There's a reason why the rules for optimisation are:
1. Don't.
2. Don't yet (experts only).
If you write good algorithms, your compiler will usually produce reasonable code. If this isn't fast enough, then make sure you really understand how your VM and target CPU work, before you try optimising. The experts only part isn't a joke.
Except that there's a clear and definite time to optimise - when performance is in the crapper!
Just 2 days ago, I heard complaints about a well-written (but very old!) report that was still taking as long as 5 minutes to run when accessing a large data set. Taking a look, I found that it was using an old template system for output using regex, and for a complex report, the regex was killing the server. So I replaced it with a different template engine using simple string replacement, and reduced > 5 minutes reporting time to about 15 seconds. Further looking there found a simple 3-element index in the database cut the time down to 2 seconds.
Now the report comes up INSTANTLY in most cases.
Optimising is necessary - but only AFTER the fact!
This makes for an intersting twist, but it's a twist where a viedeo game comes closer to reality.
I work as a software engineer. How much of my work day deals with things that are 'real'? How much do I manipulate any physical things at all? Unless you include the copious amounts of fresh-ground coffe I swirl each day, the answer is: next to none. I write software that solves a puzzle presented by our clientelle.
If what I do is manipulate information used by other people, how is that functionally different than MMO video games, which are themselves a shared information experience? Usually, in a game you solve a puzzle presented by the game creators or by other players.
Sure, at work there's money attached, and the problems are 'real' in that the karma you earn (or burn) applies to your physical person and not an avatar, but the differences are blurring fast.
You can give just about *any* car dramatic improvements in fuel economy if you know how to drive them correctly. See HyperMilingA.
Just to see if it worked, I tried it with an ageing GMC Van (big, full sized, full of people) and measured an increase in fuel economy from about 20 MPG to over 30! Of course, there's something about driving on a freeway at 45 MPH and coasting to a stop from a half mile away that annoys the bajeezus out of other drivers.... I must have been flipped off half a dozen times!
The graphics are amazing - it's like an entire, real world, with cars, airplanes, and chicks, and ice cream! You can taste, smell, have sex, the whole thing! The resolution is incredible! Game play is s a hard left from the original game, which was mostly about killing people - most of the new game seems to be centered around making money and buying food, impressing chicks, paying bills, stuff like that.
It's the most realistic video game... EVER.
Of course, you can get the same effect by leaving your mother's basement, but....
32 or 64 bit? Well, 64bit machines can run 32bit code. 32bit machines can't run 64bit code. So you're developing yet another 32bit application.
I'm an application developer. Our application is 32 bit, and it likely will be for a long, long time since our clients upgrade slowly - many are still using Windows 2000, and just last year we finally axed official support for Windows 98/95! (even though it still works)
I would have agreed w/you a year or two ago. OMG! Another dupe?!? WTF do these monkeys DO when they are busy 'working'?!?
But then I saw the firehose andplayed with it for a while. It dramatically changed my mind, and explains why sites like digg often seem like broken records, with the same stuff getting front paged over and over every few days/weeks/months.
Imagine seeing the same thing, over and over and over again, worded slightly different each time. Did you see that story before? Well, yes you did. It is one of a hundred candidates for reading/posting.
But here's the kicker: did you post it? When you see the same crap over and over, by the hundreds, day after day, that can be a very, very tough question to answer!
IBM (and to a lesser extent, Sun) GET uptime. They understand what it takes to develop systems with uptime measured in more years than slashot has even existed... think DECADES and you are starting to get the idea.
For all the bluster about uptimes with Linux, it really isn't all that great about it. For example, if you really do have 1 year of uptime on a public-facing system, you are a bad admin because there have been a number of security bulletins over any given year's time w/ Linux.
The miracle of Linux is that the uptimes are as good as they are, as cheaply as it costs. It's damned impressive that you can sustain 3-4 nines of uptime with a system board purchased at pricewatch for 60 dollars, yet the numbers don't lie - this isn't unusual!
The real question is whether or not those 4 hours per year of downtime at 99.95% actually is worth the jump from a $2,500 dollar server to a $75,000 dollar server. (I have no idea what an AS/400 really costs)
The number of cases where the additional costs are really worth it is rare. Less is more, better is worse, etc....
