Many 'net junkies like to say things like "Information wants to be free!" as if there was something anthropic about information.
But information is the foundation of the Universe, so much so that quantum mechanics is routinely described with terms like "information loss" and even measured. It's almost like Douglas Adams was right all along, and the universe actually is a large supercomputer trying to find out the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Where are the hyper-intelligent mice?
But if the universe is information, then the laws of the universe apply to information itself. Laws, such as: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
While things like shields and noise generators serve to obfuscate what goes on in a computer, they don't actually solve the basic issue that power *is* being consumed, radio waves *are* being generated, heat is being generated, and that these properties will *always* be detectable by various means so long as they are, in fact, being generated.
The only possible way around this might be some form of reversible computing but the basic programming model will require so many architectural changes to enact that it's realistically an entirely new form of computing.
I've long been sold on mainframes, but they suffer from a scalability problem - they don't scale down that far.
Here I am, at a small, organically growing company. We've been growing about 25% - 75% per year, and with the economic slowdown, our growth has accelerated. (since we save our prospective clients money) We're too small to afford mainframes. We have about $50,000 invested in our primary hosting hardware now.
We are having to bust some humps to keep up with this year's growth. We've hit the performance wall of single-system limitations, and have been working furiously on full redundancy and clustering our databases and system stack, based on CentOS Linux, heartbeat, Postgres, and lots of application-level coding. (I turned it all on in production just 3 days ago!) We're still working out kinks with load balancers, round-robin DNS, dynamic database host selection, backup validation, network monitoring, and other similar issues. Mostly though, it's been going quite smoothly.
If our company continues its growth rate, in a few years, we'll be of a budget and company size that a mainframe or three just might be a good idea - but at that point, we'll have invested enough in our current redundant clustering technology that we'll be architecturally unfit for adopting mainframes whole-hog. Instead, we'll have racks and racks of small, cheap, multi-core commodity 1U servers built with network-level redundancy and auto-failover. Not because it's the best for large scales, but because it's the best that we can afford now, and as we grow, we'll add to what we have rather than re-invent the wheel.
If they made mainframes that could scale down to a price comparable to a $1,000, cheap, 1U SATA Linux server, (where my company started years ago, though we've long moved on) and could scale up seamlessly to big iron, that would just rock.
The closest equivalent I'm aware of right now is using IBM's ZOS to host virtual linux hosts, which strikes me as inefficient, even though that's where my development path just might leave us. But I don't know anything about it, and we're too small for anybody to bother (timewise) with, even if we are a million-dollar/year company.
You forgot to mention that it's also not relevant.
The Internet itself is "insecure". It is so by design, so if the purpose of the Wifi is to get to teh iNternetz then there is logically no substantial value to encrypting your hotspot.
Practically, I can only think of two benefits:
1) Prevent neighbors from leeching bandwidth and making your YT videos "skippy".
2) Prevent neighbors from sharing MP3s on your connection so that the RIAA sues you. Of course, if you don't secure your connection, you have plausible deniability when they sue....
Now, if you are actually running a local NETWORK, (EG: printer sharing, etc) then things change a bit. But even then, it's sensible to secure your services so that security issues don't plague you. Since all my company's resources need to be "roadable", we don't bother with VPNs and instead just used all encrypted protocols. (EG: rather than SMB, we use DAV over HTTPS, SMTPS/IMAPS for email, etc)
But bloody hell, if I can make six figures writing cobol, I'll grab myself a cobol book and quit this programming job. A sucky day job isn't so bad when it means you can retire a decade earlier than otherwise.
My advice for new programmers has been exactly this: learn COBOL, study mainframes, move to large cities, make big bucks. Sure, you'll want to gouge your eyes out with a fork, but then you'll be able to afford to have robotic eyes grafted back in!
As a second, I recommend that they learn Unix skills, c, and databases. Still lots of money there, and your original eyeballs will last longer. (It's the path I chose, and I do quite well for myself)
GPS is not a map is not "local knowlege". Get the right tool for the job.
As a pilot, flying into a new airport is always a bit... unnerving. You have to review the maps in advance, ensure that you are at least reasonably sure of the types of airspace you'll be flying in, and without a GPS, there's always that haunting fear that you won't be able to find the !@# airport.
And let's not be kidding here - when flying into a large metropolitan area at night, finding the !@# local airport can be quite vexing. Imagine looking for a row of lights in a city comprised of... row upon row of street lights. It can be maddening. Sure, the big Int'l airports are usually rather easy to find, but I usually stay away from those because the fuel is usually more expensive, there's often ramp/landing fees, and who wants to try to focus on landing your mosquito-of-a-4 seat plane while a big, fast, 737-600 is behind you, while being told to "expedite clearing runway"... ?
Sorry, no.
But with a GPS, you're never unsure. You know exactly how many miles, in what direction, at what altitude, and can even make radio calls with this information heading into an airport you haven't even seen, yet. It makes all the difference, and as a pilot who purposefully trained without using the GPS, (and still glad I did) I can still say with confidence that I would much, much rather fly with a GPS, especially when flying into new territory!
Not only would this change be welcome, but it would force Microsoft to "play ball" with the standards for HTML rather than roll their own and mark all the bug reports "will not fix".
Take a look at the history:
1) Microsoft is all about selling stuff on CD-ROM with the marketing vision "Information at your fingertips".
