3rd world countries in many cases.
Our production and manufacturing idustries have been bleeding red ink for decades. Once the pinnacle of the 1st world, we now sardonically compliment our own quality. Our upper-middle and upper classes don't buy our American-made cars.
Our leadership in Science development is tanking fast. From our until-recent ban on stem cell research funding, and our generally soft support for "basic Science" research, to our cancelling funding for the SSC supercollider, we've sent the message to the scientific community - support is elsewhere!
Tallest building in the world is a pissing contest, that we led for a long time in the last century. We've not only lost it, but our vain attempt to regain it in the so-called "Freedom tower" is mired in controversy, bad design, and travesty, bungled so badly that it's the architectural equivalent of the "mission accomplished" poster of GWB notoriety.
I'm an American, and it's really, really sad to watch my nation slowly collapse in on itself.
Let's say that you get all these companies to give up ALL their addresses. You've postponed the problem by about 18 months! Whoopee!
The thing is, technology tends to grow logarithmically, which is why we have things like Benford's Law. The problem shouldn't be being solved now, while we're at the 90% level, the problem should have been solved long ago, back when we were at about the 10-20% level, because the actual halfway mark as a function of time is somewhere near 20-25% completion!
In any event, IPV6 fails to solve a couple of fundamental problems:
1) Piss poor backwards compatibility. This was even acknowledged publicly in a recent news article. It's not only not poorly backwards compatible, it just basically ISN'T backwards compatible. Want to talk to an IPV4-only resource from your IPV6-only address? You basically have to have some fancy trickery with NAT and DNS in order to do this - it isn't straightforward, and it requires coordination with the IPV4 resource. And the reverse is even worse!
2) Un-necessary complexity in implementation. Partly as a result of #1, implementing IPV6 will be costly, and will require expensive "transition tools" in order to work smoothly. But it's not just because of lack of backwards compatibility - issues such as strange hardware requirements (what... no MAC address?) and the like make the cost of implementing high. Sure, it's not that expensive per device, but multiply that by the entire Internet, and the problem becomes a bit more clear.
3) No net positive for implementing! You don't get "more" for implementing, you get "less". Some stuff that used to work won't, and other stuff that you need to work just isn't there. Sure, Yahoo and Google support IPV6, which is great for the 50 or so people who are on it. But, if anybody cares, it's on IPV4.
4) Tragedy of the Commons: The address shortages don't affect anybody who's already on the 'net. I have an IP address or two already. I don't care if *you* run out, I only care if *I* run out. So, I really don't much care about you so long as I get mine. That's called the "tragedy of the commons" - a common resource is exploited as quickly as possible by people who are motivated to get theirs before anybody else gets it, resulting in a destroyed public resource.
IPV6 sucks. The engineers had their chance, and they blew it. Now it's too late to change it because we don't have another 5 years to committee another solution, and there is already a significant amount of inertia from those poor souls who have already implemented it! (at great cost)
Seriously, I'm beginning to question the value of completely free speech. I've spent my entire life so far in support of it, and the free marketplace, but I'm finding more and more, that both are a fiction and always have been!
The "free" marketplace isn't free, it's a highly unstable situation that's carefully protected by a government that's surprisingly willing to impose on the "freedome" of the marketplace. Until the 1980s, government stepped in many times, repeatedly, over the years, to limit the power of the monopolies in the United States. But after about 1981 or so, we simply stopped caring. And the result has decimated our marketplace! In becoming more "free", we've simply become more monopolistic, where Wal-Mart now delivers some 30% to 50% of the consumed goods in the USA.
This was unheard of before then, but only because the gubbmint stepped in repeatedly to limit the power of (among others) A&P, the mid-20th century equivalent of Wal-Mart. As a percentage of population, Wal-Mart is now at least 5x as big as A&P ever was at its height. Yet Wal-Mart is just one of many vertical monopolies now rearing, to the deafening roar of untrained people who rally and cry for speech and marketplaces free from the controls of the government that was otherwise busy serving their own interests. It's a sad, sad state of affairs.
In a similar vein, I'm finding that "free speech" never existed. For over a century, there were strict controls on news organizations and reporting agencies - strict policies on libel and a general expectation of truth. This was easily enforced, because there were so few news agencies with the ability to reach a significant percentage of the population. And the result was filtered news and information of generally high-quality.
But the Internet has changed all that. Even if strict news reporting standards were still in effect, the news organizations would have to compete with the deafening roar of blogs and other "almost news" sites (Slashdot being one of them!) and so the standards would lose all their teeth anyway.
What journalistic standards is my completely private post written from my armchair going to be held to?
But the end result is that any whining idiot with an opinion that sounds nice gets lots of play, and real information gets lost in the din of noise and misinformation. Without any expectation of accountability, idiots like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly are free to spread their bile and intellectual filth to unwashed masses who haven't developed the means to filter them out, partly due to the falling standards and expectations from our public school system, which has gotten so bad that no schooling at all is often an improvement.
Free speech is just noise without a bullshit filter. Look in your spam box for 99.97% "free speech". If society is to save itself, it will need to learn the difference between speech and honest-to-god information.
We also see a drop in the quality of education (i.e. why are we still arguing about evolution in 20XX) standards and that will have a long term effect.
If only the problem really was that simple... Yes, we've had a dramatic drop in educational standards, teachers are painfully underpaid, and recent efforts to improve educational standards have strictly enforced the very things we need least, (IE: rote memorization) but the problem is much deeper than that!
For the past 30 years, the United States has been systematically under attack from a foreign power, a systematic attack designed to destroy the infrastructure of the United States. Our roads, power, and communications structures, once the wonder of the modern world, slowly crumbles. Our youth are demotivated from inception to anything that produces real world wealth, while the industries that created the great economic powers are sent overseas.
No, I'm not talking about some "liberals" or Illuminati or anything so inane and two-dimensional as that. I'm talking about China.
Yes, China, who, by performing the simple act of locking their currency to ours, created temporary abundance of apparent wealth here while slowly decimating our foundations. Why should our children work hard to learn physics and tough sciences, when careers as managers and bean-counters pays oh so much better? Engineers and skilled workers increasingly have to compete with similarly competent rivals in a country with 1/10th the pay scale. Why would anyone accept such poor terms and an environment so rigged to failure?
So we train wave after wave of nearly useless MBAs who profit immensely from the slow demolition of the US infrastructure, and a government that has now all but "come out of the closet" for its reliance on China with its recent borrowing fiascos, funded by the Chinese.
But truth is, the long-term trend is that everything is getting "sucked up" into the phone. Let me rattle off some examples that I live with, every day:
1) I have a dedicated digital camera (I paid $59 for it, BTW) that takes nice, high quality 10 MP pictures, and better-than-VHS quality video, but it's quite common that the shatty camera in my phone is actually good enough for the job, despite its flaws.