...your average phone is more powerful than your average computer was in 1982.
Sonny, I was THERE in 1982 and I can tell you that my phone (an HTC Mogul) with its dual-core 400 Mhz ARM CPU knocks the socks off the 386 I had aound 10years later, around 1992! In fact, I can run DOSbox and run all the same games I used to play on my fire-breathing 386DX25 in emulation !!
If my phone today was released in 1982 it would probably have been considered a controlled military tool and banned from use by nonmilitary personnel!
Psssssttttt! Wanna guess what I'm typing this post with?
Lets watch closely, but avoid jumping to any conclusion. No I'm not new hear, just overly optimistic.
Optimistic to the point of idiocy, perhaps. What happened here is analogous to getting a search warrant for downtown Chicago because there's reason to believe a crime has been committed.
In case you haven't been in a bona-fide data center, they are usually !@# HUGE. Even the smallish one that I host at is large - servers well into the thousands. All high-capacity equipment. Even a rather popular site like Slashdot could be easily served out of a single rack, maybe even just a half-rack! A data center is usually divided into locking cages, locking racks each the size of a large refrigerator, and often into half-racks which can hold up to about a dozen 1U rackmount servers.
Logically, it's more like a huge apartment complex - each separately locking cage, rack, or half-rack belongs to a different party.
In the IT world, a datacenter is not analogous to "a house" or even "a building", unless by "a building" you're talking about the feds getting a warrant for the ENTIRE EMPIRE STATE building.
This is farking nuts, and makes me nervous, even with our D/R plans and fully redundant, off-site hosting, off-network hosting.
I'm a long, long time RedHat user. (Since Red Hat Linux 5.1, if you're curious) And I've always upgraded every other release or so. RedHat 5.x, 6.2 (one of my favorites) 9.0, and then the Fedoras: 1, 3, 6, and 8. (which is what I type this on now)
Every single time I've upgraded, I've welcomed the upgrade. It was better, snazzier, more stable, etc. all the way up to Fedora Core 9.
Fedora Core 9 should never have been released. It was just barely alpha quality, and so buggy that merely changing the default font size would destabilize the system! I tried desperately to get it to work for about 2 weeks before shrugging, recovering my.kde directory from a backup, and rolling back to FC8. I'm not expecting an ultra-stable release with Fedora, I know it's more 'cutting edge' but when the computer crashes too badly to get to the website to file a bug report, I'm going to cut and run.
I haven't had the nerve to try 10, though I've heard good things about it. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that.
I have *loads* of respect for RedHat, but FC9 really tarnished their good image. I hope they're a bit more cautious about what they release in the future...
Wind power has a severe problem - uncontrolled availability.
Don't get me wrong - there are lots of things "right" about wind power. It's perhaps the cheapest form of "alternative" electrical power. Windmills are easy to design, and don't require expensive, polluting labs to build. Parts are readily available, and they are the only form of electrical power that's profitable today without strong tax subsidies.
But the wind blows when it wants to, not just when you need the power. For this reason, you can't supply more than about 10-20% of a given power grid directly from wind power - it destabilizes the power grid. Wind dies down, suddenly you have a brown out. Then you get hit by a strong gust, and you're blowing fuses left and right.
But, off on the horizon, there's a new economy a-brewin' that's been talked about for years. And I'm not 100% sure it will actually take off, but I have my hopes: the hydrogn economy.
If, instead of directly providing electricity to the grid, we used wind energy to build up our hydrogen supply, then suddenly things start to make sense! Hydrogen can be burned when needed, and stored (fairly) cheaply when not. Sure, it's not as efficient as direct feed, but you're going to need *something* to power all those cars, and batteries aren't any more efficient than a hydrogen system, at significantly greater cost!
The beauty of the Internet is information does not die! It takes very little work to "bring back up" massive amounts of information and service under a new banner - often just a few days, as has happened here.
Go Internetz!
We have seen article after article criticizing our archiving media. CDs last perhaps a few decades, and the equipment to read magnetic tape backups often doesn't even exist anymore.
Yet, paradoxically, it can be maddeningly difficult to get the Internet to "forget" information once it gets out there. Names, addresses, copyrighted information, all gets distributed in a matter of minutes and can be near impossible to entirely get rid of. Storage capacity grows year after year, even as new, faster, and more reliable technologies like SSD increase their market share.