2) The Internet happens, and overnight, Netscape is a raving success because it actually PUT information at your fingertips.
3) Billy boy issues a memo to the whole company to turn as fast as possible to support the Internetz.
4) IE comes out - first a sucktacular mess, and finally almost livable around IE 5 or so.
5) IE 6 comes out, Netscape crumbles.
6) Netscape goes underground at AOL who throws a few developers at it while using it to negotiate a link on the Desktop. IE Dominates so tremendously that it's the platform of choice simply because it's installed everywhere.
7) Microsoft stops doing anything for half a decade. (whistle whistle)
8) Navigator continuously improves, finally re-emerging as Phoenix/Firefox. Suddenly, Microsoft's browser looks like a 5-year-old pile of cruft that's difficult to program for.
Suddenly, Microsoft will give a shiat. They might finally fix the things that developers!developers!developers! have been whining, bitching, complaining, and screaming about all these years.
Irony: "Free Internet Exporer 8" ad at the top while I type this message!
It's required that you have two name servers when you register a domain name.
Physical separation is not required. It's just good practice. (I do, in separate cities on different ISP networks) Having separate nameservers in different geo regions is implicit because you have to register at least two for each domain name. I've seen some people game this by having a single nameserver with two IP addresses, which strikes me as the height of stupidity, but it's not happening on my watch.
You don't realize just how much of a city is parking lot until you see it from the air at low altitudes. Google maps helps, but it's just not close because you don't really get the sense of scale. So it's a double-benefit: Parking lots create power, and by putting solar panels above them, keep your car at a comfortable 80-90 instead of an energy-sapping 140.
for last 5 years same shit gets posted over and over again - Cheap solar panals 5 years later - in some cases panels went up in price
Whine whine whine. It's been going on for much longer than 5 years. When I was in 5th grade, I did a report on PV electricity, and I read numerous reports that PV panels could be much cheaper soon.
What's been going on the last 5 years? Simple: supply and demand. For many reasons, people have become wary of using fossil fuels and are willing to invest more into solar, causing a sudden, worldwide deficiency in production capacity. Low-cost production companies like Nano-Solar are ramping up production literally as fast as they are physically able.
For example, Nano-Solar has, for all intents and purposes, unlimited funding, and has already sold out several years worth of production, even that which is not actually happening yet. They are buying huge rafts of warehouse space in the Bay Area, in what used to be automotive manufacturing areas.
So the laws of supply and demand are working their magic, even though the response isn't instant. Your children will bask in a society powered by cheap solar electricity that you are funding right now, just as you benefit from the electrical power infrastructure built by your parents.
No, I don't work for any of these. And I do maintain my own backup set, because I backup TBs of data daily. But for personal use, the online vendors are the best bet.
RAID is only marginally valuable. In my experience, for all but the most carefully controlled environments, RAID simply adds complexity, the number of things to go wrong increases, along with the likelyhood of lost data. Do it only if you want the *experience* of running RAID, but don't count on RAID to "save your data".
I've worked as a system administrator for more than a decade, in medium-large scale deployments with good success, (think: servicing thousands of users, hundreds of domain names, tens of thousands of email addresses, etc) so I think I have some useful experience you can benefit from.
IMHO, you most likely to lose data from the following things (in order)
1) Aw sh1tz. "I didn't mean to delete that folder"... or "Whoops! I formatted the wrong drive", "I saved the wrong version of the file!", whatever. Although I *myself* don't have this happen often, it does happen. And even in my case I've lost about as much useful information this way as by drives dying. Users delete stuff all the time, and it's usually my job to bring it back, which is why I perform redundant, historical backups EVERY SINGLE DAY.
2) Malware. Don't minimize this - it's real, and it's why I reply to Parent. You are more likely to lose information from a virus/worm/malware and/or b0rked install of something that hoses your filesystem than by a hard disk crash given stable hardware.
3) Bugs. Filesystems have bugs. So do applications, utilities, anything with software. Strange, unexpected conditions, often caused by bugs in applications can cause data to "disappear", files to get corrupted, filesystems to get corrupted, folders to be incompletely written, etc. This is about as likely to cause lost data as:
4) Hardware failure. This is one of the lowest orders of lost data, although when it happens, it can be one of the most extreme.
Let me say this: RAID 1/5 only PARTIALLY protects you from the last one. Actual, bona-fide backups protect you from all of these. If you care about the data, get backups. If you care about uptimes at great expense, RAID *may* be worth it.
My advice is something most people don't want to hear: for personal use, get backups online for $5/month. Mozy/Carbonite/etc. There are zillion vendors, just Google it. In two years, it will cost you about as much as that 2nd hard drive. It protects you far better than that 2nd hard drive, and it's so automatic that you'll hardly notice it until the moment it actually matters: when you just have discovered that your data is gone.
Every bit of your post makes sense, except for the "delusional" part.
See, people have a basic problem of lack of information. When you meet somebody for the first time, you have no information available to work with other than that which is patently obviously in front of you. So you pretty much have to accept whatever assertions he/she/it makes, or else just not engage.
What this means is that if you work out a direct, confident air that you can project as you are working with people, you'll quickly find that they will tend to accept you at face value - in this case, direct, confident, etc. For the most part, this works. But this mechanism is exactly how con artists make their play - they work out how to appear confident and trustworthy, even when they aren't. Some are so good at conning people that even when presented with evidence to the contrary, the victims still believe the con man and refuse to press charges!