2) I have a dedicated MP3 player, but it's also common that my phone is good enough for that job, too, even if the battery life is weak.
3) And I have a small-sized laptop that approximates a new "netbook", but it's common that the browser in my phone is good enough, too.
4) I don't carry maps anymore - google maps is already installed in my phone and is better than any map, anyway, for what I need!
5) I don't ever remember phone numbers - it's either in my history or contacts list, or doesn't exist. Nicely, my smartphone integrates with my company's Zimbra mail server, so if anything happens to my phone, all my contacts, calendar, and email are backed up on the server!
6) I have decks of cards, but they are used perhaps 1/10 as often as the card games on my phone. Video games? Sure, but my phone is with me when I'm waiting at the DMV - the Xbox isn't.
7) I usually watch shows and movies on my Mac Mini in my Bedroom, or on the big-screen in the living room. But often, I watch shows on my phone! Hulu plays passably well on my dual-core ARM based smartphone! Audio isn't great, and the screen is a few inches in size, but it's with me everywhere!
In short, my phone does none of these especially well, but it does all of these in a manner that's often passable and sometimes best available. The phone is slowly sucking up all these (and more) into a single device, and it gets better every single year. The screens are getting sharper, the battery life improves, the capability gets smoother, the price is dropping... It's improving in every measurable way.
Instead of $99 netbooks, which is the next logical step, we'll end up with >$400 netbooks that will have better graphics, telco tie-ins, 3G instead of wi-fi and other limiting "features". The things that made netbooks so popular will be replaced by things which make more money for the manufacturers and telcos.
Which is just so much silly talk! Manufacturers want to sell hardware, and manufacture stuff that people buy, at a price high enough for them to make money at it. Here you are wailing about netbooks without wifi, when my farking PHONE has wifi. (Incidentally, the wifi in my phone leads to the unusual situation of running skype on my phone over wifi to replace... my phone - head assplodes!)
Manufacturers will stop selling systems with wifi when people don't want systems with wifi enough to buy them. They will stop selling systems with floppy disks when nobody cares about them. And so on...
And that's probably due to your lack of any meaningful information about the problem. Typically when there is a solution to the problem that seems simple and trivial, and the people involved are morons for not implementing it, it's because those implementation details are more significant than your understanding would allow.
But here's a hint: simple problems are generally solved quickly. Complex problems are generally solved slowly. When you see reasonably bright people working on a problem that doesn't get solved quickly, you can be sure that it's not what you think!
For a small plane I'd expect a few hundred mile effective range. They could actually fly upwards of 600 miles on a single tank, but you need to factor in reserves, hold time, wind, etc. You don't want to plan to land on empty.
On the other hand, if you've marked off a few small airfields along the way a fueling stop doesn't really take all that long - you plan to have to hold in case something odd comes up, but you're not going to need to do that in some field in the middle of farmland.
I don't like going more than about 300 miles without landing and checking fuel, even though I technically could go 600. Besides, after a few hours in the plane, I pretty much always want to get out and "freshen up" a bit...
Gas prices seem to be about $4.25/gal right now, and small planes hold about 50 gallons. You'll definitely pay more in gas than you would for a car, but that really is one of the smallest expenses associated with a plane.
What hasn't been mentioned in this thread is the maintenance. Figure that it will cost you upwards of $80/hr to fly your plane. You can pay $100/hr or so and rent (often with limitations on being able to just take the plane somewhere), or you can buy and you end up with a "cheap hourly rate" coupled with periodic major expenses. YOU CANNOT SKIMP ON MAINTENANCE. Planes are very safe if properly cared for, and proper care costs money - at various intervals based on operational time you need to have it taken care of.
First off, the cost of gas isn't a "minor detail", it's the majority of that hourly cost! In my C-182, I pay $90/hour wet. If gas costs $4.25, and my plane burns about 12.5 gallons per hour, that's $53!
Second off, the difference between $90 and $53 is what maintenance gets paid with. Airplanes need an annual inspection, which typically costs anywhere from $1000 to $2500, depending on what needs to be fixed along the way. $75/month provided by 10 flight club members over a year provides almost $10,000 to cover things like this. Also, hangar fees and related expenses need to be covered.
In my case, we have a nice GPS with XM satellite weather and radio. Both cost a fairly pretty penny and are hard to justify with personal aircraft ownership, but are a no-brainer as part of the flying club!
Then you have to factor in buying the plane in the first place - it costs quite a bit of money for something that you won't actually use all that often.
Unless you're up in the air all the time or just have to have your own plane, the best bet by far is a flying club of some kind. Essentially these are planes owned by lots of people, so that the overhead is shared efficiently. It still isn't what I'd call cheap, but it is fairly reasonable and you can usually reserve planes for longer periods of time. If you're doing rentals forget actually using a plane to go someplace, unless you plan to go, visit somebody for a few hours, and come home.
BINGO. Flight clubs are the way to go. Boats aren't cheap, either, yet when you run the numbers, an airplane is about as expensive as a boat when you join a Flight Club.
Note that I'm not a pilot but I've been investigating this stuff with interest - I could easily see myself going this route someday and I'm reasonably proficient on simulators now. (The/. crew types can easily benefit from simulators as they give you a chance to practice quite a few things for almost nothing. I have no illusions that they're a replacement for real-world experience, but if you fly them following real-world procedures you can get the hang of stuff like instrumentation and crosswinds without paying for time.)
For the record, simulators are FANTASTIC when simulating (for example) instrument-only flight. They are somewhat useful to practice landings. But for landings and other basic aircraft handling, nothing comes even close to the real experience.
Indeed. It's the streisand effect of terrorism... 9/11 could have been at most a minor annoyance but instead it became the rallying cry for numerous restrictions on freedom with questionable results at best.
Not only that, but it's become a rather strong rallying cry in support of General Aviation - you know, private planes and all?
As a member of a flight club, I can fly a private Cessna 182 at 150 MPH (pretty much) anytime I want, at a cost that's perhaps 25% higher than driving. Typically, private planes get me there in somewhere between 25% and 33% the time to drive, and for trips between 100 and 750 miles is a very competitive way to go.
1) I don't land at big airports, I land at small ones that exist in nearly every community over 5,000 to 10,000 people or so. At these airports, delays really don't exist. There are usually not more than 2 or 3 other planes active at any given time, often none.
2) Small airports almost inevitably put me very close to where I want to go, anyway! Rather than drive 1.5 hours after landing, I get a taxi for the 3-5 mile ride.
3) Stupid security restrictions? Naw - back the car up to the side of the plane and throw your bags aboard! At larger airports, there are often security fences and the like, but even these are easily navigated, certainly without the stupid wands, shoes, and security theater.