As it continues to grow, the Internet is increasingly modeling another highly effective information storage medium: the human brain.
See, The human mind retains memories and information in a highly effective manner, even though it loses and replaces component braincells constantly throughout its existence. Somehow, the brain maintains your sense of you and memories of your childhood despite being all but completely replaced, cell-by-cell since then.
As this continues to grow and evolve, I believe that we'll increasingly see less need for a specific archive medium, and grow to rely more and more on the Internet itself. Yes, information will still have to be stored. But by making storage itself cheap, reliable, and the exact medium irrelevant, the Internet stands to operate as the perfect interface.
Do you care if the video you are streaming is ultimately stored in a SCSI disk, a SAN, a SATA drive, an SSD, or a RAM disk? As long as the datarate and reliability of the original medium is sufficient and can stream the data over the standard IP network, you wouldn't care if it was stored on paper tape!
So we get to the "live archive". A good example is archive.org. It's a big cluster of cheap servers, built for low-power usage and power efficiency, with lots of big-ass, cheap hard drives. Redundancy is built in, so if a server fails, they just swap it out and slap in another one. It builds for a few hours to reload the HDDs, and then it's up, like a server-level RAID 5. It's so efficient that the entire cluster is maintained by a single guy. Part time. Who mainly just unplugs the server(s) that die in a particular week, and plugs in a new one, and turns it on.
This is true mass "live archive" storage, done right.
It's about frakkin' TIME somebody was clueful enough to notice!
I was wondering if everybody around here was an idiot?!?!? But you sir, you have finally shown some sign of cluetivity! I post an article about being a big STAR TREK fan, manage to work in a GARTH BROOKS quote, get it modded way up, and you are the only one to notice?
Srsly... WTF?!?!? What does a guy have to do around here to get some respect?!
"Star Trek is like a pizza: When it's good, it's just great. But even when it's bad, it's still pretty good!"
I'm not the type to wear blue face paint, stick pointy ears on, or know the Klingon alphabet. But I've seen every single Trek movie. I've watched all the shows, time permitting. I even endured 'Enterprise'.
Seriously, making money at a Trek show is like shooting fish in a barrel without water in it. There's a HUGE fanbase of nerds like me who dig it and make enough money to matter.
All it has to do is not actually suck bad enough to cause migraines and it will profit!
We switched long ago. I wrote an email attachment processing gateway to process the EFax emails and put them on a web doohickey for everybody in my company to see.
As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud. Of course, many doubt that such a task can be accomplished in a way that doesn't severely degrade gameplay, but it now appears that Sony is working on something similar as well.
This model is already proven in the case of my Win Mobile phone. See, IE mobile takes suck to whole new levels. There's Opera, which does much better, but is still slow as sin, even with a dual-core 400 Mhz ARM chip powering the unit. It honestly feels like Navigator 4 back on my Windows 95 Pentium 90 way back when...
Enter Sky Fire. They have a Linux rendering farm of (get this!) instances of the Mozilla rendering engine that pre-render websites for you, and you download the rendered result, much like Google Maps - in square sections, ajaxy-style.
It's fast enough for me to watch YT and Hulu video meaningfully if I'm connected via a decent Wifi. Now, it's not FPS games, but if it's good enough for a video, it's probably good enough for pre-rendering and/or AI computation.
I'm not trying to put the other projects down, and I can appreciate why they exist, but this is the exact reason I'm always being laughed out of meetings where they decide to buy an Oracle license, or a Microsoft OS, those guys have the message down (i.e. marketing).
You are being laughed out of meetings? Sounds to me like YOU need marketing experience, as well. How are you presenting your OSS solutions? More importantly, if you are in an environment where you are laughed out of meetings, WHY are you presenting your OSS solutions?
I present and offer OSS-based solutions regularly. My solutions work fantastically well, have a long-proven track record, and are taken seriously at every presentation, with excellent take-up.
I suspect that you aren't being laughed out of meetings - few people are dumb enough to do that more than once or twice. I suspect, instead, that you are either an astroturfer, or just somebody who likes to grandstand stuff without really understanding it.