But the only thing that makes this mechanism "delusional" is when this face-value judgement is wrong.
I was in a very similar situation about 7-8 years ago. I had a halfway decent product, and trying to be marketer, coder, salesman, and customer relationships management was just asking too much. I was struggling to make ends meet.
After attending numerous small business workshops that didn't help me at all, I attended an excellent program put on my by local city Chamber of Commerce and the "Golden State Capital Network" on how to prepare your business for Venture Capital. This gave me *exactly* the information I needed to figure out how to succeed. (And I have done quite well since then) It very literally changed my life; I was able to see exactly what a business needs to succeed and why. Although I'll summarize here, the workshop went into extreme detail and I was like a sponge, gobbling up every little morsel with zeal!
The three major planks in a business:
1) Production. Duh, right? Cost to market? Quality control? Disaster recovery? What about scale? What do you do when you get an order for 100,000 widgets?
2) Marketing. Can you sell it? What competition do you have? What is your market? How are you going to position your product against competitors? How can you prevent other companies from stealing your clients? How are you going to make your company name "stick out" in clients' minds?
3) Administration (finance & legal) How much did you make? What do you owe? What's your profit margin? What's your net/gross/adjusted gross/taxable profits? How do you minimize tax liability? Business risk? Personal risk? Are your sales contracts solid? How are you going to protect your "mojo", including your IP?
You need all three major planks Any business without all three of these planks put in solidly will almost assuredly fail. The amount of detail to consider is off the chart. They even had a simple worksheet that resulted in "likelyhood of success", with little 1-10s by every category so that you could quickly analyze your business and see its weak points. It was very, very, very humbling for me to do this, I think my fledgling business ranked somewhere around 7 on a 1-100 scale.
Very, very hard to swallow. I didn't have a bat's chance in Hades of making it a success.
But unfortunately, it was a correct assessment! Quickly I realized that there was just no way I was going to be able to keep all the points in line myself - there just weren't enough hours in the day. So I went out and looked for some good partners that I could trust to build a business with. It took me just over a year, but I found 'em and have since built a million-dollar business that's literally growing as fast as we can sustain.
After some analysis, I determined that our marketplace was too narrow for VC funding, we've instead gone more conservatively, and grown organically. The end result is that we have a heavy stream of new clients, a well-written, highly cohesive software stack, a well-defined market place, top-notch legal and accounting, excellent customer service, and "street cred" so good that our clients just RAVE about us at conventions.
So, to recap.....
1) Learn to analyze your business the way (smart) VCs do.
the fact is that SQL can't handle most datastructures and complex relations, only very simple one dimensional ones
You are kidding, right? Just today I cooked up a 7-table query including 2 subselects, and a left outer join to a meta table consisting of 2 inner joined tables. Total of some 11 tables comprising a highly complex data set. Don't know what you mean by "very simple one dimensional ones" but 11 tables each joined in either a one-to-many or many-to-many mapping provides at least 11 dimensions. (more if you self-join tabls, often needed) And this isn't particularly hard for me - often I have joins combining 12 or more very large tables with unrestrained combinations somewhere in the billions to trillions of possibilities that all somehow seem to parse just a few seconds thanks to a few well-placed indexes and a well-structured query.
Engineer: It's a dual-band radio! See - here on one side of it, you have the normal frequency that you use as a policeman. And.. (flips device around) here you have the frequency used by the firemen! We spent $400,000 of tax dollars to develop this!
Policeman: So let me get this straight: I have two radios in one device!? It's bigger than my normal radio...
Engineer: Yes, that's it! Now you are no longer encumbered with just police communication!
Policeman: But it's like twice as big as my normal radio...
Engineer: Yes, but think about the convenience! Now you can communicate with the other departments!
Policeman: Departments? With an "s"?
Engineer: Well, if you want to talk with another department, like say....
Policeman: Medical?
Engineer: ... yeah - medical - you would need one of these! (pulls out even bigger box)
Policeman: This one is like three times the size of my normal radio! How much weight do you want me to carry around?
Engineer: Yes, but look at the quality! Each radio has its own independent volume and frequency knob! You can customize it to work the way that you want to!
Policeman: And, let's say I want to include the Highway patrol...?
Engineer: Got that too. Here's the four-band radio...
Policeman: BUT THIS IS EVEN BIGGER?!?! This is like four times the size of my normal radio...
Engineer: And each band has it's own volume knob, battery compartment...
Policeman: Say, you didn't just get four normal radios and tape them together, did you?
Engineer: Of course not! These radios are made to exacting standards -
Policeman: Yes you did! I'm peeling them apart now!
Engineer: Turns and runs while policeman chases him, throwing radio parts at him...
Back in my day we wrote init strings to our modems over a serial connection AND LIKED IT!
How many modem init strings do you still remember? I mean, not that a Google search won't bring them all up. But I actually remember a couple that I actually USED...
ATZ (reset modem to default)
ATD 1231231234 (dial, pulse - rarely used)
ATDT 1231231234 (dial, tone)
Argh - that's it. But it was enough to test most modems to see if they were working in Hyperterm. I probably only really used these three... Remember those days? (Get off my lawn, yatta yatta)
Douglas Adams' bowl of petunias thought "Oh no, not again". "Oh my god" was not part of the petunias' thoughts because it's widely known that petunias are, by and large, atheists.