The only real limit in going this way is weather - as a visual-only pilot, I'm grounded when the clouds get too low. (But even that won't be a limit for much longer)
I second/third/fourth this! Get out of there! I would be deeply offended if my hosting company ever deigned to do so much as unlock my cabinet without consulting me first, barring all but the most exigent circumstances.
You need to move providers. It's a bit painful, but the difference between a sucky hosting provider and a good one is the difference between night and day!
4) Once the inevitable failure occurs, haul out the paper trail and get the bean counter fired. Repeat until test lab is approved. Note, step 4 may get you fired instead. Business decisions are somewhat nondeterministic.
And this is the part that SUCKS.... A while back, I was part of a three-way integration project, with myself (representing a vendor), another vendor, and the ultimate customer. In advance, I'd talked through everything with the other vendor so we had a clear plan, including a verification step to cross-check the accuracy of the integration.
Confident, I went into the meeting, we presented our plan, the customer agreed, and all was going well, until when, in what I thought was going to be a closing step, I reiterated the entire plan from beginning to end.
The other vendor decided that this was a good time to disagree with the plan that had already been agreed to, and that doing the cross-check was not valuable. I came out strongly, indicating that the system could not be trusted unless the cross check was built. After going back and forth for a while, the customer decided they didn't want to pay for it.
So the plan went forward, and I was predicting that it wouldn't work, and why it wouldn't work. And when it didn't work, I was accused by the customer AND THE OTHER VENDOR of trying not to make it work! The situation went from bad to worse, to worse still.
Finally, I ended up building the cross-check, on my dime. I was PISSED. Even after the cross-check was built, and the problems started to show clearly rather than just be vague, I never got anything more than a nod.
You can believe that my further dealings with the client and the third party were markedly more reserved after that. Being the "hero" who has the answer in a flash, and saves the day is over-rated. Far better to hint that the problem is difficult to solve and take your time answering the question!
RedHat is somewhere between 1 and 2 years late releasing RHEL 6. The split of Red Hat Linux into Fedora and RHEL came back to bite RHEL 6, because when RedHat tried to release the responsibility of developing Fedora to the community, what they got in return was an overemphasis on nifty cool stuff while long-standing bugs, some very severe, went disregarded.
Turns out, people who aren't getting paid to do it only want to do it if it's fun! And so the quality of Fedora, which is what RHEL is ultimately based on, dropped, increasingly sharply, until Fedora Core 9 was so bad it was actually unusable! You couldn't even so much as change the font size in X before it would crash!
I wish I was kidding. It was horrible.
So RedHat got the hint, and for the last year has hired a legion of programmers to do little more than fix every bug they can find. There are reams and reams. Rumor is that Fedora Core 12 is ultimately in line to be RHEL 6. I'm using Fedora 10, and it's finally about as stable as Fedora 8.
We can only hope! RHEL 5 is really starting to show its age, and I have a suite of RHEL 4 servers that I want to switch over to something newer, but as old as 5 is, I'd rather make the jump to 6 as soon as it comes out than do another switchover in a year or two.
There are two other configurations that make lots of sense and yet for some reason are underused.
1) Pancake configuration. This is commonly used in aircraft, and is the same as the VW bug. You can't argue that the engine compartment on a bug is huge! And the pancake engine lends itself to "strato" body layouts, EG: the engine sits BELOW the trunk, etc. The direct cross-firing of cylinders makes for a relatively smooth operation without extensive It's well proven, provides many of the space-saving benefits of the V8, yet is basically ignored as an engine format. Why? You can have two pistons firing at the same time, 180 degrees apart! (WTF?)
2) Radial configuration. Want an engine that runs as smooth as a baby's ass? Try radial! Also, you basically don't have a crankshaft, since all the connecting rods connect to a single, central tie rod. If you timed the pistons right, you could easily have pistons ALWAYS firing 180 degrees from each other, for pure smoothness, efficiency, and and reliability.
We don't use either of the technologies, yet they each offer significant benefits over the "satatus quo". Other than NIH, why aren't either of these two highly valuable configurations used?
one of the things you don't generally see with PHP code is a buffer overflow, where you try to copy a bunch of strings and concatenate them together and you run out of room and don't notice it and you go clobbering memory. That's because the string manipulation code goes through a bunch of checks when you're appending strings.
And this is one of the great ironies of PHP... while there *have* been a number of vulnerabilities in PHP-based applications, that's more an artifact of the unqualified developers that the language's ease-of-use tends to attract.
PHP offers quite an impressive number of security-related features that make horrible, difficult-to-solve security problems almost a non-issue. PP example of string appending is but one of far too many to name, yet it's one that's the cause of the vast majority of security issues in software, everywhere!
What's that, you say? The #1 cause of security issues has been all-but-eliminated in a programming language that's often chided for security issues? Doesn't really make sense, does it?
And then, on to what is perhaps the #1 cause of security issues for database-driven product - the dreaded SQL injection error. Yep, that one has been solved too!
Yes, you can use PHP to write an insecure application. But you can use an SUV with seat belts and airbags to kill yourself, too. When discussing security, PHP doesn't get anywhere near the respect it otherwise deserves.
The way I see it, MS is no longer trying to win the browser war. They're just trying to stay relevant.
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Oh, but if only that were true!
IE 8 is a major disappointment. Its standards compliance is still so horrible, that for our outsourced vertical application, we simply don't support it any more. We work well with Safari, Opera, Chrome, and (of course!) FireFox. IE is just out, for us - too expensive to support any more, and our users really don't complain at all when we say: "Sure, we support cross platform, as long as it isn't IE!".
MS is losing browser marketshare about as fast as the marketplace can move. And for me!? I'm just soooo glad I don't have to spend 3 days trying to get IE to work for every 1 or 2 spent implementing features!
Good-bye, Microsoft, and don't let the door hit you on the way out!
That's why I find these comparisons stupid. "Oh this is so much faster than our supercomputer!" No it isn't. It is so much faster for some things. Now if you are doing those things wonderful, please use GPUs. However don't then try to pretend you have a "supercomputer in a desktop." You don't. You have a specialized computer with a bunch of single precision stream processors. That's great so long as your problem is 32-bit fp, highly parallel, doesn't branch much, and fits within the memory on a GPU. However not all problems are hence they are NOT a general replacement for a supercomputer.
For that matter, which is faster: A two-ton flatbed truck, or a Maserati? Kinda depends on what you are trying to do, doesn't it? Want to move 3,000 pounds of Hay? You probably DON'T want the Maserati!
And all machines are like this. Some machines are better at some tasks than others. And presumably, the comparison to the University Supercomputer was because of a task that they *needed* to perform, and the pittance cost of the GPGPU-based supercomputer favored very well against the cost of leasing University supercomputer time.
Even different people are better at some things than others.... Some people are better a maths than others. Some people can take a bit of vinegar and coffee grounds, and make an artistic masterpiece.