Methinks you need to reconsider your strategies. (or STFU)
My first computer was a 80286 with 1 MB of RAM. That RAM was all parity memory. Cheaper than ECC, but still good enough to positively identify a genuine bit flip with great accuracy. My 80386SX had parity RAM, so did my 486DX4 120. I ran a computer shop for some years, so I went through at least a dozen machines ranging from the 386 era through the Pentium II era, at which point I sold the shop and settled on a AMDK62 450. And right about the time that the Pentium was giving way to the Pentium II, non-parity memory started to take hold.
What protection did parity memory provide, anyway? Not much, really. It would detect with 99.99...? % accuracy when a memory bit had flipped, but provided no answer as to which one. The result was that if parity failed, you'd see a generic "MEMORY FAILURE" message and the system would instantly lock up.
I saw this message perhaps three times - it didn't really help much. I had other problems, but when I've had problems with memory, it's usually been due to mismatched sticks, or sticks that are strangely incompatible with a specific motherboard, etc. none of which caused a parity error. So, if it matters, spend the money and get ECC RAM to eliminate the small risk of parity error. If it doesn't, don't bother, at least not now.
Note: having more memory increases your error rate assuming a constant rate of error (per megabyte) in the memory. However, if the error rate drops as technology advances, adding more memory does not necessarily result in a higher system error rate. And based on what I've seen, this most definitely seems to be the case.
Remember this blog article about the end of RAID 5 in 2009? Come on... are you really going to think that Western Digital is going to be OK with near 100% failure of their drives in a RAID 5 array? They'll do whatever it takes to keep it working because they have to - if the error rate became anywhere near that high, their good name would be trashed because some other company (Seagate, Hitachi, etc) would do the research and pwn3rz the marketplace.
And, as somebody who interviews as well, I can tell you that while I don't personally give a #!!#@ about age, the truth is that damn near everybody I've interviewed who was 'older' came with so many condition.s that it wasn't worth my time. I kept hearing things like 'I don't do ----' and ' I won't ----' and 'You must....'.
Dang it, I have lots of work that needs to be done - mostly programming - and offer decent wages, good benefits, challenging work, flexible schedule, free snacks/coffee/sodas, and a respectful environment to somebody who's willing to DO what's needed! Don't tell me you don't do databases, go spend 50 dollars at Barnes and Nobles, 2 weeks reading, and show me how you've learned to normalize tables! Don't tell me that you don't do Linux, tell me how you'd love the experience of working with a new (to you) technology!
Only want to work part-time on a pet project? Why are you here, again? Didn't I specify FULL TIME on the job posting!? It's not age that turns me off, It's people who want to tell ME what their job has to be, working for me, and this is attitude is painfully common among 'mature' applicants.
Be ready to do the work that needs to be done. I get paid (well) by clients to do the work that they need done, not what I happen to feel like doing. If you get this ridiculously simple idea, I'd hire you in a flat second!
"Collective" is an abstract idea people came up with. In this case, it represents... people.
"Collective Freedom" is not an oxymoron. When the 'collective' gets to vote, they tend to vote for things that benefit the collective. Things like: Police that don't beat people up too often; The ability to go to the grocery store any time they are open without being prevented by the state; The free^h^h^h^h ability to marry whomever you wish.
All of these things are things desired by the collective and generally voted for by same; they are all freedoms desired by the collective.
Sometimes the collective is astute enough to vote for things that aren't desired by the majority, but reflect freedoms that protect the majority by protecting collections of minorities. These include things like gay rights, minorities' right to vote, and so on. Many aspects of our government are limited thusly, for example requiring a 2/3 majority or sometimes even a 3/4 majority to perform an action that might affect a minority. In this case, it takes only 1/3 or 1/4 of the population to protect their interests.
In all cases, however, these represent the exercise of collective freedoms.
Slashdot Mirror
Mine is:
1) No passwords for SSH. At all.
2) SSH keys that require passphrase authentication.
3) SSH on a high port.
That's it! No issues, that I'm aware of...
There's a reason why the rules for optimisation are:
1. Don't.
2. Don't yet (experts only).
If you write good algorithms, your compiler will usually produce reasonable code. If this isn't fast enough, then make sure you really understand how your VM and target CPU work, before you try optimising. The experts only part isn't a joke.
Except that there's a clear and definite time to optimise - when performance is in the crapper!