Not if you have an "ASCII" file you are trying to read on Windows that has Unix newline conventions. Try opening a newlined file with notepad, for example.
I know you are being nice and explaining why, but do you think that file conversion should be done by a file transfer utility? That's like combining a turkey roaster and a hammer - a very, very dumb idea. I've defaulted to binary as long as I can remember due to issues like this. For example, it would seem not uncommon for someone to use Linux as an FTP server and Samba to serve the file repo to Windows clients.
In this scenario, the "intelligence" of ASCII mode breaks nearly EVERY SINGLE FILE TRANSFER for the Windows clients!
IMHO, ASCII mode is a very dumb idea, and that stupidity is what Parent poster is commenting on.
The problem is that folks are making life-changing decisions based on these theories. Doctors yell at us. TV "educates" us about what is acceptable. Then, something new comes along and says 'forget all that stuff, do this instead'. Doesn't take long before folks tune it out altogether.
Yes, it's true that recommendations change as we get new information. But what's really happening is that recommendations are getting *better*.
It's very rare that a recommendation is actually *worse* than the original behavior. You give the example of salt: you like salt, and recommendations are that people who eat high-salt diets tend to have significantly more heart attacks.
So you cut your salt intake.
Then new science comes out that finds that the reduced salt diets made the most difference among those with a pre-existing heart condition. Not that reducing your salt intake was *bad* for you, but that it wasn't as much good in your specific case because it was so much more effective for other people.
The recommendation was made based on available information to improve your odds of living. Then, newer information came out indicating that it wasn't as beneficial as they thought in your case. But it was still beneficial, you did improve your odds of living longer, and it sure didn't hurt you.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater! Similar things happen all the time, but it's not to say that the original recommendations were without merit, and it's even worse to conclude that newer recommendations are bogus because past recommendations weren't perfect, since the newer recommendations are made with newer, more detailed, and more accurate information.
It's like arguing for Intelligent Design because we've had to adjust our understanding of how single-celled bacteria evolved.
Yeah, Ubuntu inside 700 MB isn't really the point, now, is it?
Because Ubuntu today at 700 MB is both a far cry bigger than an OS was years ago, and a far cry smaller than many otherwise viable alternatives. Conclusion? OS's are getting bigger every year, and this won't stop any time soon.
And Optical drives are *not* getting bigger to match. Sure, there's Blue-Ray DVDs, but they just aren't getting the play in the marketplace that we all thought they would. In the dozen or so computers I have, NONE of them have Blu-Ray drives. I've never cared enough to ask for one. In fact, disk-media is, if anything, losing marketshare overall. My most recent computer didn't even come with an optical drive at all - it was understood that the O/S would be loaded by USB media. In my case, it was by an external USB DVD drive, but it could have just as easily been a USB flash disk.
Just the other day, I saw 2 GB USB flash disks at Office Depot for just $6.99 at the front counter, retail. It's not like they are expensive. But in a way, USB flash is far cheaper still.
See, I can switch from a 1 GB flash disk to a 16 GB flash disk with ZERO additional hardware cost. I don't have to buy a new drive, I don't have to add any hardware. I don't even have to be running the latest USB 2.x/3.X ports, I can access the latest 16 GB of data with my old P3 over USB 1.x at a whole 1.5 Mb without any problem other than the slow transfer rate.
USB / flash is the perfect medium for distributing installation media, because it is both cheap and can be whatever size is needed to "get the job done". And it would be easy to set a bit in the USB disk to disable write access. In short... perfect!
When you are watching television, you end up watching whatever is on, which is not something that generally excites you, and then on top of that, you have the additional insult of having to spend 40% of your time watching ads.
So, in short, because the quality of the show is marginal, you put up with further marginalization in order to have it "pay" for the content provider.
But with Hulu, you watch what you want. When you want. You CLICKED on the show. It's something you DESIRE to watch, not something that's "on". So I don't end up watching golf on Saturday afternoon, I watch stuff I happen to like: Bones, House, Burn Notice. I just caught a new show ("The Philanthropist") so good that it actually made me tear up more than once. Against this backdrop, I'm more than happy to watch a SINGLE commercial 4x in a show, and I'm even OK with the fact that I can't skip the ads. I watch what I want, when I want to. For now, formula of "online TV" works so well for me that I will probably never again buy cable or satellite TV so long as online television remains at least as good as it is now.
Seriously, when you get used to watching what you want, when you want, without knowing in advance what you want, with the ability to "catch up" when you discover something new, "normal" cable just seems... stale. Why bother?
I don't have a DTV converter box, and I have no interest in one. My Mac Mini + big screen have done everything I care to have.
Slashdot Mirror
Many 'net junkies like to say things like "Information wants to be free!" as if there was something anthropic about information.
But information is the foundation of the Universe, so much so that quantum mechanics is routinely described with terms like "information loss" and even measured. It's almost like Douglas Adams was right all along, and the universe actually is a large supercomputer trying to find out the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Where are the hyper-intelligent mice?
But if the universe is information, then the laws of the universe apply to information itself. Laws, such as: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
While things like shields and noise generators serve to obfuscate what goes on in a computer, they don't actually solve the basic issue that power *is* being consumed, radio waves *are* being generated, heat is being generated, and that these properties will *always* be detectable by various means so long as they are, in fact, being generated.