Because I'm a jogger, I can run long distances faster than most people. But I suck at sprints, and I take long showers. I type over 100 WPM.
I'm an engineer, and a pilot. I *thoroughly* understand the forces involved. I could take a Cessna aircraft apart and identify the majority of the parts by name. I've worked on them repeatedly with an A & P. (aircraft mechanic) I can name all the forces working on a plane (thrust, drag, lift, gravity) and can explain the forces that hold a plane aloft. (Venturi effect) as well as the different types of forces. (inertia, parasitic drag, etc)
But every time I jump into a plane, and taxi to take off, I'm slightly amazed when it takes off, and I'm suspended by nothing more than the energy of the engine being converted into lift by the shape of the otherwise-level wings!
Small planes (like what I pilot) are actually very simple machines, compared to (for example) a car. Their engines are designed to be as simple as possible, with as few moving parts as can be mustered, to minimize complexity and reduce failure rates. They are air-cooled. They use tie rods instead of cables. The engine's ignition system doesn't depend on the plane's electrical system, (they use magnetos, like your lawn mower) and there are two independent ignition systems so that if either fails, the other keeps the plane safely aloft. Rather than rely on complex sensors to provide optimal fuel mixtures, the mixture controls are handled manually.
And on, and on, and on.
The result is a simple machine that manages to circumnavigate a highly dangerous environment, working with a medium that is literally thin air, with a safety record that's comparable to, or better than a modern car with all its safety technology, seat belts, airbags, crash cages, and so on.
Stealing is taking something that belongs to someone else. You never had ownership of the profits made by the company you work for, so even though you helped earn it, you aren't entitled to it.
Look at it the other way: Profit is your boss's motivation to hire you. If there was no profit, why should he/she/they hire you?
I really don't see the point in "cyber warfare" other than small-scale attacks on a certain site or ISP, a large scale plan could never fully work because any country could simply switch to basically a huge local network. Would it be hard? Yes. Is it able to be done? Yes.
I think your post betrays a surprising amount of naivete. The Internet is, by definition, international. The amount of foreign transacting that would be decimated by switching to "basically a huge local network" is unfathomable. The Internet is fast becoming the heart and soul of our economy - and cutting it off at the knees is never an acceptable solution. The cost is always too high to justify.
Plus, other than attacks on military infrastructure, the coming diversity of OSes, CPU platforms, and networks would make attacks on civilian devices nearly impossible. You might be able to write an iPhone worm, but you wouldn't be able to write an iPhone/Android/Java/BREW worm that attacks anyone on any cell network. That worm would also not work on a PC running Windows/OS X/Linux/BSD. And the diversity in browsers make exploit-based attacks even harder. It used to be you could attack the weak IE browser and get 90% of web surfers, now you would only get slightly more than half, and you would need to attack Firefox (both 3.0 and 3.5 along with perhaps older versions), Safari, Chrome, Opera and many smaller browsers.
Anybody with a DSL-class Internet connection can take out large swaths of the Internet using common, widely known exploits, such as DNS spoofing attacks. Since this is a DOS attack, it would affect anything at the target points.
You are right in that the Internet is increasingly heterogeneous, but while alternate platforms have flowered, the Internet was never homogeneous! Sure, you could attack 90% of client browsers with an IE attack, but never 90% of the Internet hosts! And certainly not 90% of the "core servers" - high bandwidth servers at the logical center of the Internet.
The Russian mob runs a fairly profitable extortion racket with the force of DDOS attacks. While they currently target semi-legal websites (such as gambling and extreme porn sites) in order to keep their profile low, as their stature grows, they will become an increasing risk to companies doing core, legitimate business.
And the problem is severe. Like I said, anybody with a DSL-class connection can do terrible things - what do you think a mob gang with 125,000 infected hosts can do?
Slashdot Mirror
Firefly needs a "reboot" in that it needs to be FINISHED. It's a series that I discovered through the movie and watched online (thanks Hulu!) and fell in love with it by episode three. The characters are awesome, the acting was excellent, the plot was entertaining and managed to be simultaneously "wild west" and "high tech".
I would love love LOVE to see this series restarted!
In case you see this, it's called dblink and there's some installation required. (it's very easy)
It'll be difficult to say who's using it because they download it, try it, run it.. all quietly without fuss. No-one at PostgreSQL website can say who's using the downloads because there's no licensing or even a 'email to get your registration' type stuff going on.
We started with yum -y install postgresql-server and now, hundreds of busy clients later and a few updates later, Postgresql is still going stronger than ever...
And seriously, Postgres is the overachieving underdog of the database world. It has it all - replication, data integrity, legendarily stunning stability, MVCC, foreign keys, triggers, PLPGSQL, subselects, indexes, query scheduling, parameterized statements, DDBC, metatables, cross-database joins... I could go on, and on, and on. It holds up very nicely when Its security
model is excellent. Its organizational model is stable. It holds up well under very demanding loads and just basically doesn't crash. (In a decade of using it every single business day, I've NEVER HAD an instance of Postgres corrupt running on a RedHat/CentOS server) It costs nothing, it's available by default on any RedHat install CD, and most other distros.
If Oracle is scared, they should be scared of PostgreSQL, and if you're looking to database something, you should strongly consider Postgres!
Most people don't give a rat's ass about the iPhone not being an open platform. Hell, a vast, significant majority of people don't even know what an open platform is...
It's a phone. I don't give a rat's ass about how "open" it is, except that I do. Because I've dealt with the new AT&T before, and there's no way in heaven or hell that I'm going to sign a contract with them. Just getting them to bill me the price they promised on my long distance has been hell - I've been charged over $4.00/minute for International calls that my calling plan matrix says should cost $0.09 per minute. And while I've called and complained, I've spent more time on the phone with various reps who never seem able to help me or even answer basic questions than I actually spent on the phone!
And no, it's not chump change - it's $1,300 in disputed charges that should cost me around $60 when all is said and done. And though I've been promised a call back several times, it's been weeks and still no call comes. My next step is to sue them in small claims.
Iphone? Forget about it. Not while it's tied to AT&T!
Oh wait... isn't that whole "tied to AT&T" have something to do with it being open? Yeah, maybe it does? Maybe I can go to (gasp!) MetroPCS with their flat-rate billing model, with an "open" phone?
Hell, I'd happily plunk down a few hundred today if I knew it would work...
The bottom line is that you have to run up against the fact that a decade ago CPU's could satisfy any reasonable need for processing power. Now all one is buying CPUs for is "fluff" -- watching TV on ones computer, playing games, etc. I.e. it produces nothing, it contributes nothing, it is simply a consumer computing mentality -- my computer exists to entertain me.