Just 2 days ago, I heard complaints about a well-written (but very old!) report that was still taking as long as 5 minutes to run when accessing a large data set. Taking a look, I found that it was using an old template system for output using regex, and for a complex report, the regex was killing the server. So I replaced it with a different template engine using simple string replacement, and reduced > 5 minutes reporting time to about 15 seconds. Further looking there found a simple 3-element index in the database cut the time down to 2 seconds.
Now the report comes up INSTANTLY in most cases.
Optimising is necessary - but only AFTER the fact!
This makes for an intersting twist, but it's a twist where a viedeo game comes closer to reality.
I work as a software engineer. How much of my work day deals with things that are 'real'? How much do I manipulate any physical things at all? Unless you include the copious amounts of fresh-ground coffe I swirl each day, the answer is: next to none. I write software that solves a puzzle presented by our clientelle.
If what I do is manipulate information used by other people, how is that functionally different than MMO video games, which are themselves a shared information experience? Usually, in a game you solve a puzzle presented by the game creators or by other players.
Sure, at work there's money attached, and the problems are 'real' in that the karma you earn (or burn) applies to your physical person and not an avatar, but the differences are blurring fast.
You can give just about *any* car dramatic improvements in fuel economy if you know how to drive them correctly. See HyperMilingA.
Just to see if it worked, I tried it with an ageing GMC Van (big, full sized, full of people) and measured an increase in fuel economy from about 20 MPG to over 30! Of course, there's something about driving on a freeway at 45 MPH and coasting to a stop from a half mile away that annoys the bajeezus out of other drivers.... I must have been flipped off half a dozen times!
MotherLoad implies a very heavy workload.
Mother Lode means hitting the "main vein" of a gold or precious material mine.
Oh, and since I mentioned Naugzteez, Godwin's law and all that...
Just wait until you see Duke Nukem Forever.
The graphics are amazing - it's like an entire, real world, with cars, airplanes, and chicks, and ice cream! You can taste, smell, have sex, the whole thing! The resolution is incredible! Game play is s a hard left from the original game, which was mostly about killing people - most of the new game seems to be centered around making money and buying food, impressing chicks, paying bills, stuff like that.
It's the most realistic video game... EVER.
Of course, you can get the same effect by leaving your mother's basement, but....
32 or 64 bit? Well, 64bit machines can run 32bit code. 32bit machines can't run 64bit code. So you're developing yet another 32bit application.
I'm an application developer. Our application is 32 bit, and it likely will be for a long, long time since our clients upgrade slowly - many are still using Windows 2000, and just last year we finally axed official support for Windows 98/95! (even though it still works)
I voted for him.
This is my biggest disappointment so far in his presidency. It's a signal that, for all the talk about transparency, it's talk.
I'm not saying that he's a failure as President, but I am saying that this issue marks the end of any honeymoon.
Soon, people down under will be able to hit their download caps in a matter of minutes! Yay progress!!!!
I would have agreed w/you a year or two ago. OMG! Another dupe?!? WTF do these monkeys DO when they are busy 'working'?!?
But then I saw the firehose andplayed with it for a while. It dramatically changed my mind, and explains why sites like digg often seem like broken records, with the same stuff getting front paged over and over every few days/weeks/months.
Imagine seeing the same thing, over and over and over again, worded slightly different each time. Did you see that story before? Well, yes you did. It is one of a hundred candidates for reading/posting.
But here's the kicker: did you post it? When you see the same crap over and over, by the hundreds, day after day, that can be a very, very tough question to answer!
Respect our editor overlords. Love the editors!
IBM (and to a lesser extent, Sun) GET uptime. They understand what it takes to develop systems with uptime measured in more years than slashot has even existed... think DECADES and you are starting to get the idea.
For all the bluster about uptimes with Linux, it really isn't all that great about it. For example, if you really do have 1 year of uptime on a public-facing system, you are a bad admin because there have been a number of security bulletins over any given year's time w/ Linux.
The miracle of Linux is that the uptimes are as good as they are, as cheaply as it costs. It's damned impressive that you can sustain 3-4 nines of uptime with a system board purchased at pricewatch for 60 dollars, yet the numbers don't lie - this isn't unusual!