The only possible way around this might be some form of reversible computing but the basic programming model will require so many architectural changes to enact that it's realistically an entirely new form of computing.
Too much work. Just do what I do -- don't ever type anything worth reading.
I am posting at Slashdot - kinda like preaching to the converted, isn't it?
Makes me wonder why the +5 Funny chair throwing jokes haven't resulted in more broken monitors.
Some people take their frustrations out on their monitors. I, on the other hand, like throwing chairs!
Aurghthafi!
I've long been sold on mainframes, but they suffer from a scalability problem - they don't scale down that far.
Here I am, at a small, organically growing company. We've been growing about 25% - 75% per year, and with the economic slowdown, our growth has accelerated. (since we save our prospective clients money) We're too small to afford mainframes. We have about $50,000 invested in our primary hosting hardware now.
We are having to bust some humps to keep up with this year's growth. We've hit the performance wall of single-system limitations, and have been working furiously on full redundancy and clustering our databases and system stack, based on CentOS Linux, heartbeat, Postgres, and lots of application-level coding. (I turned it all on in production just 3 days ago!) We're still working out kinks with load balancers, round-robin DNS, dynamic database host selection, backup validation, network monitoring, and other similar issues. Mostly though, it's been going quite smoothly.
If our company continues its growth rate, in a few years, we'll be of a budget and company size that a mainframe or three just might be a good idea - but at that point, we'll have invested enough in our current redundant clustering technology that we'll be architecturally unfit for adopting mainframes whole-hog. Instead, we'll have racks and racks of small, cheap, multi-core commodity 1U servers built with network-level redundancy and auto-failover. Not because it's the best for large scales, but because it's the best that we can afford now, and as we grow, we'll add to what we have rather than re-invent the wheel.
If they made mainframes that could scale down to a price comparable to a $1,000, cheap, 1U SATA Linux server, (where my company started years ago, though we've long moved on) and could scale up seamlessly to big iron, that would just rock.
The closest equivalent I'm aware of right now is using IBM's ZOS to host virtual linux hosts, which strikes me as inefficient, even though that's where my development path just might leave us. But I don't know anything about it, and we're too small for anybody to bother (timewise) with, even if we are a million-dollar/year company.
Are you listening, mainframe vendors?
You forgot to mention that it's also not relevant.
The Internet itself is "insecure". It is so by design, so if the purpose of the Wifi is to get to teh iNternetz then there is logically no substantial value to encrypting your hotspot.
Practically, I can only think of two benefits:
1) Prevent neighbors from leeching bandwidth and making your YT videos "skippy".
2) Prevent neighbors from sharing MP3s on your connection so that the RIAA sues you. Of course, if you don't secure your connection, you have plausible deniability when they sue....
Now, if you are actually running a local NETWORK, (EG: printer sharing, etc) then things change a bit. But even then, it's sensible to secure your services so that security issues don't plague you. Since all my company's resources need to be "roadable", we don't bother with VPNs and instead just used all encrypted protocols. (EG: rather than SMB, we use DAV over HTTPS, SMTPS/IMAPS for email, etc)
But bloody hell, if I can make six figures writing cobol, I'll grab myself a cobol book and quit this programming job. A sucky day job isn't so bad when it means you can retire a decade earlier than otherwise.
My advice for new programmers has been exactly this: learn COBOL, study mainframes, move to large cities, make big bucks. Sure, you'll want to gouge your eyes out with a fork, but then you'll be able to afford to have robotic eyes grafted back in!
As a second, I recommend that they learn Unix skills, c, and databases. Still lots of money there, and your original eyeballs will last longer. (It's the path I chose, and I do quite well for myself)
GPS is not a map is not "local knowlege". Get the right tool for the job.
As a pilot, flying into a new airport is always a bit... unnerving. You have to review the maps in advance, ensure that you are at least reasonably sure of the types of airspace you'll be flying in, and without a GPS, there's always that haunting fear that you won't be able to find the !@# airport.
And let's not be kidding here - when flying into a large metropolitan area at night, finding the !@# local airport can be quite vexing. Imagine looking for a row of lights in a city comprised of... row upon row of street lights. It can be maddening. Sure, the big Int'l airports are usually rather easy to find, but I usually stay away from those because the fuel is usually more expensive, there's often ramp/landing fees, and who wants to try to focus on landing your mosquito-of-a-4 seat plane while a big, fast, 737-600 is behind you, while being told to "expedite clearing runway"... ?
Sorry, no.
But with a GPS, you're never unsure. You know exactly how many miles, in what direction, at what altitude, and can even make radio calls with this information heading into an airport you haven't even seen, yet. It makes all the difference, and as a pilot who purposefully trained without using the GPS, (and still glad I did) I can still say with confidence that I would much, much rather fly with a GPS, especially when flying into new territory!
Get the right tool for the job.
Especially if you put green LED lights on them.
Everybody knows that putting LED lights on fan blades is the way to make them super cool!
(END SARCASM)
Not only would this change be welcome, but it would force Microsoft to "play ball" with the standards for HTML rather than roll their own and mark all the bug reports "will not fix".
Take a look at the history:
1) Microsoft is all about selling stuff on CD-ROM with the marketing vision "Information at your fingertips".
2) The Internet happens, and overnight, Netscape is a raving success because it actually PUT information at your fingertips.
3) Billy boy issues a memo to the whole company to turn as fast as possible to support the Internetz.