I have an Athlon XP 3200+. It's a nice chip, and all, a 32bit one. And for many tasks, it is more than adequate. But when watching flash video full screen on my 32" HiDef TV, it's very jerky. Yes, it's because of Flash being poorly optimized. But it's also what I want to do with my computer, because I DO watch TV. And rather than spend too much money to get Cable TV or Dish, I've switched to all 100% online TV. It saves me $75/month and is a better user experience! I no longer have to pre-plan my viewing, I just watch whatever's available when I want, on demand, right from the beginning of the show.
But while it works well on the Mac mini in my bedroom, and my Dell laptop, it doesn't work so well on the old Athlon. So, I go to Pricewatch.com and buy a new Athlon X/2 motherboard/video card combo upgrade board with 2.1 Ghz of RAM for $150, and now I have a 64-bit, dual-core MB, good RAM, fast processor. Flash plays nicely, and all for less than the cost of a decent DVD player.
Are you still telling me that the CPU doesn't matter? Maybe you are happy with the ancient processor from 10 years ago, and for many tasks, it's probably good enough, but not for everything...
Sorry about your camera, dude. I use a $59 generic digital camera I got in the shrink-wrap isle at the local Best Buy. It's 10 Mpixel with optical zoom, records decent quality video, and came with a free 2 GB memory card. It doesn't have every bell and whistle, but does a good job taking pictures and video. Armed with rechargeable batteries and a cheap external USB drive, my pictures cost almost nothing at all and I don't give a hoot about compatibility since it uses standard flash cards and image format. (JPG/WMV)
What else do YOU want?
It means "a home, food on the table, education and health care".
I wonder about this. Average new home size has roughly doubled since the mid-20th century - not far from the 1962 statistic you mention. Also, the percentage of population with college degrees is higher, and health care today is a far cry from the health care available in 1962!
Today, one of my oldest sons deals daily with a horrible disease that costs some $1,000 per month - just to keep him alive. He gets the best care I can afford! But in 1962, treatment options for Diabetes were limited, and the official advice was: "Diabetics rarely live more than 20 years from the date that they are diagnosed". Today, diabetics typically live near-normal lifespans!
So I work 30% longer, but live in a spacious, comfortable, 2,000 SqFt home, fly a private airplane, and my son lives today? Sounds like a good deal!
The USA once was dominant in metrics like this. Now, our leadership position, being pissed away for so many years by inept leadership and increasily divisive politics, has been compromised in many areas.
In education, we rival the 3rd world. There is actually serious discussion about teaching so-called "Intelligent-Design" as a part of our Science curriculum! Our math and science scores are near the bottom, and are actually beaten by 3rd world countries in many cases.
Our production and manufacturing idustries have been bleeding red ink for decades. Once the pinnacle of the 1st world, we now sardonically compliment our own quality. Our upper-middle and upper classes don't buy our American-made cars.
Our leadership in Science development is tanking fast. From our until-recent ban on stem cell research funding, and our generally soft support for "basic Science" research, to our cancelling funding for the SSC supercollider, we've sent the message to the scientific community - support is elsewhere!
Tallest building in the world is a pissing contest, that we led for a long time in the last century. We've not only lost it, but our vain attempt to regain it in the so-called "Freedom tower" is mired in controversy, bad design, and travesty, bungled so badly that it's the architectural equivalent of the "mission accomplished" poster of GWB notoriety.
I'm an American, and it's really, really sad to watch my nation slowly collapse in on itself.
Let's say that you get all these companies to give up ALL their addresses. You've postponed the problem by about 18 months! Whoopee!
The thing is, technology tends to grow logarithmically, which is why we have things like Benford's Law. The problem shouldn't be being solved now, while we're at the 90% level, the problem should have been solved long ago, back when we were at about the 10-20% level, because the actual halfway mark as a function of time is somewhere near 20-25% completion!
That IPV6 has been bungled so bad is a consequence of the Second System effect and perhaps a bit of design by committee.
In any event, IPV6 fails to solve a couple of fundamental problems:
1) Piss poor backwards compatibility. This was even acknowledged publicly in a recent news article. It's not only not poorly backwards compatible, it just basically ISN'T backwards compatible. Want to talk to an IPV4-only resource from your IPV6-only address? You basically have to have some fancy trickery with NAT and DNS in order to do this - it isn't straightforward, and it requires coordination with the IPV4 resource. And the reverse is even worse!
2) Un-necessary complexity in implementation. Partly as a result of #1, implementing IPV6 will be costly, and will require expensive "transition tools" in order to work smoothly. But it's not just because of lack of backwards compatibility - issues such as strange hardware requirements (what... no MAC address?) and the like make the cost of implementing high. Sure, it's not that expensive per device, but multiply that by the entire Internet, and the problem becomes a bit more clear.
3) No net positive for implementing! You don't get "more" for implementing, you get "less". Some stuff that used to work won't, and other stuff that you need to work just isn't there. Sure, Yahoo and Google support IPV6, which is great for the 50 or so people who are on it. But, if anybody cares, it's on IPV4.
4) Tragedy of the Commons: The address shortages don't affect anybody who's already on the 'net. I have an IP address or two already. I don't care if *you* run out, I only care if *I* run out. So, I really don't much care about you so long as I get mine. That's called the "tragedy of the commons" - a common resource is exploited as quickly as possible by people who are motivated to get theirs before anybody else gets it, resulting in a destroyed public resource.
IPV6 sucks. The engineers had their chance, and they blew it. Now it's too late to change it because we don't have another 5 years to committee another solution, and there is already a significant amount of inertia from those poor souls who have already implemented it! (at great cost)
This is NOT going to end well.
Seriously, I'm beginning to question the value of completely free speech. I've spent my entire life so far in support of it, and the free marketplace, but I'm finding more and more, that both are a fiction and always have been!
The "free" marketplace isn't free, it's a highly unstable situation that's carefully protected by a government that's surprisingly willing to impose on the "freedome" of the marketplace. Until the 1980s, government stepped in many times, repeatedly, over the years, to limit the power of the monopolies in the United States. But after about 1981 or so, we simply stopped caring. And the result has decimated our marketplace! In becoming more "free", we've simply become more monopolistic, where Wal-Mart now delivers some 30% to 50% of the consumed goods in the USA.
This was unheard of before then, but only because the gubbmint stepped in repeatedly to limit the power of (among others) A&P, the mid-20th century equivalent of Wal-Mart. As a percentage of population, Wal-Mart is now at least 5x as big as A&P ever was at its height. Yet Wal-Mart is just one of many vertical monopolies now rearing, to the deafening roar of untrained people who rally and cry for speech and marketplaces free from the controls of the government that was otherwise busy serving their own interests. It's a sad, sad state of affairs.