The real question is whether or not those 4 hours per year of downtime at 99.95% actually is worth the jump from a $2,500 dollar server to a $75,000 dollar server. (I have no idea what an AS/400 really costs)
The number of cases where the additional costs are really worth it is rare. Less is more, better is worse, etc....
...your average phone is more powerful than your average computer was in 1982.
Sonny, I was THERE in 1982 and I can tell you that my phone (an HTC Mogul) with its dual-core 400 Mhz ARM CPU knocks the socks off the 386 I had aound 10years later, around 1992! In fact, I can run DOSbox and run all the same games I used to play on my fire-breathing 386DX25 in emulation !!
If my phone today was released in 1982 it would probably have been considered a controlled military tool and banned from use by nonmilitary personnel!
Psssssttttt! Wanna guess what I'm typing this post with?
Lets watch closely, but avoid jumping to any conclusion.
No I'm not new hear, just overly optimistic.
Optimistic to the point of idiocy, perhaps. What happened here is analogous to getting a search warrant for downtown Chicago because there's reason to believe a crime has been committed.
In case you haven't been in a bona-fide data center, they are usually !@# HUGE. Even the smallish one that I host at is large - servers well into the thousands. All high-capacity equipment. Even a rather popular site like Slashdot could be easily served out of a single rack, maybe even just a half-rack! A data center is usually divided into locking cages, locking racks each the size of a large refrigerator, and often into half-racks which can hold up to about a dozen 1U rackmount servers.
Logically, it's more like a huge apartment complex - each separately locking cage, rack, or half-rack belongs to a different party.
In the IT world, a datacenter is not analogous to "a house" or even "a building", unless by "a building" you're talking about the feds getting a warrant for the ENTIRE EMPIRE STATE building.
This is farking nuts, and makes me nervous, even with our D/R plans and fully redundant, off-site hosting, off-network hosting.
I'm a long, long time RedHat user. (Since Red Hat Linux 5.1, if you're curious) And I've always upgraded every other release or so. RedHat 5.x, 6.2 (one of my favorites) 9.0, and then the Fedoras: 1, 3, 6, and 8. (which is what I type this on now)
Every single time I've upgraded, I've welcomed the upgrade. It was better, snazzier, more stable, etc. all the way up to Fedora Core 9.
Fedora Core 9 should never have been released. It was just barely alpha quality, and so buggy that merely changing the default font size would destabilize the system! I tried desperately to get it to work for about 2 weeks before shrugging, recovering my .kde directory from a backup, and rolling back to FC8. I'm not expecting an ultra-stable release with Fedora, I know it's more 'cutting edge' but when the computer crashes too badly to get to the website to file a bug report, I'm going to cut and run.
I haven't had the nerve to try 10, though I've heard good things about it. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that.
I have *loads* of respect for RedHat, but FC9 really tarnished their good image. I hope they're a bit more cautious about what they release in the future...
Wind power has a severe problem - uncontrolled availability.
Don't get me wrong - there are lots of things "right" about wind power. It's perhaps the cheapest form of "alternative" electrical power. Windmills are easy to design, and don't require expensive, polluting labs to build. Parts are readily available, and they are the only form of electrical power that's profitable today without strong tax subsidies.
But the wind blows when it wants to, not just when you need the power. For this reason, you can't supply more than about 10-20% of a given power grid directly from wind power - it destabilizes the power grid. Wind dies down, suddenly you have a brown out. Then you get hit by a strong gust, and you're blowing fuses left and right.
But, off on the horizon, there's a new economy a-brewin' that's been talked about for years. And I'm not 100% sure it will actually take off, but I have my hopes: the hydrogn economy.
If, instead of directly providing electricity to the grid, we used wind energy to build up our hydrogen supply, then suddenly things start to make sense! Hydrogen can be burned when needed, and stored (fairly) cheaply when not. Sure, it's not as efficient as direct feed, but you're going to need *something* to power all those cars, and batteries aren't any more efficient than a hydrogen system, at significantly greater cost!
The beauty of the Internet is information does not die! It takes very little work to "bring back up" massive amounts of information and service under a new banner - often just a few days, as has happened here.
Go Internetz!
We have seen article after article criticizing our archiving media. CDs last perhaps a few decades, and the equipment to read magnetic tape backups often doesn't even exist anymore.