4) IE comes out - first a sucktacular mess, and finally almost livable around IE 5 or so.
5) IE 6 comes out, Netscape crumbles.
6) Netscape goes underground at AOL who throws a few developers at it while using it to negotiate a link on the Desktop. IE Dominates so tremendously that it's the platform of choice simply because it's installed everywhere.
7) Microsoft stops doing anything for half a decade. (whistle whistle)
8) Navigator continuously improves, finally re-emerging as Phoenix/Firefox. Suddenly, Microsoft's browser looks like a 5-year-old pile of cruft that's difficult to program for.
Suddenly, Microsoft will give a shiat. They might finally fix the things that developers!developers!developers! have been whining, bitching, complaining, and screaming about all these years.
Irony: "Free Internet Exporer 8" ad at the top while I type this message!
It's required that you have two name servers when you register a domain name.
Physical separation is not required. It's just good practice. (I do, in separate cities on different ISP networks) Having separate nameservers in different geo regions is implicit because you have to register at least two for each domain name. I've seen some people game this by having a single nameserver with two IP addresses, which strikes me as the height of stupidity, but it's not happening on my watch.
Sure. Ridiculous.
Ridiculous, like covering 40% of your average city with ugly, black, heat-island-creating road tar? (Which, btw, could conceivably eliminate your "ugly solar farm" argument entirely)
You don't realize just how much of a city is parking lot until you see it from the air at low altitudes. Google maps helps, but it's just not close because you don't really get the sense of scale. So it's a double-benefit: Parking lots create power, and by putting solar panels above them, keep your car at a comfortable 80-90 instead of an energy-sapping 140.
for last 5 years same shit gets posted over and over again - Cheap solar panals
5 years later - in some cases panels went up in price
Whine whine whine. It's been going on for much longer than 5 years. When I was in 5th grade, I did a report on PV electricity, and I read numerous reports that PV panels could be much cheaper soon.
Truth is, all those funky predictions were right. Solar power HAS been dropping very steadily and very predictably all along in its own version of Moore's law - PV prices drop about 6% per year per watt, cutting in half every 10.5 years. It's not dropping like a stone, but it's very predictable and very steady.
What's been going on the last 5 years? Simple: supply and demand. For many reasons, people have become wary of using fossil fuels and are willing to invest more into solar, causing a sudden, worldwide deficiency in production capacity. Low-cost production companies like Nano-Solar are ramping up production literally as fast as they are physically able.
For example, Nano-Solar has, for all intents and purposes, unlimited funding, and has already sold out several years worth of production, even that which is not actually happening yet. They are buying huge rafts of warehouse space in the Bay Area, in what used to be automotive manufacturing areas.
So the laws of supply and demand are working their magic, even though the response isn't instant. Your children will bask in a society powered by cheap solar electricity that you are funding right now, just as you benefit from the electrical power infrastructure built by your parents.
No, I don't work for any of these. And I do maintain my own backup set, because I backup TBs of data daily. But for personal use, the online vendors are the best bet.
RAID is only marginally valuable. In my experience, for all but the most carefully controlled environments, RAID simply adds complexity, the number of things to go wrong increases, along with the likelyhood of lost data. Do it only if you want the *experience* of running RAID, but don't count on RAID to "save your data".
I've worked as a system administrator for more than a decade, in medium-large scale deployments with good success, (think: servicing thousands of users, hundreds of domain names, tens of thousands of email addresses, etc) so I think I have some useful experience you can benefit from.
IMHO, you most likely to lose data from the following things (in order)
1) Aw sh1tz. "I didn't mean to delete that folder"... or "Whoops! I formatted the wrong drive", "I saved the wrong version of the file!", whatever. Although I *myself* don't have this happen often, it does happen. And even in my case I've lost about as much useful information this way as by drives dying. Users delete stuff all the time, and it's usually my job to bring it back, which is why I perform redundant, historical backups EVERY SINGLE DAY.
2) Malware. Don't minimize this - it's real, and it's why I reply to Parent. You are more likely to lose information from a virus/worm/malware and/or b0rked install of something that hoses your filesystem than by a hard disk crash given stable hardware.
3) Bugs. Filesystems have bugs. So do applications, utilities, anything with software. Strange, unexpected conditions, often caused by bugs in applications can cause data to "disappear", files to get corrupted, filesystems to get corrupted, folders to be incompletely written, etc. This is about as likely to cause lost data as:
4) Hardware failure. This is one of the lowest orders of lost data, although when it happens, it can be one of the most extreme.
Let me say this: RAID 1/5 only PARTIALLY protects you from the last one. Actual, bona-fide backups protect you from all of these. If you care about the data, get backups. If you care about uptimes at great expense, RAID *may* be worth it.
My advice is something most people don't want to hear: for personal use, get backups online for $5/month. Mozy/Carbonite/etc. There are zillion vendors, just Google it. In two years, it will cost you about as much as that 2nd hard drive. It protects you far better than that 2nd hard drive, and it's so automatic that you'll hardly notice it until the moment it actually matters: when you just have discovered that your data is gone.
Every bit of your post makes sense, except for the "delusional" part.
See, people have a basic problem of lack of information. When you meet somebody for the first time, you have no information available to work with other than that which is patently obviously in front of you. So you pretty much have to accept whatever assertions he/she/it makes, or else just not engage.