In a similar vein, I'm finding that "free speech" never existed. For over a century, there were strict controls on news organizations and reporting agencies - strict policies on libel and a general expectation of truth. This was easily enforced, because there were so few news agencies with the ability to reach a significant percentage of the population. And the result was filtered news and information of generally high-quality.
But the Internet has changed all that. Even if strict news reporting standards were still in effect, the news organizations would have to compete with the deafening roar of blogs and other "almost news" sites (Slashdot being one of them!) and so the standards would lose all their teeth anyway.
What journalistic standards is my completely private post written from my armchair going to be held to?
But the end result is that any whining idiot with an opinion that sounds nice gets lots of play, and real information gets lost in the din of noise and misinformation. Without any expectation of accountability, idiots like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly are free to spread their bile and intellectual filth to unwashed masses who haven't developed the means to filter them out, partly due to the falling standards and expectations from our public school system, which has gotten so bad that no schooling at all is often an improvement.
Free speech is just noise without a bullshit filter. Look in your spam box for 99.97% "free speech". If society is to save itself, it will need to learn the difference between speech and honest-to-god information.
Right now, it's not looking so good.
We also see a drop in the quality of education (i.e. why are we still arguing about evolution in 20XX) standards and that will have a long term effect.
If only the problem really was that simple... Yes, we've had a dramatic drop in educational standards, teachers are painfully underpaid, and recent efforts to improve educational standards have strictly enforced the very things we need least, (IE: rote memorization) but the problem is much deeper than that!
For the past 30 years, the United States has been systematically under attack from a foreign power, a systematic attack designed to destroy the infrastructure of the United States. Our roads, power, and communications structures, once the wonder of the modern world, slowly crumbles. Our youth are demotivated from inception to anything that produces real world wealth, while the industries that created the great economic powers are sent overseas.
No, I'm not talking about some "liberals" or Illuminati or anything so inane and two-dimensional as that. I'm talking about China.
Yes, China, who, by performing the simple act of locking their currency to ours, created temporary abundance of apparent wealth here while slowly decimating our foundations. Why should our children work hard to learn physics and tough sciences, when careers as managers and bean-counters pays oh so much better? Engineers and skilled workers increasingly have to compete with similarly competent rivals in a country with 1/10th the pay scale. Why would anyone accept such poor terms and an environment so rigged to failure?
So we train wave after wave of nearly useless MBAs who profit immensely from the slow demolition of the US infrastructure, and a government that has now all but "come out of the closet" for its reliance on China with its recent borrowing fiascos, funded by the Chinese.
Of course he's wrong.
Sure, at least for now.
But truth is, the long-term trend is that everything is getting "sucked up" into the phone. Let me rattle off some examples that I live with, every day:
1) I have a dedicated digital camera (I paid $59 for it, BTW) that takes nice, high quality 10 MP pictures, and better-than-VHS quality video, but it's quite common that the shatty camera in my phone is actually good enough for the job, despite its flaws.
2) I have a dedicated MP3 player, but it's also common that my phone is good enough for that job, too, even if the battery life is weak.
3) And I have a small-sized laptop that approximates a new "netbook", but it's common that the browser in my phone is good enough, too.
4) I don't carry maps anymore - google maps is already installed in my phone and is better than any map, anyway, for what I need!
5) I don't ever remember phone numbers - it's either in my history or contacts list, or doesn't exist. Nicely, my smartphone integrates with my company's Zimbra mail server, so if anything happens to my phone, all my contacts, calendar, and email are backed up on the server!
6) I have decks of cards, but they are used perhaps 1/10 as often as the card games on my phone. Video games? Sure, but my phone is with me when I'm waiting at the DMV - the Xbox isn't.
7) I usually watch shows and movies on my Mac Mini in my Bedroom, or on the big-screen in the living room. But often, I watch shows on my phone! Hulu plays passably well on my dual-core ARM based smartphone! Audio isn't great, and the screen is a few inches in size, but it's with me everywhere!
In short, my phone does none of these especially well, but it does all of these in a manner that's often passable and sometimes best available. The phone is slowly sucking up all these (and more) into a single device, and it gets better every single year. The screens are getting sharper, the battery life improves, the capability gets smoother, the price is dropping... It's improving in every measurable way.
Instead of $99 netbooks, which is the next logical step, we'll end up with >$400 netbooks that will have better graphics, telco tie-ins, 3G instead of wi-fi and other limiting "features". The things that made netbooks so popular will be replaced by things which make more money for the manufacturers and telcos.
Which is just so much silly talk! Manufacturers want to sell hardware, and manufacture stuff that people buy, at a price high enough for them to make money at it. Here you are wailing about netbooks without wifi, when my farking PHONE has wifi. (Incidentally, the wifi in my phone leads to the unusual situation of running skype on my phone over wifi to replace... my phone - head assplodes!)
Manufacturers will stop selling systems with wifi when people don't want systems with wifi enough to buy them. They will stop selling systems with floppy disks when nobody cares about them. And so on...
Relax!
I don't get what's so hard about this.
And that's probably due to your lack of any meaningful information about the problem. Typically when there is a solution to the problem that seems simple and trivial, and the people involved are morons for not implementing it, it's because those implementation details are more significant than your understanding would allow.
But here's a hint: simple problems are generally solved quickly. Complex problems are generally solved slowly. When you see reasonably bright people working on a problem that doesn't get solved quickly, you can be sure that it's not what you think!
Yes! you can certainly use the in-flight restrooms during any portion of flight except takeoff and landing!
Old thread is old. But what the hell?
For a small plane I'd expect a few hundred mile effective range. They could actually fly upwards of 600 miles on a single tank, but you need to factor in reserves, hold time, wind, etc. You don't want to plan to land on empty.
On the other hand, if you've marked off a few small airfields along the way a fueling stop doesn't really take all that long - you plan to have to hold in case something odd comes up, but you're not going to need to do that in some field in the middle of farmland.
I don't like going more than about 300 miles without landing and checking fuel, even though I technically could go 600. Besides, after a few hours in the plane, I pretty much always want to get out and "freshen up" a bit...
Gas prices seem to be about $4.25/gal right now, and small planes hold about 50 gallons. You'll definitely pay more in gas than you would for a car, but that really is one of the smallest expenses associated with a plane.
What hasn't been mentioned in this thread is the maintenance. Figure that it will cost you upwards of $80/hr to fly your plane. You can pay $100/hr or so and rent (often with limitations on being able to just take the plane somewhere), or you can buy and you end up with a "cheap hourly rate" coupled with periodic major expenses. YOU CANNOT SKIMP ON MAINTENANCE. Planes are very safe if properly cared for, and proper care costs money - at various intervals based on operational time you need to have it taken care of.
First off, the cost of gas isn't a "minor detail", it's the majority of that hourly cost! In my C-182, I pay $90/hour wet. If gas costs $4.25, and my plane burns about 12.5 gallons per hour, that's $53!