Yet, paradoxically, it can be maddeningly difficult to get the Internet to "forget" information once it gets out there. Names, addresses, copyrighted information, all gets distributed in a matter of minutes and can be near impossible to entirely get rid of. Storage capacity grows year after year, even as new, faster, and more reliable technologies like SSD increase their market share.
As it continues to grow, the Internet is increasingly modeling another highly effective information storage medium: the human brain.
See, The human mind retains memories and information in a highly effective manner, even though it loses and replaces component braincells constantly throughout its existence. Somehow, the brain maintains your sense of you and memories of your childhood despite being all but completely replaced, cell-by-cell since then.
As this continues to grow and evolve, I believe that we'll increasingly see less need for a specific archive medium, and grow to rely more and more on the Internet itself. Yes, information will still have to be stored. But by making storage itself cheap, reliable, and the exact medium irrelevant, the Internet stands to operate as the perfect interface.
Do you care if the video you are streaming is ultimately stored in a SCSI disk, a SAN, a SATA drive, an SSD, or a RAM disk? As long as the datarate and reliability of the original medium is sufficient and can stream the data over the standard IP network, you wouldn't care if it was stored on paper tape!
So we get to the "live archive". A good example is archive.org. It's a big cluster of cheap servers, built for low-power usage and power efficiency, with lots of big-ass, cheap hard drives. Redundancy is built in, so if a server fails, they just swap it out and slap in another one. It builds for a few hours to reload the HDDs, and then it's up, like a server-level RAID 5. It's so efficient that the entire cluster is maintained by a single guy. Part time. Who mainly just unplugs the server(s) that die in a particular week, and plugs in a new one, and turns it on.
This is true mass "live archive" storage, done right.
It's about frakkin' TIME somebody was clueful enough to notice!
I was wondering if everybody around here was an idiot?!?!? But you sir, you have finally shown some sign of cluetivity! I post an article about being a big STAR TREK fan, manage to work in a GARTH BROOKS quote, get it modded way up, and you are the only one to notice?
Srsly... WTF?!?!? What does a guy have to do around here to get some respect?!
What kind of idiot builds an ATM machine, to be used by the public, with publicly accessible USB ports?
Perhaps it would be more obvious to simply leave the cash in a basket outside and work on the honor system?
To paraphrase Garth Brooks....
"Star Trek is like a pizza: When it's good, it's just great. But even when it's bad, it's still pretty good!"
I'm not the type to wear blue face paint, stick pointy ears on, or know the Klingon alphabet. But I've seen every single Trek movie. I've watched all the shows, time permitting. I even endured 'Enterprise'.
Seriously, making money at a Trek show is like shooting fish in a barrel without water in it. There's a HUGE fanbase of nerds like me who dig it and make enough money to matter.
All it has to do is not actually suck bad enough to cause migraines and it will profit!
*cough* E-Fax *cough*
We switched long ago. I wrote an email attachment processing gateway to process the EFax emails and put them on a web doohickey for everybody in my company to see.
We've never looked back.
As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud. Of course, many doubt that such a task can be accomplished in a way that doesn't severely degrade gameplay, but it now appears that Sony is working on something similar as well.
This model is already proven in the case of my Win Mobile phone. See, IE mobile takes suck to whole new levels. There's Opera, which does much better, but is still slow as sin, even with a dual-core 400 Mhz ARM chip powering the unit. It honestly feels like Navigator 4 back on my Windows 95 Pentium 90 way back when...
Enter Sky Fire. They have a Linux rendering farm of (get this!) instances of the Mozilla rendering engine that pre-render websites for you, and you download the rendered result, much like Google Maps - in square sections, ajaxy-style.
It's fast enough for me to watch YT and Hulu video meaningfully if I'm connected via a decent Wifi. Now, it's not FPS games, but if it's good enough for a video, it's probably good enough for pre-rendering and/or AI computation.
I'm not trying to put the other projects down, and I can appreciate why they exist, but this is the exact reason I'm always being laughed out of meetings where they decide to buy an Oracle license, or a Microsoft OS, those guys have the message down (i.e. marketing).
You are being laughed out of meetings? Sounds to me like YOU need marketing experience, as well. How are you presenting your OSS solutions? More importantly, if you are in an environment where you are laughed out of meetings, WHY are you presenting your OSS solutions?