What this means is that if you work out a direct, confident air that you can project as you are working with people, you'll quickly find that they will tend to accept you at face value - in this case, direct, confident, etc. For the most part, this works. But this mechanism is exactly how con artists make their play - they work out how to appear confident and trustworthy, even when they aren't. Some are so good at conning people that even when presented with evidence to the contrary, the victims still believe the con man and refuse to press charges!
But the only thing that makes this mechanism "delusional" is when this face-value judgement is wrong.
I was in a very similar situation about 7-8 years ago. I had a halfway decent product, and trying to be marketer, coder, salesman, and customer relationships management was just asking too much. I was struggling to make ends meet.
After attending numerous small business workshops that didn't help me at all, I attended an excellent program put on my by local city Chamber of Commerce and the "Golden State Capital Network" on how to prepare your business for Venture Capital. This gave me *exactly* the information I needed to figure out how to succeed. (And I have done quite well since then) It very literally changed my life; I was able to see exactly what a business needs to succeed and why. Although I'll summarize here, the workshop went into extreme detail and I was like a sponge, gobbling up every little morsel with zeal!
The three major planks in a business:
1) Production. Duh, right? Cost to market? Quality control? Disaster recovery? What about scale? What do you do when you get an order for 100,000 widgets?
2) Marketing. Can you sell it? What competition do you have? What is your market? How are you going to position your product against competitors? How can you prevent other companies from stealing your clients? How are you going to make your company name "stick out" in clients' minds?
3) Administration (finance & legal) How much did you make? What do you owe? What's your profit margin? What's your net/gross/adjusted gross/taxable profits? How do you minimize tax liability? Business risk? Personal risk? Are your sales contracts solid? How are you going to protect your "mojo", including your IP?
You need all three major planks Any business without all three of these planks put in solidly will almost assuredly fail. The amount of detail to consider is off the chart. They even had a simple worksheet that resulted in "likelyhood of success", with little 1-10s by every category so that you could quickly analyze your business and see its weak points. It was very, very, very humbling for me to do this, I think my fledgling business ranked somewhere around 7 on a 1-100 scale.
Very, very hard to swallow. I didn't have a bat's chance in Hades of making it a success.
But unfortunately, it was a correct assessment! Quickly I realized that there was just no way I was going to be able to keep all the points in line myself - there just weren't enough hours in the day. So I went out and looked for some good partners that I could trust to build a business with. It took me just over a year, but I found 'em and have since built a million-dollar business that's literally growing as fast as we can sustain.
After some analysis, I determined that our marketplace was too narrow for VC funding, we've instead gone more conservatively, and grown organically. The end result is that we have a heavy stream of new clients, a well-written, highly cohesive software stack, a well-defined market place, top-notch legal and accounting, excellent customer service, and "street cred" so good that our clients just RAVE about us at conventions.
So, to recap.....
1) Learn to analyze your business the way (smart) VCs do.
2) Look for the right partners.
3) Work your ass off.
4) ????!!??
5) Profit!
Design an efficient table relating a tree structure. Then design queries to answer questions such as:...
I don't know, but I recall reading that Postgres 8.4 is now out and includes support for recursive queries. (trees) Not sure about the reputation of the blog in question, but you may have heard of it?
the fact is that SQL can't handle most datastructures and complex relations, only very simple one dimensional ones
You are kidding, right? Just today I cooked up a 7-table query including 2 subselects, and a left outer join to a meta table consisting of 2 inner joined tables. Total of some 11 tables comprising a highly complex data set. Don't know what you mean by "very simple one dimensional ones" but 11 tables each joined in either a one-to-many or many-to-many mapping provides at least 11 dimensions. (more if you self-join tabls, often needed) And this isn't particularly hard for me - often I have joins combining 12 or more very large tables with unrestrained combinations somewhere in the billions to trillions of possibilities that all somehow seem to parse just a few seconds thanks to a few well-placed indexes and a well-structured query.
Methinks you don't really understand SQL?
Policeman: So, what is this thing we have here?
Engineer: It's a dual-band radio! See - here on one side of it, you have the normal frequency that you use as a policeman. And.. (flips device around) here you have the frequency used by the firemen! We spent $400,000 of tax dollars to develop this!
Policeman: So let me get this straight: I have two radios in one device!? It's bigger than my normal radio...
Engineer: Yes, that's it! Now you are no longer encumbered with just police communication!
Policeman: But it's like twice as big as my normal radio...
Engineer: Yes, but think about the convenience! Now you can communicate with the other departments!
Policeman: Departments? With an "s"?
Engineer: Well, if you want to talk with another department, like say....
Policeman: Medical?
Engineer: ... yeah - medical - you would need one of these! (pulls out even bigger box)
Policeman: This one is like three times the size of my normal radio! How much weight do you want me to carry around?
Engineer: Yes, but look at the quality! Each radio has its own independent volume and frequency knob! You can customize it to work the way that you want to!
Policeman: And, let's say I want to include the Highway patrol...?
Engineer: Got that too. Here's the four-band radio...
Policeman: BUT THIS IS EVEN BIGGER?!?! This is like four times the size of my normal radio...
Engineer: And each band has it's own volume knob, battery compartment...
Policeman: Say, you didn't just get four normal radios and tape them together, did you?
Engineer: Of course not! These radios are made to exacting standards -
Policeman: Yes you did! I'm peeling them apart now!
Engineer: Turns and runs while policeman chases him, throwing radio parts at him...