Second off, the difference between $90 and $53 is what maintenance gets paid with. Airplanes need an annual inspection, which typically costs anywhere from $1000 to $2500, depending on what needs to be fixed along the way. $75/month provided by 10 flight club members over a year provides almost $10,000 to cover things like this. Also, hangar fees and related expenses need to be covered.
In my case, we have a nice GPS with XM satellite weather and radio. Both cost a fairly pretty penny and are hard to justify with personal aircraft ownership, but are a no-brainer as part of the flying club!
Then you have to factor in buying the plane in the first place - it costs quite a bit of money for something that you won't actually use all that often.
Unless you're up in the air all the time or just have to have your own plane, the best bet by far is a flying club of some kind. Essentially these are planes owned by lots of people, so that the overhead is shared efficiently. It still isn't what I'd call cheap, but it is fairly reasonable and you can usually reserve planes for longer periods of time. If you're doing rentals forget actually using a plane to go someplace, unless you plan to go, visit somebody for a few hours, and come home.
BINGO. Flight clubs are the way to go. Boats aren't cheap, either, yet when you run the numbers, an airplane is about as expensive as a boat when you join a Flight Club.
Note that I'm not a pilot but I've been investigating this stuff with interest - I could easily see myself going this route someday and I'm reasonably proficient on simulators now. (The /. crew types can easily benefit from simulators as they give you a chance to practice quite a few things for almost nothing. I have no illusions that they're a replacement for real-world experience, but if you fly them following real-world procedures you can get the hang of stuff like instrumentation and crosswinds without paying for time.)
For the record, simulators are FANTASTIC when simulating (for example) instrument-only flight. They are somewhat useful to practice landings. But for landings and other basic aircraft handling, nothing comes even close to the real experience.
Indeed. It's the streisand effect of terrorism... 9/11 could have been at most a minor annoyance but instead it became the rallying cry for numerous restrictions on freedom with questionable results at best.
Not only that, but it's become a rather strong rallying cry in support of General Aviation - you know, private planes and all?
As a member of a flight club, I can fly a private Cessna 182 at 150 MPH (pretty much) anytime I want, at a cost that's perhaps 25% higher than driving. Typically, private planes get me there in somewhere between 25% and 33% the time to drive, and for trips between 100 and 750 miles is a very competitive way to go.
1) I don't land at big airports, I land at small ones that exist in nearly every community over 5,000 to 10,000 people or so. At these airports, delays really don't exist. There are usually not more than 2 or 3 other planes active at any given time, often none.
2) Small airports almost inevitably put me very close to where I want to go, anyway! Rather than drive 1.5 hours after landing, I get a taxi for the 3-5 mile ride.
3) Stupid security restrictions? Naw - back the car up to the side of the plane and throw your bags aboard! At larger airports, there are often security fences and the like, but even these are easily navigated, certainly without the stupid wands, shoes, and security theater.
The only real limit in going this way is weather - as a visual-only pilot, I'm grounded when the clouds get too low. (But even that won't be a limit for much longer)
I second/third/fourth this! Get out of there! I would be deeply offended if my hosting company ever deigned to do so much as unlock my cabinet without consulting me first, barring all but the most exigent circumstances.
You need to move providers. It's a bit painful, but the difference between a sucky hosting provider and a good one is the difference between night and day!
4) Once the inevitable failure occurs, haul out the paper trail and get the bean counter fired. Repeat until test lab is approved. Note, step 4 may get you fired instead. Business decisions are somewhat nondeterministic.
And this is the part that SUCKS.... A while back, I was part of a three-way integration project, with myself (representing a vendor), another vendor, and the ultimate customer. In advance, I'd talked through everything with the other vendor so we had a clear plan, including a verification step to cross-check the accuracy of the integration.
Confident, I went into the meeting, we presented our plan, the customer agreed, and all was going well, until when, in what I thought was going to be a closing step, I reiterated the entire plan from beginning to end.
The other vendor decided that this was a good time to disagree with the plan that had already been agreed to, and that doing the cross-check was not valuable. I came out strongly, indicating that the system could not be trusted unless the cross check was built. After going back and forth for a while, the customer decided they didn't want to pay for it.
So the plan went forward, and I was predicting that it wouldn't work, and why it wouldn't work. And when it didn't work, I was accused by the customer AND THE OTHER VENDOR of trying not to make it work! The situation went from bad to worse, to worse still.
Finally, I ended up building the cross-check, on my dime. I was PISSED. Even after the cross-check was built, and the problems started to show clearly rather than just be vague, I never got anything more than a nod.
You can believe that my further dealings with the client and the third party were markedly more reserved after that. Being the "hero" who has the answer in a flash, and saves the day is over-rated. Far better to hint that the problem is difficult to solve and take your time answering the question!
RedHat is somewhere between 1 and 2 years late releasing RHEL 6. The split of Red Hat Linux into Fedora and RHEL came back to bite RHEL 6, because when RedHat tried to release the responsibility of developing Fedora to the community, what they got in return was an overemphasis on nifty cool stuff while long-standing bugs, some very severe, went disregarded.
Turns out, people who aren't getting paid to do it only want to do it if it's fun! And so the quality of Fedora, which is what RHEL is ultimately based on, dropped, increasingly sharply, until Fedora Core 9 was so bad it was actually unusable! You couldn't even so much as change the font size in X before it would crash!
I wish I was kidding. It was horrible.
So RedHat got the hint, and for the last year has hired a legion of programmers to do little more than fix every bug they can find. There are reams and reams. Rumor is that Fedora Core 12 is ultimately in line to be RHEL 6. I'm using Fedora 10, and it's finally about as stable as Fedora 8.
We can only hope! RHEL 5 is really starting to show its age, and I have a suite of RHEL 4 servers that I want to switch over to something newer, but as old as 5 is, I'd rather make the jump to 6 as soon as it comes out than do another switchover in a year or two.
There are two other configurations that make lots of sense and yet for some reason are underused.
1) Pancake configuration. This is commonly used in aircraft, and is the same as the VW bug. You can't argue that the engine compartment on a bug is huge! And the pancake engine lends itself to "strato" body layouts, EG: the engine sits BELOW the trunk, etc. The direct cross-firing of cylinders makes for a relatively smooth operation without extensive It's well proven, provides many of the space-saving benefits of the V8, yet is basically ignored as an engine format. Why? You can have two pistons firing at the same time, 180 degrees apart! (WTF?)
2) Radial configuration. Want an engine that runs as smooth as a baby's ass? Try radial! Also, you basically don't have a crankshaft, since all the connecting rods connect to a single, central tie rod. If you timed the pistons right, you could easily have pistons ALWAYS firing 180 degrees from each other, for pure smoothness, efficiency, and and reliability.