I present and offer OSS-based solutions regularly. My solutions work fantastically well, have a long-proven track record, and are taken seriously at every presentation, with excellent take-up.
I suspect that you aren't being laughed out of meetings - few people are dumb enough to do that more than once or twice. I suspect, instead, that you are either an astroturfer, or just somebody who likes to grandstand stuff without really understanding it.
Methinks you need to reconsider your strategies. (or STFU)
My first computer was a 80286 with 1 MB of RAM. That RAM was all parity memory. Cheaper than ECC, but still good enough to positively identify a genuine bit flip with great accuracy. My 80386SX had parity RAM, so did my 486DX4 120. I ran a computer shop for some years, so I went through at least a dozen machines ranging from the 386 era through the Pentium II era, at which point I sold the shop and settled on a AMDK62 450. And right about the time that the Pentium was giving way to the Pentium II, non-parity memory started to take hold.
What protection did parity memory provide, anyway? Not much, really. It would detect with 99.99...? % accuracy when a memory bit had flipped, but provided no answer as to which one. The result was that if parity failed, you'd see a generic "MEMORY FAILURE" message and the system would instantly lock up.
I saw this message perhaps three times - it didn't really help much. I had other problems, but when I've had problems with memory, it's usually been due to mismatched sticks, or sticks that are strangely incompatible with a specific motherboard, etc. none of which caused a parity error. So, if it matters, spend the money and get ECC RAM to eliminate the small risk of parity error. If it doesn't, don't bother, at least not now.
Note: having more memory increases your error rate assuming a constant rate of error (per megabyte) in the memory. However, if the error rate drops as technology advances, adding more memory does not necessarily result in a higher system error rate. And based on what I've seen, this most definitely seems to be the case.
Remember this blog article about the end of RAID 5 in 2009? Come on... are you really going to think that Western Digital is going to be OK with near 100% failure of their drives in a RAID 5 array? They'll do whatever it takes to keep it working because they have to - if the error rate became anywhere near that high, their good name would be trashed because some other company (Seagate, Hitachi, etc) would do the research and pwn3rz the marketplace.
And, as somebody who interviews as well, I can tell you that while I don't personally give a #!!#@ about age, the truth is that damn near everybody I've interviewed who was 'older' came with so many condition.s that it wasn't worth my time. I kept hearing things like 'I don't do ----' and ' I won't ----' and 'You must....'.
Dang it, I have lots of work that needs to be done - mostly programming - and offer decent wages, good benefits, challenging work, flexible schedule, free snacks/coffee/sodas, and a respectful environment to somebody who's willing to DO what's needed! Don't tell me you don't do databases, go spend 50 dollars at Barnes and Nobles, 2 weeks reading, and show me how you've learned to normalize tables! Don't tell me that you don't do Linux, tell me how you'd love the experience of working with a new (to you) technology!
Only want to work part-time on a pet project? Why are you here, again? Didn't I specify FULL TIME on the job posting!? It's not age that turns me off, It's people who want to tell ME what their job has to be, working for me, and this is attitude is painfully common among 'mature' applicants.
Be ready to do the work that needs to be done. I get paid (well) by clients to do the work that they need done, not what I happen to feel like doing. If you get this ridiculously simple idea, I'd hire you in a flat second!
Come back when your noggin is working!
"Collective" is an abstract idea people came up with. In this case, it represents... people.
"Collective Freedom" is not an oxymoron. When the 'collective' gets to vote, they tend to vote for things that benefit the collective. Things like: Police that don't beat people up too often; The ability to go to the grocery store any time they are open without being prevented by the state; The free^h^h^h^h ability to marry whomever you wish.
All of these things are things desired by the collective and generally voted for by same; they are all freedoms desired by the collective.
Sometimes the collective is astute enough to vote for things that aren't desired by the majority, but reflect freedoms that protect the majority by protecting collections of minorities. These include things like gay rights, minorities' right to vote, and so on. Many aspects of our government are limited thusly, for example requiring a 2/3 majority or sometimes even a 3/4 majority to perform an action that might affect a minority. In this case, it takes only 1/3 or 1/4 of the population to protect their interests.
In all cases, however, these represent the exercise of collective freedoms.