What is this "story" that you speak of?
I, for one, have never seen one...
Back in my day we wrote init strings to our modems over a serial connection AND LIKED IT!
How many modem init strings do you still remember? I mean, not that a Google search won't bring them all up. But I actually remember a couple that I actually USED...
ATZ (reset modem to default)
ATD 1231231234 (dial, pulse - rarely used)
ATDT 1231231234 (dial, tone)
Argh - that's it. But it was enough to test most modems to see if they were working in Hyperterm. I probably only really used these three... Remember those days? (Get off my lawn, yatta yatta)
Douglas Adams' bowl of petunias thought "Oh no, not again". "Oh my god" was not part of the petunias' thoughts because it's widely known that petunias are, by and large, atheists.
Not if you have an "ASCII" file you are trying to read on Windows that has Unix newline conventions. Try opening a newlined file with notepad, for example.
I know you are being nice and explaining why, but do you think that file conversion should be done by a file transfer utility? That's like combining a turkey roaster and a hammer - a very, very dumb idea. I've defaulted to binary as long as I can remember due to issues like this. For example, it would seem not uncommon for someone to use Linux as an FTP server and Samba to serve the file repo to Windows clients.
In this scenario, the "intelligence" of ASCII mode breaks nearly EVERY SINGLE FILE TRANSFER for the Windows clients!
IMHO, ASCII mode is a very dumb idea, and that stupidity is what Parent poster is commenting on.
The problem is that folks are making life-changing decisions based on these theories. Doctors yell at us. TV "educates" us about what is acceptable. Then, something new comes along and says 'forget all that stuff, do this instead'. Doesn't take long before folks tune it out altogether.
Yes, it's true that recommendations change as we get new information. But what's really happening is that recommendations are getting *better*.
It's very rare that a recommendation is actually *worse* than the original behavior. You give the example of salt: you like salt, and recommendations are that people who eat high-salt diets tend to have significantly more heart attacks.
So you cut your salt intake.
Then new science comes out that finds that the reduced salt diets made the most difference among those with a pre-existing heart condition. Not that reducing your salt intake was *bad* for you, but that it wasn't as much good in your specific case because it was so much more effective for other people.
The recommendation was made based on available information to improve your odds of living. Then, newer information came out indicating that it wasn't as beneficial as they thought in your case. But it was still beneficial, you did improve your odds of living longer, and it sure didn't hurt you.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater! Similar things happen all the time, but it's not to say that the original recommendations were without merit, and it's even worse to conclude that newer recommendations are bogus because past recommendations weren't perfect, since the newer recommendations are made with newer, more detailed, and more accurate information.
It's like arguing for Intelligent Design because we've had to adjust our understanding of how single-celled bacteria evolved.
Yeah, Ubuntu inside 700 MB isn't really the point, now, is it?
Because Ubuntu today at 700 MB is both a far cry bigger than an OS was years ago, and a far cry smaller than many otherwise viable alternatives. Conclusion? OS's are getting bigger every year, and this won't stop any time soon.
And Optical drives are *not* getting bigger to match. Sure, there's Blue-Ray DVDs, but they just aren't getting the play in the marketplace that we all thought they would. In the dozen or so computers I have, NONE of them have Blu-Ray drives. I've never cared enough to ask for one. In fact, disk-media is, if anything, losing marketshare overall. My most recent computer didn't even come with an optical drive at all - it was understood that the O/S would be loaded by USB media. In my case, it was by an external USB DVD drive, but it could have just as easily been a USB flash disk.
Just the other day, I saw 2 GB USB flash disks at Office Depot for just $6.99 at the front counter, retail. It's not like they are expensive. But in a way, USB flash is far cheaper still.
See, I can switch from a 1 GB flash disk to a 16 GB flash disk with ZERO additional hardware cost. I don't have to buy a new drive, I don't have to add any hardware. I don't even have to be running the latest USB 2.x/3.X ports, I can access the latest 16 GB of data with my old P3 over USB 1.x at a whole 1.5 Mb without any problem other than the slow transfer rate.
USB / flash is the perfect medium for distributing installation media, because it is both cheap and can be whatever size is needed to "get the job done". And it would be easy to set a bit in the USB disk to disable write access. In short... perfect!
When you are watching television, you end up watching whatever is on, which is not something that generally excites you, and then on top of that, you have the additional insult of having to spend 40% of your time watching ads.
So, in short, because the quality of the show is marginal, you put up with further marginalization in order to have it "pay" for the content provider.
But with Hulu, you watch what you want. When you want. You CLICKED on the show. It's something you DESIRE to watch, not something that's "on". So I don't end up watching golf on Saturday afternoon, I watch stuff I happen to like: Bones, House, Burn Notice. I just caught a new show ("The Philanthropist") so good that it actually made me tear up more than once. Against this backdrop, I'm more than happy to watch a SINGLE commercial 4x in a show, and I'm even OK with the fact that I can't skip the ads. I watch what I want, when I want to. For now, formula of "online TV" works so well for me that I will probably never again buy cable or satellite TV so long as online television remains at least as good as it is now.
Seriously, when you get used to watching what you want, when you want, without knowing in advance what you want, with the ability to "catch up" when you discover something new, "normal" cable just seems... stale. Why bother?
I don't have a DTV converter box, and I have no interest in one. My Mac Mini + big screen have done everything I care to have.