We don't use either of the technologies, yet they each offer significant benefits over the "satatus quo". Other than NIH, why aren't either of these two highly valuable configurations used?
one of the things you don't generally see with PHP code is a buffer overflow, where you try to copy a bunch of strings and concatenate them together and you run out of room and don't notice it and you go clobbering memory. That's because the string manipulation code goes through a bunch of checks when you're appending strings.
And this is one of the great ironies of PHP... while there *have* been a number of vulnerabilities in PHP-based applications, that's more an artifact of the unqualified developers that the language's ease-of-use tends to attract.
PHP offers quite an impressive number of security-related features that make horrible, difficult-to-solve security problems almost a non-issue. PP example of string appending is but one of far too many to name, yet it's one that's the cause of the vast majority of security issues in software, everywhere!
What's that, you say? The #1 cause of security issues has been all-but-eliminated in a programming language that's often chided for security issues? Doesn't really make sense, does it?
And then, on to what is perhaps the #1 cause of security issues for database-driven product - the dreaded SQL injection error. Yep, that one has been solved too!
Yes, you can use PHP to write an insecure application. But you can use an SUV with seat belts and airbags to kill yourself, too. When discussing security, PHP doesn't get anywhere near the respect it otherwise deserves.
The way I see it, MS is no longer trying to win the browser war. They're just trying to stay relevant.
.
Oh, but if only that were true!
IE 8 is a major disappointment. Its standards compliance is still so horrible, that for our outsourced vertical application, we simply don't support it any more. We work well with Safari, Opera, Chrome, and (of course!) FireFox. IE is just out, for us - too expensive to support any more, and our users really don't complain at all when we say: "Sure, we support cross platform, as long as it isn't IE!".
MS is losing browser marketshare about as fast as the marketplace can move. And for me!? I'm just soooo glad I don't have to spend 3 days trying to get IE to work for every 1 or 2 spent implementing features!
Good-bye, Microsoft, and don't let the door hit you on the way out!
That's why I find these comparisons stupid. "Oh this is so much faster than our supercomputer!" No it isn't. It is so much faster for some things. Now if you are doing those things wonderful, please use GPUs. However don't then try to pretend you have a "supercomputer in a desktop." You don't. You have a specialized computer with a bunch of single precision stream processors. That's great so long as your problem is 32-bit fp, highly parallel, doesn't branch much, and fits within the memory on a GPU. However not all problems are hence they are NOT a general replacement for a supercomputer.
For that matter, which is faster: A two-ton flatbed truck, or a Maserati? Kinda depends on what you are trying to do, doesn't it? Want to move 3,000 pounds of Hay? You probably DON'T want the Maserati!
And all machines are like this. Some machines are better at some tasks than others. And presumably, the comparison to the University Supercomputer was because of a task that they *needed* to perform, and the pittance cost of the GPGPU-based supercomputer favored very well against the cost of leasing University supercomputer time.
Even different people are better at some things than others.... Some people are better a maths than others. Some people can take a bit of vinegar and coffee grounds, and make an artistic masterpiece.
Because I'm a jogger, I can run long distances faster than most people. But I suck at sprints, and I take long showers. I type over 100 WPM.
See?
Old fashioned?
I'm an engineer, and a pilot. I *thoroughly* understand the forces involved. I could take a Cessna aircraft apart and identify the majority of the parts by name. I've worked on them repeatedly with an A & P. (aircraft mechanic) I can name all the forces working on a plane (thrust, drag, lift, gravity) and can explain the forces that hold a plane aloft. (Venturi effect) as well as the different types of forces. (inertia, parasitic drag, etc)
But every time I jump into a plane, and taxi to take off, I'm slightly amazed when it takes off, and I'm suspended by nothing more than the energy of the engine being converted into lift by the shape of the otherwise-level wings!
Small planes (like what I pilot) are actually very simple machines, compared to (for example) a car. Their engines are designed to be as simple as possible, with as few moving parts as can be mustered, to minimize complexity and reduce failure rates. They are air-cooled. They use tie rods instead of cables. The engine's ignition system doesn't depend on the plane's electrical system, (they use magnetos, like your lawn mower) and there are two independent ignition systems so that if either fails, the other keeps the plane safely aloft. Rather than rely on complex sensors to provide optimal fuel mixtures, the mixture controls are handled manually.
And on, and on, and on.
The result is a simple machine that manages to circumnavigate a highly dangerous environment, working with a medium that is literally thin air, with a safety record that's comparable to, or better than a modern car with all its safety technology, seat belts, airbags, crash cages, and so on.
Amazing!
Stealing is taking something that belongs to someone else. You never had ownership of the profits made by the company you work for, so even though you helped earn it, you aren't entitled to it.
Look at it the other way: Profit is your boss's motivation to hire you. If there was no profit, why should he/she/they hire you?
I really don't see the point in "cyber warfare" other than small-scale attacks on a certain site or ISP, a large scale plan could never fully work because any country could simply switch to basically a huge local network. Would it be hard? Yes. Is it able to be done? Yes.
I think your post betrays a surprising amount of naivete. The Internet is, by definition, international. The amount of foreign transacting that would be decimated by switching to "basically a huge local network" is unfathomable. The Internet is fast becoming the heart and soul of our economy - and cutting it off at the knees is never an acceptable solution. The cost is always too high to justify.
Plus, other than attacks on military infrastructure, the coming diversity of OSes, CPU platforms, and networks would make attacks on civilian devices nearly impossible. You might be able to write an iPhone worm, but you wouldn't be able to write an iPhone/Android/Java/BREW worm that attacks anyone on any cell network. That worm would also not work on a PC running Windows/OS X/Linux/BSD. And the diversity in browsers make exploit-based attacks even harder. It used to be you could attack the weak IE browser and get 90% of web surfers, now you would only get slightly more than half, and you would need to attack Firefox (both 3.0 and 3.5 along with perhaps older versions), Safari, Chrome, Opera and many smaller browsers.
Anybody with a DSL-class Internet connection can take out large swaths of the Internet using common, widely known exploits, such as DNS spoofing attacks. Since this is a DOS attack, it would affect anything at the target points.
You are right in that the Internet is increasingly heterogeneous, but while alternate platforms have flowered, the Internet was never homogeneous! Sure, you could attack 90% of client browsers with an IE attack, but never 90% of the Internet hosts! And certainly not 90% of the "core servers" - high bandwidth servers at the logical center of the Internet.
The Russian mob runs a fairly profitable extortion racket with the force of DDOS attacks. While they currently target semi-legal websites (such as gambling and extreme porn sites) in order to keep their profile low, as their stature grows, they will become an increasing risk to companies doing core, legitimate business.
And the problem is severe. Like I said, anybody with a DSL-class connection can do terrible things - what do you think a mob gang with 125,000 infected hosts can do?